The Phillies moved to Connie Mack Stadium 85 years ago. A South Carolina ballpark still uses the seats.

The ballpark is emptied, home plate is covered in dirt, and the chalk to mark the foul lines has nearly faded away when it’s time for John Barron to turn off the lights at Duncan Park Stadium.

“And then there’s a sense of quiet,” Barron said. “There’s nothing on but you and the lights. And you just sit there. It’s peaceful and you don’t want to leave. You want to stay.”

Barron is the athletic director of the American Legion post that fields a baseball team each summer to play at the nearly century-old stadium in Spartanburg, S.C.

The wooden park served for decades as a gateway to the major leagues. It was home to future Phillies such as Larry Bowa, Darren Daulton, and John Vukovich. Hall of Famers Chipper Jones, Tom Glavine, and Mariano Rivera played there. Ryne Sandberg and George Bell were teammates in Spartanburg before winning MVPs in the majors.

Barron, gazing over the empty ballpark, thinks each night about that history and the icons who kicked the dirt the same way his teenagers do each summer. And he reflects while sitting in an old wooden seat from Connie Mack Stadium.

The Phillies moved 85 years ago this summer into what was then known as Shibe Park, playing their first game there in July of 1938 after untethering themselves from their lease at the antiquated Baker Bowl.

The Phils spent 32 years at 21st and Lehigh, where generations of Philadelphians fell in love with baseball. There were the 1950 Whiz Kids and the 1964 Phils. There was green grass, the Coke sign, the light towers, and the Ballantine scoreboard. There was Richie Ashburn, Robin Roberts, Dick Allen, and Johnny Callison.

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“It was like heaven,” said Bowa, a rookie in 1970 when the Phils played their final season in North Philadelphia.

The ballpark was pillaged during its final game as fans left carrying rows of wooden seats, railings, and even toilet seats before the Phillies moved to Veterans Stadium. But the Phillies salvaged nearly 600 wooden seats and shipped them the next season to Spartanburg, where they had a minor-league affiliate in need of new seats.

More than 50 years later, they’re still there under the cover of Duncan Park’s grandstand. The green seats from a stadium where Babe Ruth played were installed at a ballpark where Derek Jeter played as a 19-year-old minor-leaguer. When you sit in one, there’s a lot to think about.

“You know you’ve been in a place where many, many people have been before you,” Barron said. “It’s overwhelming at times.”

Bowa didn’t play high school baseball and he was not drafted, so it’s easy to imagine the thrill he felt leaving Phillies spring training in 1966 as the starting shortstop at Duncan Park. It didn’t take long — strikeouts in his first four professional at-bats — for that joy to fade.

“I was sitting on my stool with my head down,” Bowa said. “Our manager, Bob Wellman, came up to me and said ‘Are you all right?’ I said, ‘Yeah, but if pro ball is like this, you might as well just send me back to Sacramento. I have no chance.’ He said, ‘This guy we faced will be something special, believe me.’ ”

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The guy the Spartanburg Phillies faced was Nolan Ryan, then a 19-year-old starting his first full minor-league season and another legend to pass through the old park.

Instead of returning to Sacramento, Bowa recovered to hit .312 at Spartanburg and begin a playing career that would last 16 years in the big leagues. His Spartanburg team won 25 straight games and the ballpark was filled every night by general manager Pat Williams, who would have the same title two decades later when the Sixers became world champions.

“It was electric. We put on good shows and we had a good team. The people responded,” Bowa said. “I had no idea what it was going to be like. That place was rocking for us.”

Bowa entered the big leagues as the shortstop at Connie Mack on Opening Day in 1970. First, he had to get into the ballpark. A kid from the neighborhood charged him $5 to “watch his car” after he parked and the security guard at the clubhouse entrance tried turning him away.

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“He said, ‘Who are you?’ I said, ‘I play for the Phillies.’ ‘Yeah, so do I,’ ” Bowa said.

Bowa made five All-Star teams in the 1970s, no longer needing to force his way into the park. And he received another chance against Ryan. Fourteen years after their introduction at Duncan Park, Bowa batted leadoff in the eighth with the Phils down three runs in the fifth and final game of the 1980 National League Championship Series. The kid who sulked on his stool slapped a single. Three batters later, Houston lifted Ryan out of the game and an epic Phils win started to take shape.

“It was payback,” Bowa said. “I get to say that he embarrassed me and then I got the hit that started the inning to get him. There was a documentary that asked him what his toughest loss was and he said, ‘The Phillies. When I had a 5-2 lead going into the eighth inning.’ He said that was his hardest defeat in baseball.”

The magic Bowa felt at Duncan Park in the 1960s had faded by the time the Phillies left Spartanburg after the 1994 season. Duncan Park can hold 3,000 fans as the Connie Mack seats are mixed in with plastic stadium seats and wooden bleachers. But they averaged just 908 fans per game before moving their A-ball affiliate to Kannapolis, N.C.

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By then, Duncan Park was beginning to show its age. The outfield wall was unforgiving cinder block, the lighting was poor, and the clubhouse wasn’t really a clubhouse.

“This would never happen today but they didn’t even have a tarp,” said Gene Schall, who played at Duncan Park in 1992 after being drafted by the Phils a year earlier. “If it rained at 2 or 3 o’clock in the afternoon and it was a downpour, they had nothing to cover the field with. We’d come to the park at 3:30, quarter to 4 and they’d say, ‘Game’s off tonight.’ It was like a summer league. ‘We’ll see you tomorrow for a doubleheader.’ ‘All right, sounds great. See ya tomorrow.’

“We were in these catacomb-like lockers underneath the seats. It wasn’t like a locker room. You had to walk through these little hallways that had these cubbies where lockers were and you got dressed. You wouldn’t put food out down there because it probably would’ve been exposed to whatever was living under the stadium.”

A game was postponed once when the lights blew out during the fourth inning. The next night, it happened again. Eventually, Schall said they realized someone had hammered a metal stake into a power line when setting up a tent.

“It was kind of like a mom-and-pop production,” said Schall, who grew up in Willow Grove and starred at La Salle High and Villanova.

The old park did prove to be a good teacher as it required an outfielder to always know where the wall was. Or else he could get knocked out cold like Al Bennett, the team’s center fielder.

“It seemed like he ran into it once every two weeks and knocked himself out,” Schall said. “He’d hit it and just go down. We’d have to go chase the ball. We had the ‘Al Bennett Outfield Drill’ of how to play the ball off the wall and then we’d have to make sure we could get him off the field because he knocked himself off the wall. You learned how to play the wall very quickly. Then if you got too close, the ball could carom off and hit you.”

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Three years later, Schall was a major-leaguer, becoming another big-leaguer to pass through Duncan Park.

“It was a completely different time when it came to the minor leagues,” he said. “If this was something you wanted to do, this place would really test you that this was the direction you wanted to go when it came to that type of career choice.”

Duncan Park was nearly condemned 15 years ago before the City of Spartanburg took it over and pumped in $500,000 worth of renovations. The dugouts were rehabbed, new locker rooms were built, and a scoreboard was installed in the outfield. The old park received a second life, guaranteeing that the Connie Mack Stadium seats would see more baseball.

No professional team has played at Duncan Park since the Phillies left and a college summer league team quickly faded after trying to make it their home. But Spartanburg High plays its home games there each spring and American Legion Post 28 keeps it humming in the summer.

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“We’ve seen a lot of teams come and go. We were there before anyone and we’re still there,” said Barron, referring to the fact the Legion moved into the park the first year it opened. “Everyone wants to play in Duncan Park. You can just tell when people walk in there and they look around in wonderment at what they’re in. It’s emotional.”

Barron usually asks his American Legion players before each season to sit in the old wooden seats while he tells them about the history of the old park and the players who came through Spartanburg.

There was the final game of the 1936 American Legion World Series when 20,000 fans came to Duncan Park. Jackie Robinson and Hank Aaron played there when they were in the Negro Leagues. Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio played there in 1937 when the Yankees stopped on their way home from spring training.

And hours after he gives the players a history lesson, Barron finds himself sitting in those seats. The hardest part is turning off the lights.

“When you turn the lights off and walk away, you’re looking towards the next time you come down,” Barron said.