By Joey Smith
Picture Johnston County in the summer of 1948. The tobacco is in the ground and coming on strong. The barns will start curing in a few weeks. That smell, sweet and smoky and specific to this place, will sit over the whole county from late July into fall. The men in the fields have been up since before light. Their backs know it.
When the sun goes down, some of them drive to Smithfield, to Legion Park, to watch the Leafs.
The Smithfield-Selma Leafs were Johnston County’s professional baseball team. They played five seasons, 1946 through 1950, as charter members of the Class D Tobacco State League. Class D was the lowest rung of professional baseball. Raw talent. Thin budgets. Long bus rides between towns close enough to make it work. But it was real baseball. Real standings. A real pennant race. It belonged to Johnston County.
The name said everything. Bright leaf tobacco had remade this county’s economy in the 1890s. It built the brick storefronts in Smithfield and Selma. It put telephone lines to practically every farm.
The whole league named itself after what their region did: the Lumberton Auctioneers, the Dunn-Erwin Twins, the Angier-Fuquay Springs Bulls. Every name, a declaration of place. This is who we are. This is what we grow.
The 1946 season was the first. The war was barely over. Some of the men who took the field that summer had been in the Pacific. Some had been in Europe. One of them, a shortstop named Jack Lance, had played in a baseball game among soldiers in Germany in 1945, waiting to come home. He used the GI Bill to go to tech school. He had a brief stint with the Leafs in 1948. A lot of them were like that.
The 1948 team was the best of the five. Manager Sam Narron, a North Carolina man with local roots, hit .317 in 49 games while running the club. His pitcher Aaron Osofsky went 24 and 5, leading the Tobacco State League in wins with a 2.76 ERA. They finished fourth. They made the playoffs.
Narron left midseason. He went to the Brooklyn Dodgers as bullpen catcher, earned a World Series share and spent 14 years coaching in the major leagues. He retired to farming in North Carolina in 1965. People here remember Sam Narron.
Work in the field during the day. Play in another field at night. That was the county’s rhythm in those five summers.
The Leafs folded Aug. 16, 1950, partway through their fifth season. Television was coming. People who used to drive to Legion Park on a summer night were staying home. The economics were brutal. The team was already struggling. The Tobacco State League collapsed at the end of that season. Legion Park went quiet.
Johnston County went 75 years without professional baseball.
Now consider a team from Wilson, 30 miles northeast of Smithfield. Tobacco country too, maybe even more so. They put a team in the Eastern Carolina League in 1908 and called them the Tobacconists. Same logic as the Leafs: name the team after the thing that holds the community together.
Tobacconists became Tobs. In 1966 they had a young infielder named Rod Carew. He went to the Hall of Fame. In 2025 they won the Coastal Plain League championship.
Then a $70 million minor league stadium arrived in Wilson. The Tobs lost their lease on Fleming Stadium and the franchise needed a new home within 30 miles.
They looked 30 miles southwest. Johnston County said yes.
In November 2025, the Town of Smithfield and Johnston County made it official by approving a new $6 million stadium at Smithfield Community Park with a 20-year lease. The Smithfield Tobs will take the field in the summer of 2027.
The name still means what the Leafs name meant. The crop that built the towns where we play ball.
The team also carries an alternate identity for part of the season: the JoCo TaterHogs. Sweet potatoes and eastern North Carolina barbecue. The two things this county produces that the rest of the world, if it is paying attention, has to admit are genuinely world-class.
Kids who will be in those stands in 2027 will be watching something their great-grandparents watched. Their grandparents and parents never got to. Three generations went without a team. Three generations of summer nights when the field in Smithfield was quiet.
Aaron Osofsky won 24 games for Johnston County in 1948. Nobody here remembers his name. They played in a field that is long gone, in a league that folded before most of the people reading this were born.
The tobacco barns are mostly empty now too.
The Smithfield-Selma Leafs played five summers. Then the boys of summer went home.
On a warm Carolina evening next year, though, an umpire will yell “Play ball” in Smithfield again. There will be that unmistakable sound of the crack of a baseball bat, the smell of hot dogs (red, of course) and the boys of summer will be back.
