📍 Bowling Green, Kentucky
⚾ Home of the Bowling Green Hot Rods

Bowling Green serves as a backbone of the automotive industry and is Kentucky’s third-largest municipality. Powered by a substantial blue collar population, the ideal demographic for a minor league baseball team, the city was ripe for an affiliated ballclub when a Class-A squad relocated to the region in 2009. Ever since, the beloved Hot Rods have been the area’s premier summer entertainment and play all of their homestands at downtown’s Bowling Green Ballpark.

The franchise began as an expansion team in 2001 in Wilmington, North Carolina. Lasting just a season there as the Wilmington Waves, the team would move to Albany and Columbus, Georgia before settling in the karst hills of Kentucky in 2009. They were renamed the Hot Rods in honor of the city’s deep connection to the Chevrolet Corvette, as Bowling Green is home to the sports car’s Final Assembly Plant and the National Corvette Museum.

Bowling Green Ballpark, which holds about 4,600 fans, features the classic red-brick design that’s become synonymous with minor league stadiums over the last few decades. There are a few standout elements, however, including an oddly-shaped wall in right-center. The fence here bows in slightly due to the existence of 7th Avenue behind it, creating some rather unique field dimensions. Bowling Green is also one of just a few ballparks in the minors that has a full-time bat dog. A golden retriever named Turbo – the city’s goodest boy – dutifully fetches players’ bats to rounds of cheers from a swooning crowd.

Affiliated with the Tampa Bay Rays for their entire existence, the Hot Rods have won four league titles in their short existence. The 2018 campaign concluded with their first and only championship in the Midwest League, and the team would go on to win three more trophies in the South Atlantic League in 2021, 2022 and 2024. Over the years, stars like Blake Snell, Willy Adames and Jake Cronenworth have come and gone from the Hot Rods roster, proving that – in addition to building Corvettes – Bowling Green can also build an amazing Major League development pipeline.