CAROLINA BASEBALL: GAME 7
Carolina Mudcats
For our seventh Carolina ballpark, Dad and I drive via Raleigh east to Zebulon, NC, home of Five County Stadium and the Carolina Mudcats, the Low-A affiliate of the Milwaukee Brewers. The would be taking on the Baltimore Orioles affiliate, the Delmarva Shorebirds
Five County Stadium, home of the High-A Carolina Mudcats, sits at the eastern edge of Zebulon, a town of about 6,000 that sits 20 miles east of the state capital in Raleigh. It features one of the best baseball water towers in Minor League Baseball.
The ballpark resides in In Wake County, but it’s called “Five County Stadium” because it lies within 1,500 feet of the intersection of Wake, Franklin, Nash, and Johnston counties, and the Wilson County line is also close by. Built in 1991 for $2.5 million and seating 6,500, Five County Stadium was extensively renovated in 1999, replacing metal with concrete.
One of the most interesting aspects of the ballpark is that the majority of its seating is on a second deck that hangs over a much smaller lower bowl.
The Mudcats go back to 1969, when the Columbus (Georgia) Mudcats played in the Double-A Southern League, then moved to North Carolina in 1991, playing the first half of the season at Fleming Stadium in nearby Wilson, North Carolina, while constructed continued on Five County Stadium. Since that first season in Zebulon, Carolina has been affiliated with the Pirates, Rockies, Marlins, Reds, Indians, Braves, and, since 2017, the Brewers.
The Mudcats won Southern League titles in 1995 and 2003. But the franchise moved to Pensacola after 2011. The High-A Kinston Indians, just 65 miles away, took the opportunity for a newer ballpark, moving to Zebulon and reclaiming the Carolina Mudcats name.
During Minor League Baseball’s reshuffling in 2020, the Mudcats — once a Double-A team — were relegated from High-A to Low-A ball.
I took a few shots of the ballpark and returned to the concourse behind home plate to find that my dad had made some new friends. Carlotta Schmittgen, a freelance sports columnist and broadcaster who works for the Mudcats on game days, had heard Dad’s story and introduced him to a few others at the stadium, including these nice folks running the North Carolina Friends of Santa toy drive.
The players slowly filtered out of their clubhouses and onto the field. There was an eerie quiet to this pre-game. As always, we had arrived when the gates opened, and much of crowd typically arrived just before the game. But on this Wednesday night with rain the forecast, Five County Stadium would get just 405 souls in attendance. I could have met every one of them before the seventh inning stretch.
The Mudcats had started the season hot and had been in a dogfight all year with the Wood Ducks and the Salem Red Sox for the second and final playoff spot in the Carolina League (called the Low-A East in 2021, a single season of Minor League Baseball re-naming madness). But most of the players who contributed to that success had moved on to the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers, the Milwaukee Brewers High-A affiliate. Their replacements came from the Arizona Complex League, a Rookie League for newly signed players. No longer playing games in protected training facilities, these fresh faces were had lost five of their last six games to relinquish the playoff lead to Salem. In the previous night’s game against the Delmarva Shorebirds, the Mudcats gave up 18 runs and committed four errors.
The Low-A affiliate of the Baltimore Orioles, the Shorebirds had been in the hunt early, but they were now five games behind first-place Salem for that final playoff spot, with the Wood Ducks and Mudcats to overcome as well.
Delmarva put the damper on a damp evening with two runs on three singles in the top of the first, ending 22-year-old starter Brendan Murphy’s night after one inning.
At an early-inning break in the action, I went looking for food. I asked a young lady at the counter for a recommendation, and went with her pick of the Pulled Pork Loaded Nachos. Dad did the same. Zero regrets.
The teams traded runs on the third and fourth innings, highlighted by a three-run homer over the right-field fence by Mudcats catcher Darrien Miller. The game was tied 4-4 after four.
Carolina mascot Muddy the Mudcat sat for autographs for an inning or so. I asked to have my Mudcats hat signed, completing a 30-year circle of life. When the team first moved to Carolina in 1991, I went into a baseball hat shop in Horton Plaza in my native San Diego, determined to buy a funky Minor League Baseball hat. I came away with a Mudcats hat. And now, I had brought it home.
Delmarva took a 7-4 lead in the sixth, but the Mudcats answered with five runs in the bottom half. Again, it was Darrien Miller, this time with a grand slam to right, his second home run of the night. Mudcats 9, Shorebirds 7 after six.
I took a stroll through the Tackle Box, the Mudcats team store. As I mulled over the merchandise, the room was quiet, save for the radio broadcast playing crisply over the speakers, emanating from the level above us. The girl at the counter looked up from her homework to handle my purchase, then went back to her studies.
Darrien Miller
Delmarva closed the gap to 9-8 in the top of the seventh. But in the bottom of the eighth, Darrien Miller once again came to the plate. Once again, the left-handed hitter smacked a homer over the 309-foot short porch in right field.
In a full year of Low-A ball, Miller would have 204 plate appearances and 160 at-bats, hitting just seven home runs — three in this game. He drove in eight of Carolina’s 10 runs. The Mudcats outlasted the Shorebirds, 10-8.