The Park in the Middle of Nowhere

Walking into Five County Stadium, Sep-2007.

A look at the seating bowl, and Cattails restaurant, from the third-base bleachers.

The water tower beyond the scoreboard is painted like a baseball with a Mudcats logo.

Chronological Tour: Stop 165

• Location: NC 39 at old Route 264 (SR 2404), Zebulon, N.C. (map it using Google Maps)
• Opened: 1991 (renovated 1999)
• Home team: Carolina Mudcats, Southern League (1991-2011), Carolina League (2012-present)
• Capacity: 6,500

Rating: 3 baseballs

The second-deck seating bowl was very short going around, on top of being rather steep, giving me a “little piece of a big stadium” feel. Worse yet, the place still seemed to be unfinished – the ticket sales and most of the concessions were out of trailers flanking the park. As it happened, renovations were still under way, and they were completed in 2000. I got back in November 2006 to reshoot the park, and I took these photos in September 2007.

Five County Stadium is out in the middle of no man’s land. Zebulon is a town of 3173 located 19 miles from Raleigh’s Beltline (the expressway ringing the state capital) and about the same distance from Wilson and Rocky Mount along I-95. That means there’s little to see from the park except one warehouse, a water tower painted with a Mudcats logo, and the pine trees that block the view of Route 264.

One saving grace here during the 1999 expansion was that the park was spotless, and there was a stand selling not only lemonade, but orangeade and limeade as well. The orangeade was tremendous; the lemonade, less so. The stand was still there on a 2007 visit, and the orangeade was just as good.

On that 2007 return trip, I found a park that was still quite serviceable, although they don’t have a white board for posting the lineups, so that the intense fan must listen for the announcer at the start of the game, or catch up as the game goes on. By 2021, there was still no white board, but they did hand out a single-sheet scorecard at the customer service desk with pre-printed starting lineups, as well as having the rosters available there.

My other complaint remains with the park itself: the upper-deck stands are pitched very high. It does give a good view of the game, but those stairs can be quite difficult to navigate. Fortunately, there is good access to the lower stands, but there aren’t many of those.

In late 2010, an investor group announced that they were purchasing the Double-A Mudcats and moving them to Pensacola for the 2012 season. Mudcats management promptly arranged to move the Carolina League’s Kinston Indians to Zebulon, so that Zebulon would retain professional baseball through the transition. The team moved to Low-A during the 2021 Major League Baseball shakeup of the minor leagues.

Plans were announced in December 2023 to relocate the Mudcats to Wilson, about 25 miles to the east. The club would play starting in 2026 at a new park to be built downtown, rather than resurrecting Fleming Stadium, the city’s old minor league baseball home.