A Castle Out of State

Entrance to Knights Stadium, Sep-2007.

The seating bowl, as viewed from the top of the upper deck down the first-base line.

This photo, taken from the Home Run Café, shows the unusual scoreboard location in straightaway center field.

Chronological Tour: Stop 106

• Location: Deerfield Drive, off SC 460 at I-77, Fort Mill, S.C. (map it using Google Maps)
• Opened: 1990
• Demolished: 2015
• Home team: Charlotte Knights, International League (1990-2013)
• Capacity: 10,000

Rating: 4 baseballs

Despite its being built in 1990, the park, designed, like the one in Buffalo, to be expandable if Major League Baseball came calling, featured many of the modern amenities fans and corporate clients come to expect. There were at least a dozen sky boxes ringing the upper deck, and these flanked a two-level structure of which the bottom level was the press box and the top level was the Home Run Café, providing the best indoor view of a ball game this side of the 600 Club at Fenway Park. The restaurant was open year-round.

My impression of the park was favorable upon my first visit in 1996, and it remained unchanged in 2007. A few minor upgrades, such as replacing a few of the seats that have gotten a little creaky, would have kept this a first-class Triple-A facility for years to come.

The trouble is, the Castle’s days were numbered. Citing low attendance because fans in the more populated North Carolina part of the Charlotte metropolitan area don’t care to travel all the way down to Fort Mill (even though the park is only 20 minutes from downtown Charlotte), the team, the city of Charlotte, and Mecklenburg County got together to build a new park in downtown Charlotte, just two blocks from the football stadium that houses the NFL Carolina Panthers. This was similar to the situation in Indianapolis, also an International League member, when the Colts played at the Hoosier Dome across the street. The new Knights park was proposed to open for the 2009 season but was delayed; however, plans were resurrected and the Charlotte park opened in 2014.

York County sold the property to the holding company for a clothing retailer in 2015, and the new owners tore down the stadium. All that remains as a reminder of the Castle is a water tower visible from nearby I-77 that was painted to resemble a baseball.