The Carolina Mudcats Era Near Raleigh: A Look Back at Zebulon Baseball

If you grew up anywhere near Raleigh in the last three and a half decades, there's a decent chance your first real baseball memory happened in Zebulon, not Raleigh itself. Not because Zebulon was ever the obvious choice — it wasn't, and the story of how the Mudcats ended up there instead of Raleigh is honestly one of the best parts of this whole saga — but because for 35 seasons, Five County Stadium quietly became the place where this region actually watched baseball. That era ended after the 2025 season. This is the real story of how it started, what it was actually like, and why it's over.

Opening night was almost a disaster, and that tells you everything

Here's a detail that somehow doesn't get told enough: the Carolina Mudcats' very first game at Five County Stadium, on July 3, 1991, nearly didn't happen. The stadium wasn't finished when the season started that April, so the brand-new team spent its first three months playing "home" games an hour east in Wilson, at old Fleming Stadium, waiting for construction in Zebulon to catch up.

When July 3 finally arrived, Wake County officials were still finalizing their sign-off on the building that same morning. That night, as a standing-room-only crowd of 7,333 people filed in and found their seats, the construction crew was reportedly still out on the field bolting the last of those seats down. The Mudcats lost that first Zebulon game 6-1 to the Braves. Nobody who was there remembers the score.

Why Zebulon, and not Raleigh

This is the detail that makes the whole story make sense, and it's a genuinely good one: team owner Steve Bryant didn't actually want Zebulon. When he bought the Double-A Columbus Astros in 1988 and started planning a move back to his home state, his first choice was Raleigh — specifically, land that today sits under the Lenovo Center. It didn't happen, because Durham Bulls owner Miles Wolff held territorial rights that blocked any competing minor league team from setting up within 35 miles of Durham.

Bryant had to pivot, and he landed on a tobacco field in a town of just over 3,000 people, choosing Zebulon specifically because it was about as close to Raleigh as the rulebook would allow. The stadium's own name comes from that same geography — Five County Stadium sits within about five miles of where Wake, Franklin, Nash, Johnston, and Wilson counties all converge. It wasn't the plan. It became the identity.

Thirty-five seasons, seven big-league affiliations, and a genuinely wild guest list

Across its run, Zebulon served as a Double-A franchise for the Pittsburgh Pirates (1991-98), Colorado Rockies (1999-2002), Florida Marlins (2003-08), and Cincinnati Reds (2009-11), before the Double-A franchise itself relocated to Pensacola and a Class A-Advanced club — first tied to Cleveland, later Atlanta, and finally Milwaukee starting in 2017 — took over the Mudcats name and kept the Zebulon tradition going at a different level. More than 300 former Mudcats went on to play in the majors, and two seasons in particular are worth knowing if you want the highlight reel:

The 1995 team, a Pittsburgh Pirates affiliate, won the franchise's first Southern League championship behind catcher Jason Kendall, who took home league MVP honors that year on his way to a genuinely excellent big-league career. The pitching staff four years earlier, in that chaotic 1991 inaugural season, had been anchored by a young knuckleballer named Tim Wakefield, who led the league in wins before becoming a Boston icon.

The 2003 team might be the single best roster this ballpark ever hosted — a Florida Marlins affiliate loaded with Miguel Cabrera, Adrián González, Dontrelle Willis, and Josh Beckett, all playing together in Zebulon before combining, collectively, for multiple MVP awards, Cy Young honors, a Rookie of the Year trophy, and a World Series championship at the big-league level. They won the Southern League title that year too, which feels almost like an afterthought next to what that roster became.

And the stars weren't only wearing Mudcats uniforms. More than 7,000 fans packed Five County Stadium in 1992 for an exhibition game against Barry Bonds and the parent-club Pirates. In 1994, Michael Jordan came through as a member of the Birmingham Barons during his one-season detour from the NBA into professional baseball.

And in 1997, an entire Seattle Mariners exhibition squad — Ken Griffey Jr., Alex Rodriguez, Jay Buhner, Edgar Martinez, and Joey Cora among them — played a Southern League All-Star team on this same small-town field. If you were a kid in the Triangle in the '90s, there's a real chance you saw a future Hall of Famer here before most of the country had any idea who they were.

The ballpark had a genuine personality, and that's not nothing

Part of what made Zebulon baseball special wasn't the affiliate logo on the jerseys — it was the specific, slightly goofy character of the place itself. Muddy, the team's bipedal catfish mascot (joined later by Mini-Muddy), became a genuinely beloved local fixture. A massive water tower loomed just beyond left field with "Zebulon" painted down its side and a Mudcats logo on top, visible from well outside the stadium.

The upper-level lounge, once a full-service restaurant called Cattails before becoming the DRB Sky Lounge, gave fans an elevated view of both the game and that water tower. And naturally, given the team's name, the concession stand served an actual cornmeal-crusted, deep-fried catfish sandwich — Muddy himself was reportedly less than thrilled about that particular menu item, but he was assured he was personally exempt.

None of that shows up in a box score, but it's exactly the kind of detail that made Five County Stadium feel like a real place with a real identity, rather than a generic ballpark that happened to have a catfish logo slapped on it.

Zebulon grew up alongside its team

It's worth pausing on this: Zebulon had just over 3,000 residents when the Mudcats arrived in 1991. Today, the town's population sits closer to 8,000 — nearly double what it was over the past two decades — and while a minor league baseball team obviously isn't solely responsible for a town's growth, 35 years of a Double-A and then Single-A franchise putting Zebulon on the map, drawing visitors from across the Triangle, and giving the town a genuine, recognizable identity beyond "the place near Raleigh" is not nothing either.

Why it actually ended, without the spin

Here's the honest version, not the sentimental one: this wasn't really a choice anyone in Zebulon made. In 2021, following the pandemic-driven, league-wide restructuring of Minor League Baseball, MLB imposed new facility standards on every affiliated ballpark — things like proper pitching tunnels, adequately sized batting cages, and dedicated locker room space for women's staff and players — with a 2026 compliance deadline. Five County Stadium, built quickly in 1991 and renovated once in 1999, would have needed serious, expensive upgrades to meet those standards.

The Mudcats and their parent club, the Milwaukee Brewers, ultimately faced a straightforward business decision: invest heavily in an aging stadium, or build new somewhere else. In December 2023, the city of Wilson approved a $69 million investment in a brand-new downtown ballpark, and the Mudcats played their 35th and final Zebulon season in 2025 before relocating about 23 miles east and rebranding as the Wilson Warbirds for 2026.

There's a real, almost poetic irony buried in that ending: Wilson's Fleming Stadium is the exact same ballpark where the Mudcats played their first "home" games back in 1991, before Five County Stadium was even ready. Thirty-five years later, the franchise's story essentially closes the loop back to where it started.

What happens to Five County Stadium now

The ballpark itself isn't going anywhere, and it isn't being torn down like Devereux Meadow before it — it's simply getting a new tenant. Five County Stadium is now home to the Zebulon Devil Dogz, a summer collegiate wood-bat team in the Coastal Plain League, continuing to host live baseball in Zebulon even without an MLB-affiliated club calling it home. It's a quieter chapter than the Mudcats era, but a genuinely hopeful one — the field where Miguel Cabrera and Ken Griffey Jr. once played isn't sitting abandoned, it's just playing a different level of the same game.

Quick reference

A few honest tips

• If you want to see Five County Stadium's water tower and the old ballpark feel, it's still there — the Devil Dogz now play a full summer schedule, and tickets are genuinely inexpensive compared to what affiliated ball used to cost.

• Don't blame Zebulon or the Mudcats organization for the move. This was a facility-standards and financing story, not a story about declining local support — Five County Stadium drew real crowds right up until the end.

• If you've got old ticket stubs or photos from a Mudcats game, they're worth holding onto. With the franchise now rebranded entirely as the Wilson Warbirds, Zebulon-era memorabilia is a closed chapter in a way it wasn't just a year ago.

• The Wilson Warbirds' new ballpark opened this year (2026) is worth a visit if you want to see where this story goes next — same Milwaukee Brewers pipeline, same region, new building entirely.

Thirty-five years, a 300-plus-player alumni list that reads like a Hall of Fame ballot, and a Michael Jordan cameo — Zebulon punched well above its weight for a town that started with barely 3,000 people. The Mudcats era is over, but if you were there for any of it, you already know it was never really about the affiliate patch on the jersey. It was about a summer night, some stadium eats (never long lines for food), and the very real chance that the kid at shortstop might be a Hall of Famer in ten years.

Sources

1. MLB.com — "Explore Five County Stadium, home of the Carolina Mudcats"

2. Wikipedia — "Carolina Mudcats"

3. Wikipedia — "Five County Stadium"

4. The Wilson Times — "Goodbye to the Mudcats"

5. Personal Recollection of Attending Games