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 in straightaway center field.

• Location: Deerfield Drive, off Gold Hill Road at I-77, Fort Mill, S.C.
• Opened: 1990
• Home team: Charlotte Knights, International League (1990-present)
• Capacity: 10,000

Rating: 4 baseballs

Despite its being built in 1990, the park features many of the modern amenities fans and corporate clients come to expect. There are at least a dozen sky boxes ringing the upper deck, and these flank a two-level structure of which the bottom level is the press box and the top level is the Home Run Café, providing the best indoor view of a ball game this side of the 600 Club at Fenway Park. The restaurant is 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, will keep this a first-class Triple-A facility for years to come.

The trouble is, the Castle’s days are 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 are working on an agreement to build a new park in downtown Charlotte, just two blocks from the football stadium that houses the NFL Carolina Panthers. This would be similar to the situation in Indianapolis, also an International League member. The new park was slated to open for the 2009 season but has been delayed.