1. Good-bye to the Southern League
Mudcats owner reflects on the past and looks ahead to team's future in Carolina League
When the last pitch is thrown at Five County Stadium today, it won’t just signify the end
of another season, it will be the final time that a baseball with the inscription “Southern
League” will cross home plate.
In December, news broke that Carolina Mudcats owner Steve Bryant was on the verge of
selling his Double-A professional baseball franchise to the owner of the then Independent
League franchise, the Pensacola Pelicans. In this basically three-team swap, Bryant
would acquire a new team, the Kinston Indians of Advanced-A Carolina League.
On a recent night eight months later, Bryant sat relaxed in the back of the air-conditioned
confines of Cattails Restaurant, overlooking the first-base side of Five County Stadium.
The restaurant is where Bryant most likely can be found during a Mudcats game when
he’s not walking around the stadium talking to the fans.
Wearing a Mudcats shirt and sipping on a goblet full of ice water, he watched through the
glass windows his Mudcats battle the farm team of the Florida Marlins, the Jacksonville
Suns. With the voice of Mudcats radio announcer Patrick Kinas calling the game in the
background, Bryant reflected on the past 21 seasons and what’s to come in the future,
only taking breaks to watch the action on the diamond below.
It was just a year ago when Bryant stood in front of home plate and addressed the crowd
to announce the Mudcats had reached an agreement on a player development contract to
keep the Cincinnati Reds minor league affiliate in Zebulon for two more years. At that
time no one knew, not even Bryant, that wouldn’t come to pass.
“I was approached in September, after the season, about would I have an interest in
getting involved in the sale of the club,” Bryant said. “I told them I had no interest if it
involved leaving Five County without a team.
“I worked too hard to get a team here, to get the stadium built, and I wasn’t going to take
baseball away from Wake County.”
Bryant disclosed that he had been approached numerous times over the years about
selling his Double-A franchise. He said he would always balk at the opportunity if it left
him without a team. Then came the offer to buy the franchise in Kinston, which Bryant
purchased with the intentions of moving it to Zebulon — leaving the fans of Kinston
without a team.
Many people questions why the owners in Kinston, which has had a team there for

2. decades and has a rich baseball history, would agree to such a deal that would leave the
city without professional baseball.
“In my discussions, probably 15 years ago, (the Kinston Indians) came to the conclusion
they had to bring in a bunch of outside investors to keep baseball in Kinston,” he said.
“There were about 65 of them that put money in just to keep baseball in Kinston. And
what has happened is baseball has grown, franchises have grown, and Kinston hasn’t.
“When we made an offer to them, the general partners for this year had the responsibility
to all the investors to bring the offer to the table. We paid them fair-market value. We
didn’t try to get it discounted,” Bryant said. “Our goal was we were going to sell our
team and let’s take the money, turn it, and reinvest it.”
Bryant pointed out that because of how the Southern League was transitioning, along
with rumors of current teams moving farther south to states such as Louisiana, he felt it
was the right time to make the move.
“I’ve always felt that the Southern League, while I’ve really enjoyed being in it and the
prestige of being in the Southern League, left us and went south,” he said. “When I
brought the team here, we had a Double-A team in Charlotte and Greenville, South
Carolina. So our travel was real easy. Yeah, we had to go to Alabama and Tennessee, but
we had these intermediate stops.
“We could stop in Greenville and then go and come back and play Charlotte and come
back (home.) It wasn’t 10- or 12-hour bus rides.”
Bryant noted how much of a crackdown baseball has had on travel in recent years,
making it more costly for the Mudcats.
“The last five or six years, Major League Baseball’s biggest beef with the minor leagues
is these long bus rides,” he explained. “They have instituted a rule that said ‘if you go
more than 500 miles in one trip you had to have a day off. We had situations where I was
taking 28 or 29 guys, counting the trainers, on a bus trip. I’d put them up in a hotel room
an extra day or night without even playing a game.”
But the travel arrangements were not the only component that had Bryant contemplating
leaving the Southern League.
By cutting ties with the Southern League, Bryant will join a new league full of different
opponents and a somewhat new brand of baseball. Teams will be closer, and there will be
the use of the designated hitter year round. Bryant, however, doesn’t see the switch as
beginning a new era, but more of another segment in the history of the Mudcats.
“I don’t think of it as so much as the end because we had a lot of segments,” he said. “We
had the segment where the stadium was basically modular and erector-set; we got

3. through that phase.”
Bryant listed different ‘segments’ such as affiliation change, the bypass opening up,
among other things.
The segments to which Bryant referred aren’t as nonchalant as he made it seem. He and
his front office staff went through a plethora of setbacks and hardships to get his baseball
team in Wake County.
A ROCKY START
When Bryant purchased the Columbus Astros in 1988, his main objective was to bring
baseball back to the Triangle. Bryant wanted the team where the RBC Center currently is
in Raleigh, but the Durham Bulls’ owner at the time, Miles Wolff, implemented a 35-
mile radius rule. Bryant then found a plot of land that was just outside the radius and was
still in Wake County. He decided that’s where he wanted his field of dreams to be.
“The most importing thing of all was securing a site and some very, very special people
helped us secure this site,” he said. “And without it, it would never have happened
without a lot of people doing things that were extraordinary by taking the chance on
loaning us money and buying the land and starting up the stadium.
“There weren’t many people who thought it would ever make it. And because so many
people stepped forward and stood up and said ‘I’m going to help you do this,’ quitting
was never an option.”
Bryant thought that one selling point to Wake County and the fans would be that he
would give them the chance to see Double-A baseball, something that hadn’t been done
before in the area.
“When we first bought a team to bring here, the highest level of baseball around here was
A-ball. So had we brought an A-ball club in, no one would have thought any different
about it,” he said. “And when we brought Double-A instead of A-Ball, it was quite
frankly a freak of nature that a Double-A team was even available.”
But it wasn’t as easy of a sell as he thought.
“In order to even be taken seriously by the city of Raleigh, we had to show the ability that
we either owned a team that we could bring, or that we could have an agreement to buy a
team,” he said. “So when I bought Columbus, there was no assurance that I would ever
get a stadium built. But by my willingness to go do that, it showed the city my intentions
were to do it and it really made us a serious player.”
But Bryant said that he and his front office got used to all the setbacks that were put in
their way and just trudged forward.

4. “If this had to be done today with the way we did it, it couldn’t have been done,” he said.
“In this economy, I’m not sure this stadium could be built. You look at the stadium now
and you realize that this is here for future generations. It’s an impeccable stadium and it’s
beyond our wildest dreams that we’d ultimately end up with this.”
BACK TO THE FUTURE
Bryant said he is very excited about joining the Carolina League.
“I always thought a High-A team would do well here,” he said. “The reason I thought that
was North Carolina — in particular Wake County and the Triangle, and for that matter
Rocky Mount and Wilson as well — have all had Carolina League teams.
“Obviously the movie Bull Durham portrayed the minor leagues and almost every city
they went to was a North Carolina city and it was the Carolina League,” he said. “We’re
sort of going back to the future; we’re going back to the days of when the minor leagues
were at its height in the ‘50s, when the Carolina League was the league in this part of the
world, and recapturing that romance.”
Bryant said that even though the players on the field may be a year or two younger, they
would still have “those stars in their eyes” of wanting to make it to the big leagues.
“I think we have a chance to sort of have a rebirth with everything here now with the
stadium finished and the roads open,” he said.
As the game finished and the Mudcats defeated the Suns 5-2, Bryant said he thinks this
change will help the franchise grow and will be beneficial to everyone. Bryant is
confident that this spot is the right spot for baseball, no matter what league they play in.
“Once the first game was ever played here, I knew we had the right place,” he said. “I
knew it would take a while for it to really mature, but there was no question that the
passion was here and this was sort of hallowed ground — not bad for a soy bean and
tobacco field.”