Away from the Grand Strand

Home plate entrance to Pelicans Ballpark, Aug-2012.

The handsome seating bowl, as seen from down the first-base line.

Trees, along with a stand of palmettos, dominate the view.

Chronological Tour: Stop 166

• Location: 21st Street North, between Route 17 Bypass and Grissom Boulevard, Myrtle Beach, S.C. (map it using Google Maps)
• Opened: 1999 as Coastal Federal Field
• Additional names: BB&T Coastal Field (2007), TicketReturn.com Field (2012), Pelicans Ballpark (2023)
• Home team: Myrtle Beach Pelicans, Carolina League (1999-present)
• Capacity: 4,324

Rating: 3 baseballs

A fan I ran into in Winston-Salem said I could come down and sit in his lower box seats, and I did. But as I walked the park beforehand, I looked in vain for a whiteboard that contained the league standings and the day’s starting lineups. I wondered how they could possibly forget that. That, and a lemonade stand. They had soft-serve ice cream (with the humidity, I had to eat it super-fast to save it), but no lemonade. South Carolina and no lemonade? Horrors! At least that was rectified by my 2012 return visit. (On a related note, the stats failed to print on the game-day inserts for that 1999 game. We’ll blame it on Friday the 13th, I suppose.) Another issue is that the scoreboard is in left field, and the sun bleaches it out in the early innings, especially in the summer.

On the other hand, the park looks nice, and it’s in a good spot. Instead of going down along congested Ocean Boulevard, it’s just off the bypass (Route 17) and right near a club strip called Broadway at the Beach. And the park faces away from the clubs, so instead you get trees, a little bit of the parking lot, and 17 young palmettos (for the highway number?) to add a true South Carolina touch.

I was afraid the park would be suffering the same fate as Atlantic City, with tourists not flocking to the games. The Pelicans are doing better, though, and a healthy crowd of 4700 was in attendance the night I went – many of them visitors looking for an alternative to the club scene. They had contest participants from as far away as New York and Kentucky, as well as one who was playfully announced as coming “all the way from Myrtle Beach, S.C.”.