There is a verification list that each university baseball team knows that they need to fill with brands to conjure the perfect season. The type of year that takes Omaha, perhaps that beautiful dogpile, and a trophy to be brought and exhibited in its baseball stadium for the rest of the time.
As the May oven is approaching and the postseason, the Clemson 2025 tigers seem to be checking all those boxes. Pitching. Batting Depth. Postemporada experience. And there at the bottom of that crucial list, in a line that barely hangs on the edge of the paper, stained with barbecue sauce and beer, it is that baseball stadium at home. More exactly, a corner of that stadium. The one that hangs on the garden wall with an old school parked under the stands, serving as a base for a scaffolding platform that is also a launch plate for the smoke of the grill and the insults marks.
Welcome to cheap seats.
The fans of the tigers who make up the strident tribune of the right field at the Doug Kingsmore stadium in Clemson, also known as Doug, have, good and irregular, the opposite gardeners for more than two decades.
“Man, I have been playing baseball all my life, and I can say that it is definitely the most, say, a unique garden I have found,” said Whit Merrifield, three times All-Star and hero of South Carolina's 2010 Men's Men's College World Series. That season began on March 5, placed under the cheap seats. “They knew everything about me. Where I grew up. What classes I was taking? If I didn't like Clemson, I would congratulate them for their research.”
When the Tigers come together to play Clemson's Alma Mater after the games, they score the melody with a “cheap seat” in the union! greeting.
And a year ago, when the Tigers swept their first regional NCAA in High Point and Carolina's coastal rival, rival in the state, what was the first instinct of Chief coach Erik Bakich? To run directly to the right garden and climb the fence in the cheap seats, despite the residents of those seats that soak that fence and the railings on it with large amounts of adult drinks.
“When we were doing the Alma Mater, coach Bakich touched me on my shoulder and said: 'We are jumping there,'” recalled Clemson's third base, Blake Wright, that day. “I thought I was kidding, but as soon as the Alma Mater finished, it ran, so we followed it.”
The 47 -year -old coach arrived in Clemson two seasons He returned two years later as an assistant coach under the legend of Clemsson, Jack Leggett, so he has direct experience with the first years of starting and formation of cheap seats.
There is a giant framed photo that hangs in the Clemson baseball office of a tigers team of the past that celebrates in the cheap seats. Then, when the team achieved its first super regional appearance since 2010, Bakich thought, why not return to the noisy roots of the program?
“When I came here, one of the things we did immediately was to challenge the community to make this place the most noisy and hostile as possible,” Bakich explained during the low season. “They responded even bigger than we could have imagined. Then, yes, when it was time to celebrate, there was no other place to go, even if I am getting too old to climb feet to 10 feet in the air.”
But let's go back to that beginning to see how everything really joined.
“We all started at school in Clemsson in 2000, and it was just a wire fence,” said Garrett Edens, 43, and the current president of the cheap seats. Yes, they have a president. “I can remember in 1999, when I was in the last year of high school, reaching the games and the boys would have their trucks backed up to the fence, relaxing and roasting on the backs of their trucks. There was a high fence and a short fence. So we backed our trucks in the right field. We have been there since then.”
Of course, with some modifications of the big leagues. In 2003, Edens and his Pals Ogfield OG bought an international school bus of 36 passengers of 1979 for $ 450 after someone saw a classified announcement taken by a local private school. They expelled the seats, installed some sofas, including one expelled by Clemson's athletics department during a renewal of their legendary football stadium in Death Valley. Over the years, the bus was full of stereo speakers, apparently any metal surface that could be reused on a grill, and its roof was covered with what became a scaffolding tower of scratch scaffolding.
But the incredible complexities of their engineering always brought a rear seat to the insults of the red face thrown from those seats and in the ears of involuntary victims on the field of play below.
“Let me say that I was always glad that they were on my side and not vice versa,” said Seth Beer, former Clemson gardener and winner of the 2016 Dick Howser trophy.
Did a player reject a great signature bonus to go to college? That will arise.
Did a player attacked or make a mistake in a great game at any time of his young life? That will arise.
Did the girlfriend of a player recently leave him for someone in the football team? Oh Devils, yes, that is definitely coming.
“The moment I assumed that I am better known was a South Carolina player, who had a brother who played for us here in Clemson,” Edens said, referring to the former gardener of the Tigers, Collin Mahoney, and his brother with the dreaded Gamecocks, Ryan Mahoney, in 2004. Collin agreed to chat with the cheap seats and plates in his brother.
“I have many things. About the brides and everything. It was quite hard. Only 45 minutes, all during the warm -up and I am outside the scaffolding. I can almost stop at the top of the wall and I'm just sitting there. Demons. And this was long before the game!”
Clemson's officials called Edens and his cohorts and told them to calm him down. Over the years, multiple athletic administrators have made noise by putting an end to cheap seats. At one point, the local firefighters was waiting to tell them that they were not up to the code. When Edens, who works in the construction business, requested details, has just gone to his truck to recover his tools and fixed it.
“What saved us was the coaching staff,” Edens said. “The coach Leggett announced that he was behind us 100%, and that made us officers.”
Officer to the point that the bus is now a permanent part of the stadium, with supports built around it. The success of the cheap seats and the huge and smoked Cajun Café located behind it (the games at Casa routaria asan 200 pork chops and at least so many chickens) has generated other field communities in the field around the Doug, as well as next to Clemson's softball facilities. Then there is the students section, which is just behind the bullpen of the opposing team, which adds even more to the intense atmosphere.
Heating as a South Carolina pitcher with Clemson students who breathe around the neck is pure nightmare fuel. pic.twitter.com/bjcefihetm
– Chris Phillips (@cphilly19) March 1, 2025
And Edens does not dispute any credit that cheap seats can receive for the increase in wild field activity in the baseball field at the university throughout the country.
“We were probably the basis of that in university baseball, yes. I think Ole Miss and Mississippi State and they were like a year or two behind us,” Edens said. “They have some great old representations out there. But it would also believe that their university attended, right? Ours no. Not at first. Now they love it. Although we still have some side eyes of some of the oldest people.”
A couple of decades have passed since Edens graduated from Clemson, so he and his boys are also beginning to graduate in older people. Now a dad with teenagers and close to teenagers at home, a bit is verified when university students. But just a little. And the cheap seats are now legitimate, a non -profit organization that collects funds for a variety of causes. Last year, they used cash raised in their annual golf tournament to help pay the university costs of the Clemson Bullpen Receiver, which was not eligible for null funds.
But it doesn't matter how much older or corporatized they become, cheap seats remain the cheap seats. And they believe a lot in their orange hearts, scratched by tiger and smoked with walnut wood that could be the advantage that this Clemson team finally needs to win a title of the World Menseus of Livede Men's, since many consider that the tigers are the best university baseball program to never win the biggest sport award.
“We are here for them. Always, even as we age,” Edens promised. “When they won that regional last year, we had discussed, we bring champagne? Or is that? That is more our style anyway.”
Yes it is.
