There is a checklist that every college baseball team knows they need to fill up with marks in order to conjure up the perfect season. The kind of year that leads to Omaha, perhaps that precious dogpile, and a trophy to be brought back and displayed at their home ballpark for the rest of time.

As the kiln of May and the postseason approaches, the 2025 Clemson Tigers appear to be checking off all of those boxes. Pitching. Hitting. Depth. Postseason experience. And there at the bottom of that crucial list, on a line that barely hangs onto the edge of the paper, stained with barbecue sauce and beer, is that home ballpark itself. More accurately, one corner of that ballpark. The one that hangs over the outfield wall with an old school bus parked beneath the stands, serving as a foundation for a platform of scaffolding that is also a launchpad for grill smoke and the grill marks of insults.

Welcome to the Cheap Seats.

The Tigers fans that make up the raucous right-field grandstand at Clemson’s Doug Kingsmore Stadium — aka, The Doug — have, well, ragged opposing outfielders for more than two decades.

“Man, I have been playing baseball my whole life, and I can say that’s definitely the most, let’s say, unique outfield I’ve ever stood in,” confessed Whit Merrifield, three-time MLB All-Star and hero of South Carolina’s 2010 Men’s College World Series championship. He started that season on March 5, positioned beneath the Cheap Seats. “They knew everything about me. Where I grew up. What classes I was taking. If I didn’t dislike Clemson so much, I’d compliment them on their research.”

When the Tigers stand together for the playing the Clemson alma mater following games, they punctuate the tune with an in-unison “Cheap Seats!” salute.

And a year ago, when the Tigers swept their first-round NCAA regional over High Point and in-state rival Coastal Carolina, what was head coach Erik Bakich’s first instinct? To run straight out to right field and scale the fence into the Cheap Seats, despite the residents of those seats drenching that fence and the railings above it with copious amounts of adult beverages.

“When we were doing the alma mater, Coach Bakich tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘We are jumping up there,'” Clemson third baseman Blake Wright remembered about that day. “I thought maybe he was kidding, but as soon the alma mater ended, he took off running, so we followed him.”

The 47-year-old coach came to Clemson two seasons ago after leading Michigan for a decade, including a stunning championship series appearance in 2019, nearly winning the Big Ten’s first MCWS title since 1966. As an East Carolina outfielder in 2000, Bakich played two games at the ballpark, then known as Beautiful Tiger Field. He returned two years later as an assistant coach under Clemson legend Jack Leggett, so he has direct experience with the early onset and formative years of the Cheap Seats.

There is a giant framed photo that hangs in the Clemson baseball office of a Tigers team of the past celebrating in the Cheap Seats. So, when the team clinched its first super regional appearance since 2010, Bakich figured, why not get back to the program’s rowdy roots?

“When I came here, one of the things we did immediately was challenge the community to make this place as rowdy and as hostile as possible,” Bakich explained during the offseason. “They responded even bigger than we could have imagined. So, yes, when it was time to celebrate, there was nowhere else to go, even if maybe I am getting too old to be climbing fences 10 feet in the air.”

But let’s go back to that beginning to see how it all really came together.

“We all started in school at Clemson in 2000, and it was just a chain-link fence,” recalled Garrett Edens, 43, and the current president of the Cheap Seats. Yes, they do have a president. “I can remember in 1999, when I was senior in high school, coming to games and guys would have their trucks backed up to the fence, chilling and grilling in the backs of their trucks. There was a tall fence and a short fence. So we’d back our trucks up to it in right field. We’ve been there ever since.”

Mind you, with some major league modifications. In 2003, Edens and his OG outfield pals purchased a 1979 International 36-passenger school bus for $450 after someone spotted a classified ad taken out by a local private school. They ripped out the seats, installed some couches, including one thrown out by the Clemson athletic department during a renovation of its fabled Death Valley football stadium. Over the years, the bus was filled with stereo speakers, seemingly any metal surface that could be repurposed into a grill was, and its roof was covered in what became a spiderweb-like tower of scaffolding.

But the incredible intricacies of their engineering always took a backseat to the red-faced insults cast down from atop those seats and into the ears of unwitting victims on the playing field below.

“Let me just say that I was always glad they were on my side and not the other way around,” said Seth Beers, former Clemson outfielder and 2016 Dick Howser Trophy winner.

Did a player turn down a big signing bonus to go to college? That’s going to come up.

Did a player strike out or commit an error in a big game at any time in his young life? That’s going to come up.

Did a player’s girlfriend recently dump him for someone on the football team? Oh hell yeah, that’s definitely coming up.

“The moment I supposed I’m best known for was a player for South Carolina, who had a brother that played for us here at Clemson,” said Edens, referring to former Tigers outfielder Collin Mahoney and his brother with the dreaded Gamecocks, Ryan Mahoney, in 2004. Collin agreed to chat with the Cheap Seats and dished on his brother.

“I got a lot of stuff. About girlfriends and everything. It was pretty rough. Just 45 minutes of it, all during warmups and I’m out there on the scaffolding. I can almost stand on top of the wall and I’m just sitting there barking. Finally, he had enough. I hit a sore spot and he was climbing, climbing that wall. Pointing his finger, threatening how he’s going to cut my tail and multiple ways. His teammates and coaches came out there and we’re all just raising hell. And this was way before the game!”

Clemson officials called Edens and his cohorts and told them to calm it down. Over the years, multiple athletic administrators have made noise about putting an end to the Cheap Seats. At one point, the local fire marshal was waiting to tell them they weren’t up to code. When Edens, who works in the construction business, asked for details, he just went to his truck to retrieve his tools and fixed it.

“What saved us was the coaching staff,” Edens said. “Coach Leggett made it known that he was behind us 100%, and that kind of made us official.”

Official to the point that the bus is now a permanent part of the ballpark, with stands built around it. The success of the Cheap Seats and the massive, smoky Cajun Café located behind it (home games routinely grill 200 pork chops and at least that many chickens) has spawned other outfield communities around The Doug, as well as next door at Clemson’s softball facility. Then there’s the student section, which is located right behind the opposing team’s bullpen, which adds even more to the intense atmosphere.

Warming up as a South Carolina pitcher with Clemson students breathing down your neck is pure nightmare fuel. pic.twitter.com/BjCEfiHeTm

— Chris Phillips (@CPhilly19) March 1, 2025

And Edens doesn’t dispute any credit that the Cheap Seats might receive for the rise in wild outfield activity at college ballparks around the nation.

“We were probably the foundations for that in college baseball, yeah. I think Ole Miss and Mississippi State and them were like a year or two behind us,” Edens said. “They’ve got some big old representations out there. But I would also believe their university catered to it, right? Ours did not. Not in the beginning. Now they love it. Though we do still get some side eyes from some of the older type folks.”

It’s been a couple of decades since Edens graduated from Clemson, so he and his fellas are also beginning to graduate into older type folks. Now a dad with teenage girls and near-teens in the house, he checks up a little bit when crowing at college students. But only just a little bit. And the Cheap Seats are now legit, a nonprofit organization that raises funds for a variety of causes. Last year, they used cash collected at their annual golf tournament to help pay the college costs of Clemson’s bullpen catcher, who was ineligible for NIL funds.

But no matter how much older or corporatized it might become, the Cheap Seats are still the Cheap Seats. And they very much believe in their orange, Tiger-striped, hickory-wood-smoked hearts that they might be the edge that this Clemson team needs to finally win a long-elusive Men’s College World Series title, as the Tigers are considered by many to be the best college baseball program to never win the sport’s biggest prize.

“We’re here for them. Always, even as we get older,” Edens promised. “When they won that regional last year, we had debated, do we bring champagne? Or will that jinx it? So when Coach Bakich started climbing up there with us, I said, ‘Y’all just shake your beers and spray it like it’s champagne!’ That’s more our style anyway.”

Yes, it is.