The Braves Left Pearl. The Ballpark Got Busier.
August 13, 2026
August 13, 2026
For twenty seasons, Trustmark Park meant one thing: the Mississippi Braves, Double-A baseball, and a summer schedule that went dark every October. When the Braves relocated to Columbus, Georgia after the 2024 season and became the Columbus Clingstones, the obvious assumption was that the ballpark on Bass Pro Drive would shrink back into a seasonal curiosity, busy for six months and empty the rest of the year.
That is not what happened. The calendar at Trustmark Park is more crowded now than it was under the Braves, and the reason has less to do with who plays there and more to do with what the field is made of.
Pearl did not stay without professional baseball for long. On September 9, 2024, the Frontier League, a Major League Baseball Partner League, announced an expansion franchise for Trustmark Park. After a name-the-team contest run under the placeholder "On Deck 2025," the club became the Mississippi Mud Monsters. They took the field for the first time on May 8, 2025, beating the Florence Y'alls 13-2 in front of 4,552 fans, the Frontier League's first game ever played in Mississippi.
The season that followed was solid but unspectacular on the field. The Mud Monsters finished 49-47, third in the Midwest Conference, and missed the playoffs. Off the field, that first year exposed a problem that had been building for longer than anyone wanted to admit.
Grass had been failing at Trustmark Park long before the Braves ever packed up. In 2023, an Ole Miss-Southern Miss game was called off mid-game because the infield sod had become unplayable. In June 2024, the Braves had to move an entire series against Rocket City to Alabama because the field could not be used at all. The Mud Monsters inherited that same surface for their debut season and absorbed a string of rain delays and rainouts that scrambled the schedule from the start.
The fix that followed was not cosmetic. In fall 2025, Spectrum Entertainment, which operates both the ballpark and the Mud Monsters, tore out the natural grass infield and installed more than 40,000 square feet of Major Play Matrix synthetic turf, the same surface used in professional stadiums and top NCAA programs. Mud Monsters general manager Andrew Seymour summed up the old routine when he announced the change: "Those nights are over."
That single decision is the real hinge of this story. A grass infield that could barely survive one baseball season had no chance of hosting an ice rink, a beer festival, or six weeks of nightly holiday foot traffic. Turf could, and Trustmark Park's 2026 calendar is what that added capacity looks like in practice.
By the time the new surface was announced, the events built around it were already on the books. Main Street Pearl's Oktoberfest ran during the day on October 11, 2025, and MonstoBEERfest, a ticketed beer festival, took over the same space that same night, a daytime family event and an evening adults-only event stacked back to back on ground that would have been torn apart by the second one just a year earlier.
Two months after that, Trustmark Park became something the Braves era never had: a holiday destination. The Southern Lights opened November 21, 2025 and ran through January 4, 2026, filling the ballpark with more than 2.5 million lights, a real ice rink, fire pits, and train rides. General admission started at $15, with a $10 Tuesday rate through a running promotion called Trustmark Tuesdays. Pearl Mayor Jake Windham told WJTV the point was giving the Jackson metro "more things to do in Jackson-metro area," a comment less about the light show itself than about what he expected the ballpark to become.
The 2026 season kept building on that. Trustmark Park hosted the MLB HBCU Power Series from February 12 through 15, a multi-day showcase run in conjunction with Major League Baseball that brought Jackson State, Alcorn State, Texas Southern, Prairie View A&M, Alabama A&M, and Grambling State to Pearl. The 2026 Governor's Cup between Mississippi State and Ole Miss sold out at 8,223 fans, a crowd size that would have been hard to imagine on a field prone to midgame cancellations three years earlier. Belhaven University's Division III team, the Blazers, now calls Trustmark Park home too, under a 2025 through 2030 agreement that adds college games and practices to a building that used to sit dark most weekdays. In April, the Mud Monsters even launched an online team store, a small sign of a fan base with enough staying power to shop for merchandise between seasons.
Right now, in the middle of August, the Mud Monsters are closing out their regular season at Trustmark Park with:
The same stretch of Bass Pro Drive that anchors Trustmark Park has picked up its own momentum. Mississippi's first Dutch Bros opened at 200 Bass Pro Drive on July 8, 2026, opening its doors at 5 a.m. with $3 medium drinks to mark the launch. It sits a short walk from the Outlets of Mississippi, the state's only outlet shopping center, a 325,000-square-foot property whose smaller storefronts have turned over repeatedly in recent years even as its anchor lineup, Nike, Coach, Under Armour, and Ulta Beauty, has held steady.
None of this happened because Pearl lost a baseball team. It happened because the corridor around Trustmark Park, coffee shop, outlet mall, and ballpark together, keeps drawing enough daily traffic to make new investment worth making.
The easy version of this story is that the Braves left and a new team showed up. The more useful version, if you actually live near Bass Pro Drive, is that Trustmark Park spent two decades as a summer-only venue and only became a year-round one after its own field stopped being able to reliably host a full baseball season, let alone anything else. The turf was not an upgrade for baseball. It was the fix that let the same ballpark run a beer festival in October, a holiday village in December, an HBCU showcase in February, and a sold-out college rivalry game, on top of a full baseball schedule all summer.
If last year's numbers are any signal, expect Main Street Pearl's fall festival and The Southern Lights to return again this year. Either way, the pattern is set. Whatever team wears the uniform in Pearl next, the building underneath them is doing more work than it ever did under the Braves.
If you're curious what else has changed around Pearl lately, our Pearl neighborhood guide keeps track of more of what's local and current. And whenever ballpark small talk turns into a real conversation about a move, Marketplace Real Estate is glad to help you find your next home or get a free home valuation, no pressure, just local knowledge you can use.
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