William Faulkner once said,  “To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.” Well, in order to understand Starkville and Mississippi State University, you must first understand the Left Field Lounge at Dudy Noble Field.
Starkville is a quaint town in the deep South. Mississippi State is “The People’s University.” It is the Left Field Lounge that best personifies this.
Take a stroll through the Lounge, a motley collection of remodeled cotton trailers, rusted Chevrolet pickup trucks and a host of other homemade platforms and contraptions which have to be seen to be believed, on a warm, spring day, and you will see families and students engaged in the most American of activities: grilling, drinking cold beverages and watching baseball.
It is in the Lounge where you can find prominent businessmen, inebriated students, colorful Starkville residents and perhaps even your favorite professor. All are there for the same reason: to watch their Bulldogs play baseball in one of the most hallowed venues the college baseball world has to offer. In a sport often lacking fan support and tradition, the “Dude” and the Left Field Lounge are a bright spot; a place where the romanticism of the major leagues can be found at the college level. Dudy Noble is to college baseball as Wrigley Field and Fenway Park are to Major League Baseball.
The Lounge has not always been the way it currently is. Like most good things in life, it came about rather organically, Starkville resident and “Lounge Lizard” Dennis Everett explained.
“They were out here in the mid-60s or so,” he said. “It was just a pasture, and when they opened the field here in ’65, I think kids started coming out here. At one time it was called the Beer Gardens, up until ’73 or ’74. We started out with a truck. We would back the truck up to the fence with a piece of plywood on the back of it and put chairs on across it. Then we had to buy a car and park it at the fence to leave it there for the weekend. Actually, we bought a junk car and left it there for the whole season. More and more people wanted to get on the car and there was not any room, so we got this trailer in ’84. It has been rebuilt several times since ’84, but this basic cotton trailer has been here since then.”
Stories such as this are the norm in the Lounge, where many regulars have been attending MSU baseball games for decades, like Tchula resident Brock Marett.
“I’ve been coming out here since ’91; just hooked,” he said. “In the early ’80s you could get a $25 pass and drive in whatever vehicle you wanted. That is kind of how it started. The deck was not out here, so you were actually looking through the fence. They built the deck after Will Clark had built a fence for us, and we could not see through it. By the next ballgame they had built us a deck. They started getting lots out here in ’86,” Marett said. “The buggy has been out here since ’87. We rebuild it every year, but it has been here since ’87.”
Lounge regulars such as Everett and Marett are not the only ones who appreciate the uniqueness of the Lounge. Caleb Carlson from Minneapolis, Minn. sat in the Lounge during Friday’s baseball game against Kansas and said he enjoyed it.
“I think it is pretty freaking brilliant,” Carlson said. “You have a whole section out here, but it is all a collage of different styles of trailers, but the purpose is the same: everyone is coming to grill, have a few beers and watch baseball. I enjoy it. I love the smell of grilling. It is one of the most nostalgic smells out there: grill smoke and baseball.”
It is the Lounge’s lack of pretension and easy, carefree atmosphere that have made it endearing to Bulldog fans of all ages and make it the perfect representation of Mississippi State as whole. For all its complexities, Marett sums the Left Field Lounge up best with a simple statement.
“It is the best place to watch college baseball in America. I think Sports Illustrated and ESPN said it best. It is that simple,” Marett said.