The sky over Ticketreturn.com Field turns to the cotton candy colors of dusk during a late-August Myrtle Beach Pelicans game. The fans are a decidedly older bunch now that the kids are back in school and the summer vacationers are gone. The accents are all over the place.

“Let’s go Sawks!” shouts a heavy-set guy when he sees a fellow fan wearing a Boston Red Sox cap.

Inevitably, another older gentleman, this one in a Yankees shirt, responds.

“Boston sucks!” he cracks, then laughs maniacally. Had this been a scene in Yankee Stadium or Fenway Park, they might have come to blows. But they’re Myrtle Beach retirees who just don’t have the passion for that kind of thing anymore. So the game continues unabated.

This may be the last season before the place gets full-on invaded by the brassy lake accents of Chicago Cubs baseball fans. In this, the Year of the Cubs, Myrtle Beach has firmly declared itself a proud member of the organization by extending its player development contract with the big league club for another four years.

“The Cubs front office and player development staff is second to none,” said Andy Milovich, the Pelicans vice president and general manager, during a rare break at a recent game. “Obviously, the job they did in Boston speaks to that. Whether you’re talking about Theo [Epstein] and Jed [Hoyer] or Jason McLeod and Jaron Madison, the guys we deal with more on a day-to-day basis, they are as thorough and detailed and organized and well-thought-out as anyone else I’ve encountered in my 26 seasons of baseball.”

It doesn’t hurt that the organization has a strong farm system which has supplied Myrtle Beach with a steady stream of future big leaguers. Current No. 1 organization prospect (according to MLB.com) Ian Happ started the season there before his midseason promotion to Double-A. Before he was traded to the Yankees for closer Aroldis Chapman, Gleyber Torres was the Cubs’ top guy, and he began the season as a Pelican, too.

The talent isn’t limited to position players. Right-hander Trevor Clifton, the 2016 Carolina League pitcher of the year and the organization’s eighth-best prospect, anchored the Pelicans rotation all season. Right-hander Jake Stinnett, No. 16 on MLB.com’s organizational rankings, also spent the 2016 season in Myrtle Beach.

Milovich said being with a Cubs affiliate for the last two years has been a thrill for him. He grew up a Cubs fan in northern Indiana. What about the rest of Myrtle Beach? It’s not a far-fetched question. The town, set along the Atlantic Ocean in the northeast corner of South Carolina, is a vacation and retirement destination, welcoming transplants from all over.

“When I moved here and started trying to understand this market, I read a ‘Facebook Likes’ study on fan preferences here,” said Milovich, who took over as the Pelicans general manager in December 2012. “The Braves are No. 1. They’re the team that people who grew up in Myrtle Beach identify with most. The Yankees are a very close second and the Red Sox are a very close third.”

Translation? There are a lot of transplants from the Northeast. That didn’t stop Milovich and his staff from trying to court Braves fans whenever possible, but they’re a fickle bunch, apparently. The Pelicans’ efforts to drum up interest by advertising their games with the Braves’ high-A affiliate, the Carolina Mudcats, didn’t really work.

“We see a lot of orange when the Orioles’ team (the high-A Frederick Keys) comes to town,” said Milovich. “We see a ton of Red Sox gear when their Salem affiliate is here. And we see a lot of everything just because of people traveling from the Northeast and the Midwest.”

In year two of the affiliation with Chicago, Milovich said, he has seen more fans in Cubs caps, shirts and jerseys. He credits the cute and cuddly reputation of the team. The Cubs have long been a lovable loser type — at least until this season.

“The Cubs are a team everyone nationally identifies with,” said Milovich. “The Yankees and Red Sox can be very polarizing, but the Cubs generally aren’t.”

A Hardball Times Update by Rachael McDaniel Goodbye for now.

All the winning by the big league club should take some of the shine off that appeal, but it hasn’t. Anyone with even a passing interest in baseball knows the Cubs have dominated the National League all year and are the favorites to finally win a World Series title. Fans, both casual and passionate, still love them.

“It’s amazing how many people talk about being able to watch our players play on WGN someday,” said Milovich. “Everyone identifies with them because they grew up watching them on TV. It’s a team everyone feels a connection to because they’re the ultimate underdog.”

Given the Cubs’ strong national pull, Milovich and his team have gone to work making the Cubs affiliation more visible at the ballpark.

“We’ve invested heavily in trying to put a Cubs feel in the ballpark, whether it’s raising the “W” flag or the Clark & Addison Grill or our Windy City Wieners stand, with Chicago-style dogs,” he said. “We also converted the kids’ whiffle ball field for kids into a little Wrigley Field.”

A scheduling snafu foiled an attempt to host Cubs great Ferguson Jenkins at the ballpark this year, but plans are already in the works to invite him and other Cub luminaries to Myrtle Beach next season. In fact, Milovich and his team want to go even further than that.

“Maybe there’s a day-long fantasy camp, and the next day is a golf outing with former Cubs,” he said. “Creating a package like that would give someone a compelling reason to come visit and vacation in Myrtle Beach.” That is a pretty great idea, at least for those who could afford it. But could they go further?

How about a rebrand? South Bend did it in advance of the 2015 season, its first as a Cubs affiliate. Not only did the team adopt the Cubs colors, it took the Cubs name. The results were positive, to say the least. South Bend owner Andrew Berlin discussed the rebrand decision in an April 2016 Chicago Tribune article:

There are a lot of minor league teams that do not take the brand of their major league affiliate for fear that one day they may lose the affiliation, and then they have to rebrand once again,” said Berlin, a minority investor in the Chicago Cubs. “But again, our goal is to attract the Cubs to the point where they’ll never want to leave.” South Bend reached new heights in 2015. The South Bend Cubs set a franchise-record in total attendance (347,678) and per-game attendance (5,039) last season. The team’s merchandise sales increased 700 percent thanks to the rebranding, Berlin said.

Milovich not only grew up in South Bend, he also got his first job in baseball there as a member of the South Bend White Sox front office in 1990. He said even with the Sox affiliation, South Bend was a Cubs town.

“When it comes to reinventing yourself and waking up the community to what you’re doing, the change in identity and brand was really critical and a brilliant move for [South Bend],” said Milovich. “It instantly made them a favorite among 90 percent of the locals, and it gave people a reason to stop in and feel connected to the major league club they’ve been following for a long time. It was perfect.”

The Cubs’ Triple-A affiliate in Des Moines has long been called the Cubs and its players wear virtually the same caps and uniforms as the big leaguers. Double-A Tennessee may still be called the Smokies, but in 2014 it unveiled a new logo and branding strategy that tied it more closely to the parent club. Its new logo featured a bear. From an October 2014 post on BallparkDigest.com:

Matching our color scheme with the Chicago Cubs further reflects the great partnership we have enjoyed with them since our affiliation with them began in 2007,” stated Smokies General Manager Brian Cox. “It’s an iconic brand, and we expect to continue our relationship with them for many years.”

Market-wise, the Tennessee Smokies are the mountain version of Myrtle Beach. Smokies Park, in Kodak, Tenn., is set right off Interstate 40 near the gateway to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Tourists come from all over every summer, just like they do in Myrtle Beach. People have chosen to retire nearby, just like others have in Myrtle Beach.

So, wouldn’t it make sense for Myrtle Beach to rebrand itself, too? Not so fast, said Milovich. Given all the Pirates and Orioles and Red Sox and Yankees fans he sees at Ticketreturn.com Field every summer, giving exclusivity to the Cubs brand would be a mistake.

“It’s important to be respectful of people who identify with another team and give them a reason to go home with a Pelicans hat,” said Milovich. “If it was a Cubs hat, maybe they wouldn’t buy it.”

Besides, the team has always been called the Pelicans, ever since its very first game in Myrtle Beach in April 1999. The team has tweaked its branding over the years to get everything just right.

“Everything here has a beachy feel and theme, from the colors and the logo to the amenities throughout the ballpark,” he said. “This is who we are. The Pelicans make a lot of sense here.”

All that said, the kid in Milovich hopes the Cubs affiliation lasts forever. This is a guy who had two dogs, one he named Sammy and the other he named Sosa. He has a daughter named Addison. These are the things you do when you’re a lifelong Cubs fan.

“When you get into baseball and you’re working in it, it’s easy to distance yourself from the fan aspect that brought you to the game in the first place,” he said. “The affiliation with the Cubs has given me a reason to reconnect with that a little bit.”

He feels it all the time now, like when he recently watched the late innings of a Cubs game against the Pittsburgh Pirates. During a break in the action, the Pelicans logo flashed on the screen and the broadcasters talked about the Pelicans making the Carolina League playoffs for the sixth straight year.

“The baseball fan in me gets excited seeing our logo up there as a part of the Cubs organization,” said Milovich. “As a kid who grew up reading the Chicago Tribune box scores every morning before school, I dreamed of playing for the Cubs one day. Obviously, that didn’t happen. But to be a part of the organization now, at this time, is a really cool thing.”

This year, even grizzled old Red Sox and Yankees fans in Myrtle Beach think so, too.

“It’s pretty hard not to get caught up in the Cubs vortex,” said Milovich.

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