Perdue Stadium opened in 1996 as the home of the Delmarva Shorebirds, the Single-A affiliate of the Baltimore Orioles, then in the South Atlantic League and now in the Carolina League. The 5,200-seat ballpark sits on the east edge of Salisbury, just inside the bypass that ring-roads the city. Future major-leaguers stop here for a season or two on the way up - Manny Machado, Dylan Bundy, Jonathan Schoop, Adam Jones all played for the Shorebirds before reaching Camden Yards. The stadium has the standard minor-league features: grass berm beyond the outfield, picnic pavilion down the right-field line, a wraparound 360-degree deck added during the 2014 renovation. Tickets stay cheap. A summer evening at Perdue Stadium is the kind of small-town baseball experience that the major leagues have priced out of their own ballparks - bring a glove, sit in the front row, the foul ball is going to come at you eventually.

Behind home plate, in a corner of the concourse, sits the Eastern Shore Baseball Hall of Fame. It documents the Eastern Shore Baseball League, which ran from 1922 to 1949 with teams scattered across Maryland and Delaware - the Pocomoke City Salamanders, the Salisbury Cardinals, the Cambridge Cardinals, the Centreville Orioles. The league produced its share of major leaguers, including Hall of Famer Jimmie Foxx, who grew up in Sudlersville, just up the peninsula. Foxx hit 534 home runs in the majors and was three times the American League MVP. The Eastern Shore was a baseball country in the early twentieth century. Crab pickers and watermen and railroad workers filled the bleachers on summer Sundays, and the small-town teams developed a level of competition that produced more major-leaguers per capita than just about any rural region in America. The Hall of Fame collects gloves, uniforms, scorecards, and photographs from that era - a quiet, well-curated museum tucked into a working ballpark.

On October 10, 2009, Salisbury's own Fernando Guerrero fought for a regional middleweight title at Perdue Stadium. Until 2016, the larger Wicomico Youth and Civic Center could not serve alcohol because of an old real covenant on the property - a quirk of property law that meant the city's biggest indoor venue could not host events that depended on beer sales. The boxing card came to the ballpark instead. A makeshift ring stood at the pitcher's mound, the crowd packed into the stands, and Guerrero won. The covenant on the Civic Center has since been lifted, but the boxing match in the outfield remains a piece of local lore - the night the chicken stadium hosted a championship bout because Maryland alcohol law had quirks left over from Prohibition.

The University of Maryland Eastern Shore Hawks played their 2018 and 2019 baseball seasons at Perdue Stadium while their own field, Hawk Stadium in Princess Anne, was being renovated. The arrangement made sense - Princess Anne is fifteen miles south of Salisbury, and the Hawks' home games drew bigger crowds at the minor-league park than they would have at the campus stadium. Perdue Stadium also hosted the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference baseball tournament from 2015 to 2017, bringing teams from across the conference - North Carolina A&T, Norfolk State, Bethune-Cookman - to the Eastern Shore for postseason play. The stadium has had a longer career as a college and amateur venue than its design implied: it was built for the Shorebirds, but the Eastern Shore needs more baseball than the Shorebirds alone can supply.

Arthur Perdue's poultry company is now one of the largest chicken producers in the United States, with about 22,000 employees and processing plants from Maryland to Indiana. The family still runs it - the third and fourth generations both currently involved in the business. The naming of the stadium for the founder is part of a deliberate Perdue family practice of putting Arthur's name on civic spaces rather than Frank's, the son who actually built the company into its national form. Frank Perdue gave most of the seven-figure gifts, but the buildings carry the founder's name. The pattern shows up across Salisbury - Perdue Stadium for the ballpark, Perdue Hall for the business school building at Salisbury University, the Perdue Brand of frozen chicken in every Northeastern supermarket. A grandfather's name on a stadium where his grandsons watch baseball. The chickens, the ballpark, and the family that connected them define a piece of how the Eastern Shore works.