Chickasaw Bricktown Ballpark (Oklahoma City, Oklahoma)

 MiLB - Minor League Baseball, baseball park / stadium

2 South Mickey Mantle Drive
Oklahoma City, OK 73104
www.milb.com/oklahoma-city

The Chickasaw Bricktown Ballpark opened in 1998 in downtown Oklahoma City's Bricktown district. It is the home of the Oklahoma RedHawks, the AAA affiliate of the Houston Astros major league baseball team. 'The Brick' also plays host to two of the three regular season baseball games played between Oklahoma State University and the University of Oklahoma each year in the Bedlam Series (the other game is played in Tulsa at Drillers Stadium). The ballpark regularly hosts the Big 12 Baseball Championship tournament. The facility has hosted seven baseball tournaments in the league's 10-year tenure, including last season's edition. Chickasaw Bricktown Ballpark seats 13,066 fans and has gone through several name changes. The original name would have been the Southwestern Bell Ballpark, but was quickly changed to add the word Bricktown to the title. The name changed from Southwestern Bell to SBC to AT&T until AT&T's naming rights ran out on the building on Feb 13th 2011. At that time it became known as the Redhawks Field at Bricktown. On April 4th 2012 the Newcastle Gaming Center announced that it had bought the naming rights, and the building would be known as Newcastle Field at Bricktown. However, after public uproar, mostly due to the fact that Newcastle was a suburb of Oklahoma City, the name was changed one day later to the Chickasaw Bricktown Ballbark as the Chickisaw Tribe owns and opperated the Newcastle Gaming Center.

The stadium was the first of Oklahoma City's Metropolitan Area Projects, a one cent sales tax consisting of nine projects designed to improve Oklahoma City's quality of life in an effort to lure business back to the city following its economic collapse in the 1980's. In addition to being one of the largest and most visible of the projects, the ballpark is now surrounded by public art including statues of Oklahoma's greatest baseball players including Mickey Mantle and Johnny Bench, as well as murals paying tribute to Oklahoma City's history