Oklahoma City voted to tax itself to build a ballpark, and the ballpark rebuilt the neighbourhood around it. Chickasaw Bricktown Ballpark at 2 South Mickey Mantle Drive opened on 16 April 1998 before a sellout 14,066 - the RedHawks falling to Edmonton - as the flagship project of the original MAPS program, the citizen-approved sales tax that remade downtown Oklahoma City. The 34-million-dollar park by Architectural Design Group and Boldt Construction anchored the Bricktown Entertainment District, a quarter of repurposed brick warehouses, and its own exterior of roughly 480,000 bricks was designed to blend in; the district that has grown around it - canal, restaurants, music halls - is the civic proof of concept. The tenant lineage is one of the longest in Triple-A baseball: Oklahoma City's franchise dates to 1962, when Houston's new major-league team placed its top affiliate there as the 89ers, named for the 1889 Land Run. The club became the RedHawks in 1998, the Dodgers in 2015 after a Peter Guber-led group bought in, and the Comets in 2024 - honouring Commerce Comet Mickey Mantle, the Oklahoma-raised Yankee whose statue stands outside on the street bearing his name, alongside bronzes of fellow Oklahomans Johnny Bench and Warren Spahn. Clayton Kershaw, Cody Bellinger, Walker Buehler and Roki Sasaki all passed through on their way to Los Angeles, and the 2023 side won the Pacific Coast League title. The park's double-decked bowl was built big for its class - over 13,000 could squeeze in originally - though the operating capacity is now 9,000 with parts of the upper deck curtained. Upgrades have kept pace: a 185-foot LED board in left field in 2011, a 1,600-square-foot centre-field videoboard in 2016, and forty suites. The Big 12 baseball championship has been a near-annual tenant, and concerts, college games and community events fill the summer calendar. With the OKC Streetcar's Ballpark stop at the gate and the Paycom Center arena three blocks away, the ballpark remains the cornerstone of the district it created - minor-league baseball as successful urban policy.

Type: Stadium / Arena

Address: 2 S Mickey Mantle Drive, Oklahoma City, OK, United States, 73104

Website: https://www.milb.com/oklahoma-city

Capacity: 9000

Opening Date: 16/04/1998

Serves Food

Outdoor Area

Accessible