First Tennessee Park

First Tennessee Park

First Tennessee Park at dusk
Location	19 Junior Gilliam Way Nashville, Tennessee, US
Coordinates	36°10′23″N 86°47′06″W / 36.173031°N 86.785033°W / 36.173031; -86.785033Coordinates: 36°10′23″N 86°47′06″W / 36.173031°N 86.785033°W / 36.173031; -86.785033
Owner	Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County
Operator	Nashville Sounds Baseball Club
Capacity	8,500 (fixed seating) 10,000 (plus berm seating)
Record attendance	11,759 (July 3, 2016; Nashville Sounds vs. Oklahoma City Dodgers)
Field size	Left Field: 330 feet (100 m) Left-Center Field: 386 feet (118 m) Center Field: 403 feet (123 m) Right-Center Field: 388 feet (118 m) Right Field: 310 feet (94 m)
Acreage	10.8 acres (4.4 ha)
Surface	Bermuda Tifway 419 grass
Construction
Broke ground	January 27, 2014
Opened	April 17, 2015
Construction cost	$47 million ($47.5 million in 2017 dollars)
Architect	Populous Hastings Architecture Associates, LLC
Project manager	Gobbell Hays Partners, Inc. Capital Project Solutions, Inc.
Structural engineer	Walter P. Moore
Services engineer	Smith Seckman Reid, Inc.
General contractor	Barton Malow/Bell/Harmony, A Joint Venture, LLC
Tenants
Nashville Sounds (PCL) (2015–present)

First Tennessee Park is a baseball park in downtown Nashville, Tennessee, United States. The home of the Triple-A Nashville Sounds of the Pacific Coast League (PCL), it opened on April 17, 2015, and can seat up to 10,000 people. It replaced the Sounds' former home, Herschel Greer Stadium, where the team played from its founding in 1978 until 2014.

The park was built on the site of the former Sulphur Dell, a minor league ballpark in use from 1870 to 1963. It is located between Third and Fifth Avenues on the east and west (home plate, the pitcher's mound, and second base are directly in line with Fourth Avenue to the stadium's north and south), and between Junior Gilliam Way and Harrison Street on the north and south. The Nashville skyline can be seen from the stadium to the south.

The design of the park incorporates Nashville's musical and baseball heritage and the use of imagery inspired by country music, Sulphur Dell, and Nashville's former baseball players and teams. Its most distinctive feature is its guitar-shaped scoreboard—a successor to the original guitar scoreboard at Greer Stadium. The ballpark's wide concourse wraps entirely around the stadium and provides views of the field from every location. The greenway section connects with two other greenways in the city.

Though primarily a venue for the Nashville Sounds, other collegiate and high school baseball teams based in the area, such as the Vanderbilt Commodores and Belmont Bruins, have played some games at First Tennessee Park. It is also home to the City of Hope Celebrity Softball Game.

As early as 2006, the Nashville Sounds had planned to leave Herschel Greer Stadium for a new ballpark to be called First Tennessee Field, but the project was abandoned after the city, developers, and team could not come to terms on a plan to finance its construction. Instead, Greer was repaired and upgraded to keep it close to Triple-A standards until a new stadium could be built. In late 2013, talks about the construction of a new ballpark—later called First Tennessee Park—were revived. Three possible sites were identified by the architectural firm Populous as being suitable for a new stadium: the east bank of the Cumberland River, the North Gulch area, and Sulphur Dell. Sulphur Dell, the site of the city's original ballpark from 1870 to 1963, was chosen.