Nashville Sounds: Minor League, Major History

First Horizon Park sits on a site with a long baseball memory. From eighteen eighty-five to nineteen sixty-three, Sulphur Dell ballpark occupied this ground, one of the most eccentric diamonds in professional baseball: a steeply graded outfield that made catching fly balls a genuine athletic feat. The modern Nashville Sounds were founded in nineteen seventy-eight as a Double-A franchise.

They led all of minor-league baseball in attendance that first season, won six consecutive division titles from nineteen seventy-nine to eighty-four, and have been the Triple-A affiliate of the Milwaukee Brewers and the Oakland Athletics along the way. The current park opened in April twenty fifteen and brought professional baseball back to downtown Nashville for the first time in decades.