Burlington Athletic Stadium

Burlington Athletic Stadium
Location	Burlington, NC, United States
Building chronology
Built	1960
Tenants
Burlington Royals, (2007–19)
Capacity
3,000 (largest reported baseball crowd: 4,023) Dimensions: Left Field: 335 feet Center Field: 410 feet Right Field: 335 feet

Burlington Athletic Stadium in Burlington, NC, was the home of Burlington affiliated baseball from 1958 through 2019. After that and the Coronavirus pandemic-canceled 2020 season, MLB's 2021 Minor League Reorganization made the Rookie-Advanced Appalachian League a collegiate wood-bat circuit.

Minor league teams often move; this stadium did! Built in Danville, VA, after World War II, it was dismantled in 1958, moved 43 miles south, and reassembled near Fairchild Park. Also originally named for Fairchild Aircraft, it originally hosted Carolina League games, took its current name in 1960, and started hosting an Appy franchise in 1986. On June 24, 1988, the then-Indians' game with Bluefield went 27 innings. Richard Musterer's 8-hour-15-minute WBBB play-by-play is the longest continuous one-game solo broadcast ever in Organized Baseball history.

Until the reorganization, three clubs played in a city named Burlington - the minors' most, with the others in Iowa and Vermont - but all three were contracted out. Another commonality was the nickname Bees, used by North Carolina's Burlington club in 1942 and 1945-1951 and by Iowa's Midwest League team for more than 70 of the seasons dating back to 1924 - but they never overlapped.

"The BAC" appears in Bull Durham (1988).