Drillers Stadium

Drillers Stadium in Tulsa, OK, was the home of Tulsa affiliated baseball from 1981 through 2009. After that, the Tulsa Drillers of the Texas League moved into a new downtown ballpark.

Opened in 1981 as Robert B. Sutton Stadium, it replaced Drillers Park five seasons after its condition cost Tulsa Triple-A ball. Country music star Roy Clark staged a telethon to raise funds to get Sutton built, and with a partner purchased the Lafayette Drillers to move them to Tulsa.

After Sutton, a millionaire oilman who helped fund the ballpark, was indicted for fraud, it was renamed Tulsa County Stadium in 1983 and Drillers Stadium in 1990. Its 1994 home-opener crowd of 16,934 remains Tulsa's baseball record.

The ballpark was a set of the film Home Run (2013), and the University of Tulsa considered using it to revive varsity baseball before deciding it was too expensive. Some of its seats were moved to Salinas Speedway after the American Bicycle Association/BMX announced it would build its national headquarters on the ballpark site. After that fell through, Drillers was finally demolished.

It originally seated 4,800 but eventually had a capacity of 10,997.

Further Reading

• Article on funding