Truist Field

• Name: Truist Field
• GPS-able Address: 324 South Mint Street, Charlotte, NC 28202
• Ballpark Owner: Mecklenburg County
• Architects: ODELL Associates; Ballpark Design Associates
• Groundbreaking: 9/14/2012
• Minor League Baseball Teams: Charlotte Knights (AAA) 2014-present
• Class/League History: AAA/International League 2022-present; AAA/Triple-A East 2021; AAA/International League 2014-2020
• First Professional Baseball Game: 4/11/2014; stadium debut of Class AAA Knights
• Others Playing or Operating Here: None
• Previous Ballpark Names: None
• LF: 330 CF: 400 RF: 315
• Seats: 8,800
• Stated Capacity: 10,200
• House Baseball/Softball Record Attendance (as currently configured): 10,962, 7/4/2021

Truist Field in Charlotte, NC, is the home of the Charlotte Knights, the Chicago White Sox' Triple-A International League farm team.

The gleaming uptown ballpark overcame years of legal challenges. The baseball-blocking lawyer wanted the game in Charlotte - but only the Major League game. Then called BB&T Ballpark, it opened to 10,231 on April 11, 2014.

The move returned baseball to the Queen City after an arson-fueled move to a suburb that happened to be in another state. Less than a month before the 1985 professional baseball season, Jim Crockett, Sr., Memorial Park burned to the ground after a high-school baseball game. Investigators found that a group of juveniles set the blaze. The burnt ballpark, originally called Clark Griffith Park, had hosted baseball since 1941.

The displaced ballclub, a member of the Double-A Southern League, quickly built a temporary ballpark on the same site. The makeshift, 3,000-seat facility never drew well and the Crockett family sold the club to the owner of the NBA's Charlotte Hornets, George Shinn, after the 1987 season. Shinn also built a temporary ballpark, but with a long-term purpose: located across the state line in Fort Mill, SC, it went up on what would become the parking lot of the permanent stadium he then built.

In Knights Castle - later renamed Knights Stadium - the Charlotte Knights initially drew well, more than doubling attendance from 1989 to 1992. The next season, a Triple-A expansion club took over the Castle and became the first Charlotte pro baseball club ever to draw 400,000. That proved to be a one-season thing, though, as the Knights gradually slid to the bottom of International League attendance.

Eventually, the team, the city of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County put together a deal to bring baseball back downtown and rammed it through the legal challenges. The new stadium is less than two blocks from Bank of America Stadium, the home of the NFL's Charlotte Panthers, and only seven from the Hornets' Spectrum Center - and just two miles from the old Crockett site.

BB&T Ballpark's name changed after BB&T and SunTrust banks merged to become Truist Bank in 2019.