Change of Heart – Chickasaw Bricktown Ballpark
I’m hearing from a lot of folks who are very complimentary of the Chickasaws for listening to local concerns about their first choice of names for the ballpark (Newcastle Field at Bricktown) and going with a name that celebrates the tribe, and not a suburb and one of its casinos.
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I heard on the news that they were a couple of weeks from having signage up. Now it will be a couple of months as they now have to do a signage redesign and approval I suppose – unbelievable.
They’ve just never learned down there at the ballpark have they. You would have thought “Southwestern Bell Park” would have taught them something.
If the Red Hawks sold the naming rights to the
Chickasaws why can’t they name it whatever they want to?
Hmmmm…. seemed that way to me; the city gave the RedHawks total control of the ballpark name, they sold it to the tribe, and then the city became upset with the tribe’s first choice of names…
Steve: could you clarify something? It has always been my understanding that the City gave up the naming rights in perpetuity to things like the Ballpark and Arena. Someone posted that the City gets the naming rights back in a few years?
Early articles indicated that the naming rights were literally given away to the team owners and the owners received a previously undisclosed sum (just like now). Recent articles seem to read that the City sold the rights to the baseball team owners for $100,000. Am I misreading that or is the $100K what the team owners got from the various Southwestern Bell/SBS/ATT&T namings?
Chickasaw Bricktown Ballpark is definitely a better name than Newcastle Field, but I didn’t get the outcry about the ballpark being named after a Casino. Casinos are a major part of the Oklahoma economy, advertisements for them are all over the ballpark and inside the Chesapeake Energy Center and its not like the baseball stadium his a historic site that is devalued by the name, in a way that Wrigley Field or Kauffman Stadium would be with a corporate name. However, the new name fits the region and will promote a local tribe that probably doesn’t get as much attention as it should for all the work it does in the state…including casinos.
Good move; very happy they reconsidered.