Before the DAP, the Bulls played at Hanes Field on Trinity College's east campus, named for a Trinity graduate who would found the underwear company that still bears his name. They moved to Doherty Park in East Durham in 1913, then in the summer of 1926 to the brand-new park on Corporation Street that would carry them, in one form or another, for nearly seventy years. Tobacco money built the neighborhoods around it - Bull Durham smoking tobacco, sold in muslin pouches stitched at the Erwin mills, had made the city rich. The team's name was already a wink at that brand. Through the Depression, the Bulls sat out the 1934 and 1935 seasons entirely, the country too broke for baseball. They came back. The ballpark stood through it.

Ron Shelton's script was about an aging catcher named Crash Davis, a wild young pitcher named Nuke LaLoosh, and a literature-quoting baseball groupie named Annie Savoy. It was also, quietly, about the texture of life in a particular kind of American place - the bus rides, the cheap motels, the snorting mechanical bull above the outfield wall. Filming wrapped after the 1987 season; the cast and crew left, and the next April Bull Durham opened to glowing reviews. Attendance at the DAP exploded. Temporary bleachers went up. The team installed lights bright enough for night television. By the early 1990s, the Bulls were clearly outgrowing the park that had just made them famous. The city decided to build a new stadium downtown, next to the empty American Tobacco campus, and the Bulls played what was supposed to be their final season at the DAP in 1993. Construction delays kept them there one more year. The 1994 club sold T-shirts that read "2nd Annual Final Season at the DAP."

On September 5, 1994, the Bulls played their last game at the DAP, losing 6-2 to the Winston-Salem Spirits in Game 1 of the Carolina League's South Division playoffs. The next spring they opened at the new Durham Bulls Athletic Park across downtown, and the old DAP began a long slow afterlife as a college and amateur field. In 2008 the city pledged a $5 million renovation, breaking ground that April. The park reopened in August 2009. On May 10, 2010, the now-Triple-A Bulls came back for one regular-season game against the Toledo Mud Hens - a kind of homecoming - and lost 6-4, exactly mirroring the score of the Single-A team's final game sixteen years earlier. A crowd of 3,911 watched from refurbished bleachers. In 2024 the city hired Perkins & Will to study what the DAP could become next: maybe a music venue, maybe something else entirely. The land, the city has said, isn't for sale.

Walk around the DAP today and you notice how small it feels. The current right field line stands 290 feet from home plate. Straightaway center is 398. The seats sit close enough that you can hear the catcher call signs. Old photographs from 1992 show a hand-painted sign welcoming fans, a souvenir stand that looked like a shed, fans lined up at a ticket window straight out of a 1940s newsreel. The snorting bull above left field - the one Crash Davis was supposed to hit - now lives in storage; a newer version snorts above the new ballpark a mile away. But the brick and the bones of the place are still here. Bull Durham made the DAP famous, and then it almost killed it. Now Durham is trying to figure out what to do with the ghost it left behind.