By the early 1990s the Bulls had outgrown their old wooden park north of downtown. Bull Durham, the 1988 Kevin Costner film shot at the original Durham Athletic Park, had made the franchise nationally famous, and minor league attendance was surging across the country. The city wanted a Triple-A team. To get one, it needed a Triple-A ballpark. They hired HOK Sport - the firm now called Populous, the same architects behind Baltimore's Camden Yards, Cleveland's Progressive Field, and Coors Field in Colorado - and built an $18.5 million ballpark in the retro-classic style the 90s had fallen in love with. The Bulls opened it in 1995 in the Class A Advanced Carolina League, then moved up to Triple-A in 1998. The park expanded to 10,000 seats. The first Triple-A game was played April 16, 1998. The bull sign atop the Blue Monster was modeled on the snorting prop from the movie. It's now in its fourth iteration; the third lost its head and forelegs in a Piedmont windstorm in April 2007.

What makes the DBAP work as a place isn't really the field. It's where the field sits. Walk out the gates after a game and you're in the American Tobacco Historic District - the brick warehouses where Bull Durham smoking tobacco was packed for nearly a century, now full of software startups, restaurants, and apartments. The Tobacco Road Sports Cafe opened in the Diamond View II building beyond left field in 2010. The Durham Performing Arts Center sits next door. American Underground, the startup hub inside the old tobacco buildings, was selected by Google in 2013 to host the Glass Roadshow. The ballpark became the anchor of downtown Durham's revival - the thing that brought people back to a part of the city that had emptied out when American Tobacco closed in 1987.

Triple-A baseball is supposed to be a waystation, a step below the majors. But the DBAP has hosted moments that felt larger. In 2012 it became the first International League ballpark to host the Triple-A National Championship Game; the Pacific Coast League's Reno Aces beat the International League's Pawtucket Red Sox, 10-3. In 2014 it hosted the Triple-A All-Star Game, a five-day festival that brought a $9 million renovation forward by years. The most famous game played there might be the 2013 ACC tournament semifinal, when UNC and NC State went eighteen innings before the Tar Heels won 2-1. 11,392 fans watched - a North Carolina college baseball attendance record - and it became the longest baseball game in ACC tournament history. On June 15, 2019, the DBAP set its own paid attendance record at 12,000 for a game against the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders.

Today the DBAP is home to the Triple-A affiliate of the Tampa Bay Rays. Duke's baseball team plays here. So does North Carolina Central. Wool E. Bull and a furry blue mascot patrol the stands; "Lucky the Wonder Dog" works the concourse. The big bull above the Blue Monster still snorts smoke when a Bull hits one out, just like in the movie - though the sign that actually appeared in Bull Durham is now in storage. The lease keeps the team in Durham through 2033. The neighborhood around the ballpark has filled in around it: Diamond View III opened in 2013, ribbon boards went up in 2019, and the brick of the old American Tobacco buildings still glows in the sunset behind right field, the same brick that built the Bull City in the first place.