Former ballpark · 1966 – 1996
Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium
Atlanta, GA
- Opened
- 1966
- Closed
- 1996
- League
- NL
The lore
The Launching Pad
A bowl cut below its own parking lots, 1,050 feet up, where Aaron passed Ruth and the Braves finally won.
Below the Lot
The field level sat about 30 feet below the surrounding parking lots — a bowl cut into Georgia clay, the infield red-brown, the grass real. Until 1993, no major-league park in the country stood higher than its 1,050 feet above sea level. The elevation contributed to a nickname that outlasted the building: The Launching Pad. The foul lines measured 325 feet. Center field ran to 402. The air was thin and the corners were close, and for thirty seasons that was the ground the Braves played on.
The park went up on the site of the Washington-Rawson neighborhood, a once-wealthy section of Atlanta that had declined by the time the stadium came. A joint venture of Atlanta firms FABRAP and Heery and Heery designed the circular multipurpose facility. More than 50,000 fans came for the Braves' first game there, on April 12, 1966 — a 3-2 loss to the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Braves had arrived from Milwaukee, and this bowl in the ground was their new home.
715
Eight years in, on April 8, 1974, Hank Aaron hit his 715th career home run into the left-center-field bullpen, breaking Babe Ruth's all-time record. As Aaron circled the bases, the Braves mascot Chief Noc-a-homa emerged from his tepee in the left-field stands to celebrate with a customary war dance. The park had twenty-two seasons left.
Gone
The games that carried the place came late. In Game Seven of the 1992 NLCS, Francisco Cabrera delivered a ninth-inning pinch-hit single that sent Sid Bream sliding home with the pennant-winning run. In 1995, Tom Glavine and Mark Wohlers combined on a one-hit shutout in Game Six of the World Series against Cleveland, securing the franchise's first championship since 1957 — and its first in Atlanta. The next summer the park hosted Olympic baseball, where Cuba's Orestes Kindelan hit a 521-foot home run.
The final game played there was October 24, 1996 — Game 5 of the World Series, a 1-0 loss to the New York Yankees. Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium stood from 1966 to 1996. It is gone now.
Reporting: SABR, This Day in Baseball, Wikipedia. Park data: MLB StatsAPI and Retrosheet, via the Fever engine.
By the Desk · filed 2026-07-24 — the piece reads as of its filing; the park record around it is live · every fact in this piece comes from a filed, sourced research pack and clears an independent fact-check, and nothing is edited after filing.
Where it stood
Atlanta, GA. We don’t have exact coordinates for this park in the historical record — we’d rather say so than pin the wrong spot.
Sources
- Retrosheet · as of 2026-07-23
The information used here was obtained free of charge from and is copyrighted by Retrosheet. Interested parties may contact Retrosheet at 20 Sunset Rd., Newark, DE 19711.