The sun sets over Turner Field during a baseball game between the Atlanta Braves and the Seattle Mariners Tuesday, June 3, 2014 in Atlanta. (AP Photo/John Bazemore)
Editor’s note: This column was submitted by Sierra Mannie in the onsite op-ed writing competition at the 2015 Southeast Journalism Conference hosted by Georgia State University. It won first place.
Almost two decades after throwing their first pitch in Turner Field, the Atlanta Braves have decided to sink their tomahawks into new soil. In 2016, Suntrust Park will not only be the new home of the Braves but also a gilded glob of mucus to further congest the 285 and the race, space and class tensions that still plague the city.
The circumstances surrounding the Braves and their new move have been kept intentionally opaque.
Why, indeed, without alerting the citizens of Atlanta and those of Cobb County, would the team abandon its perfectly good stadium – Chick-fil-A cows and Coca-Cola imagery standing tall – for a smaller one just a few minutes away? Why would this team that in two years hasn’t been able to completely fill its old stadium think getting a new one would make its players any more talented or its fans any more loyal?
The answers are less murky.
Surrounded by lower-income households, most of which are predominantly black, Turner Field is an island of all-American fun situated in the awkwardness of America’s failures. Late last century’s white flight – to places like Cobb County from Atlanta, for instance – have negatively impacted the infrastructure of many Southern cities. Lower-income citizens are left behind and are hoped to stay there.
This is why in its many years of housing Turner Field, the community that surrounds it has hardly received any economic benefit or restaurants or stores, despite the wealthy baseball lovers who travel there to watch the games. And while these communities deal with the problem of poverty and the evil it enables, suburbs, right up the highway, close their eyes and their wallets especially as it concerns tax dollars. Even the guarantee of more awful city traffic isn’t enough to deter the project and the racism and classism in which its genesis is steeped; investing money in mass transit wouldn’t be a solution to travel woes, but a solution for nefarious Atlanta poor people to find their way to greener grass.
And the Atlanta Braves have noticed.
Citing the fact that its season ticket holders live in Cobb County, the Braves have sought a different type of cow – cash, not Chick-fil-A. Coupled with new restaurants and shopping centers for the most loyal (read: richest) Braves fans to enjoy, Suntrust Park offers you America’s pastime in the most American way possible: lauding the nationalism and Coca-Cola capitalism while eagerly ignoring the social issues it enables for the veneer of a happy few hours.
If the Atlanta Braves wish to be Atlanta’s team, they must care and play for all of Atlanta, not just its rich white consumers. The Braves and its investors eat the idea of new stores, restaurants and toys to accompany Suntrust Park but ignore its fiber-rich serving of social, political and economic responsibility. And they will leave all these scraps and the tab for it all to the citizens, who are understandably bitter; with the decision to keep Suntrust Park, the Cobb County Braves would be a much more suitable team name.
