Life was returning to normal Wednesday outside Truist Park after MLB’s All-Star Game the night before, where Atlanta fave Chipper Jones threw out the ceremonial first pitch.
Work crews were everywhere busting down equipment after the Braves’ big soiree. Crowds near the park were sparse, as the area had a lethargic day-after-a-party feel.
Nearby in The Battery Atlanta, the Braves’ mixed-use appendage that has other team owners salivating, John Pulicare was walking his dog, Axel.
Pulicare, an engineer, lives in one of 1,000-plus apartments in the complex and commutes by foot to his employer, which is also there.
“It’s getting a lot of attention; owners from all over the MLB are coming to look at it,” Pulicare said of The Battery, where he has lived for two years. “This is kind of like Epcot, a Disneylike vision of where you can live, work and play.”
The Battery is a sanitized interpretation of a village of yore, a company town created to capture the time and treasure of fans before and after the game.
The Wall Street Journal this week gushed about the Braves in a story headlined, “They have a losing record. Everyone in baseball is trying to copy them.”
Credit: Hyosub Shin/AJC
Credit: Hyosub Shin/AJC
The article by the nation’s foremost financial periodical said the team’s business prowess, not its recent achievement on the field, was “a shining example for the rest of the sport.”
The Braves “have become an economic juggernaut,” the WSJ noted, and have “turbocharged perhaps the most profound change to the professional sports business in a generation.”
The team was once owned by the media megaconglomerate Liberty Media but was spun off in a stock offering where Liberty’s billionaire chairman, John Malone, still has considerable holdings.
The so-called “turbocharging” came in 2013 when the team cut a secret, and lucrative, deal — one that had Cobb County kicking in more than $300 million to build the stadium. The deal cut with Cobb’s then-Commission Chair Tim Lee was controversial and got the late politician unelected.
People, however, seem to largely forget the unpleasantries surrounding the high-end corporate socialism and now like to wander The Battery to quaff pricey beers and gear up for the game.
The Braves’ revenue last year was $663 million, up from $641 million in 2023. But its “baseball revenue” was flat, up just 2% to $595 million.
What has everyone eyeing the Braves is not the athletic play but their real estate moves. That mixed-use component, The Battery, grew 14% last year to $67 million.
The beautiful thing — for the Braves — is they get to keep The Battery money, every penny of that $67 million. Almost half of MLB teams’ “baseball money” goes into a revenue sharing agreement — something Karl Marx might have set up if he teamed with Abner Doubleday.
The transformation of a forgotten, 60-acre, grassy field, crisscrossed by utility lines and near the nexus of two busy interstates, has become a textbook example of how to play a government into greasing the skids.
Other MLB billionaires are deeply impressed and contacting the Braves, trying to figure out how to work their local governments.
Cobb’s government has long been largely copacetic with the deal that moved the Braves to the county. Officials like to tout that the county’s general fund contribution, initially about $6 million a year, has dropped to zero, a county report says.
But Cobb is still on the hook for almost $19 million a year, says J.C. Bradbury, an economist and professor at Kennesaw State who’s long been a stitch in the Braves’ side. That’s $16 million a year for the stadium mortgage (mostly from nongeneral fund sources) and almost $3 million more for capital maintenance and public safety.
“They are just playing accounting tricks,” he told me.
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Bradbury belongs to a long line of economists who believe public subsidies for stadiums are almost always a giveaway for the rich and never fully pay for themselves. The Braves’ mixed-use model, he says, is merely the newest scheme.
In the 1990s, teams all wanted distinctive, old-time ballparks funded, in part, by taxpayers. Now they all want their own Batteries.
Bradbury is writing a book called: “This one will be different.”
The Braves have long bristled at such criticisms. My colleague, Ken Sugiura, recently related Bradbury’s comments to Braves CEO Derek Schiller.
“Unless you’re a fool, there is no doubt that The Battery and the ballpark are an overwhelming success for not just Cobb County and the metro Atlanta area, but also the state of Georgia,” Schiller said. “That is undeniable.”
Take that, ivory tower boy!
An hour after my visit to Cobb, I spoke with Kirsten Ankrom and her husband, David Swift. They had their dog, Bodhi, in tow on Georgia Avenue, down the street from where the Braves played until 2016.
In 2000, an All-Star Game was played at the former Turner Field there. Chipper hit a home run.
Credit: Bill Torpy
Credit: Bill Torpy
The couple were enjoying ice cream at Big Softie, located next to the popular Halfway Crooks Brewery and a ton of other shops and eateries. For years, this three-block stretch, just steps from the MLB ballpark, was an oddly a boarded-up ghost town.
A Publix has since opened up around the corner, now freed from the worry that streets around there will be clogged by crowds 81 days a year.
The couple moved to the area five years ago, drawn by the new amenities, just like the fellow with the dog I spoke with earlier in The Battery.
Losing the Braves was traumatic for Atlanta, where they had played for half a century. But the exodus gave the struggling neighborhood there new life.
I guess you could call it a “Resurgens,” the kind of thing Atlanta likes to boast about.
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