Atlanta Braves Morning Chop: Stadium News; The Yankees are Coming!
Stadium rendering courtesy of AtlantaBraves.com
New Braves Stadium Is Three Months Ahead of Schedule, Team Says
MICHAEL BUTEAU / BLOOMBERG.COM
Construction of the new $1.1 billion home of Major League Baseball’s Atlanta Braves is about three months ahead of schedule, according to team executives.
“We’ve built a really solid, aggressive, efficient plan,” Mike Plant, head of the team’s business operations, said in an interview Thursday during a brick-laying ceremony. “No one has ever built a ballpark of this scale and scope in 39 months, and we’re going to do it in 36.”
The 41,500-seat stadium, 14 miles northwest of Turner Field and known as SunTrust Park, will be about 20 percent smaller than the existing ballpark and could be completed by mid-November 2016, Plant and Braves Chairman Terry McGuirk said. The complex will include a 250-room Omni hotel, a nine-story corporate office for Comcast Corp. and the Roxy Theatre, a 4,000-seat music venue.
The Braves are scheduled to move out of their offices in Turner Field in December 2016. Getting into the new venue earlier than planned will ease the transition before the first pitch is tossed in April 2017.
[ Note: Hopefully this schedule for the stadium will permit time to get some of the additional infrastructure improvements done so that people can get in and out of the area with some efficiency… there is no such thing as a ‘soft opening’ for a new stadium! ]