Atlanta Braves Morning Chop – At Least We Can Beat Philadelphia
Sep 27, 2014; Dallas, TX, USA; TCU Horned Frogs mascot super frog takes a selfie during the game against the Southern Methodist Mustangs at Gerald J. Ford Stadium. TCU beat Southern Methodist 56-0. Mandatory Credit: Tim Heitman-USA TODAY Sports
The Atlanta Braves’ New Stadium May Make Fans Play Highway “Frogger”
NEIL DeMAUSE / VICE SPORTS BLOG
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Ah, the Braves bridge. It’s a mess. It has always been a mess. The concept first appeared in November of 2013, shortly after Cobb County stunned the sports world by announcing that it was luring the team out to the ‘burbs. (To keep the negotiations a secret, it later was revealed, county commission chair Tim Lee had secretly hired a lawyer with commission money without telling any of his colleagues, and then made some commission members stand outside in hallways while others met behind closed doors to evade open-meetings laws. The democratic process.) At the time, no one knew how much the bridge would cost, or exactly how it would be paid for. Those details would be worked out in due time.
Two weeks later, the Cobb County commission passed the Braves stadium deal—or most of it, anyway. Still to be negotiated was a “transportation agreement” that would spell out things like any highway ramps or, say, bridges that might need to be built to enable Braves fans to get to games. But that would happen soon, just you wait.
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This summer, things got much, much worse, as the Journal-Constitution reported that the bridge might not be ready until September 2017, five months after the stadium opens. That would leave almost an entire season where Braves fans would have to park their cars, then edge their way along the side of a eight-lane highway, underneath an overpass, to finally arrive at their seats. It’s walkable, but as one local noted in a web comment, only in the way that “the road in the game Frogger was walkable”— so probably not the sort of stroll anyone will want to attempt after nine innings and a few beers.
That brings us up to this week, when Lee finally admitted that the bridge won’t be open until at least the stadium’s second season, at the earliest. The Marietta Daily Journal, meanwhile, is reporting that the actual owners of the parking lot that the Braves plan to use—both the state authority that runs the neighboring convention center and the private owners of the office towers that sit nearby—have no interest in allowing the Braves to build a bridge at all, which could result in sad, desperate fans driving to the stadium only to sit forlornly in their cars, listening to games on the radio and wondering what life is like on the other side of I-285.
Now, there are a couple of lessons here. One would be that building a stadium before knowing how fans are going to get there is completely insane. The only possible explanation here is that Lee and his Cobb cohort were so desperate to lure the Braves to their county—we’ll finally be known for something other than being the home of Big Boss Man!—that they left the transportation plan as a blank sheet, figuring they could work it out later. Well, the future is now, and they’re staring blankly at the same can that they previously kicked.
[ Ed. note. – it was just a couple of days ago that we also reported on the bridge delay… but I so much liked the attitude of this post that I thought it should be shared here as well. This isn’t the entire piece, so please check out the rest over at vice.sports.com – see the link above. ]
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