Braves ditching The Ted for suburbs

So to summarize. Cobb County will pay a boatload of cash to help build a stadium they don't want people to be able to get to. But that's OK, because the Braves currently have a ballclub nobody would want to see anyway.

 

Hey! They won six straight recently ...

... and are just 18 games out of first place.

 

I know it wasn't a retrofit, but what about the roof design at Enron Field? Part of it is some clear panels that are put in place where the choo-choo train goes by when the roof closes. Place the retracted roof at one end, a huge wall it would attach to at the opposite, and run those clear panels on the other two sides.

Just spitballing. When some other place wanted to retrofit the stadium for a roof, the claim was that the cost of the roof was almost as much or greater than the cost of a new stadium. The economics may have changed with the rise in the cost of stadiums.

 

Yeah, I think it's a lot more complicated than just building a roof starting at the top of those four walls. All of those arches in the walls are open (for getting breeze through the concourses. That would be a heck of a windowing job. and there are tons of other retrofitting jobs thatwould also need to be done. To seal that place and make it climate-controllable, I'm pretty sure you're near $100 million before you even start building the roof.

 

Except Sandy Springs is in Fulton County, across the river.

 

Yeah, stand corrected on that one, although I'm sure Cobb Countians will be getting their own fair share of unwanted traffic from this debacle.

I don't think I ever appreciated, until now, how good the Ted was from a traffic perspective. The area it is in definitely sucks, but there are multiple ways in and out of it and it was just far enough out of downtown to not clog up commuter traffic too much.

 

If memory serves correctly, in the days of Arlington Stadium the Rangers were the only team playing Sunday night games in the summer regardless of television because it was simply too hot during the day.

 

And if my memory serves correctly, Major League Baseball has some kind of executive-level branch. This "commissioner" could, ideally, tell the Braves to take their white-flight, traffic-magnet, 1950's-era stadium idea and fuck off.

 

Correct. The perpetual backup game. Yet it wasn't an issue until now ...

 

The HVAC install alone might eat that $100 million up before a pane af glass is installed.

 

They've done that off and on over the years more recently, but not in the last few years. They've been experimenting with 8 p.m. home starts on Saturdays this year.

 

It was proposed, but the then-owners (GWB et al.) didn't want one.

I hate to say goodbye to that park. It's held up remarkably well, and over the years the various owners have not been hesitant to make changes to improve it.

Really, though, the only reason it's being done is that since letting the Cowboys slip away to Arlington, Dallas has been making tons of noise about bringing the Rangers over. Somebody was going to build the Rangers a new home; it was just a matter of who and where.