by Tommy Gimler
Odds are if you are at least 25 years old, you have seen your favorite Major League Baseball team play their home games in one if not two stadiums. But if you are a twenty-something year old Atlanta Braves fan, get ready to see your team play its home games in its third different stadium since 1996. Well, unless you’re blind.
Even though Turner Field is younger than almost half of the other 29 Major League ballparks, the Braves are calling it quits with the facility after their lease runs out at the end of the 2016 season. Their number one reason? Traffic blows.
Look. I’ve seen a game at 24 of the existing 30 Major League stadiums, and do you know what sucks at the end of the day at each one of those ballparks? Well, if you’re leaving Wrigley Field, it’s probably the pain that comes along with being a Cubs fan. But at every other stadium, it’s that the traffic fucking blows. Whether you’re walking to a train, trying to exit the parking lot in your tricked-out Accord, or attempting to flag down a 14-year-old Hispanic kid pulling a rickshaw, you’re going to have trouble leaving the facility in a timely manner.
The Braves organization is arguing that traffic is so bad around Turner Field that it keeps fans away from the ballpark. We’ll counter with the argument that fans stay away from the ballpark because they’re sick and tired of paying two hundred bucks to watch the Braves beat the Houston Astros in June only to watch their home team get curb stomped when it counts in October. According to 2013 MLB attendance statistics, Atlanta ranked 13th in total attendance but just 21st in stadium capacity percentage. But it’s not known for sure what is keeping fans from filling all 49,586 seats at the ballpark, whether it’s the traffic or the unwillingness to get blue-balled for another season.
I was there this April to watch Carlos Marmol blow another game for Chicago in front of a packed house, and it took us about 35 minutes to complete a two-mile trip from Turner Field to the Georgia Dome. I’d say that’s not bad considering we were in the ninth largest metropolitan area in the United States after a sporting event with over 38,000 in attendance. And on top of that, the Final Four was in town at the same time, and the Michigan/Syracuse game had just let out.
The new $672 stadium is slated to begin construction next year on sixty acres of land in Cobb County near the intersection of I-75 and I-285, an interchange that the DOT routinely lists as one of the top twenty worst highway interchanges in America. That means that beginning in 2017, the Braves will move their home games from an area with really bad traffic to an area with really bad traffic. Meanwhile, Turner Field will celebrate its birthday that year with nobody, which is probably the same way Corey Feldman will celebrate his…
