Atlanta Braves

It’s been a busy season for the Atlanta Braves and their future home in Cobb County. The past few weeks have seen heavy machinery on the ground, and last night, the development team for the $400 million mixed-use complex was formally announced. Today, new images of the stadium were released–and although we have to admit that a few of them are rather stunning, it’s important to realize that nothing pictured is official.

Mazzone has fond memories of Turner Field, where he wore out the bench as pitching coach, rocking nervously back and forth in the dugout beside manager Bobby Cox as the two oversaw the most successful stretch in Braves history.

Cobb Commission Chairman Tim Lee must feel like he’s sitting in a dunking booth. During the Public Comment portion of the bi-monthly Board of Commissioners meetings, it has become almost customary for citizens disgruntled with Lee’s handling of the new Braves stadium to take their best shot at the chairman.

One year ago today, our local baseball team crashed the Veterans' Day news cycle with the announcement that it was fleeing downtown for new digs in the northwestern 'burbs. Today, the team released a time-lapse video of construction on the stadium/mixed-use development near Cumberland—compressing twelve months of slow fan torture into one rip-the-bandage-off minute.

In the media scrum to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Hank Aaron’s record-breaking home run, the undercurrent—the moral—of the story was the blatant racism he faced while chasing down Babe Ruth in 1974. In many of those commemorative stories, Aaron explained that he held on to the epithet-laced letters to remind him that racism still exists. Well more than a few “fans” have gone out of their way to prove Aaron right.

It was party time in East Cobb, Tuesday morning be damned, courtesy of the county’s newest corporate citizen. The Braves laid down AstroTurf beneath the dance hall-sized tent they pitched in the middle of the barren Cumberland construction site that will, in two years time, be their new home—the newly christened SunTrust Field.

It would be difficult to overstate the role the Cobb Chamber, a 2,500-member business organization, played in bringing the Braves to Cobb, whether as public cheerleaders or private decision-makers.

When Tim Lee isn’t running Cobb County government, he's promoting an artificial turf manufacturer. But the Cobb County commission chair doesn't see that job conflicting with his newfound role as cheerleader-in-chief for a $672 million Atlanta Braves stadium. "I am so far removed from the process of what goes in what stadium, it's not even funny," Lee told me last week.