Tag: baseball

At its first public meeting, the Atlanta-Fulton County Recreation Authority, the owner the 87-acre Turner Field site, discussed the sale and outlined a plan for community input. For an hour and a half, a panel that included AFCRA Executive Director Keisha Lance Bottoms, AFCRA Board Chair William K. Whitner, Atlanta Planning Commissioner Tim Keane and others answered questions and responded to criticism from the crowd.

The Braves will leave Atlanta for Cobb County after the 2016 season. But in essence, they’re already gone. Las Vegas oddsmakers have them losing more games this season than all but four MLB teams. Barring a miracle showing, what’s an Atlanta fan to do? Well, you could embrace the sorrow and reminisce with us. Through six decades in our city, the Braves gave us some wonderful memories.

Who ever would have believed a baseball team could convince us eternity doesn’t last forever? Well, that actually happened back in autumn of 1991—the year October began to taste like honey, when leaves turned brighter shades of gold and crimson, and Atlanta nights felt fresh as mountain air.

Unless you're still dizzy from the virtual flyover of the new Falcons stadium, we've got a look-in on the metro's other big sports construction project. Not to be outdone by the their soon-to-be-former in-town neighbors and true to their conservative Cobb roots, the Braves have taken a much more realistic approach to their video.

Catie and Jeff Francoeur have known each other since third grade and started dating at Parkview High School in Lilburn. So even though Jeff’s career as a professional baseball player takes the couple all over the country (he’s currently with the San Diego Padres organization), Atlanta is their sanctuary.

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.

For both millenials and long-time fans, this Braves season is starting to bring flashbacks. Young fans recall the collapse of 2011 as the long-sufferers fight off visions of the late 1980’s. The team has lost six straight games—falling to three games behind the first-place Nationals. Despair over this slump is mitigated by a trade with the Cubs that could give the team a needed jolt.

For Aaron, this is a season of big, round numbers: eighty years on earth, forty years since breaking Babe Ruth’s career home run record. Big, round numbers tend to send reporters and fans scurrying to revisit legends and milestones to remind themselves that a figure of such Rushmorean proportions in American sports is still a flesh-and-blood man among us, and to beg a moment of his time. I was one such beggar.

I’m still relatively new to town, not a Braves fan. But I’ve followed baseball most of my life, and I’ve gotta say that some Braves fans seem to have an inflated sense of their own suffering. You’ve had, what, two losing seasons in the past twenty-three? Fifteen division championships? Five pennants? C’mon!

As a sportswriter and producer for outlets like ESPN, Turner Broadcasting, and the New York Times, Robert Weintraub writes about the action that unfolds on the field of court in front of him in real time. But in his other career, as a Decatur-based author focusing on the history of the nation’s pastime, Weintraub has spent hours upon hours in libraries from St. Louis to Cooperstown scouring old newspapers and taped interviews trying to see the game’s golden age through contemporary eyes. The latest result is The Victory Season (Little Brown Books), a broad, yet incisive look at the 1946 baseball season, the first after the end of World War II, when changed players and fans were coming home from the front to find stingy salaries, unfair contracts, and a game in desperate need of structural—and social—reform.