Do a city's sports franchises troll each other?

So vacations and other travel have disrupted the accustomed writing schedule for this blog. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. 

In this case, one part of this most recent vacation travel offered me an opportunity to follow up on something that received comment in this blog some time ago. Yes, I got to take a peek at the site where the Atlanta Braves' new stadium (already named SunTrust Park, which I suppose means the bank is ponying up the dough for naming rights at first at least) is being built.

It is in Cobb County, outside (by its own fierce declaration) of Atlanta, wedged into a parcel near where I-75 and I-285 meet. It's not too hard to find, although it's not exactly a direct shot from either freeway.

I even took a few pictures:

A few off-the-cuff observations:

Some of the features suggest the new park will have a lot in common with the team's current home, Turner Field (p.k.a. Olympic Stadium, remember?). Still plenty of time for the look to turn out quite differently, of course. And I have no idea where they're going to put parking. You can see that's not exactly a major thoroughfare running by the site either.

Just for funsies, a few pictures from the decrepit stadium, and the interminable walk thereunto from MARTA:

So anyway, nothing about the views above did much of anything to change the opinions expressed in the earlier blog. The location is going to be a logistical nightmare of vehicles, probably lacking sufficient parking (and of course nobody is going to be taking MARTA to the game, not if Cobb County has anything to do with it). It will be a plague environmentally, not only because of all those cars but also because a spot that actually managed to have some green space to it isn't going to have any green space anymore. Those two freeways are going to be pretty severe before and after games, as if they aren't -- ahem -- challenging already. Some of the secondary roads in the immediate area are either going to have to be expanded dramatically or get overwhelmed dramatically.

What was interesting, though, was a series of billboards seen around Atlanta, including very near the Braves' stadium site. They were promoting one of the other sports franchises in the city, the Atlanta Hawks. The Hawks have already appeared in this space before, first a little more than a year ago in the wake of a racially-charged scandal in the team's front office, and more recently (and more briefly) in the wake of Thabo Sefolosha's acquittal in New York City. In between the team had an interesting and surprising season, by far their most successful ever, before falling in the playoffs (at least to some small degree affected by Sefolosha's absence due to that broken leg). 

Their season is just underway, of course, and they're off to a decent start. What I found interesting, though, was the slogan they chose to promote themselves in and around Atlanta, including even that billboard near the new Braves' stadium:

TRUE TO ATLANTA

OK, maybe I'm reading too much into it, but are the Hawks throwing shade at the Braves?

I mean, is somebody not being true to Atlanta?

So this slogan apparently dates to last year, in the midst of the scandal and renaissance season, and appears to be continuing into this year (or at minimum nobody's taking down the billboards). As the letter notes, the franchise also endeavored to get into bridge-building and greater community involvement, as well as, you know, being a good team. Given the long-term mediocrity in which the Hawks had been mired, one doesn't necessarily have to read the slogan as shading others. But to brand yourself as being "True to Atlanta" is hard not to read as suggesting that somebody else is being untrue to Atlanta, particularly when nestled up next to the suburban stadium one of the other franchises is building in their re-enactment of 70's-era white flight. 

Perhaps my sensitivites are more acute on such a subject in the wake of the announcement of the team seeking to become Atlanta's fourth major-league franchise, in Major League Soccer. 

MLS franchises have taken to being extremely responsive to their fan bases, regarded as a necessity in building a franchise in a far less extravagantly funded league than the longtime four major sports leagues in this country. In the case of the Atlanta MLS franchise that included actually leaving the naming of the franchise up to that fan base (via surveys and focus groups). The name chosen by the fans was...

Atlanta United FC.

In case you don't follow soccer all that closely, this is a bit like an NCAA athletic program choosing the name Bulldogs, Eagles, Tigers, or Wildcats. It's rather common. It's a formula used by a lot of programs around the world, from the lofty Manchester United Football Club to any number of other lower-level clubs. Even in MLS this will be the third team to use the "United" label, after currently-existing DC United and fellow expansion club Minnesota United FC (which is currently playing in the second division NASL and due to move up at the same time as Atlanta United FC or soon after). Across the four divisions of US soccer, Atlanta will be the twentieth team to use "United" as the predominant element in its name.

So, why so formulaic a name?

At least some fans responded with a fairly literal read of the name; Atlanta as a city that needs uniting. And at least one fan cited the aforementioned "True to Atlanta" slogan as an example. (The team itself puts forth its explanation here.)

Uniting a city is a pretty tall order for a sports franchise, even if is a lofty and noble idea. Sports fandom, though, is by its nature tribal, and tribal things have a pretty strong tendency to be at least as exclusive as inclusive. Since in most cases there's only one franchise per city for each sport (cities such as New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago being exceptions sometimes), that isn't necessarily as prominent a problem (collegiate affinities, on the other hand...). But it can still touch off some identity politics among fan bases that may or may not overlap. 

If the Braves weren't decamping to the 'burbs (and to those particular 'burbs) none of this would be remotely noteworthy. But they are. And that two of the city's other franchises are at the same time seeking to tie themselves ever more closely to the city that the Braves have evacuated feels like something is going on. I don't live in Atlanta and don't plan to anytime soon or ever, and aside from occasional interest in the Hawks I don't follow the city's teams (and no, I won't be jumping ship to Atlanta United FC; Sporting KC is still my team, even from half a country away). But I can't help but  wish that the baseball team would have to call itself the Cobb County Braves (but that's just me being contrary; I hate the Angels using the city name of Los Angeles too), and I can't help but wonder how this stew of loyalties and identities is going to play out, and just how much some of these franchises are going to be able to keep their promises.

Hallowed ground

As has been alluded in early posts, the title of this blog alludes to a saying that was heard in precincts where I was born and raised (south Georgia, remember), typically spoken about football but applicable to other sports in other parts of the country. It would serve as a response to charges that folks in those parts treated football like a religion. "Football ain't a religion," would come the response. "It's way more important than that."

The saying itself belies the degree to which many of the rituals that accrue around sports have a quasi-religious nature, and are certainly performed with a fervor that surpasses the religious devotion of many if not most of the faithful. This does in fact hold true for many sports beyond football; I'd even suggest that soccer, with its supporter groups and elaborate pre-game ceremonies, might be even closer to religious ritual in its practice. Having been a couple of different times to matches as part of a visiting supporter's group for Sporting Kansas City I noticed at least two different ways in which the experience paralleled that of attending a new church for the first time: strangers bonded quickly around a common passion, and I didn't know all the songs.

It may be that the most intriguing or disturbing manifestation of this particular devotion is in the request, or occasionally the attempt, to dispose of the remains of a devoted fan on the team's playing field.

The impetus for this reflection is this feature piece from the Washington Post, reflecting on the phenomenon as it attaches to college football fields, particularly in but not limited to the Southeastern Conference. A recent example of the phenomenon is featured in the article, in which the infamous 2013 Iron Bowl, the one in which Auburn defeated Alabama on a miracle-like final play (again with the quasi-religious stuff!). In the crush after the game an unknown fan surreptitiously deposited the cremains of another (presumed) fan on the turf, near the sideline. A tweeted picture of the discolored turf can be found in the article.

And there's the rub; cremated remains aren't particularly good for athletic turf.

College football teams as a rule have rules against such a thing, for that very reason. As a turf expert at Auburn notes, the cremains burn pretty much any plant, including that lovely green turf your athletic heroes tread upon.  Obviously this doesn't stop these particularly single-minded fans, who don't seem to mind doing damage to the field they so revere.

My preacher-mind goes a few different directions here: (1) to see such devotion directed towards a very human and very flawed (to the point of corrupt, far too often) institution (as opposed to the One we are charged to proclaim, the only One truly worthy of such devotion) only points out just how far the church has fallen, and how little impression it evidently makes upon a segment of the population that is frequently presumed to be quite religious (but then, we knew that already); (2) the author of this book probably has nightmares about this sort of thing; and (3) we've all known church members like that, the type whose seeming outward devotion masked a near-maniacal urge to control or to impose their will upon the church/program. At minimum, after all, this is a kind of trespassing and (one could argue) vandalism. Why do you want to do that to your favorite team?

This article also appeared in the local paper, with an interesting super-headline: "SEC: Where Sports and Religion Meet." Now I hate to break it to you SEC partisans, but this phenomenon hardly began with you. The aforementioned sport of soccer also has enough of an issue with this practice that English clubs actually have established guidelines for the practice (if you're a fan of Blackburn Rovers you're in luck; Chelsea, not so much), and fans of the Argentinian club Boca Juniors can actually buy burial plots in a cemetery dedicated for players and fans of the team; you can be buried among your club heroes.

In the States baseball has also inspired such acts of devotion, with Wrigley Field in Chicago a particular object of such passion. It's not hard to guess why, in a way; the team is notorious for its extended championship drought and the long-suffering fans who have waited literally all their lives for a Cubs World Series win, so you can imagine those fans wanting to "be there" when it finally happens. Not surprisingly, more than a few Cubs fans have copped to scattering remains on the warning track or somewhere else in the park, occasionally without particularly trying to be sneaky about it. At least one former player was also supposedly meant to have his cremains scattered there, and a dispute has arisen over the intention of another Cubs great to be similarly scattered there (there was a quote from him many years ago, but no official documentation of such wishes in his case).

You can probably guess I find the practice a little distressing. At least in the case of Wrigley Field, though (or most of those hallowed SEC and other gridirons), there's the logic of scattering those ashes on, well, grass or dirt. I can't quite understand the thought of one devoted fan of his local team who got somebody to dump his ashes on the field of his local team, the Toronto Blue Jays, last year.

The Blue Jays play in the Rogers Centre. It used to be known as the SkyDome.

As most old domes do, that field has artificial turf.

Think about that one.

Addendum: a more detailed post on the subject and the compelling power of stadiums and such places for many devoted fans. 

The official Auburn Turf Team image of the 2013 Iron Bowl ashes (@AuburnTurf)

Stadium subsidy blues

While it may have slipped the notice of many in the rush of historic court decisions and crazy-popular sporting events of the last weeks, a possibly surprising development in the news this week might have long-term ramifications for the relationship of sport and civic life.

In his budget proposal for the forthcoming fiscal year, President Obama floated a proposal to eliminate the use of tax-free government bonds for the financing of sports stadiums or arenas. Given the lumpish behavior of the trolls of Congress over anything proposed by the president, it's pretty unlikely the proposal will ever see the light of day. Nonetheless, it's an interesting proposal to see at a time when public frustration over sports stadia expenditures is closer to boiling than it has been in many years.

It's not hard to find pretty grotesque examples of ludicrous amounts of public money being lavished on the fields in which teams owned by the 0.0001% play. Marlins Park in Miami is probably the gold standard for most recent stadium financial obscenity, a case in which notorious tightwad Jeffrey Loria basically got handed the keys to a crazily expensive monument to a team that has sandwiched a whole bunch of losing seasons around two of the flukiest World Series titles ever won. In forthcoming stadium spending, the impending move of the Atlanta Braves to a new park in Cobb County, leaving behind a former Olympic Stadium that will barely be twenty years old at their departure, has caused a bit of carping from this blog and other sources, although not all the issues in that case (at least for me) are necessarily about public financing of the stadium. Stadium deals for the Minnesota Vikings, San Francisco 49ers, Seattle Seahawks and other teams resulted in massive transfer of public funds into the pockets of people who already have plenty of money. It doesn't just extend to stadiums proper; the now-convicted-of-corruption former governor of Virginia gave a boatload of public money to the Washington Racist-Mascot-Not-Protected-By-Copyrights to put a summer training facility in Richmond, for example.

As the Slate article linked above notes, this isn't the first time Congress or the executive branch have tried to thwart such money giveaways; perversely, those attempts only seemed to encourage even more stadium giveaways. So perhaps a direct ban is the equivalent of a last-ditch attempt to curb the excesses of public financing for stadiums. Something tells me, though, that states or municipalities won't take kindly to being told by Big Gummint evildoers in Washington how they can and can't give away public money.

For the moment, I am actually withholding an opinion, mostly because I have an active and virulent allergy to even the possibility of agreeing with the Koch brothers on any subject (read down a little ways to see what I mean). I do think there are a couple of points that need to be made in relation to the subject, here on the direct relationship of such spending and civic responsibility on the part of the mindful faithful fan. Specifically, to raise your voice in opposition to public spending on sports facilities, you morally obligate yourself to be equally vociferous on two highly related subjects.

One: if you're going to get agitated on this subject you are morally obligated to get equally agitated on other giveaways of public funds for corporations that don't involve sports teams. Here I am speaking of the gobs of tax breaks and other financial giveaways used to lure things like automobile building facilities or other presumed "jobs deals." There are a couple of reasons for this; (1) the job-bringing capabilities of these deals are more mythological than real. Expecting that the bulk of the jobs in such giveaways to be filled locally is about as wise as expecting the entire lineup of the team playing in your city's stadium to be made up of folks actually from that city; and (2) the giveaways combined with the exaggerated job effect render the newly-lured factor a net revenue loser for your municipality. You've given a rich guy a big gift to very much the same degree that Miami or Minnesota did for the Marlins or Vikings, with virtually nothing coming back to you and/or your city.

Two: you are obligated to be proactive about how those dollars that don't go to the sports owner are spent, up to and including punishing politicians not just for sports giveaways but for all of their financial sins. One of the most often-cited reasons for opposing stadium giveaways has been the claim that such giveaways "took away" money that should have been going to education, or poverty alleviation, or (insert your pet cause here). It sounds very noble, and often gives the person making the argument a sheen of moral superiority. The trouble is it's seldom actually true. In most cases the monies in question never were going to education or poverty or whatever in the first place. In other cases, as with the Wisconsin story above, the funds were going to be cut anyway. Scott Walker didn't cut education funding in Wisconsin to give money away to the Milwaukee Bucks; he cut education funding because he's a hateful jackass who thinks any education beyond high school is an elitist scam. If you haven't already been creating whatever civic unrest is necessary to get that money into education before your governor or mayor wants to redirect it to the NFL or MLB or NBA, that's on you.

And yes, I do mean civic unrest if that's what it takes. These clowns give away such monies because on some level they believe their careers or their futures depend on doing so; if you don't make their lives miserable they'll never believe otherwise.

Got it?

Marlins Park under construction, 2011; crazy amounts of public money involved

Stadiums, race codes, and cold hard cash, part II: the Richmond dilemma

Back in November, I used a column to go off on the Atlanta Cobb County Braves' plans to ditch Turner Field and decamp to the suburbs as indicated in the snark above.  There were financial issues, there were race issues, there were urban/suburban issues, there were environmental issues.  Indeed that whole story was quite a feast of issues.

Atlanta is hardly the only city to face questions about stadiums and their upkeep and financing.  Perhaps the most notorious fleece job of late was down in Miami, where the Miami-Dade municipality ended up on the hook for the bulk of the cost of Marlins Park, to the point that some elected officials quickly found themselves no-longer-elected officials.  But there are other examples -- the Yankees sticking NYC with the tab for the current, bloated iteration of Yankee Stadium, and the Mets doing likewise with Citi Field or whatever it's called now; the bizarre spectacle of Los Angeles, the second largest city in the US, not having an NFL franchise despite two venerable stadiums (and former Super Bowl hosts) in the greater metro area; the heist that transformed the Seattle SuperSonics into the Oklahoma City Thunder; and so forth.

One doesn't hear about these kinds of kerfuffles when it comes to non-major-league sports, but the issues don't necessarily avoid the minor leagues.  Here in my current location, Richmond is undergoing a protracted stew over the proposed replacement of The Diamond, a 70s-vintage stadium built for the Braves' AAA franchise of the day.  The R-Braves hotfooted out of Richmond for the Atlanta suburbs some years ago, and after some wanderings in the baseball-less desert the city finally attracted a new tenant in the form of the San Francisco Giants' AA franchise, which had been somewhere in Connecticut previously.

The team, renamed the Richmond Flying Squirrels (I kid you not), has played in The Diamond since 2010, and has, to quote the Richmond Times-Dispatch, "become a regional asset that enjoys the public's affections to an extent the R-Braves did not."  The management of the franchise has worked hard to be an attractive and good neighbor in the city, offering the over-the-top in-game attractions typical of many minor-league teams, the kind that are so prolific that you (not me, specifically, but perhaps some of you) might even forget a game is going on.  They've made good connections with local businesses, sponsored activities outside baseball season to benefit the community, and generally hit all the right marketing and community-relations buttons during its tenure here.

There is one small issue, though, on which the organization has, even before relocating to Richmond, been unequivocal: The Diamond had to be replaced.

The Diamond, exterior (right field/first base side)

To put it kindly, The Diamond is an odd duck of a stadium.  From a distance it can look a bit like a UFO broke apart in midair and half of it landed here.  For a minor-league stadium it feels huge, even though it isn't necessarily all that big, I guess.  

Aerial view of the Diamond, with a team logo cut into center field.

As the above picture shows, while the stands feel a bit ginormous, the only extend a small stretch beyond first and third bases, and there is no outfield seating.  It is basically surrounded by its own parking lot, and as the picture suggests, the stadium hasn't necessarily gotten surrounded by a lot of commercial development on its street, The Boulevard (clever names seem to abound).  To be honest, that stretch of The Boulevard is a little bleak.

Hey, who turned out the lights?  This has happened more than once.

To put it a bit more bluntly, The Diamond has seen better days.  I don't know if it's an issue of upkeep, or if what worked in the 70s was a bit shortsighted, or what the issue is, but the best I can say of it as a place to watch a ball game is "it's okay."  Concourses for getting around the stadium are a bit cramped, the bathrooms need help badly, the concessions facilities struggle with large crowds, and the sight lines from the stands are fairly bad unless you're directly behind home plate.  

Apparently the parts of the stadium not populated by fans have bigger issues.  A substantial chunk of the left-field fence was taken out in a strong thunderstorm back in 2012.  The clubhouses for both home and visiting teams apparently flood easily in any kind of non-trivial rain.  And as the previous picture suggests, the power goes out a bit too easily for a large facility that tends to be highly occupied. 

Lookit the crowds! Lookit the crowds!

The Squirrels draw well.  They tend to be at or near the top of the Eastern League in attendance (admittedly, The Diamond is a bit bigger than most of the stadiums in the league, having been built for a AAA team), thanks mostly to the tireless promotional efforts of their front office.  They may in fact be undermining their efforts towards a new ballpark by being so good at their jobs.  When so many show up so readily for the big concrete thing, it's hard to persuade those so many that something better (and probably not bigger) is needed.  Perhaps inviting fans into the flooding clubhouse during the next rain delay might help.

Not everybody is so easily swayed, however.  A certain level of irritation is evidently settling in with the Flying Squirrels management (though they're far too savvy to show it in public), the parent Giants, and the Eastern League, whose president invoked the specter of a "Richmond Braves sequel" in a statement last December.  That statement, along with one from the president of Minor League Baseball (also included in that last link), seems to have prompted some movement.  The mayor of Richmond came forward with a plan for a ballpark/development plan that would move the team from that location on The Boulevard to a part of the city known as Shockoe Bottom.

One rendering of the proposed Shockoe Bottom development.

Shockoe Bottom and Shockoe Slip are two different sectors of Richmond down by the James River.  While Shockoe Slip has started to flourish as a business and nightlife location, the Bottom (cut off from the Slip by I-95) has seen spottier development.  There are some businesses and other organizations there (full disclosure: the office of the organization for which I am doing my internship this year is located in Shockoe Bottom), and it does have some of the best restaurants in Richmond, increasingly a foodie town.  It also has a lot of vacant buildings.  

It also has a microcosm of the history of slavery in the United States.  

Shockoe Bottom was the site of the second-largest antebellum slave market in the United States (after one in New Orleans).  Almost seventy slave dealers and auction houses dotted the district.  Also found in Shockoe Bottom were Lumpkin's Jail, a slave jail, and a large burial ground.  Some active excavation is still underway in the area, and exact locations of these facilities can be hard to pin down in some cases.  

Hence building much of anything in Shockoe Bottom is fraught with complications and heated passions.  There are factions who find Shockoe Bottom unendurable in its present state and badly in need of redevelopment.  There are those who are vocally insistent that any kind of redevelopment is equivalent to desecration.  And there are probably hundreds of positions in between.

The mayor's plan would include all sorts of other stuff besides the stadium in the Bottom: a grocery store and other retail locations, and of course plentiful nightlife options.  Most notable is a plan to build a long-awaited slavery memorial of some sort as part of the project.  In the meantime, The Diamond's location on The Boulevard would also be targeted for commercial development (a tacit admission that stadiums don't automatically bring a neighborhood redevelopment), probably as a sop to the building of a training-camp site for the Washington NFL franchise that first operated this past summer and an attempt to generate more commercial traffic for that site that functions for about six weeks a year.  

The mayor and council have made a few road trips in the course of developing a plan, including to Denver and Coors Field, one of the few fairly successful redevelopment plans with a stadium involved, and Durham, NC, a minor-league town that had its own struggles in replacing an aging park.  A local columnist suggests they should visit Tulsa, OK, which faced a somewhat similar situation in building a ballpark on the site of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot.  

A series of public meetings have been held on the project, marked mostly by heated accusations and recriminations and a general lack of listening.  (At this point it's probably best to refer you to the Times-Dispatch's coverage of the ballpark issue.  The T-D is far from my favorite paper, but it has generally been decent at covering this story.)  The mayor, once roused to action by the aforementioned grumblings from the Eastern League and Minor League Baseball, has been relatively resolute in pushing the new plan, and a fairly aggressive public-relations campaign has simultaneously been pushing the concept.  (That sprang up in Shockoe Bottom pretty quickly; I showed up for work one day and there were signs all over the Bottom.)  

And there the situation sits.  

If you're expecting a fully formed answer out of me on this one, you're going to be disappointed.  I'm torn, and in many ways not totally invested as I hope to be moving away from Richmond some time in the reasonably near future.  But it is a disturbing situation that touches on many things I care about, and I can't totally ignore it.

So, a few thoughts:

1. That there has not yet been any kind of slavery memorial or museum or anything done in Richmond (capital of the Confederacy, remember) is bizarre and repulsive.  You can find about sixty million Civil War museums or memorials around here, including the infamous Monument Avenue statues of Robert E. Lee, Jeb Stuart, "Stonewall" Jackson and other Civil War figures (along with tennis star Arthur Ashe, incongruously).  There's a Holocaust museum.  There are sites related to the Revolutionary War era, and some dating back to the 1600s.  Aside from the Lumpkin's Jail site and one statue marking Richmond as a corner of the "slave triangle" slavery in Richmond is kept largely hush-hush.  That's nuts, and wrong.  If this redevelopment finally pushes along the establishment of some kind of memorial, it deserves not to be dismissed out of hand.

2. There is a lot of unknown, as indicated before, about where exactly everything was in Shockoe Bottom.  It's probably not a great idea that home plate or the pitcher's mound end up smack on top of a major slave cemetery.  Is there not a way to get some greater clarity about the Bottom before rushing into the project?

3. Shockoe Bottom is near the James River and I-95.  What about traffic off that interstate (already rather snarled on frequent occasions) or flooding?  I'm sure these have to be addressed in any such plan.  As I railed about the environmental horror of the Braves' plans in Cobb County, so I'll want to see that this isn't going to create a similar emissions nightmare for Richmond (obviously, the number of cars is going to be a bit smaller).  

4. In the mayor's and council's travels, I wish they had bothered to visit the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City.  It is the cite without peer for getting an understanding of baseball and race in America.  Far from being confined to the famous Negro Leagues of the 30s and 40s, the museum tracks a long history of baseball and the African-American experience and their frequent intertwining. The Richmond folk should visit for two reasons.  One, this is the place to learn how to make baseball and history work together.  Baseball is about the only sport that could possibly be moved into Shockoe Bottom and work in harmony with the history/memorial project that has to happen there.  Baseball's history is long, and may well have intersected with the lives of slaves -- it certainly was played among free blacks in various locations, and games similar to baseball are recounted in stories of slave life.  Its intersection with African-American life after slavery is much easier to trace.  (Side note: your homework assignment is to go to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum if you're ever in Kansas City, along with the National World War I Museum at Liberty Memorial.)  

In short, baseball is uniquely suitable to be the sport in this situation.  (If basketball's history went any further back than 1904, it might have worked.)  If a stadium is going to be built in Shockoe Bottom, it better be a ballpark.  (And it better be named for Ray Dandridge.)  

5. A stadium does not have to be built in Shockoe Bottom.  They aren't magic bullets for development.  The pairing of sports facilities and memorial/museum sites is actually not without precedent; in Cincinnati, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, with its related story, sits nestled in between Paul Brown Stadium (Bengals) and the Great American Ballpark (Reds).  But you have to explain why it works, and how the ballpark will honor and serve the memorial/museum and the story that must be told (and avoid dishonoring site and story).  But being able to do that takes time and research and commitment.  And I don't know if anybody in the city or with the Squirrels is able or willing to do that.  

The Great American Ballpark, as seen from the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center

Some people will recoil at the thought of building so frivolous as a ballpark on what they view (and think everybody should view) as sacred or sacralized ground.  If you want to go forward, you have to take those claims seriously and make the case that it is not frivolous.  Baseball does offer a unique opportunity to do that, but it takes work.

6. On the money issue: I cannot make the case that municipalities should never spend money on sports facilities.  I kinda wish I could, but I have this problem: I like symphony orchestras.  I like history.  I like art.  And the facilities that house such things -- concert halls, museums, galleries and such -- tend not to happen without some sort of public participation.  And if I like my concert halls and museums, I'm not in the position to deny a ballpark to those who like having that available (admittedly, that number does include me too).  (And yes, there are plenty of folk who would call concert halls and such frivolous, on the brilliant reasoning that "if I don't like it, it's frivolous" -- don't be that person, folks, about either one.)

I can, however, say that no municipality should ever foot the total bill for said sports facility.  The Squirrels have indicated they will pay part of the cost in this case, though the exact proportions are not clear.  And I can say that a municipality with a 35% poverty rate should not be throwing wads of money around for a stadium without first addressing that poverty rate (looking at you, Richmond).  And please don't try to convince me that the whole redevelopment plan is going to fix that.  Developers are not particularly charitable.  

In short (too late!), I think a Shockoe Bottom stadium can make sense, and even be useful in doing a profoundly good thing and righting an injustice (something always theologically in favor).  But it takes time and careful thought and foresight, whereas in Richmond neither seems to be readily available.  This kind of process should probably have started the first time Shockoe Bottom was proposed as a ballpark site, several years ago; I see no evidence that it was.  

Of course there is time pressure; the Squirrels (along with the Giants, Eastern League, and MiLB) are getting restless, and too much more delay might provoke Nutzy the Flying Squirrel mascot to throw up his hands and stick out his thumb on I-95 or I-64 and hitch a ride to a municipality with its act together (or a bigger sucker, whichever you prefer).  But doing it right, in a way that hears all voices and respects and honors the horror and tragedy in Shockoe Bottom's history, can't be achieved by shortcut.  In a way maybe it's fitting that sports entertainment should "earn its keep" by putting itself at the service of something larger than one team, by being a servant to history and the public good.  I just wonder if anybody in Richmond has that kind of vision.

Note: the image used as the background for this blog is from one of my frequent trips to The Diamond for a Flying Squirrels game, from my usual general admission seating choice behind home plate.  

Stadiums, race codes, and cold hard cash (Part I)

For a blog that isn't going to get out of the double digits in readership any time soon, the major sports sure do seem to be competing very hard to get included in it.

It isn't as if the NFL has done anything to relinquish its hold on the questionable-ethics crown in American sport.  The Richie Incognito-Jonathan Martin story continues to splay out in ugly fashion.  A random drug bust or two also broke out during the week.  One player got caught on video engaging in Asian stereotyping, which couldn't feel good to the NFL after the preseason outcry over video of a different player dropping n-bombs.  While the deaths of two different high school players due directly to injuries sustained on the football field are not strictly NFL stories, and should not be objectified as such, you can bet the NFL was unhappy to see them happen.

However, basketball jumped into the fray, and in a way guaranteed to cause a fluster among commentators.  An NBA player took to Twitter to drop some of his own n-bombs, and announced to the world that such n-bombs would continue as a part of the "culture" (shades of Incognito/Martin, or shades of hip-hop?) that made it o.k.  And hockey made its bid to get included as well, with an NHL player offering up the kind of twisted logic -- in which the thuggery of the NHL with its more-or-less endemic brawls on the ice somehow makes the sport safer (one wonders what Derek Boogaard would say, were he still around to address the issue) -- that reminds you the NHL has its own head-trauma issues.

But one of the main sub-motivations of trying to develop a blog on this subject is the conviction that sports are not extraordinary in their plunges into the depths of human failure.  They are, at their worst as well as at their best, reflections of our own worst and best, and sometimes projections of our worst and best.  Sometimes our own failings actually bleed over into how sports are run.  While college football fandom would be an easy target, and I'm sure will eventually make its way into this blog, this is the week for me to prove I won't spare my favorite sport.  Thank you, Atlanta Braves, for the chance to prove that.

In case you didn't hear, the Braves managed to let loose a surprise announcement that at the end of their current lease at Turner Field in the city of Atlanta, the team would be decamping to the suburbs, in a stadium in the northwest suburbs of Cobb County.

If you're thinking "hey, wait, Turner Field isn't that old, is it?" you are correct.  Formerly the principal stadium for the 1996 Olympics, Turner Field isn't as old as most of my seminary classmates.  Apparently, however, the Braves look at Turner Field and see an inaccessible dump: they claim that the facility needs something like $250 million in improvements, is inaccessible to public transportation, and doesn't have enough parking.  Oddly, though, the cost of a new field will be between two and three times that amount (though Cobb County is apparently going to foot the bulk of that), will be completely inaccessible to public transportation*, and will have even less parking.

*more on this later

There is not much around Turner Field; that much is true.  The area has not developed.  How much the city of Atlanta is to blame I will leave for others to decide.  But one unavoidable element of the story involves folks who aren't going to be able to go to games out in Cobb County quite so easily, undevelopment around Turner Field or no.

Turner Field isn't quite on top of a train stop for MARTA, the city's metro system, but there is one about a mile's walk away.  There are fans, evidently, for whom that walk isn't a big deal, high crime potential or not.  However, those fans won't have that option with the new location, because the MARTA system doesn't reach to Cobb County.

This is by design.  Cobb County's design, not MARTA's.

Indeed, one of the apparent conditions for Cobb County to pursue this stadium deal (at least in the eyes of a certain party chairman in Cobb County) was that the move wouldn't be accompanied by a MARTA expansion.  

This is Atlanta we're talking about, or particularly the city/suburbs divide.  The race issue was going to come up.

Anyway, to the point of this blog:

1) The Braves are a business.  They apparently believe that they will better serve their fan base by moving to this suburban location to the north, calculating that they'll gain enough to offset any loss of fans from, frankly, any other part of the Atlanta area -- not just the city proper.  No sane person is going to drive from, say, Jonesboro to a game in Cobb County.  If they want to make that calculation, that's their prerogative, and moral/ethical judgments don't necessarily apply.

2) What Cobb County is thinking, I'm not sure.  The last linked article notes that the same pol is adamant that Cobb County citizens won't pay higher taxes to fund this new stadium.

Hmm.  So, where is that $400+ million going to come from?  Just how does Cobb County plan to pay for this?  Oh, so they're pledging tax revenues after all, you say?  Should be fun to see how this plays out.

As always this is going to raise the question of just what is going to get de-funded to pay that amount?  Or how much are Cobb County taxes going up?  Or do they resort to the old trick of getting others to pay for it, in the form of fees on things like hotel stays or restaurants?  I have no plans to stay in a hotel in Cobb County any time soon, at least.

3) Here is where I'm going to get agitated: this stadium plan and location is going to be an environmental nightmare.  And that, in this world, is damned immoral.

At the juncture of two of the busiest freeways around one of the highest-traffic cities there is, this is going to introduce a heck of a lot more traffic.  Just what the world needs, more emissions.  Is the memo not getting through?  POLLUTION IS BAD.  I don't care whether you believe in human-influenced climate change or not (which at this point is about like saying you don't believe in gravity or basic physics), POLLUTION IS BAD.  So Cobb County, already a traffic nightmare (and believe me, they aren't all driving Priuses or electric cars), is going to add even more traffic to the mix eighty-one times a year.  Any way we can just build a dome over the county so they can keep all that extra pollution to themselves?

As if the American addiction to cars (and frequently large and inefficient ones at that) weren't bad enough in emission terms, now we're just going to add to it.  What kind of psycho handles traffic planning in Cobb County?  The 75/285 area is a nasty, congested mess under the best of circumstances; how do you possibly plan to avoid making traffic snarls (and the emission that comes with them) any less problematic?

This is thoroughly justifiable from the point of view of a faith that emphasizes the need for humans to be good and just stewards of creation.  (And please don't embarrass yourself by bringing up the burn-it-up drivel of the likes of Mark Driscoll; you'll tell me nothing about a genuinely faithful few of creation stewardship, and nothing good about yourself.)  Apparently the regional dysfunction between Atlanta and its suburbs (whether you chalk it up to old attitudes that never die or not) is going to lead to a fairly profane ecological cock-up.  When any other sane sports franchise wants to get near rapid transit, the Braves are running away from it (and for the Cobb-and-rob crowd among you, I've taken the train to games in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, and I'm still alive, so shove it).  And yes, for this, they can justifiably be held morally responsible as much as Cobb County.

(PART 1: PART 2 TO COME)