Truist Stadium, Cumberland (The good, the bad, and the ugly)

 

 

Truist Park, in suburban Atlanta, is one of those parks I have mixed feelings about.

              The good:

              This is a remarkably easy park to get to, for an out-of-towner. There are a lot of hotels within a mile, and even though the hotels are on the opposite side of Interstate-75, there’s a nice sidewalk on the bridge over the freeway, and even lots of benches along the bridge, if a half-mile walk is too long.

              There are a lot of restaurants (mostly chain restaurants, but decent chains, like Pappadeaux Cajun and Pappasito’s Mexican), also within walking distance of the hotels. They’re in the other direction, but there are plenty of sidewalks, and you can walk around easily.

              The  exterior of the stadium is nice-looking, architecturally, set on the top of a hill.

              The Braves fill the house, so it feels like a major league game. That’s especially apparent after going to poorly-attended major league games in Florida. At each of the Atlanta games, the attendance was within a few percent (less than 1% on Saturday) of the total for the first five games of this trip.

              The Braves’ organist. Seven-five years ago, every team had an organist. Many teams still do, often limited to occasionally playing chords designed to inspire the fans to make noise. The Braves’ Matthew Kiminski is different. In particular, he plays “walk-up” music for the other teams’ players. Many players have walk up music for when they come to bat or (for an end-of-the-game relief pitcher) when they enter the game, selected by the player. The most famous is probably Hall-of-Fame reliever Trevor Hoffman of the San Diego Padres, who always came into the game to the accompaniment of “Hells Bells” by AC/DC. But Kiminski plays walk-up music for the opponents, selected by him and/or by the Braves’ fans on the internet. Needless to say, some of them are delightful trolls. The Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani at one point got an accompaniment of Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler” (Ohtani was embroiled in a scandal last year over huge gambling debts that his interpreter had run up). Others are just kind of clever – Chris Taylor was accompanied by the theme song from the 1960s’ Andy Griffith Show (the lead character was sheriff Andy Taylor), Teoscar Hernández was accompanied by the theme song to “The Odd Couple” once (one of the characters is named Oscar) and by “Hernando’s Hideaway” another game. I’m sure I missed many more because I wasn’t paying attention or didn’t recognize the song.

              The bad:

              Truist Park is in the suburbs, not even in the same county as Atlanta. A lot of people in the city itself are offended. Cobb County is much wealthier than Fulton County, so that’s where the money is. Incidentally, the only other major league team with a city in their name that doesn’t play in the city itself are the Los Angeles Angels, who play in Anaheim.

              I like a stadium with a view of something, whether it’s San Francisco Bay, the San Gabriel Mountains, the St. Louis Arch, the Iowa State Capitol, bridges over the Ohio River in Louisville or Pittsburgh, or just a nice city skyline, but there’s really nothing to see here other than the stadium itself, and a construction crane over the centerfield wall. If you’re near the top of the stadium behind home plate, you can barely see the skyline of Atlanta in the distance (it’s to the left of the scoreboard in the photo).

              Also, Cobb County voted down the regional public transit that covers most of the area, so Truist is perhaps the least friendly park in that sense. And I can’t imagine what an Uber or Lyft from the city would cost.

              On some days, Truist being an outdoor stadium would be an advantage. The Twins’ stadium certainly tried hard to sell that idea in the stadium tour we took there, but I worry about what will happen if the Twins ever have a great team that’s trying to play a World Series game outside on a November night in Minnesota. I’m cranky about Truist being an uncovered outdoor stadium because we sat through a rain delay of 1:19 (that’s hours and minutes, by the way) on Friday, and Saturday’s start was delayed by rain for 3:06, so the first pitch was at 10:21 pm local time, and the game ended at 1:30 am. Kerry left before the first pitch, I watched five innings and then left, in part because we had a driving day coming up and in part because the game was pretty much over, with the Braves trailing 7-3 (they lost 10-3).

              This is just an inconvenience, but the Braves have a different policy on bringing bags into games than the other professional baseball parks, or at least different than the 28 others we’ve been to in the last three years. So the clear bag I had (which was a giveaway by the Diamondbacks, so that people would have something the right size) was too large. I could bring everything in it inside, but the bag had to stay out. They did have lockers where one could put a bag – for $15 plus tax. I believe the lockers are free in Phoenix, but I’ll have to check next time. Tonight, I wadded up the bag, put it in a pocket, carried everything else, and refilled the bag once I got inside the stadium.

              The ugly:

              The “Braves” nickname is one of the last holdouts of the “Injun” names in professional sports. The Braves are trying, sort of – one of their corporate sponsors, with the logo painted on the field, is a casino on Cherokee land, and they have had promotions with locally recognized groups that identify as Cherokee. But not all those groups are associated with the federally recognized tribes of the Cherokee nation, so there’s some bad feelings there. I’m not saying they should go back to their original nickname, the Beaneaters (they were in Boston two cities ago), but why not just have some respect and change the nickname as many college and professional teams have.

 

But the worst is the “tomahawk chop,” accompanied by the early-to-mid-20^th-century movie western version of an “Indian” war chant. The tomahawk chop makes me cringe every time I hear/see it. Not only is it an offensive stereotype, the chant is sung in different keys by different parts of the ballpark unless it really gets going loud and long enough that a consensus evolves. We’ve been getting away from racial stereotypes in many places, but in many ways (including locating their stadium in a very white county), the Braves have not, which is a shame, since they’ve got a good fan base and have had some great players. At least in this series, the Braves fans didn’t have much to cheer about, so we didn’t hear the tomahawk chop much.