Breaking Up With The Braves
Like Hercules, if you wanna grow up first you gotta fight some monsters.
Some monsters are easy, like taking care of your own self by doing laundry, cleaning dishes, noticing dirty floors, washing yourself correctly. Other monsters have a winning record — these are the big ones — depression, self-hate, insecurity, the burnt-in notions we have about ourselves and our capabilities, and others and their capabilities. We might inherit these from our parents or grandparents or teachers. Some version of they fuck you up, your mum and dad.
Then there are mid-level monsters like, say, abandoning your childhood sports team — in my case the Atlanta Braves — and the litany of revelations about your sense-of-self, your values, and your nostalgia that comes with that kind of a break-up.
I was born in Atlanta in 1987, four years before the Atlanta Braves went on the greatest sustained run of excellence in baseball history. If you’re rolling your eyes at that characterization then you‘re wrong because it’s defensibly true — no team has come close to the Braves’ 14 consecutive division titles. In the modern era (post 1995), where winning a division only means beating out four other teams, it’s a minor miracle no one’s come within six seasons of touching the Braves’ record.
My dad used to take me to Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium when I was a toddler. We’d sit in the bleachers and both take our shirts off, maybe get a whole section to ourselves. Back then the Braves were bad. They’d been bad for a long time and Atlanta wasn’t built to be a sports city anyway.
That all changed in 1991. The worst-to-first Braves got good fast with Glavine, Smoltz, Pendleton, Justice, Gant, Nixon … and kept going through the 90’s and early 00’s with Maddux, McGriff, Lemke, Blauser, Chipper, Andruw, Klesko, Javy, Milwood, McCann, Heyward.
During this run, I was 3-through-17-years-old. So I fucking loved the Braves. I mean like I had a signed Ryan Klesko rookie card — that kind of love.
The TV clip of Hank Aaron beating the Babe with number 715 (voiced by color analyst Vin Scully because history allowed us a perfect baseball moment) and those two white guys running onto the field to hug Aaron and pat his back as he rounded the bases cut together with close-up shots in the crowd of ecstatic black women with big afros screaming their heads off encapsulated the most romantic notion of Atlanta, a city too busy to hate — a distinction we fought mightily to carve out for ourselves in the Deep South.
Sure the occasional Native American tribe protested our mock war chants and “Tomahawk Chop” — but we didn’t have the racist mascot like the Cleveland Indians or the racial slur in our name like the Washington Redskins — or so we justified. Hell, we’d even fired Chief Nock-A-homa in the late 80’s. Admittedly that move had nothing to do with some progressive notion of representation and human decency, but was due to a contract dispute. The guy who played the Chief wanted a pay raise.
The Braves were a near daily ritual every year I was alive for 18 years, 162 games year — plus a dozen or so postseason games . But yesterday morning I woke up and realized I’m a Dodgers fan now.
I’ve lived in LA for 4 years but that’s not an automatic — I lived in Chicago for 7 and never flirted with the White Sox or the Cubs.
The Braves are moving out of Turner Field this season. More specifically, the Braves are moving out of downtown Atlanta and into Cobb County. This is a much bigger deal than it might seem to an outsider. In fact it’s fucking devastating.
There’s a dramatic irony in the character of the South that’s hard to explain to folks from elsewhere — embracing that dramatic irony leads to the richest elements of the South. Erasing that same irony has been the mission of a soft, conservative, racist, and bloated Southern contingency for roughly 150 years. On the one hand we are of a place that’s more strongly influenced by, marked by, and driven by black folks than most anywhere else in the country. On the other hand that vibrant black culture — historically and geographically — lands in Georgia because of the slave trade. Said culture — and peoples — was suppressed by 100 years of overt Jim Crow. It is still in a constant, present-tense struggle against city and state institutions designed to maintain white supremacy.
As a white kid, I grew up only knowing black mayors, represented by a black congressman (represented by John Fucking Lewis, to be precise), going to my Dad’s law office downtown and seeing all around me white collar black men and women, walking past the country’s most prestigious black colleges, commuting to school and driving by MLK’s church. But as a white southerner, a white liberal, and a white Atlantan I’m fully aware that the black culture that make my city so interesting — that makes me so proud to be an ATLien in other words — exists precariously — always on the brink of an existential threat — and exists largely despite people like myself.
And so the Atlanta Braves, this downtown team, a short walk from MARTA, whose hats Outkast wore, whose jerseys hung on the shoulders of Ludacris and Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young alike, with Hank Aaron and Deion Sanders two generational faces of the franchise — these Braves — are moving to the suburbs. They’re moving to Cobb County — the County with plenty of time to hate. Cobb is the county that famously voted to keep public transportation out. It’s the proverbial Atlanta Republican County. In my childhood imagination, it was where the dead-eyed country club conservatives, the white-flighters, the Buckhead Betties, all went. And the Braves are moving there to get closer to what they dub, “Braves Country.” Because their fans ostensibly don’t like going to Atlanta.
The Braves could have said, “we are Atlanta.” Instead they said, “you’re right, the suburbs are pretty nice.”
To add injury to insult the Braves spent the past three years tanking so we (or, I guess, they now if I’m going to be serious about this) could be good again for their Cobb County move. This is like telling your spouse that you’re going to do a three-year juice cleanse that’s gonna make both of your lives miserable — but it’s worth it because when it’s over you’ll divorce them and be in great shape for your next significant other. Also said next significant other will be rich, dumb, and the great granddaughter of some Grand Wizard of the Klan.
The Atlanta Braves are now the Cobb County Braves. Now when I think of my childhood team I think of being stuck in the worst traffic you’ve ever seen where I-75 hits I-285, or the military base , or Smyrna, or Marietta, or Kennesaw and it’s mandatory gun ownership ordinance, Six Flags, Chuck E. Cheese, and the lynching of Leo Frank. If I had a fever dream of everything anathema to decency in American culture, that fever dream may be of Cobb County.
*******
When the Atlanta Braves won their 10th straight division title we had a Democratic Governor, two democratic senators (if you count Zell Miller, the guy nationally most famous for challenging Chris Matthews to that duel), a democratic mayor, a democratic congressman, and were a swing state in Presidential elections. Our city had a robust progressive voice and a diverse electorate. The Braves played downtown and were the best team in the league besides maybe the Yankees. We were a thinking man’s team in the center of the coolest fucking city in America.
Also our owner was Ted Turner which for better or worse was interesting. And I haven’t even found space to talk about the perpetually sunny and literally-impossible-not-to-love Jimmy Carter being a staple in the stands. Or Jane Fonda. Or this:
Yeah that’s Bill Murray.
Now we’re a property of Liberty Media. The days of our quirky TV deal with TBS are long gone. Our GM is an ex-Cleveland guy who frankly just makes me depressed to think about. Our owners have identified the most noxiously racist parts of our state as “Braves Country.” Our stadium is doing what our white upper class did 40 years ago — fleeing for the ‘burbs. And our citizens either aren’t voting at all or voting for ass clinching little shitheads like Perdue, Chambliss, Isaakson, Barr, or Deal who have as much vision and goodness as you can fit on the head of a sewing needle.
And so here I am, in the heart of Los Angeles, living a stone’s throw from downtown which itself is a stone’s throw from Elysian Park, where the Dodgers play in the third-oldest stadium in the Majors.
I can park on Sunset Blvd, walk through the park, and land on foot at the edge of the Dodgers parking lot. I can look around the stands and see every kind of Angeleno. While the Braves seem intent on cultivating a homogeneous fan base of “true Georgians,” the Dodgers bleed through every inch of the city — and have very little to do with West Hollywood or Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, or Orange County — even though there’s more money out there.
The Dodgers have their problems — the three-year old TV dispute keeping the games out of a majority of LA households, no god damn trains going to the stadium, only a decade removed from Frank McCourt, our weird stadium design physically preventing upper deck fans from even eating at the nicer food stands on field level (as virulent a form of quotidian classism as I can imagine), and big-picture how our team was taken out of Brooklyn and left a hole in NYC that won’t ever fully heal.
But we’ve also got Andrew Toles from Decatur, Georgia, a 24-year-old playing left field after a stellar rookie campaign. We’ve got Kershaw of course. Urias is crazy young and has shown signs. They’ve got Maeda over from Japan. Kenley Jansen is fun as hell to watch play baseball. It’s a fun team to root for.
For me, moving on from the Braves — my father’s team, my older brother’s team, my sister’s team, my mother’s team, my own team whose hat I wore every single day for five years — feels like giving up on Georgia. It’s a mourning process. It’s a concession. It very well might be cowardly. But I look at my home state and see a place that’s more angry, vicious, and homogenous in it’s outlook than I can remember. And I look at my hometown ball club and and see a franchise eager to embrace, to the exclusion all others, the worst parts of it’s home soil.
