How to Lose Fans and Alienate People: The 2016 Atlanta Braves
It wasn’t long ago the Braves had a young core, which included Julio Teheran. (via Arturo Pardavila III)
The Atlanta Braves are rebuilding, and they’re nearly unwatchable. They can’t hit or field and most nights they can’t pitch. They opened the year 4-17. Three weeks later, they fired manager Fredi Gonzalez, which hardly reassured fans that they knew what they’re doing. By nearly every measure they are the worst team in baseball.
This is their last season in the city of Atlanta; next year they’re moving to suburban Cobb County. But if they’re not careful, they could lose fans in the process.
“The product they’re putting out is insulting,” says Jim Tremayne, the editor of DJ Times magazine, a trade publication for disc jockeys. “It definitely feels very cynical to me. The entity that owns this club, it doesn’t feel like they’re interested in winning. At the end of the day, that’s what fans want.”
And, from a practical level, the team’s approach seems self-defeating, because Atlanta is a college football town with a decided fair-weather approach to its pro teams. “I think it’s really shortsighted,” says Cliff Harpe, an attorney in Cordele, Ga. “In Atlanta, if you have a superb product you can make superb money. But if you have a mediocre product, you can’t even make mediocre money.”
The team has taken a rapid plunge. In the 2013-2014 offseason, the Atlanta Braves were in an enviable position. The previous year’s team had won 96 games and a division title with the equivalent of a team full of sophomores: lineup anchors Jason Heyward, Freddie Freeman and Andrelton Simmons were all 23, and the rotation was equally fresh-faced, led by 22-year-old Julio Teheran, 25-year-old Mike Minor and 27-year-old Kris Medlen, and the team had a 25-year-old ace closer in Craig Kimbrel.
Braves brass believed the future was bright, and brought in former Indians GM John Hart — the man who in the 1990s in Cleveland helped to pioneer the practice of handing pre-arbitration extensions to young stars — and signed extensions with five of them, committing $280 million to Freeman, Simmons, Kimbrel, Teheran and Heyward.
That future is nothing but a hazy memory. Since Opening Day in 2014, the Braves have gone 158-212 and gotten rid of nearly everyone who was on that division-winning team. Among players who played a single inning for the 2013 Braves, only three are still on the 40-man roster: Freeman, Teheran and Eric O’Flaherty, who signed as a free agent in the offseason after spending the last two years elsewhere.
For many fans, the Andrelton Simmons trade was the absolute nadir. The Braves traded the best defensive shortstop in baseball, to whom they had recently handed a long-term, team-friendly extension, to the Angels in exchange for two risky pitching prospects. They also made sure to ask for Angels shortstop Erick Aybar in return. By WAR, Aybar has been the worst player in baseball this season.
And now their ballpark is in its last months as home of the Braves. After 20 years in Turner Field and 51 years in the city of Atlanta, the Braves are building a stadium in the suburbs that they hope will be easier for fans who live outside the city to reach by highway.
But anyone who has ever driven in Atlanta knows the city’s highways are so nightmarishly congested that, as Chris Gigley recently wrote here, “Fans who must take I-285 or I-75 to the game will never make it for the first pitch of any Braves game. Ever. They’ll probably miss the entire first inning. And probably the second.”
A lot of old-timers are reminded of the bad old days in the 1970s and 1980s, when the team was frequently one of the worst in baseball. But back then, the team had heroes to worship like Henry Aaron, Phil Niekro and Dale Murphy. They see nobody like that now.
“They were sort of analogous with the Falcons,” Tremayne said. “I grew up in Columbus, Georgia, so you had a lot of kids who couldn’t bring themselves to root for the crappy Atlanta baseball and football, so they would root for the Cowboys, or the Reds, or the Pirates, or even, later into the ‘70s, the Yankees… You actually believed that they may not be good in your lifetime. I believed that.”
Tremayne grew up in Columbus and started rooting for the team in 1971. “It got to the point where it was a little depressing,” he says. “The only thing you had to root for was individual accomplishments. Aaron, obviously, hitting 715. Or Niekro winning that 20th game. Or Buzz Capra winning the ERA title.”
But Aaron’s chase won the team new fans across the country. “I think I was the only kid in the state of Connecticut who followed the Braves,” says Chris Nicholson, who is now a real estate developer in Concord, Mass. “Hank Aaron, he was chasing the record… and I just thought, he was my guy.”
Joel Kauffman had the same experience in Mount Union, Pa. Discovering the Braves was almost an illicit thrill. His father gave him a radio one day, and he started listening to it after bedtime, searching for stations.
“I stumbled on WSB, and there was a Braves game on. I stopped there. And this guy named Hank Aaron stepped to the plate and hit a home run,” Kauffman remembers. “So I listened to the rest of the game, waiting for him to come to the plate again. The next night, I went there, and — there was another game on! That’s how I got hooked.”
Ted Turner’s TBS Superstation played that role for a lot of fans. “I didn’t really come from a family of baseball fans, but I watched the ’95 World Series and I was hooked,” says Karissa Marken, a schoolteacher who grew up in central Virginia. “I call myself a TBS fan — they really were the only team I could get.”
The Braves often like to point out that they are the oldest continuously operating franchise in major league baseball, a direct descendent of the Cincinnati Red Stockings of 1869, the first professional franchise in baseball history. A large contingent from that team moved to Boston — the Boston Red Stockings of 1876 were a charter member of the National League — and the franchise then went to Milwaukee in 1953, then to Atlanta in 1966.
But in their long history, the Braves have won only three World Series, one in each city: 1914, 1957 and 1995. Between pennants in 1958 and 1991, the team made the playoffs just twice, with division titles in 1969 and 1982, getting swept both times. With those two exceptions, the Atlanta Braves were pretty terrible for most of their existence.
“The Braves have sort of always been an underdog,” says Rhett Thomas, who grew up watching the team in Sebastian, Fla. “As bad as it was, I felt like, this is my team, and they need somebody, they’ve got me. And they were on TV all the time. One hundred thirty games a year. If you were a baseball fan you watched the Braves.”
For some, being there for the lean years was a point of pride. For others, it was simply a matter of fact.
“I’ve been a Braves fan for a long time, ever since there’s been such a thing as the Atlanta Braves, and there’s been a lot of lousy teams and lot of lousy seasons,” says Tim Floyd, a law professor at Mercer University in Macon, Ga. “And this is right up there with the worst of them. That expression, ‘There’s No Such Thing as a Pitching Prospect’: They hadn’t invented it yet, but I lived it.”
Attendance is always higher for good teams than bad teams. The team is betting on the belief that once the team wins again, fans will come in droves to their shiny new stadium.
By way of contrast, Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Mark Bradley points out that “there weren’t many Braves fans” in the 1980s, before the worst-to-first season of 1991 changed everything. He remembers a court case from the 1980s that a colleague of his attended:
It was a guy from TBS. They got free Braves tickets, because nobody wanted them. This guy got free tickets and saw ten to twelve games a year.
One day, he drove to the game and went the same way he always did, and got ticketed by the Atlanta police for a wrong turn. He goes before the judge and my colleague is watching.
And the judge says, “You go to 12 games a year?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Is this gonna be an insanity plea?”
However, Terry Pluto, a Cleveland sportswriter who has written extensively on the Indians, thinks that the benefits of the new stadium may not be quite as great as the Braves would hope. (I quoted his book “The Curse of Rocky Colavito” in April.)
“The Braves are not going to be able to cash in” on the new stadium, Pluto believes, because the contrast with Turner Field is simply not that great. “It’s not like they’re going from a place where the plumbing didn’t work.”
Both the Braves and Indians went from extraordinarily bad in the ’70s and ’80s to extraordinarily good in the ’90s. But they were also fortunate to be the only good show in town: The Browns had left Cleveland, the Falcons were mediocre, and the Cavaliers and Hawks were middling. “When they came in, the door was wide open for them to plant the flag,” Pluto explains. “That’s not the case in Cleveland now, and I don’t think that’s the case in Atlanta.”
Through their first 40 games, the Braves used 21 pitchers. They have the fifth-worst ERA and sixth-worst FIP in the National League. Two of their top pitching prospects, Mike Foltynewicz and Aaron Blair, have respective FIPs of 4.48 and 4.64 in the majors this year. (Foltynewicz’s ERA is 3.95; Blair’s is 7.59.) Blair, who just turned 24 on May 26, was sent back to the minors after a horrendous May 17th start in which he gave up nine runs and recorded just four outs. They may develop — old-timers remember that Tom Glavine put up a rookie ERA of 5.54 in 1987, and John Smoltz had a 5.48 ERA as a rookie in 1988 — but being young and struggling is not a particularly good predictor of whether a pitcher will go to the Hall of Fame.
Watching the team fail so spectacularly, and seeing the front office blame the manager for losing with a roster that Babe Ruth and Joe McCarthy couldn’t save, raises a disturbing question: is the team being torn down and rebuilt by people ill-equipped for the task?
On May 1, the Braves tried to call up Emilio Bonifacio, a player they’d released in spring training then re-signed to a minor league contract. It turned out he was ineligible due to a rule that teams must wait 30 days to call up players whom they have cut and re-signed, a rule the front office had overlooked. “They bungle these little things,” says Bill Smith, a disability benefits specialist in Chattanooga. “You wonder if they know what they’re doing.”
Worse was the team’s blockbuster trade for Cuban defector Hector Olivera. Team scouts and then-manager Fredi Gonzalez loved him and pushed the front office to trade young pitching and prospects for the 30-year old third baseman, who was in the Dodgers’ minor leagues at the time, getting back into playing shape after two years moving through the administrative process of defection. Shortly after the trade, the Braves announced that he was moving to the outfield because they didn’t believe he could stick at third.
In early April of 2016, he was arrested on domestic violence charges and placed on administrative suspension by major league baseball. Before the league announced his punishment, Yahoo’s Jeff Passan reported that the team was trying to trade him, only to find — predictably — that he is perceived around the league as untouchable. On May 26, the league handed down an 82-game suspension, announcing that Olivera will be ineligible to play until August 1. There is a chance that he may never play another game by the Braves.
“It feels like every move has backfired,” Tremayne says.
The biggest problem, as the team builds its new suburban stadium in Cobb County, about 15 miles from their downtown digs at Turner Field, is convincing the fans that it will all be worth it.
“There’s nobody really that you can pull for,” says Tim Denman, the cybersecurity learning director at Defense Acquisition University in Huntsville, Ala. “I know the players are playing hard, but there’s no part of the game that, as a fan, draws me to them right now.”
It’s hard not to draw a conclusion about how the team feels about its rooters. “The lineup they throw out there every day is as bad as anything I’ve seen,” says Floyd, the law professor. “They don’t seem to care that much about the fans or the product on the field.”
If the Braves win again, they will probably find a way to fill the stadium. But some Braves fans who have been with the team for years may not be with them. There’s a serious empathy gap, and a sense of profound loss.
“I hate that they’re moving it to a mall in some horrible suburb,” says Nicholson, the Massachusetts developer. “Not that I’m tied in with Atlanta or any connection with the South, but I feel I should be rooting for a team that’s in a city, not in a mall, with a bunch of players who come and go.
“I think Bobby Cox cried the day he traded Dale Murphy. Well, okay! That’s my general manager. He feels the way I feel. I think [GM John] Coppolella traded Simmons to show everyone he could do it.
“I hate these guys.”
References & Resources
- Chris Gigley, The Hardball Times, “If You Build It, They Will Bottleneck”
- Phone interviews with nine commenters from Braves Journal (a site that I manage): Tim Denman, Tim Floyd, Cliff Harpe, Joel Kauffman, Karissa Marken, Chris Nicholson, Bill Smith, Rhett Thomas, and Jim Tremayne.
- Phone interviews with Mark Bradley and Terry Pluto.
I think you could talk to a subset of nearly any fan base (maybe not Cubs, Royals, Giants) who would say the team is trash, the FO is terrible, and the whole franchise is a disaster. That subset is probably largest with the Braves right now but in my experience that level of pure negativity and “I hate these guys” is not close to the prevailing view. Obviously people complain about the terrible MLB team, and rightfully so, its unwatchable. But most people recognize that some amazing trades have been interspersed with the not-so-great ones, people still love Freddie and… Read more »
These weren’t the ten most negative fan quotes I could find. I talked to a lot of passionate longtime fans of the team. Some were more philosophical than others — some said they were optimistic, though they noted that they didn’t have a choice: their team is their team. They all watch the team less than they used to. The point is, these are all people who have been passionate about the Braves for a decade. “I hate this team” is not a typical reaction to get out of the most passionate and loyal part of your fanbase, and I found… Read more »
Very interesting. I probably do not talk to as many older / longtime fans as I do younger fans, although mostly very casual, watch-but-not-analyze types so I figured there would be more similarity and the bigger differences would be more along the sabermetric/traditional dimension. I guess it makes sense that the vibe would be more negative from the group that has been through it before, vs. the ones who grew up with the 1990s Braves. I feel like we could also make some broader age-related connections about optimism, time on this planet, etc. but I’ll stop there.
And where exactly are the quotes from the more philosophical/optimistic fans? I see nothing in this article about the city of Atlanta refusing for a decade to improve the area outside Turner Field. I see nothing about all of the blockbuster trades they made, except to use it as a negative. I see nothing about all of the players they’ve drafted. I see nothing about how the Braves rebuild looks to be a short term solution, rather than the decade long build that the Royals, Cubs, and Pirates subjected their fan base to. I see nothing about how the Braves… Read more »
It seems to me that it’s a very open question as to whether the rebuild “looks to be a short-term solution.”
Sure, if you have your head in the sand. Braves have money to spend if they need it, they have trade pieces if they need it, they have, arguably, the best MiL system in baseball. Sure, they’re will be ups and downs, but the future is a whole lot brighter now than it was at the end of 2015, and infinitely brighter if they had tried to stay the course after 2015.
Again, “money to spend if they need it” seems like a very open question.
It’s actually not a question at all. You’d basically have to be accusing Terry McGuirk of being an out and out liar. He has been quoted as saying that the payroll will increase around the $120 million mark. So again, head in the sand.
I am very comfortable with accusing the team’s front office of lying. Remember, John Schuerholz said that last year’s 95 losses was absolutely unacceptable and that the team would do what it took in the offseason to ensure that it never happened again?
That was a lie.
It’s a question you could have and should have asked. You didn’t. It discredits your overall piece.
I agree I’ve been listening to the Braves since they moved to Atlanta, I’m 60 now. We get they’re bad Liberty doesn’t care if they win or loose. The front office appears to be clueless .
But if I can cheer for guys like Biff Pocoroba ,Sonny Jackson, etal then I can cheer for these guys.
If games were still on TBS I would watch every damn one.
I will not apologize for being a fan.
Tim S
The front office and management does care, and they are going to spend money on the team but it’s going to be a year maybe two yet, this is a rebuild like none have ever seen before. Personally the only bad move they made was firing Fredi G, made absolutely no sense.
“Personally the only bad move they made was firing Fredi G”
Whaaaa….??
Atlanta need more non white players. Look at the other good teams. They find ways to get rid of good non white players or not sign them. Christian Betancourt will become a star. Remember what Lonnie Smith said about John schourholtz
It’s past time to get off of this rant, unless you specifically mean African American players whose numbers across the majors are shrinking the roster matches up in non-whites as any. On the 25 man roster – Julio Teheran, Alexi OGando, Arodys Vizcaino, Williams Perez, Ender Inciarte, Daniel Castro, Mallex Smith, Adonis Garcia and Erick Aybar On the 40-man – Mauricio Cabrera, Jose De la Cruz, Tyrell Jenkins, Manny Banuelos, Dario Alvarez, Paco Rodriguez and sadly Hector Oilvera Among their top 30 prospects not on the 40 man roster – Ozzie Albies, Touki Toussaint,Rio Ruiz, Zachary Bird, Ricard Sanchez, Ronakld… Read more »
lol….are you guys really debating this?
John Stearns, Willie Montanez, Doug Flynn, Frankie Taveras, Wayne Garret, Joel Youngblood, John Milner, Lee Mazzilli, Swan, Falcone, Zachary on the mound, Lockwood out of the pen.
Growing up a Mets fan, can assure you that this too will pass, and turnarounds are possible.
Agreed, too many Braves fans wetting their pants. Teams historically go thru cycles. Maybe success of the 1990s plays into this. Funny many of the same folks scream that Hawks should be torn down due to consistent mediocrity.
I think some of these commenters missed the main point of the article – it isn’t that fans quoted in the article lack perspective (clearly, they have tons of it. Most of them have been fans of the Braves for decades.); no, the problem the article tried to get at was that the Braves as a business operation are doing horrible things to their fanbase. That is dumb from any business standpoint you can think of. That’s why fans are losing faith, because they do not appreciate their love of the team being taken advantage of by the business side… Read more »
While I agree with you that Liberty Media has mistreated their Atlanta fans and pulled a fast one on the Cobb County taxpayers, I disagree with your last sentence. Liberty Media bought the Braves in 2007 for $450 million. Forbes’ 2016 valuation (which isn’t perfect, but still) has the Braves at $1.175 billion. That’s about 2.5 times higher in a decade that oh by the way featured a global financial meltdown. As far as Liberty Media is concerned, the current ownership group is AMAZING at running a sports business. So long as the numbers are going up, none of the… Read more »
It’s awfully hard to lose money by buying a team these days. The businesses are monopolies and new entrants are heavily restricted.
Which is the point! They don’t care about the product or the fans or anything as long as their investment grows. That is the problem with corporate ownership and the Braves will never be the same until there is a new owner who wants to actually own a baseball team not an investment vehicle.
The problem isn’t Liberty Media. They have already stated that they will never make a single baseball decision and the money the Braves make is the money they can spend; neither are negatives. The problem is that the big spenders spend big because they have lucrative TV contracts and the Braves don’t. LM isn’t responsible for that; Time Warner is. Time Warner were the ones who signed a 25 year, non-negotiable, TV contract right before the TV contract bubble exploded; all because they wanted quick cash before they sold the team. It has already been said countless times that their… Read more »
John C Malone is the current chairman of Liberty Media, is a huge baseball and Braves fan. From all that I have read he seems to like owing a baseball team and genuinely cares about its success. Just because he leaves day to day operation to those more expert, doesn’t mean no one above Terry Mcquirk cares. I say “more expert” because I listened to an interview with Theo Epstien who said he believes the Braves currently (in just the last 18 months) have accumulated more total baseball talent in their organization, though not at the major league level, than… Read more »
By law, that of the US Securities and Exchange Commission and that of MLB, Liberty Media cannot and will not EVER receive a dime due to the operating expenses of the Atlanta Braves. No one in the Braves front office answers to Liberty Media as to the day to day operations of the club. They look at the numbers, say here are your payroll constraints, go run the team.
“Liberty Media bought the Braves in 2007 for $450 million. Forbes’ 2016 valuation (which isn’t perfect, but still) has the Braves at $1.175 billion. That’s about 2.5 times higher in a decade that oh by the way featured a global financial meltdown.”
To be clear, that spectacular increase in valuation was NOT brought about by anything that Liberty has done. ALL sports franchises are skyrocketing in value, primarily because they are a super-scarce good for the “price is no issue” set.
This is pretty much the perfect summary for how I feel, thank you.
The stadiums are like a 20 minute drive apart and the new one is barelyyy outside Atlanta proper, right next to the perimeter. Symbolically sure there’s meaning, but the actual hassle is way overblown, as is “killing the Atlanta” in the Braves. The Braves fanbase was already much much more than just Atlanta proper.
Not defending the move, I just think the attack against it should be from a taxpayer / financial standpoint and not this whole Atlanta vs. Cobb fan thing.
I mean, they’re 20 minutes apart if there are no other cars on the road. And the difference for a fan coming from, say, Decatur is quite large.
Yeah. If you’ve never driven outside the Perimeter from inside the Perimeter, you may not understand just how bad it could be.
No one’s actually driving between the stadiums – that’s not the point.
I suggest next time you’re at Turner ask people around you where they’re coming to the game from. The ‘entire fanbase in Atlanta’ thing is flat wrong. That’s either a lack of knowledge or a willing dismissal of some segment of Braves fans you deem less important.
@Alex Remington: Yeah, if you’ve never driven from Gwinnett to Turner Field at 6pm on a weeknight, you may not understand just how bad IT could be. It’s 60 to 90 minutes. The traffic is a non-factor, a WASH for those in Gwinnett, and a HUGE PLUS for those in Cobb County, which, like it or not, is where most of the money is in metro Atlanta. The only people with a possible beef about traffic are the paying customers living south of downtown (few) or downtown proper (less than few).
“The only people with a possible beef about traffic are the paying customers living south of downtown (few) or downtown proper (less than few).”
To be fair, there are very few coming from *anywhere* right now, with that unmitigated AAAA disaster club that takes the field on a nightly basis…
If they actually were coming from there…the attendance is abysmal and the majority of the fan base was outside the perimeter from NW to NE. You have to go where the money is…just a fact in today’s sports environment.
Plus, Braves now own land and can lease the property and have a vibrant social life around the stadium 365. Blame Kasim Reed. He wouldn’t work with them.
Anyone who attended games at Turner Field over the past 5 years saw the neglect of surrounding areas. The park benches directly across from stadium were destroyed, broken bottles, etc. No development (other than a mini golf course) for fans. As for stadium, the City alienated the fans, Braves are taking the PR hit by making a sensible move.
The tax money for the stadium was drawn from the Cumberland Community Development something or another (forget the exact name). It was voted on by this group comprised of area businesses. If you don’t want to support the Braves in Cobb County, don’t shop in the Cumberland area. The Braves aren’t pulling tax dollars from schools.
You forgot boring, bland, cookie cutter, looks much like Turner Field stadium.
..and you time travelled to the future to experience it firsthand? Tell us, did Heywood ever hit .260 again?
Bob’s right. And you should have predicted it coming, Chief.
That’s funny the “fan base” you speak of hasn’t shown up for “their” team in 10 years probably the worst fan base in baseball. Fine you don’t want to watch don’t, but don’t say their isn’t talent just a year or two away, go watch AAA and AA clubs 2-3 years is nothing for a rebuild.
Perhaps Atlanta is a different type of sports town but if the Pirates can sell tickets after putting garbage on the field for 2 decades, anything is possible. These comments do sound a lot like what people in Pittsburgh had to say in the late 90s-2012 though.
Didn’t a change in ownership help turn the Pirates around?
Yes. The team was a lot worse under Kevin McClatchy than it has been under Bob Nutting.
Thank you, Alex Remington, for summing up feelings that I haven’t actually been able to put into words. I’m disgusted by the team that Atlanta has been saddled with for the past two seasons. I was born and raised in and around Athens, Georgia, and I’ve been a Braves fan my entire life. I’m in my mid-thirties, and as a kid, my step-dad and I went to games at the old Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. Being a sports fan growing up in the Atlanta media market, Dale Murphy and Dominique Wilkins were the only sports heroes I could have (okay, I’m… Read more »
Just go. If you don’t understand that a team can’t win every season, you aren’t paying attention. GO root for the Nats. If tough times get to you that badly, you’re not needed as a fan.
Do you lack reading comprehension skills, or are you just a troll? Read what I wrote, specifically about the Braves versus the Falcons. I don’t expect a team to win every season, but I do expect the team’s ownership and front office to, at the very least, appear to be trying to put a winning team on the field. That isn’t happening with the Braves. Why should anyone continue to root for a team that isn’t even rooting for itself?
What exactly do you think they’re doing right now? They have decided to invest in the future and, by god, they’re doing a whole heck of a lot to make that happen sooner rather than later. If we have to endure a couple of years of losing for ten years of prosperity, count me among those who have the patience to wait. In the meantime, if the team loses I’ll root like hell for them to win. If they don’t, oh well.
The fact that “the Nats” are your example of a team that wins every season suggests maybe you’ve only watched baseball for 3 of the last 12 years.
So you are not a fan, as one would use that term in other cities. Cubs -Philly- Sox etc, fans complain, scream, cry, but in spring they show up. Maybe the media is right about Atlanta sports fans. If so, you can’t alienate what you don’t have so why not pursue an alternative business model.
Have you actually considered talking to some baseball people, as opposed to DJs and school teachers? It’s called rebuilding, and it takes more than one season. The Braves were awful in 2014 with all of our good major league talent. Hart put it best when he said that we weren’t breaking up the ’27 Yankees. Upton and Heyward were going to walk for free and we got excellent returns for them. As great as Andrelton was with the glove, he was equally bad with the bat. This is where we were heading, and frankly, it should have happened long ago.… Read more »
*ignorant
Simmons was garden-variety bad with the bat. He was transcendent with the glove.
This article is about the fan perspective. Baseball fans have jobs and then they go home and they watch the team. That’s what the people I talked to have done for the past two to five decades. But this team is unwatchable. It may be the worst team in Atlanta Braves history — possibly worse than 1988. That is awfully hard to watch.
How do you watch them?
With plenty of alcohol available.
I watch the young players like Blair, Perez, Smith develop, and also baseball in general. Yes losing is tough, especially like Braves are doing now, but if you accept the rebuild -even grudgingly- you can find interesting things.
Absolutely agree
Oh so your the kinda guy that thinks the Ozzie Smith trade was a good idea. In 2016.
I have been a fan since just about birth. So, pretty much since 1965. Every realistic Braves fan watched as the farm system became depleted under Frank Wren and knew this would have to be done. Is it hard to watch? Absolutely it is, but the avid fan sees what is coming and will tolerate the losing for a season or 2. While Coppy tried to put on a brave face, no pun intended, during the off season, they and the fans knew this would be bad. I don’t know if we expected epically bad, but we had no delusional… Read more »
Well said.
Well, we’ve already had two and a half seasons of sub-.500 baseball — 2014 through May 2016. Albies and Swanson are knocking on the door, but the rest of the talent is a little ways off. Austin Riley and Ronald Acuna remain extremely raw; Tyrell Jenkins and Sean Newcombe issue far too many walks; Max Fried is a long way from ready; etc. It is not likely that this farm system will yield a playoff-bound team before 2019, and it could take longer. After all, the Royals’ rebuild took a decade. The Pirates went through multiple rebuilds over their two decades… Read more »
That’s an inaccurate statement. It hasn’t been almost 2.5 seasons, the rebuild has gone on for 1.5 years; that first losing year was comprised of the players the Braves traded away in order to rebuild. As for your opinion on the state of the MiL system, here’s a brief snippet of what to expect next year Albies Swanson Freeman Free Agent/Trade Markakis Inciarte Flowers Smith Teheran Wisler Folty Perez/Jenkins/Newcomb/Blair/Gant… Inexperienced? Sure, but can they compete? Absolutely. Plus, I inserted a free agent/trade in the 4 hole. The thing is the Braves will have as much as $60 million to spend… Read more »
Teheran won’t bring a Shelby Miller haul. He can get 1 very good prospect and a minor piece. Albies and Swanson should both start next year in the minors or they are wasting a year of control. Having smith and inciarte both as starters doesn’t make sense. They have the same toolset with inciarte the better player, smith is just a 4th of. They are giving a lot of the young guys chances to start, but in the end folty, jenkins, newcombe, gant are relievers. Wisler and blair are mid rotation upside but more likely 4/5 guys. Allard is the… Read more »
Best rebuild in baseball history? Coppy is that you?
Why said…. Thanks for the thoroughly pessimistic outlook on the Braves future. Your takes make absolutely no sense when you consider there is already talk of bringing up Albies and Swanson right now, but in your expertise they should stay in the minors a whole other year. Smith and Inciarte shouldn’t both be starters? Well, they’re both starters now and if the Braves don’t improve the OF, like exactly how I have it in the lineup I proposed, they’d be starting again. Folty, Jenkins, Newcomb, and Gant are relievers? Excuse me, I need to walk away and laugh for a… Read more »
“but can they compete? Absolutely”
Eehhhh….that rotation isn’t scaring *anyone*. Nor is that lineup, for that matter, with ??? as your cleanup hitter and a well-past-his-prime-which-was-never-that-prime-to-begin-with Markakis in the five hole.
“This is arguably the best rebuild in baseball history.”
Eehhhhh…..
This is a really one sided article…so basically, you had not a single interview that offered insight…just some fans complaining. I don’t understand how anyone who has actually been to a game at the Ted who can disagree with moving the team. It is in a run down part of town, my car got broken into right down the road, and traffic is horrible without the move to Cobb. This is possibly one of the worst articles I’ve ever read…terrible interviews….a teacher, a real estate developer from Massachusetts, and an attorney. Wow. Those guys are bound to know baseball.
Fortunately, some random guy posting as “BrockJ” is here to balance out the Braves fans who were quoted in the article. Wow. That comment is much more credible.
A lot of Braves’ fans born around the 80’s 90’s have never lived through a bad Braves team with the 13 straight division titles. That’s what is making it so hard for Braves fans to understand any kind of rebuild process
A lot of Braves fans born in the 1950s and 1960s saw decades of losing, and this is still as bad as anything they’ve ever seen.
I lived thru them, and you are wrong. I know you mean on the field today, at this moment. But unlike today, there was no strong farm system, or a new stadium surrounded by bars and restaurants, or even a hint of a plan. The hands-on individual owner that folks dream about now was killing the team, though unintentionally. The 3500 or so fans peed in a damn trough! I agree that the product on the field stinks today, but the situation is very much better than in the decades of losing.
I remember the troughs at the old Launching Pad! The thing is, back in the ’70s and ’80s, the front office claimed that they had talent that was gonna come up and change everything. But before the internet it was almost impossible for regular fans to get access to accurate prospect evaluations, so it was a lot easier to place your hopes and believe the team’s overoptimism when it came to the Andres Thomases and Gerald Perrys and Pat Rocketts of the world. Nowadays, we know a lot more about the farm system, and optimism about the future is a… Read more »
I have several issues with this piece, so let me lay them out as simply as possible. First, what was the alternative with the roster? This team is terrible this year, but they always were going to be. Heyward and Justin Upton were leaving. Medlen and Minor’s pitching arms failed them. Simmons cannot hit. The team has a limited payroll and until last year, they had no farm system. Yes, the Braves could have gone all in for the 2015 season, but what would that have netted? A division title? Maybe. A playoff win? Unlikely. The bullpen would still have… Read more »
fantastic outlook on the team…..you sir, are a great American!
Agreed, Remmington out, Kyle you’re in.
Yes, Alex, please cut Kyle’s reply out and paste it to your wall. It’s called critical thinking, not just being Katie Couric-like and selecting quotes to fit your purpose.
So that’s the secret! “Stances I agree with” = critical thinking. “Stances I disagree with” = Katie Couric (?!)
I thought the article was even-handed. Showed lots of fans are generally frustrated with the current direction of the club but many of them having pretty good perspective about it. Then again, I lack critical thinking skills because I’m a Katie Couric clone (or…something?)
“The mid-2000’s in Atlanta are also to blame for the team’s current plight. The pursuit of 14 consecutive division titles and then 1 last hurrah for the old guard was short-sighted, and robbed the team of some very good prospects for rentals on teams that were not good enough to win the World Series. Was 1 excellent season of JD Drew worth the career of Adam Wainwright? One year of Teixeira, with 6+ WAR, worth 5 prospects that ultimately put Texas where Atlanta wanted to be, the World Series? These Braves teams were not merely a piece away, but the… Read more »
Not exactly. Schuerholz and Cox are still involved, but Copplella and Hart are pulling the strings. For proof of this, look no further than Fredi finally getting fired.
OK. You’re a Braves fan. We get it. The biggest issue with these sorts of hot take responses is that a few vocal members of the fan base get so worked up over how wonderful their team is that they fail to grasp the basic point of the article (*perceptions* of the team’s actions in this case, as opposed to whether or not the actions themselves are or will be the greatest decisions ever made in the history of MLB), and instead they just spew off-topic vitriol at the author and anyone else who doesn’t unconditionally praise the Braves for… Read more »
I was going to make similar points as Ryan Bruce but he speaks for me. Go tell me how that loaded roster of 2014 is actually doing today. They are collectively terrible and the Braves were able to restock their severely depleted farm system in under 18 months to make it a top 5 farm system. It’s actually a miracle they are at where they are in terms of future talent and will climb even further ahead of the pack after this crop of international signings and high draft picks. Also, this idea that the new stadium is so far… Read more »
I’m 37. I was born in Atlanta. I grew up outside of Columbus. I went to the first ever World Series game in Atlanta. I live in Florida now and watch most of the games. I don’t care if they play games in Stone Mountain. I never had any great affinity for Turner Field where they have a 15-22 postseason record. It’s a converted Olympic Stadium with nothing of interest going on around the park. It’s a pain in the ass to get to the park and there’s nothing to do around the park. It has a great skyline. I… Read more »
I don’t think they needed to tear everything down as drastically as they did — but, regardless, they have a strategy and they’re pursuing it. However, if you watch this team every night and you’re happy about it, you’re a very different man than I am.
But that’s not all you pointed out in your article is it? You lambasted the moves since 2014 as all bad (and as many pointed out, failed to mention what has to be one of the best trades of all time) without evaluating the alternatives. Kyle above lays out what sticking with that 2013 team would have meant, and that disaster is squarely on poor decisions and planning on the part of the brain trust that won the division in 2013. Yes, Coppolella and crew haven’t gotten it all right (pro tip, NO ONE does), and aesthetically, you’re right, this… Read more »
I don’t lambaste the moves since 2014 as all bad. Many were very good, and most were easily defensible on the merits. But they have all, nearly without fail, served to make the major league team worse. My focus was on the fan experience in 2016.
So clearly you just admitted that this was purely a trash piece in order for you to complain. You grabbed quotes to fit your narrative and you ignored any that ran counter. It’s cool if you’re not happy with what’s going on, but don’t pretend your opinion is in the majority. It’s disingenuous. How about next time, before writing an article bashing the team you’re supposed to be a fan of, you think about what you would have done instead and write an article about that. It’s easy to complain, it’s a lot harder to actually have to think of… Read more »
Wow. It’s an article about perceptions of the franchise. Average attendance at Braves games has dropped to 21,000+ so far in 2016, down nearly 10,000 from 31,000+ in 2013, and only about half of the 42,000+ per game in the season that Turner Field was opened. It’s cool if you’re happy with everything the Braves have been doing. But don’t pretend that your opinion, that it’s “arguably the best rebuild in baseball history,” is in the majority. *That* is disingenuous. How about next time, before bashing a writer who put a thoughtful article out there, you think about what the… Read more »
Thoughtful? You think this “article” was thoughtful? It was merely a garbage piece written to air a personal grievance that the team he “roots for” is currently losing. It’s called rebuilding and every single team in sports does it. If you can’t handle that then maybe watching sports isn’t for you. It doesn’t have to be all pie in the sky, but when you compare what the Braves are doing compared to what the Cubs, Pirates, and Royals have done, it’s pretty clear the Braves have put themselves in a better position to win faster than those other teams. And… Read more »
Agreed, I thought the article was thoughtful also. Maybe it’s just you. “HOW ABOUT NEXT TIME” you sit this one out, chief. Maybe just stop talking for a bit.
So clearly you just admitted that this was purely a trash piece in order for you to complain. You grabbed quotes to fit your narrative and you ignored any that ran counter. It’s cool if you’re not happy with what’s going on, but don’t pretend your opinion is in the majority. It’s disingenuous. How about next time, before writing an article bashing the team you’re supposed to be a fan of, you think about what you would have done instead and write an article about that. It’s easy to complain, it’s a lot harder to actually have to think of… Read more »
My feelings towards the Braves are summed up by the quote
“Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining.”
Were we built for the long term? No. Did we need a rebuild? Yes.
The problem is that ownership/management mistreats fans and cities. Remember “parallel paths” and “we are a better team”? The team has driven up prices while slashing payroll. They have fleeced cities for stadiums (http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-atlanta-braves-stadium/). They will not admit to mistakes. They need to tell the fans we are bad, we know it, and we make mistakes instead of tooting their own horns.
You know what makes this team watchable for me? Even in the midst of a historically poor season, there are still flashes of brilliance. The Andrelton trade was tough for a lot of reasons, but I’d wager to say that Ender Inciarte is about as close to Simmons as it comes in defensive ability, tenacity, and baseball acumen. Win or lose, his effort is always all-out, which is more than can be said of a few unnamed players on the roster. He’s already won over a lot of fans. Mallex Smith is still incredibly raw and often overmatched, but he’s… Read more »
Teheran has been great. Wisler hasn’t been great, yet, but he’s been good. It’s been great to see flashes of brilliance from him and Foltynewicz. But the bullpen outside of Vizcaino has been extremely shaky, the defense has been atrocious, and the offense is on pace to score fewer runs than any team since the 1970s.
More to the point: ends do not always justify means. The games right now are horrible. If the team starts to win in 2020, that’s great, but it won’t change how bad it is right now.
“Teheran and Wisler are two of the top pitchers in baseball. ”
Uh, what? By fWAR Teheran has been the 32nd best pitcher and Matt Wisler is 47th.
Thank you for writing this, Alex. I’ve been feeling exactly this way for the last couple years. Some of the commenters here are focusing on what I think is the wrong question – the question isn’t “was this rebuild strategy necessary and will it work?” The question is “what relationship does this organization have with its fans?” And all evidence points to the idea that they see us as idiots with wallets, which isn’t a good look. Since that playoff loss where Fredi kept Kimbrel in the bullpen, the organization has: – sprung a secretly-negotiated publicly-funded stadium deal out of… Read more »
Hinkie got fired for being honest. You’ve already solved why Coppy & co. have to be optimistic and basically lie. They can’t see their plan out of they’re fired midway through.
The rebuild was necessary. Their farm system was horrible, they had no money, they had key offensive players leaving the next winter and their rotation was a mess. They were either going to be a .500 team in 2014 and really bad for many years to come or really bad for a shorter period of time with cheap talent and payroll flexibility on in the future. The minor league affiliates have been fun to watch, lots of pitching depth and after this draft and international signing period they should have the unanimous #1 farm system. The future is bright with… Read more »
Fans being upset their team is bad. I’m flabbergasted.
On the contrary! Some think they’re in the midst of the greatest rebuild IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND. (See inexplicable comments above.)
As a resident of the city of Atlanta and also as a Braves fan for 20+, I can say this article pretty much sums up how myself and how most of my fellow baseball friends feel. I know I can’t speak for everyone, but it hits on my personal experience perfectly and the same could be said of those that I know. It’s not just simply the recent rebuild, either. All teams have rebuilds. No, this has been a long, drawn-out, relentless, ~10-yr emotional beat-down of the fans… and that’s something that a lot of us are never coming back… Read more »
I now live Florida. I have been a Braves fan since 1953 when I lived in Wisconsin. I tend to agree with the writers that claim that the Braves Front Office does not care about the fans is not truthful about wanting to improve the team. They trade away good players for players like Aybar, Inciarte, and Olivares. To fill the roster they sign castoffs like Franceur, Johnson, Pierzinski, and Stubbs. I don’t see Why the Braves keep Aybar and continue to play him. He can’t hit. he can’t field, he can’t throw, and he makes bad decisions. The Braves… Read more »
For what it’s worth, his name is Olivera.
And they also got Sean Newcomb and Chris Ellis in addition to Erick Aybar. They didn’t trade anyone to acquire Aybar. They wanted Newcomb and Ellis.
And they also got Dansby Swanson and Aaron Blair in addition to Ender Inciarte, who is every bit the player Shelby Miller is (if not better).
This article pretty much unreadable for me. How do people not grasp the fact that our young core from a few years back weren’t actually that good. We sold high and did very well with the returns. Our future is much brighter right now and that isn’t even counting this year’s IFA’s and 2016 + 2017 draft (#3 overall pick and probably another top 3 pick). I get that people are upset with this year’s team and feel anger with the front office about the product being put out on the field. Those same people, for the most part, aren’t… Read more »
It’s not that the young core wasn’t good. A huge part of the problem is that our starting rotation got catastrophically injured: Kris Medlen, Brandon Beachy, and Mike Minor all had multiple Tommy John or shoulder surgeries. Freeman remains a good player. Heyward remains a very good player. Simmons is having an awful year, but with his glove, he’ll remain good for a long time.
Now, are those injuries an indication that the team’s training and coaching staff isn’t particularly good at keeping players healthy? Your guess is as good as mine.
So now you are proposing that the training staff is alienating the fans?
I’m suggesting that one reason that the team is awful is that the team has done a bad job of keeping its players healthy.
Our minor league system is one of the best in baseball now. In the next few months when Albies, Newcomb, Jenkins, and Swanson etc get called up, how high will our minor-league system rank then? A good GM would have been able to find a way to keep Heyward for home discount, not get rid of the only Lefty in our rotation Alex Wood, and not trade Simmons who was the most exciting player I’ve seen on the field since Andruw.. a good GM would have been able to do all these things and build our minor leagues at the… Read more »
As soon as the young prospects gain a little seasoning at the major league level, will we trade them to rebuild for future again?
@ Steve -Found a way to keep Heyward at a discount? This isn’t a video game, you can’t force things. Which gm has been able to do the things that you suggest. Your post is wrong for so very many reasons.
http://www.minorleagueball.com/2016/4/2/11333890/minor-league-baseball-farm-system-rankings-for-2016
Patience is a virtue, Braves fans. Your day is coming…
The first casualty of the re-build was Tommy LaStella, who could actually put the ball in play. Fans clamored long and hard for him to be brought up to replace Uggla. When he finally was, he became practically the only Brave who could get a hit. He’s now on the Cubs major league roster. I frequently see his name in their box-scores. The Cubs are probably the best MLB team, so LaStella’s presence on their big team speaks well of him. Who do the Braves ultimately have now in their system as the result of shipping LaStella to the Cubs?… Read more »
they traded lastella for vizcaino.
Oh! Well, I guess that’s sorta OK, then. Thanks, tp! (Still, though….he could move runners around with timely hits. Oh, well.)
You mean the guy that hit .251/.328/.317 with a -.04WAR and 85 WRC+ when he played for ATL? He’s currently sporting a BAPIP 40 points higher than his career norm. Don’t think that he’s all of a sudden morphed into a different player because he’s on the Cubs now. His defense is still suspect and when he regresses back to his norm he’ll still be the same fringe starter/utility player he always was. Trading him for someone who has turned into one of the best closers this year was a no brainer.
Good article. But what yall need to get is this is a REBUILD. It isn’t supposed to be pretty. It’s not fun. But the Braves front office has done and looks like they will continue to do what NEEDS to be done for this team to not only contend, but win a World Series. You said it yourself, the Braves only have three titles. I admire the front office for doing what they have to do to build a World Series winning team, even though they know the process to reach it stinks, and that the fans would hate it.… Read more »
I’d be interested to see where this writer stands in a couple of years when the Braves are thrashing through the National League, like the Cubs – a team that suffered through several years of awful product. If Braves fans are as fair-weather as we’re assuming, myself not included, then they will be flocking to SunTrust Park when they’re winning with extensive pitching depth and all-star middle infielders Swanson and Albies. Let’s go ask some more people that have no knowledge of how franchises build winning teams and see what their expert opinion on the matter is.
Alex will then write 2000 word articles on how great the Braves FO is.
“I’d be interested to see where this writer stands in a couple of years when the Braves are thrashing through the National League”
Eehhhhh…..
Good article. I watched some horrible 70’s and 80’s Braves teams that never even sniffed of the likely 120 losses that the 2016 edition of my favorite team is likely to endure. Those teams were bad. This team is putrid. My confidence in the front office is shaken to the point that I keep imagining that I smell ostriches. (Anyone remember the Braves ostrich races in the 70’s?) Anyway, the smell of a bad front office / ostrich is in the air and it permeates everything. We supposedly have a top 3 farm system (with lots of pitchers who had… Read more »
Let’s look at the players they got rid of and see if we are doing the right thing J-hay yet to hit a homerun this year and is batting around 230-240 Justin upton having the worst year of his career Shelby Miller trade some calling it the most lopsided trade ever and with him having a terrible season u start to see a trend here We do have one of the best farm systems in baseball due to the trades we are basically doing the same blueprint as the Cubs and Astros but we did it much quicker with this… Read more »
Sure hope there’s going to be a follow-up article telling us more about the throngs of Braves’ faithful who spent 1974 rooting for Buzz Capra to win the ERA championship. I see that his home starts after the first of September drew an average of almost 3700 fans. How else did their enthusiasm manifest itself? Did they stop by Chief Noc-A-Homa’s tent and get buzz-scalped? Did they sit in the upper deck with a giant slide rule and recalculate Buzz’s ERA as opposing batters paraded back to the dugout? If a guy who edits a magazine for disc jockeys says… Read more »
If a random guy posting as “Col. Edwin” misinterprets a quotation of a Braves fan, it must be the new true meaning of that Braves fan’s comments. After all, he’s a Colonel.
Hey Alex, how about interviewing one person from… Atlanta for your expose on the despair of the Braves fan.
To me the last quote with the guy from Boston, with no ties to Atlanta, complaining about the team moving to Cobb County perfectly sums up the stadium moving experience. People from the northeast talking down about it while atlantans are happy because it is going to improve the experience.
A lot of them are from Georgia: Cliff, Jim, and Tim Floyd. (I’m from Atlanta, too.)
There are plenty of Atlantans and Georgians who are not happy about the stadium move. It would not be controversial if opinions were unanimous.
Bingo.
Some of these posters (as well as the author of this garbage article) do not remember the rotten years. The 1991 team had no chance either.
If this is how you feel then you aren’t a real fan and don’t understand that for every hill (The 90s/early 00s) there is a valley. Went to the game today and it still feels like my first Braves’ game everytime. The new front office has performed magic setting up the organization for a lot of future success.
Everyone has their own opinion of the Braves, but it really just comes down to what your expectations are of an organization. Ever since Ted Turner left, there’s been a growing segment of the fanbase that feels the organization hasn’t made a good faith effort to put the most competitive team possible on the field. That bothers some people and I wouldn’t begrudge anyone for closely watching the last 15 years or so and being turned off… and if someone genuinely feels that way, it wouldn’t make any sense to invest their time, money, emotions, etc. It’s good to be… Read more »
If there are fans that think the Braves haven’t made an effort to win since Ted Turner left then they haven’t been paying attention. They traded for JD Drew, they signed Gary Sheffield, they traded for Mark Texieria, they signed Lowe (The 2nd best FA pitcher that offseason), they brought up Heyward and Freeman early, they traded for Dan Uggla. The Braves have done quite a lot in order to win, while having payroll constraints the entire time. The fact that, prior to the rebuild, they had only 2 losing seasons since Turner sold the team speaks to the fact… Read more »
Well, the primary reasons they had to overpay on that 4th year to Lowe, hand three years to Kawakami, and trade for Vazquez that offseason was because they’d gone cheap on the rotation for years and were literally starting to panic on whether or not they were actually going to get enough innings from their staff to complete a 9 inning ballgame. For years the rotation had been cobbled together with journeyman middle relievers like Jorge Campillo and Buddy Carlyle. They were more than content to trot out pre-arbitration JoJo Reyes for 100+ innings. They weren’t that far removed for… Read more »
Fans have a right to be upset. Don’t let anyone tell you that you aren’t a “real fan” if you are upset with the product on the field. As a Pirates fan, I was beyond fed up with hearing that line. The Pirates fielded dreadful teams for many years that were, as this article put it, unwatchable. I hope the commenters that made points about how quickly the Braves appear to be rebuilding are correct. I wouldn’t want the Braves fanbase to suffer through 2 decades of losing like the Pirates. But we Pirates’ fans were told many times over… Read more »
Amen.
Being upset with the product on the field can be just as thoughtless and myopic as unconditional optimism and support. If you understand the value of prospects and the situation the organization was in at the end of 2014, there’s no reason to feel despondent over what’s happened since then. Certain moves have been questionable, but it’s terribly easy to cherry pick bad decisions over a long enough time period. It kind of sucks watching the Braves right now. It’s impossible to approach the MLB Braves without a scintilla of cynicism. They’re horrendous. But that’s not because they traded for… Read more »
With all respect, this article is one of the most Bravey things an (assumed) Braves fan/sympathizer could write. I think there are real important conversations to be had about Liberty Media’s ownership, public stadium financing in general, the traffic issues that will exist around the new field and the general inability of this offense to score runs right now. However, you seem to try and coalesce all of these moot, minor, debateable gripes (failure of Olivera trade, despite Wood being equally terrible in terms of value over the same stretch, trade of Simmons, who’s on the DL anyway and still… Read more »
As a Braves fan who suffered through a lot of losing seasons, I occasionally wondered why I spent so much of my time this way. Then finally, I did it! I cut the cord! I quit following them. Quit reading the box scores every morning. Quit tuning the games in on the radio. I had moved away and didnt have cable and didnt see other people every day who talked about the team or saw the headlines in the paper. I could go several days without wondering how the Braves were doing. Maybe check the standings once a week. I… Read more »
I have mixed feelings about this whole thing. First, some of the comments and fans, generally, seem obsessed over the evils of “corporate ownership.” While I have no great love for corporations or Liberty Media, in particular, let’s not romanticize the benefits of individual owners. How would you like a team owned by Peter Angelos (O’s) or Jeffrey Loria (Marlins) or, until a couple of years ago the Dodgers (I can’t remember the names). Fans are seduced by the idea that individual owners automatically want to win and will do whatever it takes. Well, that’s not necessarily true and, even… Read more »
I’m not even sure what the point of this article was besides some basic rehashing of well-known shortcomings the Braves have had this season. Braves still have a very good farm system, two very tradeable players in Freeman & Teheran, and are poised to have a very high draft pick along with spending big on the international markets this year. Fans in Atlanta are simply fair weather fans when it comes to all sports but college football for several reasons with the most notable one being the high degree of transplants to the area. Atlanta has lost 2 NHL hockey… Read more »
Most fans I know aren’t put off by the rebuild… or the present short-comings of the team. Has more to do with the last 15 years and a perception that the front office is complacent.
Not everyone shares that view, but that’s to root of the negative opinions.
*the root
Did not the taxpayers pay for the new stadium and not ‘the Braves?’ Further, they did not win 14 straight division titles, they won three, nobody won in ’94, and then they won eleven. Impressive, but not 14 in a row.
The team will get better eventually, but fleecing taxpayers to replace a stadium barely twenty years old is wrong, problems with the surrounding area notwithstanding.
Let me say this. I have been a Braves fan since 1956. I use to crawl up on the counter top in the kitchen when my parents were sleeping to listen to night games, so I have a extensive history. The current status is sad and unbelievable. This management group has destroyed the Braves. For the price that is charged for the experienced, these people need to look in the mirror. 1# this management group needs to be compensated on performance or fans in ATL need to protest until they are replaced. I now live in Florida so I have… Read more »