The Truist Test
Stadiums have always been about politics
Major League Baseball moving the All-Star Game is not an example of virtue signaling, writes Jessie Daniels, but the latest point in a long story about politics, business, and race.
by Jessie Daniels
When the Atlanta Braves moved in 2017 to their new stadium, Truist Park, in suburban Cobb County, they bucked a trend – baseball had successfully been moving into the city since the retro ballpark Camden Yards opened in downtown Baltimore in 1992. The club argued that it moved to its fans, producing a heat map that showed season ticket holders resided in the suburbs. Critics lamented that the move would keep many others out.
Truist Park is once again at the center of a controversy after passage of Georgia's new voting law, SB 202, which contains several provisions that keep people – and, critics argue, disproportionately people of color – out of the election process. Joining other major companies in protest of the law, Major League Baseball made its move: it pulled the 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta.
Thus began an unlikely subplot – MLB, a traditionally conservative league, vs. GOP – and the current showdown is especially noteworthy because of the longer history it represents about race and politics in the South.
Atlanta wanted a major league baseball team in the first place because it saw itself as more than another Jim Crow backwater; professional sports would take it to a higher level. So after campaigning on bringing a team to the city in 1961, Mayor Ivan Allen, Jr. worked with the business community to construct Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, then lured the Milwaukee Braves down – one of the concessions being that the seating and facilities would be integrated. The stadium opened in 1965, exactly 100 years to the day of the Confederate surrender at Appomattox. The Braves officially became Atlanta’s team starting in the 1966 season and helped transform it into a big league city.
Part of that new image was driven by Braves star Hank Aaron, who would go on to break Babe Ruth's home run record and become a legend in Fulton County Stadium. Now, some former players say moving this year’s Midsummer Classic out of Atlanta is the most fitting tribute of all for the Hall of Famer and proponent of civil rights.
Predictably aggrieved by MLB's decision, Governor Brian Kemp complained that it was a bad call rather than acknowledge he got caught trying to steal. In fact, the law puts the two sides at cross-purposes precisely because Kemp and his allies don’t want an exit strategy. They are playing their own version of moving the game to their fans, implementing restrictions that make voting less accessible for people who don’t vote for them. It’s because they are looking to buck a political trend – Georgia voting Democratic – and, interestingly, Cobb County is also integral to this story.
By the time Kemp lost to Stacey Abrams in Cobb by almost 10 points in the 2018 gubernatorial race, it seemed like there must be something in the Chattahoochee River. Though he won statewide, it was yet further indication that the white flight Gingrichland suburbia of the nineties had grown more diverse – including politically – since then. The shift had become noticeable in 2016 after Hillary Clinton won by 2 points, a 14-point shift from Mitt Romney's easy win in the county four years earlier. Then in 2020, Joe Biden won the county by 14 points on his way to becoming the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the state since 1992. Cobb was now going blue – and maybe so too was Georgia.
Two months later, Democrats also won the U.S. Senate runoff elections, again buoyed by Cobb. But there were already fewer early voting sites in the county, despite high voter turnout in November and palpable interest in the races. Under SB 202, those sites will have fixed hours as well and only about a quarter of the 94 drop boxes for absentee ballots will remain across the four major metro Atlanta counties, which includes Cobb.
As the writer Flannery O'Connor, who penned many a Southern Gothic story, said about the region: “it is not made from what passes, but from those qualities that endure.” No wonder the Big Lie – the notion that The Former Guy only lost because of widespread fraud – is creeping its ugly head back up again, and driving new voter restrictions under the false premise of election integrity. It wants to become the enduring lie.
But sometimes if you build it, they don't come. Since the Braves moved to Truist Park, attendance has been down and the stadium deal, approved without public debate, looks like a boondoggle. Meanwhile, Kemp, facing unexpected backlash from traditional allies in response to SB 202, lost an opportunity to show off Atlanta, including Cobb County, as major league. There are costs, both in terms of revenue and reputation, to playing this kind of game.
In July, the All-Star Game will be played in Colorado – the so-called “gold standard” in safe and accessible voting – at Coors Field, another retro ballpark in downtown Denver. MLB has taken a big swing. Good thing for the league that Coors Field is known as a home run-friendly park.
Jessie Daniels is a policy professional and writer based in New York. Daniels previously worked in the U.S. Senate as a national security legislative aide to Majority Leader Harry Reid. Daniels writes frequently on foreign policy and political issues. Her writing has been published in outlets including The Guardian, The Orlando Sentinel, and The San Francisco Chronicle. This is her third piece for The Experiment. Her previous contributions are last August’s “Roll Call Bracketology,” “What it Takes Now,” and “Dolley's Mandarinquat.”
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