Led by living legend Hank Aaron, Braves' Turner Field exit brims with symbolism
At the time of Justin Upton's game-ending strikeout, sealing Turner Field's 20-year run with an Atlanta Braves win, eight police motorcycles waited outside a tunnel next to the players' parking lot. The ballpark's final sellout crowd echoed out onto the streets below. The police escort was positioned to deliver the franchise's preeminent dignitary from Point A to Point B, from the present to the future.
Hank Aaron threw out the final pitch in the ballpark's history to Bobby Cox as the escort idled outside, flashing lights and cameras loading down the motorcade's accompanying vehicles.
Aaron, the Hall of Famer with 755 home runs under his belt, was scheduled to deliver a home plate in one venue to its new home, SunTrust Park, in Cobb County. Once his limousine boarded and departed, home plate in tow, the motorcade turned left up his street, Hank Aaron Drive, then pulled onto Interstate 85 headed north. The highway cleared in all directions. After merging onto I-75, a helicopter joined the caravan overhead, documenting the full scope of the Braves' ceremonial transition.
“To be very honest with you, today is kind of a — you look at it and it’s a sad day but it’s a day that I think is progress," Aaron said along the way. "A day that we’re all moving in the right direction. … I was so glad to see this park (Turner) the way it was today. It was filled. I think it was something like 53,000 people here today and all of them had smiles on their face.
“We look at it and I know a lot of us say we want things to be like it always was, but that’s not to be.”
Forty-five minutes later, Aaron delivered home plate as promised. The Braves have left the Atlanta city limits for good.
It was a full circle moment for the franchise.
On April 4, 1997, the door in Turner Field’s center field wall — the same spot from which the franchise’s all-time greats, including Hall of Fame pitchers Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and John Smoltz and future Cooperstown inductee Chipper Jones, emerged before the stadium’s final act — opened to reveal Aaron carrying Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium’s home plate. Dressed in a brown suit and white shirt with no tie, baseball’s then-reigning home-run king walked confidently across the outfield grass to a standing ovation. Ted Turner and former president Jimmy Carter joined in the celebration.
Glavine met Aaron at the pitcher’s mound that night. The two all-timers, past and present, shook hands and crossed the final 60 feet and six inches together.
Camera flashes give the archived footage a shimmering effect.
Following the 1996 Summer Olympics, Turner Field was built in the shadow of icons, an 85,000-seat track and field venue retrofitted into a stage for baseball giants. Atlanta was the epicenter of baseball’s universe. Five current and future Hall of Famers anchored a collective that advanced to the World Series in four of the previous five seasons before the new stadium opened.
The dynasty did not crumble outside of Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium’s confines — the organization opened the new era with three straight 100-win seasons, finishing two wins shy of the Fall Classic in 1997 and 1998 before returning in 1999 — but it was a prolonged twilight. The franchise never won a World Series game from 1997 to 2016. The unprecedented string of division titles stretched to 2005, but the final playoff series win wrapped up four years earlier. The Braves rattled off 90-plus wins with regularity, but deep playoff runs passed into memory.
The afterglow of the Big Three and Chipper only lasted so long; Turner Field captured a franchise on a gradual descent from its mountaintop.
This latest move, from south Atlanta to Cobb County in controversial fashion, comes at a very different juncture. It’s meant to signal a rebirth rather than a commemoration. The franchise finds itself in the middle, or perhaps the upswing, of an aggressive rebuilding effort, modeled in the image of its late-80s youth movement. Replicating that group’s extreme highs and rare lows will be unlikely, but as Aaron arrived at SunTrust Park's field level, step by step, the optimism was understandable.
The final two months at The Ted felt different than the previous five — or the previous 24, for that matter. Top prospects bolstered the roster. Atlanta’s bats, long dormant, woke up. A once-forgettable bullpen started slamming doors. Young arms flashed potential. Capped by 22 strikeouts from starters Julio Teheran and Aaron Blair over the final weekend, the Braves posted an 18-10 record after August, winning the final five series against four teams in the playoff picture.
SunTrust Park appears to be receiving a roster with its worst days behind it.
It is fitting, though, that the new park remains an active construction zone. Both dugouts are framed without padding. Plywood sheets dot the stands. The field is outlined, but it is a gravel playing surface. Turner Field, much like the roster it inherited, was a readymade product when the Braves officially christened it with their home plate. Everything has changed.
At the end of the evening the only light at SunTrust Park was provided by a solitary light tower in right field. The sky, farther away from the city lights, was a shade darker. A white BMW entered the park through the center-field opening and pulled up along what will become the first-base line. Hank Aaron's other ride had arrived.
As Aaron slowly made his way to the passenger seat, Bill Bartholomay, the organization's former owner, stopped to bid farewell to one of baseball's living legends and his wife, Billye, sitting in the back seat. The two Braves dignitaries share a long history. Aaron was just 28 years old, already a perennial All-Star and former MVP, when Bartholomay bought the team in 1962 and decided to move it to the Deep South two years later. It was Bartholomay who lifted Aaron's mother over the owners' box barrier when her son hit his 715th career home run, breaking Babe Ruth's all-time record, leaving the baseball world with the indelible image of mother and son hugging at home plate.
Aaron and Bartholomay exchanged pleasantries in the infant coliseum. And there was the moment, spanning generations: Two architects of the Braves' successful move to Atlanta, one through his play and the other behind the scenes, finding closure at the end of an era.
Then the white BMW pulled across the gravel into center field, out into the night.
