My sincere apologies for neglecting to inform you last week of this excellent article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, in which reporter Dan Klepal revealed that Cobb County is going to be on the hook for $900,000 a year for traffic police around the Atlanta Braves‘ new stadium. And before you say, “But isn’t free policing one of the services that government typically provides to sports teams and others alike?”, nuh-uh:

The Braves paid for traffic control during the team’s last eight seasons at Turner Field. At Mercedes-Benz Stadium, the Falcons will reimburse the Georgia World Congress Center an estimated $2.5 million a year for traffic management during football games, soccer matches and other events…

An AJC survey of 11 cities with professional sports stadiums found only two other instances where taxpayers funded all or a portion of traffic control…

“The Falcons outcome is the norm. The Braves outcome is a throwback to the 1990s” when those kinds of subsidies were more common, [Stanford economist Roger Noll] said.

This free-traffic-cops clause apparently wasn’t part of the original Braves deal with Cobb County — traffic control costs weren’t addressed at the time, along with a lot else having to do with transportation — which left the county stuck with the costs by default. (Though it would be kind of fun to think of what would happen if the county said to the Braves, “Go get your players to direct traffic, it’s clear they’re not occupied by actually playing baseball.”) If we figure that the free patrolling is worth around $14 million in present value, adding that to the $355 million in existing public costs gets us to $369 million in subsidies to move the Braves from downtown Atlanta to the suburbs, totally not because any Braves fans think all urban black people are violent criminals. But hey, who can put a price on burgerizzas?

If there’s one sure truism in the sports stadium world, it’s that the honeymoon effect drawing fans to a new building varies depending on the quality of the product on the field: Put together a winning team and you can get something like the Cleveland Indians‘ six-year sellout streak; a losing one, and you’re more likely to be the Miami Marlins.

The Atlanta Braves have a brand-new stadium, and are in last place with an 11-19 record. Fans aren’t exactly turning out in droves:

After a couple initial sellouts, the Braves have settled into 12th in major league attendance. They were averaging a bit more than 30,000 (tickets sold), a good number considering that the team hasn’t averaged that high for a season since 2013. But not exactly the eye-popping boost you’d expect from the lure of a new ballpark.

Okay, maybe it’s just that it’s early in the season, and more fans turn up once it’s summertime? We can check that by looking at Baseball Reference’s year-over-year attendance chart, which shows how teams are doing in attendance compared to the same number of games the previous year. The numbers show that Braves attendance is up an average of 4,980 a game from 2016 at Turner Field — the third-largest jump in baseball, but still nothing to write home about. It looks like any honeymoon effect from the Braves move from downtown to suburban Cobb County will be marginal at best, at least unless the team gets good in a hurry, in which case it’s less “build it and they will come” and more “build Dansby Swanson and they will come.”

The Atlanta Braves held their official opening day for their new stadium on Friday, two weeks after holding their unofficial opening day, and all was mostly uneventful, unless you count the massive traffic tieup from a foam tomahawk spill two days earlier.

While most of the media coverage focused on the new stadium’s food options and other amenities (1,300 televisions! blackened catfish po’ boy tacos! beer aged from bat shavings!), ESPN’s Bradford Doolittle took a harder look at what makes the new Cobb County stadium different. And, as you might imagine, much of it has to do with being in Cobb County, far from the city center:

The last time I saw so many people slow-walking on bridges over an Atlanta highway it was on “The Walking Dead.”

They spilled in from everywhere Friday, on concrete bridges slung over highways they had successfully traversed to get to SunTrust Park. They crowded in a wide line, on concrete suspensions, above a morass of multilaned freeways. They found their way into the New Urbanist neighborhood. Then they crowded into the brand-new stadium for the first regular-season game.

Yes, the bridge to nowhere opened just in time for Friday’s game, though I haven’t been able to find any photos of what it actually looked like with people on it. (Here it is with no people on it.) But the more interesting aspect of the stadium, and of Doolittle’s article, is that New Urbanist neighborhood:

Any reviews of the new park wouldn’t be complete without mentioning The Battery, a mixed-used development that combines a yet-to-open hotel that looms over center field, bars, restaurants, office buildings and apartments, of which some are still vacant.

The Battery’s hotel will have high-dollar rooms on its stadium side, where guests can chill on a balcony and take in the ballgame. Really, The Battery is what marks this particular stadium project as distinct as any that came before it, and the success of it will likely determine the success of the entire endeavor…

It’s more than a park. It’s an experiment, one where a sports franchise attempts to create a bubble. And once a fan enters it, there is no reason for him or her to spend money outside of it. And if it works, the ramifications will be noticed by baseball owners from coast to coast. If it works, it could change a lot of things. But we won’t know if it works for a long time.

Creating a bubble in which sports fans spend all their money isn’t new, of course — it’s the same reason the Baltimore Orioles have the Eutaw Street shopping strip inside the Camden Yards gates, and the Boston Red Sox insisted on the right to close off Yawkey Way on game days, and the New York Yankees built their “five-star hotel with a ballfield in the middle.” But no one has gone as far as the Braves in building an entire faux neighborhood around their new stadium, hoping that fans will want to spend enough money there before and after games that they can build a booming shopping district — one where the team owners control all the revenue.

Color me skeptical, at least for now: “Ballpark villages” haven’t tended to be huge successes, in part because ballparks are closed most of the year, making running a restaurant based on ballpark clientele a tricky matter; and in part because when you’re already sitting through a three-hour ballgame that you have to fight your way through Atlanta traffic to get to, going out for dinner before or after the game isn’t always the first thing on your mind. If the Braves owners do beat the odds, though, it’s potentially a game changer for the stadium business, in that team owners will no longer be satisfied merely with a new stadium jammed with bells and whistles and steakhouses, but will want to get to run their own pretend urban neighborhood around it. That’s not something that’d necessarily be limited to suburban areas, and I really hope it’s a demand we never see becoming standard business practice — but who am I kidding, somebody’s going to ask for it regardless, because you can’t get if you don’t ask, right?

The Atlanta Braves‘ new stadium in Cobb County opened for its first exhibition game on Friday, and from what was shown on TV, it’s somewhat … odd. First off, for a stadium whose architect promised “intimacy” and which team owners promised would feature cantilevering of the middle and upper decks to bring fans closer to the action, holy crap is that a lot of not-especially-cantilevered decks:

You’ll notice no one is sitting in the top deck, which is probably a good move as you’d need bottled oxygen to ascend that high. (The Braves actually limited attendance to season-ticket holders and people who worked on the stadium project, so only 21,392 showed up.) Not to mention that, judging from on-field photos, fans up there may have a hard time seeing the field over their fellow fans heads, thanks to some curious decisions about the rake of the upper deck:

Then there’s — holy crap, what is that?

No, not Bartolo Colon, I’m used to seeing him on a ballfield. But what are those seats in right field, where fans appear to be sitting behind desks or flat-panel TV screens or something? According to the Braves seating chart, those are the “Chophouse Terrace” seats — because in the year 2017, it’s never a bad time to employ a play on words combining a term for a steakhouse with a reference to your team’s embarrassingly racist chant — so maybe those are just tables to help you better wolf down your $26 burgerizza? (Though actually, starting at $36 a person and coming with $15 in concessions credits, the prices on those seats aren’t too hideous, though it does seem a shame to eliminate several rows of not-bad seating so that fans don’t have to put their beers in cupholders.)

What else? There were some problems with the scoreboard and the LED outfield lights that the team promised to fix, and one New Jersey sportswriter said it was missing a “wow factor” and reminded him of Turner Field, which isn’t especially damning except that the Braves and Cobb County taxpayers just spent more than $600 million to replace Turner Field just 20 years after it opened, so “hey, this looks just like the old place” isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement. And the team has relented and allowed fans to bring in outside food, which is good, so long as it fits inside a one-gallon plastic baggie, which is less good. (The most sensible outside food policy to me remains the New York Mets‘, which a team rep memorably explained to me when their new stadium opened back in 2009 as “you can bring a turkey sandwich, but you can’t bring a whole turkey.”)

Oh, and the pedestrian bridge to get fans from their cars to their seats still isn’t open, but is promised to be by opening day in two weeks. Though “open” doesn’t mean “finished,” which apparently means you’ll be able to walk across it and it won’t fall down or anything, but it may still resemble a construction site.

Any Braves season ticket holders out there who actually attended this game? Very curious to hear your impressions, so please chime in in comments. (As should anyone who watched the game on TV and has thoughts.)

Looks like having Mike Boyce running Cobb County instead of Tim Lee is already having some consequences: The Atlanta Braves just demanded an extra $14 million for roads and sidewalks around their new stadium opening in April, and the Cobb County Commission is telling them to get lost:

The dispute has been on-going since December, with origins that date to the earliest agreements forged by the county and team in 2013 and 2014. Those contracts require that $14 million in public funds be spent on transportation improvements, and are vague as to the exact projects covered by the money.

Cobb transportation director Jim Wilgus wrote in a Dec. 2 memo to County Manager David Hankerson that taxpayers have already spent $69.5 million on nine road projects for the stadium and privately owned, mixed-use development.

“We feel this satisfies Cobb County’s transportation improvement contribution,” Wilgus wrote in the memo.

The Braves think otherwise.

What appears to have happened here: When the county agreed to build the Braves a stadium back in 2013 without specifying a transportation plan, it threw $14 million into pot for unspecified future transportation needs. The Braves owners now say that the stuff the county built shouldn’t count toward that because the county was going to build that stuff anyway (though the county says $17 million worth of that stuff only came up as a result of the stadium deal), and is instead demanding reimbursement for $14 million worth of stuff that the team has already built.

This is almost certainly going to get resolved in court based on whatever crappy contract language Cobb County agreed to in 2013, not based on fairness or anything like that, and either way it shouldn’t interfere with getting transportation improvements like that bridge to the parking lots sort of working by opening day. It’s nice to see public officials not just signing any checks they’re asked to, though, even if it’s shutting the barn door way, way late.

What’s worse than living in Cobb County and having to pay more than $355 million toward a new Atlanta Braves stadium, plus dealing with a traffic and transit mess because the county didn’t approve a transportation plan before agreeing to build the stadium? I’m going to go with “having to pay more than $355 million toward a new Atlanta Braves stadium, plus dealing with a traffic and transit mess because the county didn’t approve a transportation plan before agreeing to build the stadium, plus having your house torn down to make way for the whole mess“:

Tuesday night, Cobb County informed me I’d have to find a new front door, and a new house, because they’re bulldozing both to build a new road…

Why this new road? So the folks who take the new managed lanes along Interstate 75 can easily hop off the freeway at Terrell Mill Road and get to the new stadium quickly. The stadium I was so happy about.

If it wasn’t all so ironic, I would cry.

County officials say they’re seizing 16 homes by eminent domain — and possibly as many as another 15 — for a road project that had been planned for years, but was expedited because of the opening of the stadium next year. So you can’t exactly say “Cobb County is bulldozing 30 homes to make way for a road to Braves stadium” — actually, you can totally say that, even if they might have maybe done it at some point with or without the Braves. Economic development, everybody!

Another day, another article about how much Cobb County has bent over backwards to ensure that the Atlanta Braves owners can extract every last dollar from their new stadium, even at the expense of other local business operators:

The ordinance, passed in February, requires vendors who wish to operate in unincorporated areas of the county to obtain a license in order to sell or distribute retail or food items from a cart or kiosk. But a provision in the ordinance gives those in charge of “mixed-use development districts” the power to construct a plan that sets where vending activity can take place, and, according to Dana Johnson, Cobb’s community development director, those who manage such a district could decide not to designate any areas for vending as part of the plan, which has to be approved by the Cobb Board of Commissioners.

Johnson said just one area in the county qualifies under that provision — SunTrust Park, the Braves’ future home stadium, and The Battery Atlanta, a mixed-use development being built next to it.

In other words, the Braves ownership has veto power over anyone else selling anything in the entire development around their new stadium, meaning if you want to buy a bag of peanuts or a bottle of water, you’ll have to do so at Braves-approved prices.

Cobb County is currently reviewing this ordinance, along with the one against anyone other than the Braves renting out parking spaces — like that one, violators of the vending ordinance would be subject to both fines and jail time — because they and the Braves know it looks terrible, plus Cobb County Commission chair Tim Lee is in a tough re-election battle with a runoff vote coming up in two weeks. (Actually early voting has already begun.) If Lee gets re-elected, want to bet that the commission decides that the ordinances are just fine as is?