Braves planning move to Cobb County in 2017

Anyone who has visited the Willets Point in the borough of Queens to see the great Polish pianist Ignaz Paderewski play Schubert’s polonaise from the good seats at Ralph’s Auto Body and Used Tires knows what a boon Citi Field has been to the district. Around the soft, rolling parking lots that hold the ballpark in a welcoming embrace has sprung up an arts district that has been favorably compared to that of Venice during the Renaissance.

I had planned to discuss the many benefits that U.S. Cellular Field has brought to Chicago’s South Side (the entire Museum Campus district has been relocated there, the Dalai Lama has been spotted checking out apartments, and every evening at dusk the sidewalks flood with debutantes) but I’m sure a little of this goes a long way. The point of all this exaggerated silliness is that whenever teams and politicians talk about the benefits of building a ballpark in a given community as a reason to invest millions in public funding, we need not make recourse to any of the countless studies that strongly suggest that the benefits of taxpayer subsidies to ballparks are either vanishingly small or nonexistent. Instead, we have merely to look at the buildings already in existence to see the lie in action.

The rest of the funding will be public, coming from the residents of Cobb County. There have been promises made that more than 95 percent of the county will not see an increase in taxes to help fund the stadium project, with those in the “Cumberland County Improvement District” -- where the park is actually going -- the ones seeing a hike in their tax rate.

The move into Cobb County will represent a shift for the Braves, who have been playing downtown, in Fulton County, since the team moved to Atlanta from Milwaukee before the 1966 season.

A hellscape surrounded it: the tall, once-gleaming corners of what was known once as “Turner Field.” Once, people walked these spaces, and purchased beer in aluminum mock-bottles to drink while watching a game, and living life as people did in the now-distant year 1997.

Now, only feral dogs and the merciless wind inhabited its spaces, a picture of desolation itself.

For starters, the proposed site in Cobb County has only been identified and hasn’t been purchased. Furthermore, the stadium will require $450 million in public funding which has not yet been presented to the Cobb County commission, much less approved. Farmer learned these details in a recent phone call with Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed.

Mayor Reed countered the Cobb County talk by mentioning that his city has been in “good faith negotiations” with the team for over a year in an attempt to keep them in the city. However, he doesn’t think that Atlanta taxpayers should be on the hook for a publicly-financed ballpark, and he reports that the city’s hotel and motel tax dollars are already wrapped up in the financing for the Falcons’ upcoming new NFL stadium.