Author: Joe Siegal
Though baseball is America’s pastime, it is now facing a crisis of popularity. As the median age for viewers of this year’s World Series hit 54.4 years old, and as the Fall Classic produced the fourth-lowest television ratings in its history, many have bemoaned the seemingly rapid aging of baseball’s fanbase.
Arguably more disconcerting and underemphasized, however, is baseball’s trend toward becoming a whiter game. As of this year, only 8.5 percent of players on opening day rosters were African-American, compared to 19 percent just 25 years ago, according to The New York Times.
The conflation of these two troubling statistics makes the Atlanta Braves’ planned move out of the city center and into the suburbs of Cobb County, Ga. all the more problematic. The Braves, who play in the less-than-20-years-old Turner Field, built for the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics, jeopardize their fanbase and, in essence, the health of Atlanta baseball as an urban sport by fleeing to the suburbs.
Atlanta is a city with a majority black population and the neighborhood adjacent to Turner Field has an 89 percent black population. Cobb County is a majority white suburban county, and one of the towns closest to the proposed stadium site is almost 90 percent white, according to the International Business Times.
Cobb County, which lies northwest of Atlanta, has no mass transit options that would bring fans from the city to the new stadium. This lack of public transit access is intentional, as far as the county and the Braves are concerned, and the true intentions of this plan are thinly veiled by local stakeholders. The chairman of the Cobb County Republican party recently stated, “It is absolutely necessary the solution is all about moving cars in and around Cobb … and not moving people into Cobb by rail from Atlanta.”
According to a rider survey conducted in 2007, Atlanta’s Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) public transit system is used disproportionately by the city’s black citizens. The system does not extend into Cobb County, meaning that Atlanta residents who rely on public transit will be unable to attend a Braves game.
Baseball’s best fanbases and historical franchises have been from urban centers. Despite the sport’s expansion and suburbanization of the ’50s and ’60s, recent trends in stadium-building have led to new parks in downtown areas, in turn revitalizing cities and fanbases and ushering in what should be a new era of accessible, urban baseball that could take the game to new heights.
For Atlanta, a city with a majority black population and a persistent history of racial tensions, moving the Braves out to the suburbs will have a damaging cultural effect. Removing public transit access to baseball stadiums leads to a paying fanbase that draws only from the suburbs, effectively pricing out fans who either do not drive or cannot afford cars.
The Braves are setting a dangerous precedent for baseball becoming a sport that is not accessible to the working class residents of cities, the very people who helped the sport become what it is today.
Joe Siegal is a junior American Studies major. He can be reached at siegal@oxy.edu or on Twitter @WklyJSiegal.
This article has been archived, for more requests please contact us via the support system.
