This was the VERY FIRST regular-season game at the Braves’ new ballpark, and it was the 53rd major league stadium I ever visited . . . so you could say I was excited. Here’s what it looked like from the road:
I was with my friend Brandon. He’s the guy who’s been traveling all over the place with me lately and filming the videos for my YouTube channel. Here’s a screen shot of me doing the intro for the video in the parking lot:
It was nearly five hours until first pitch — plenty of time to wander around the stadium and take it all in. Check out the 3rd base gate:
Did you notice the small electronic screen with the gate opening time? What a great idea! (I can’t count the number of times that I’ve been at a stadium and asked three different employees when the gates open and gotten three different answers.) And best of all, the game was scheduled to begin at 7:35pm, which meant I’d get inside more than three hours early and see both teams take their full batting practice. I wasn’t nervous about getting shut out — somehow I always find a way to snag at least one baseball — but I was feeling a little extra pressure with Brandon there filming, and I wanted as much ballhawking action as possible.
I walked counter-clockwise around the stadium . . .
. . . and stopped to look at everything:
So did everyone else. Here are a bunch of men who took turns posing in front of a statue of Bobby Cox:
In case you can’t tell from that photo, they were Asian, and based on the snippets of their conversations that I overheard, I knew they were Japanese. That made me wonder: is Bobby Cox big in Japan? I mean, if that were a statue of Brad Clontz, would they have been just as excited?
Here’s a statue of Phil Niekro, which got ME excited because of the knuckleball grip:
As I approached the right field gate, I got recognized by these guys:
One of them admitted that he was the person who’d asked me this mildly inappropriate question in one of my recent Q&A videos; my mildly inappropriate in-person response made them laugh:
I toned things down a bit at the huge plaza between the right field and chop house gates. Brandon and I spotted a two-person TV crew interviewing random fans, including this old-timer with a killer sign:
After the woman finished talking to him, Brandon told her about me, and I did a brief interview as well. You can see a bit of that in my video, which I’ll link to at the end of this blog entry, so keep scrolling/reading for now. And by the way, I’ve blogged about all 52 of the other MLB stadiums I’ve been to. This entry makes it 53-for-53, and you can see those entries here, arranged neatly by stadium in alphabetical order.
Check out the plaza from above:
Beautiful! (Right?)
Here I am near a large Atlanta Braves sign outside the chop house gate.
This was the scene outside the left field gate at around 4pm:
I expected it to be much more crowded, so I’d asked my friends Leigh Barratt and David Welch (fellow ballhawks) to hold a spot for me at the front of the line. Here I am with them just before the stadium opened:
That’s Leigh (aka “Padre Leigh”) on the left and David on the right. Great guys. Leigh is as passionate about hitting up new stadiums as I am. We met for the first time on 4/22/08 at Champion Stadium, and check this out — here’s a photo of us on 3/22/14 at the Sydney Cricket Ground. Remember when the Dodgers and Diamondbacks opened the MLB season there with a pair of regular-season games? Ooh yeah.
As for THIS game in Atlanta, I was thrilled to finally run inside and get my first glimpse of the stadium:
Based on my own ballhawking preview of the stadium, I knew that left field was the best place to catch home runs. That said, I gave up on it quickly and headed over to right-center because (a) it got crowded within a few minutes and (b) several lefties started hitting.
A little while later, I spotted Braves pitcher Ian Krol picking up a ball on the warning track:
I called out to him and got him to toss it up — but he threw it so far over my head that I didn’t even bother jumping. Instead I turned around and hoped for a good deflection, and whaddaya know? It hit the back of a seat and bounced right back to me. Here I am reaching out for the bare-handed snag:
I had gotten at least one baseball at each of the other 52 stadiums that I’d been to, so it felt great to extend that streak. Here I am enjoying a tender moment with the newest member of my baseball family:
Umm . . . yeah.
After that I turned my attention to the chop house section in straight-away right field:
Before I say anything else, let me tell you that ALL of right field is difficult at this stadium. The problem with right-center is that most of the seats are behind the bullpen and approximately 20 feet high, so it takes a real blast for a ball to land there. There IS one little patch of seats beside the bullpen, but it gets crowded there, so catching a home run in right-center is unlikely. Then there’s the chop house. Lots of balls land there, but in order to enter the seating area, you need a ticket for that section, and those rows are narrow anyway, so the presence of just one other person clogs up the space and makes it nearly impossible to move from side to side. Therefore the only decent spot that was available to me in right field was directly under the “chop house” sign at the back of the section. That’s a somewhat narrow but wide-open area that connects the restaurant to the outdoor seating. Anyone is allowed to stand there, which is nice, but guess what? That just means it gets crowded as hell.
Here I am waiting for some action:
Here’s a bunch of people scrambling and going nuts and falling on top of each other for a ball:
In the image above, that’s my glove and arm on the right-hand side. I hung back because it just wasn’t worth getting involved and potentially injured in that mayhem. For a gamer? Sure. (Or when I was 14? Of course!) But not a BP ball at this point in my life.
Another issue with the chop house is that the back wall produces TONS of ricochets, so you really need to watch out. While that entire area looks cool and is probably a lovely spot to sit or stand and watch the game, it seems like an injury waiting to happen, especially during BP.
Check out the following screen shot. You can see everyone looking up at the ball except for me:
I predicted that it would hit the back wall and bounce down into the seating area, so I was already focusing on my route to get down there. Sure enough, that’s exactly what happened, and as the ball started rattling around in the last row, I was all over it:
Here I am with it:
I’m not sure who hit it, but if I had to guess, I’d say Nick Markakis.
Back in left field for the next group of Braves hitters, I noticed several balls in the bullpen. It was the perfect opportunity to bust out my glove trick:
Here I am reeling in my third ball of the day, and if you look closely, you can see another type of ball-retrieving device — the cup trick — dangling in the background:
I snagged another ball with the glove trick and handed that to the nearest kid. (Once again, you’ll see all of this in the video — if you haven’t seen it already.)
Look how crowded it got in left field:
Did you spot me in the image above? That’s me right in the middle on the stairs — not ideal circumstances to catch a baseball. It was almost as crowded as BP for the Home Run Derby. In an attempt to gain an edge, several kids stood atop the outfield wall!
To clarify, there’s a double-wall with a four-foot-wide patch of grass/plants in between, but still, that was quite a sight. And where was stadium security? Nowhere. I’m all in favor of having fewer rules, but sometimes people need to be told “no.”
That double-wall, by the way, is yet another dangerous spot. The actual outfield wall is too far away for people to reach from the stands, which of course is the point. The stadium was designed like that to prevent fan interference on deep fly balls, but because people can’t reach it, they’re going to get drilled in the face by deflections when they’re standing in the front row. Mark my words and be careful! That’s an awful spot. You basically never want to be in the front row anyway unless there’s a chance to get a toss-up, in which case you can just move down there for a few moments.
SunTrust Park is one of the stadiums that has protective netting in front of the dugouts — kinda funny considering how easy it is to get hurt in the outfield. I hate that netting (for various reasons), but check this out — because of a quirky configuration near the home-plate end of the dugout, there’s actually a gap were it’s possible to get toss-ups:
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