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| Truist Park – Note the Centerfield Number 44 in Memory of Hank Aaron |
Our baseball trip back to Atlanta this year will make 38 Major League ball parks that Brady and I will have visited. I hear you wondering that since there are only 30 MLB teams, how have we managed to hit 38? That’s because they keep tearing down the older ball parks and building new ones making us have to come for a return visit. (That has a nice ring to it doesn’t it? “If you build it, we will come.” Maybe I should shop that quote around some and see if anyone wants to use it in say a movie or something!)
The cities that we have visited where we saw a game in the original ball park and then later in a replacement stadium include Philadelphia, New York (both the Yankees’ and the Mets’ old and new ball parks,) Detroit, Minnesota, St. Louis, San Francisco*, Washington D.C. and of course Baltimore. (Note that San Francisco gets an asterisk because we caught a baseball game at the Giants’ new digs Pac Bell several years before we returned to see the 49ers play the third to last football game ever played at Candlestick Park (click here for Buzzyblog post on that visit.)
To finish visiting all of the current MLB stadiums, we have to return to Arlington Texas, where the Rangers have recently replaced the stadium we visited in 2008. We then will finish up with the Seattle Mariners’s T-Mobile Park. That will bring us up to a total of 40 MLB ball parks visited and that sounds like a good number to retire on. (And just who said that I would never see 40 again?!)
Truist Park is the third baseball facility that Atlanta has had in my life time. Fulton County Stadium was replaced with the 1996 Olympics Stadium (later renamed Ted Turner Field) and then put out to pasture when Truist Park came along just last year. This is another sign you know that you are an old fart – you can remember when the ball park being replaced was first built! Like someone said – 1996? I’ve got shirts older than that! Here is something I put on the Buzzyblog following our visit to Turner Field in 2010.
Along with baseball parks, Brady and I have also been catching an NFL pre-season game when we do these August baseball visits. To date, we have been to 18 of 32 NFL Stadiums and this year we will notch Number 19 as we go back to Atlanta to check out Truist Park (above.) We visited the Georgia Dome in 2010 (click here) to see the Falcons play. However, Sunday night we will pay a visit to the new Mercedes Benz Stadium which was just built last year to replace the Georgia Dome as the Falcons new home.
Note that Truist Ballpark is now sited north of Atlanta in Cobb County and continues a trend where the locations of new stadiums and ball parks seems to have shifted from wanting to be downtown city-wise to moving out in the burbs. Locally then, keep an eye on Danny and WFT as they look for their new digs. I would think that some new and improved facility on the RFK site would be a good solution particularly if they decide to keep the WFT moniker.
However, with Northern Virginia being just across the river and Danny boy knowing where the money pipes are calling, I predict he goes west out to somewhere near Ashburn. But if I was a Maryland-based mover and shaker, I would be cutting Danny in on some MGM action and have him put that new stadium down by the river at the National Harbor somewhere. Jess sayin’.
I’ve played Neil’s Down by the River too many times previously, so how’s about something here from PJ Harvey? Good tune even if it she is talking about drowning her own daughter (click here.)