Braves: First season at SunTrust Park a success
The inaugural season in the Braves’ new home brings out more than 2.5 million fans.
COBB COUNTY — The first season of professional baseball in Cobb County is in the books.
The Atlanta Braves finished the inaugural season with SunTrust Park as their home with a 72-90 record, hitting 165 home runs and striking out more than 1,200 batters. And more than 2.5 million fans turned up at the team’s home games to watch them.
For the Braves, who announced their decision to relocate to Cobb in 2013 and spent 30 months construct- ing the new ballpark and mixeduse development, it was a successful first season, Mike Plant, the Braves president of development, said in an interview this week.
Braves President of Development Mike Plant speaks before the Cobb Chamber at the Cobb Galleria Center.
The organization is “extremely proud” with how the first season went, Plant said, “knowing the incredible amount of work and effort that went into this really aggressive timeline, to have SunTrust Park up and ready and certainly in a place where we needed to be to play that first game and bring a full house of 41,000-plus fans in there.”
Through 81 home games at SunTrust Park, the Braves averaged an attendance of 30,929, good for 13th in Major League Baseball. In 2016, the Braves ranked 22nd with an average attendance of 24,949, according to ESPN.com
Total attendance was 2,505,252, according to MLB.com figures, up from 2,020,914 in 2016 at Turner Field.
Plant said he’s happy with the attendance figures, given the team’s performance on the field this season.
Ricky Leroux, Marietta Daily Journal