The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Players, fans endure for gift of home opener
Another night of baseball is all we’re guaranteed, as games now are as day to day as any ailing athlete has ever been.
There are not many guarantees in life or baseball anymore. As for the latter, every game they play in 2020 is a gift. So, even if there was no chance she could squeeze through the locked gates of Truist Park on Wednesday, Smyrna’s Kristen Peebles was determined to take some part in the Braves’ home opener. An opener unlike any other.
Three hours before first pitch, she and 7-year-old son Finley were setting up chairs on an artificial grass lawn just beyond Park’s right-field gate. “Even if we’re just small voices out here, I wanted to come,” Kristen said, preparing to cheer or to agonize over a game that was going to be shown on The Battery Atlanta’s big screen.
Finley tossed a baseball to himself, two gloves at his feet awaiting his father’s arrival. Another collection of boys played Wiffle ball on the lawn. An idyllic scene, so long as others kept their distance. That would be the concern as game time drew closer. “I do have faith in people doing the right thing,” Kristen said.
Did we mention that some baseball people also are rosy optimists? On his 32nd birthday, Kyle Johns of Tyrone didn’t want to be anywhere other than the general vicinity of a Braves game.
“Baseball is back, and I just want to be as close as possible,” he said as he roamed The Battery with his wife, Danielle, and friend Kelley Queen. They could look up and see a few fellow fans already taking up their perch on the Omni Hotel balconies that overlook center field, costly seats but the only ones offering any kind of live look-in on the Braves now that fans are banned from the park.
The Braves opened at home Wednesday night against the Tampa Bay Rays, a team that had just swept them in two games inside the silly concrete
mushroom that passes for a ballpark in Florida. Ah, but they surely would be a more difficult opponent at home, where the Braves have won nine of their last 11 openers.
Wednesday was a fairly good day for baseball. We woke up to discover that no other team had decided to play pass-the-coronavirus, as the Miami Marlins had done so recently. No new Braves appeared on the list of those who tested positive for the coronavirus – OK, exhale, we made it through another cycle of testing.
So, there would be at least another night of baseball. That is all we are guaranteed, as our games now are as day-to-day as any ailing athlete has ever been.
The theme of the night — aside from trying to make the most of a ghastly situation — had something to do with the drawing power of baseball. Some people, like those who gathered around the fringes of Wednesday’s game are honeybees. And baseball the sunflower.
The Braves manager noticed and appreciated the following, which was there even during intrasquad games the Braves played in advance of the restart of the season. Brian Snitker just knew there would be a sizable crowd congregating around The Battery Atlanta, even if none of the people had a hope of visiting the ballpark itself.
“I feel like we have fans because we have them out there,” Snitker said.
The Peebles family showed up for the Braves’ home opener last season. But everything was different then. For one thing, it was April 1, not here in the dying days of July.
They enjoyed a pregame parade of players who pressed close to the fans on their way to the game. How unthinkable is such a thing now?
And the gates weren’t locked then. Fans were welcomed in along with more than 41,000 others to take in what was an 8-0 victory over the Chicago Cubs.
There were no human bodies or live voices inside Truist Park on Wednesday. As other teams have done, the Braves put up 1,400 cardboard cutouts in the seats ringing home plate. They featured the likenesses of fans and of Braves family members. “I saw my grandkids out there,” Snitker said proudly, hours before first pitch.
Fitting of an opening night, they dressed Truist Park in red, white and blue bunting, decorating empty sections all around the park.
Fireworks erupted before the pregame introductions. The Braves lined up along the first-base line as their names were called, sharing air highand low-fives. Following the prerecorded national anthem, a flyover of the 79th Fighter Squadron of the 20th Fighter Wing from Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina rattled the bones of the Braves’ smallest crowd ever. A crowd of none.
As well as they possibly could with celebration in such short supply, the Braves wrapped the gift of one more game.