Atlanta police are investigating a car break-in. The victim left two Braves tickets on his console. An unknown perpetrator smashed the driver’s-side window — and left four more.
Old joke. I know. But I’ve heard it twice recently, and it’s not far from the truth.
The Braves recently announced a bargain package that allows fans to buy tickets for $2.60 a game, based on 15 games in June for $39. The $39-a-month “deal” will renew every month unless you actively call the team and say “STOP!”
I gather $2.60 is more than people are willing to pay — $2.60 more. In fact, it’s now common for fans to turn down free Braves tickets. I know, I’m one of them.
Average attendance is 22,868, which is waaayyy high, according to our sports writers, who are paid to attend. (They drew 50,000 for country singer Chris Stapleton and averaged 35,000 for a three-day series with the Cubs.)
I got to thinking about all this after getting an email from Doug Wexler, a longtime fan of the Braves and an even longer lover of the sport. Mr. Wexler (I say Mister when referring to a 92-year-old World War II Army vet who was at the Battle of the Bulge) was responding to a column I wrote about the Braves' habit of playing one city off another soaking taxpayers when building new stadiums, from Georgia to Mississippi. He wrote:
“As a long time baseball fan beginning with the Cardinals/Tigers World Series in 1934 when I was 10 years old, I have followed baseball and competed as a rank amateur.
“It has been proven over and over again that there are no profits, only deficits, when public money is used to finance sports stadiums. It is another example of our deteriorated political environment in this country that communities are saddled with such extravagant and wasteful expenditures.
“I have chosen to declare myself a non-Brave fan and I will not spend a red cent to see a Braves game at Turner or at Cobb County if I survive long enough. I wouldn’t go if they paid me the price of a box seat to attend.”
Wow. The Braves are so annoyingly awful, so eminently unlikable, that they turned away a baseball fan who has loved the sport since FDR’s first term. I had to meet him, so I drove out to his DeKalb home, and we talked baseball.
I was a baseball nerd growing up and didn’t need to go to The Google to know that the Cardinals, and their Gashouse Gang of scrappy players, beat the Tigers in the 1934 World Series.
Mr. Wexler is a diminutive fellow with a sharp eye for detail and a love of gardening. He grew up in working class Carteret, N.J., the same hometown as Hall of Famer — and Gashouse Gang member — Joe “Ducky” Medwick. This caused him to follow the far-away Cards, rather than the three teams then in New York.
A career in manufacturing management brought him to Atlanta in 1979 and he supported Ted Turner’s Braves, who then drew fewer than 10,000 fans per game. But there was something lovable and uniquely Atlanta about those teams, as inept as they often were.
By contrast, the current Bravos are a line item of corporate synergy, an entertainment/real estate play by an out-of-town colossus — and paid-for by taxpayers in a deal cooked up in secret.
“That’s the part that really has turned me off,” he said. On top of that, he added, they’re just not worth his money.
“I’m conservative,” Mr. Wexler explains, “I don’t like to spend money for things I don’t need. I don’t spend it on the Braves if I don’t think it’s worth it.”
“You have guys who belong in Gwinnett or Mississippi but have a Braves uniform on,” referring to two of the Braves’ farm teams.
So, here’s a guy, a Depression Era kid, who knows the value of a buck. How about free?
His son this year got some nice tickets from an accounting firm. They were free. He declined.
“I wouldn’t go to a Braves game if they paid me,” he said, as he did in the email to me. “I wouldn’t go there, pay for food or pay to park. The people who get tickets are with corporations. They get tax breaks. We’re paying for it.”
Mr. Wexler exudes youthful joy when paging through an 82-year-old scrapbook of long-ago newspaper clippings. That’s what baseball can do — it can retain an outlook that is worn down in other aspects of living.
And now, the Braves have worn down that earnest enthusiasm.
Sure, you might say. The dude is Ninety Two! Everything has a shelf life, even one’s love of baseball.
But it’s not just old guys turning away from the team. Bruce Harvey, the pony-tailed defense lawyer and box-ticket season holder for 25 years (no longer) said he recently turned down free tickets for the Braves.
Was it the move from Atlanta? The corporate handout? The excising of popular players in a mass salary dump?
All of the above, said Harvey who has vowed to no longer attend games.
“There is nothing I see commendable about the Braves organization that would make old-time, long-time baseball fans stick with them,” he said.
“They don’t have the same place in our hearts,” he said. “I’m not going any more. It’s in my heart and in my blood. But it’s fading. It’s like an old lover.”
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