Regarding the Braves

The Atlanta Braves had a rather dramatic off-season, and it laid the team's priorities bare: they don't care at all about putting a good team on the field in the 2015 season, or in the 2016 season. They do care about putting a good team on the field in 2017, and thereafter. And honestly, many of their moves have been savvy ones, within that framework: they've shed a lot of talent for the 2015-16 seasons (Jason Heyward, Justin Upton, Evan Gattis, and now Craig Kimbrel) while stockpiling a lot of future value and increasing their flexibility going forward. (They also signed Nick Markakis to a four-year deal, which is a little weird but shouldn't be any crippling difficulty in 2017-18 anyway.) One possible criticism of their off-season would be that they didn't get good enough value out of their deals; for instance, many thought the return in the Jason Heyward trade was just too light. Another possible criticism would be this kind of rebuild is just generally improper: that it's a betrayal of the fans and/or the players to deliberately spend a couple of years slashing payroll below capacity and, therefore, sucking. I'm not especially interested in either of those criticisms, honestly: as to the former, who can say?, and as to the latter, I think a genuine, Andrew Mellon-style, liquidationist rebuild, wherein the team accepts being truly terrible for a few seasons while trying to build a strong organization for the future, can be the right thing to do in certain circumstances. So, especially since it results in the Mets' chief rival over the course of my lifetime being terrible for the next couple of years, I would normally not have any great problem with what the Braves are doing.

Except that it's so racist.

Because, you see, the Braves were not forced into this rebuild. This wasn't a situation where the team had drained its farm system and saddled itself with bad contracts to aging veterans and was on a path that would lead to perpetual awfulness without a rebuild. The Braves weren't great last year, tying for second place with the Mets with 79 wins, and their farm system, even prior to the supplementation it's received over the off-season, was not what you'd call barren, though also perhaps not one of the top systems in the league. Certainly the team had some problems, but going into this off-season they could quite plausibly have done the usual thing and tried to make their 2015 team a potential contender without harming the organization's long-term prospects. The thinking was that they would probably pick one of Upton or Heyward to extend long-term and trade the other, striking that delicate balance between preserving current assets and using some of those assets to replenish the pipeline. That would've been a conventional off-season for the Atlanta Braves. In other words, nothing about the baseball end of things forced them to decide that 2015 wins and 2016 wins don't matter.

No, the reason why 2015 and 2016 wins don't matter is that for those years, they'll still be stuck in their current stadium, Turner Field. It opened in 1997 (I'm practically old enough to remember!), but will be replaced before it can reach 20 years of age, and the team will move from the city proper of Atlanta to the Cobb County suburbs. A little thing about Atlanta proper versus Cobb County: the former has way more black people in it. The decision to get this new stadium build has been subject to enough criticism along racial grounds as is. I can't help but feeling like that is just compounded by their really quite flagrant declaration that they don't care about their two remaining years in the city, that they have made the completely discretionary decision to sacrifice those years that they may be better in their debut season before their new rich, white audience.

It's hard not to root for their scheme to fail--even if I weren't a Mets fan.