It takes a village? Inside the MLB ballpark model of the future

The Battery was fully charged that first day, more than eight years ago, when the Atlanta Braves unveiled baseball's next big thing to the greater MLB world.

This was April 14, 2017, the date of the Braves' first regular-season game at Truist (then SunTrust) Park. It was a perfect, 79-degree day, as 41,149 patrons turned out to see the new digs, the Braves' third home since arriving from Milwaukee in 1966. A smiling Hank Aaron waved to the fans as he made his way onto the field with the aid of a cane to deliver the first pitch. Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter were on hand.

"It is a classic-feeling ballpark," an unusually effusive Rob Manfred, baseball's commissioner then and now, said before the game. "Just had a little tour. Some of the different seating areas in the ballpark, a lot of imagination, a lot of options in terms of seating. It's the kind of ballpark that will attract, not only our hardcore fans that really are the backbone of our game, but really people who may not be quite as interested [in baseball], because there are so many options here."

Ah, the options. As much interest as there was in the new park, baseball had seen many ballparks unveiled over its long history. This was different, because the Braves were introducing not just a stadium, but a village, a new neighborhood in Cobb County, Georgia, that did not exist before. The mixed-use development, called The Battery, wasn't quite finished that first day -- the hulking Omni Hotel that now overlooks the ballpark wasn't up and running just yet, among other things -- but most of it was ready for action. And whether they realized it or not, all those who jammed the streets and walkways of the new village were seeing something that had not yet been seen in baseball.

What had been created for the low, low price of a reported $1.1 billion, in a 60-acre suburban parcel that heretofore had been literally nothing, was a baseball theme park, an Atlanta Braves bubble, where you could live, work, eat and be merry, and you could do those things year-round, even when baseball wasn't happening.

"The most exciting thing for me is the number of fans who were here really early and were enjoying the place for a full day," Manfred said. "I do think it's a model for other organizations. You know, we ask our fans to do a lot. They come 81 times a year. You've got to make sure you have a venue that is attractive and provides entertainment alternatives, food alternatives. The Braves have done just an unbelievable job with those concepts."

Since then, Truist/Battery has been a resounding success for the Braves.

"By creating a better fan experience, you're creating more desire for fans to want to come here," Braves president and CEO Derek Schiller said. "It sets the event revenues, which includes tickets of course for the baseball team, on a better trajectory. Then beyond that, you've got a whole other set of revenues from the real estate development that can then be deployed for the baseball team."

There is every indication that the Braves are swimming in gravy and the real estate arm of the operation is a key factor in that success. On-field performance matters, too, and it hasn't hurt that since Truist Park opened, the Braves have won six division titles, earned seven playoff berths and won a World Series. But this, too, was more or less planned, as Atlanta timed its full-scale rebuild to begin to bear fruit around the time the new venue was opened. They pretty much nailed it.

Financially, it's easy to see the impact of The Battery through the prism of the annual franchise valuations published by Forbes. At the time the Braves announced their move, the most recent set of valuations ranked the Braves 15th across MLB. The Braves now rank eighth, at an estimated $3 billion. Their 250% increase in valuation since the announcement is the fourth highest during that span, behind the Los Angeles Dodgers, Philadelphia Phillies and Houston Astros.

While it is hard not to be impressed by the sheer audacity of what the Braves had done, with the aid of public funds that remain a source of contention in Cobb County and beyond, it's worth revisiting Manfred's 2017 comments on a new model for teams. Would such projects -- a stadium and a neighborhood to go with it, created concurrently, become baseball's new ballpark standard?

The answer is as complicated as these sorts of megadevelopment projects always are, but from the standpoint of the team, the Braves' village-style development has been an unqualified success. And that is a big reason it now seems that nearly every team wants a village of its own.

A new phase of MLB ballparks

What we now refer to as ballpark villages isn't a new concept, and the project in Cobb County wasn't an invention so much as an iteration, the product of what the Braves sought and felt they could not get from their former home, Turner Field, near downtown Atlanta, and the ingenuity of the park's architects, Populous, who designed the park itself and stewarded the overall development process with other companies.

From design through construction, it took about 37 months to turn an empty field nestled next to a confluence of freeways into Battery Atlanta. The goal was to create not just a park, and not even a park with a revenue-boosting entertainment district surrounding it, but what it became: a brand-new neighborhood.

The ballpark village concept dates all the way back to the 1880s, when eccentric St. Louis Browns owner Chris von der Ahe turned an early version of Sportsman's Park into something akin to a baseball carnival, complete with a water slide in right field and a beer garden that was, technically speaking, in the field of play. Many decades later, in a different part of St. Louis, the Cardinals opened Busch Stadium III in 2006 and have been gradually developing the grounds of the old park across the street into what is literally called "Ballpark Village" ever since.

Truist Park and The Battery presented a unique challenge to its designers, who have seen an evolution in the kinds of projects they are asked to ponder in recent years.

"There has been a shift," said Zach Allee, principal, senior architect at Populous, who worked on the project. "When you're able to design Wrigleyville at the same time as Wrigley Field, that's a different opportunity than in organically growing. It depends on the circumstance, the place and the sport, but we're certainly getting a lot more of this mixed-use stuff. There's a big desire for this kind of community that's 24/7 around these projects, especially when there is public funding involved. They need to be a lot more than just a ballpark or a stadium."

Ah, Wrigleyville. As we ponder the extent to which the Truist/Battery project has become baseball's ballpark model, we know that it, too, had its models, perhaps most prevalently Wrigley Field and the neighborhood around it on Chicago's North Side.

"Chicago has always been a unique atmosphere," McGuirk told ESPN when Truist Park opened. "There's nothing like it in the United States, in baseball and sport. But even the ownership of the Chicago Cubs understands what we're doing, and I've had conversations with them. This is sort of an even bigger breakthrough."

In seeking that Wrigleyville vibe, the Braves were in effect turning back the clock in the stadium design saga, skipping over the past two predominant trends and returning -- albeit in a highly reimagined form -- to foundational concepts.

In "Ballpark: Baseball in the American City," author and architectural critic Paul Goldberger refers to four phases in the history of stadium development.

It began with the classic lineage of parks -- Wrigley Field, Fenway Park, Ebbets Field, Tiger Stadium, etc. -- located in dense, urban environments and literally shaped by the neighborhoods around them. Next came the move away from the city centers to suburban (or suburban-style) areas with cookie-cutter stadiums, often multisport, surrounded by oceans of surface parking lots -- Riverfront Stadium, Royals Stadium, Shea Stadium.

Then came the move back to the city, the wave of retro parks started by the arrival of Oriole Park at Camden Yards in the early '90s, parks that brought baseball back to its urban roots and which -- hopefully -- would spur organic economic growth around them. It's that last part that didn't work so well for the Braves at Turner Field, leading them to explore other options.

The Braves got their development and so much more -- a neighborhood all their own, under their control. Team officials were very much aware that they were doing something with similar historical resonance to what happened in Baltimore.

"I'm a Baltimore native," Hall of Fame Braves executive John Schuerholz told ESPN when the Braves' park opened. "I was gone from Baltimore when Camden Yards was built, but Camden Yards' design, that creative vision that incorporated the Civil War warehouse building as a part of that structure, that started a whole new view of how baseball stadiums ought to be built. I think that this is the new Camden Yards."

According to Goldberger, Schuerholz's words were more than a little prescient. With Truist Park and the development around it, a fourth-phase ballpark evolution has dawned.

"If we think of the third wave of re-integrating into the real city," Goldberger said. "The fourth wave is the making of a kind of pretend city around the ballpark, either in the literal sense of The Battery, which is really created out of nothing. Or the way places like St. Louis have created their own little world, but is still in the city."

For many of the teams working to develop their surrounding area, the transaction boils down to one of trading surface parking for mixed-use development. But that's not true in all situations, particularly on Chicago's North Side. Ultimately, the difference between the original Camden incarnation and what the Braves have in Cobb County is one of control -- who oversees the real estate around the park, what it's used for and, of course, who benefits from it.

"[The fourth phase] is also about this gradual accretion of other things around the ballpark by the team that suddenly changes the neighborhood," Goldberger said. "We see that at Wrigley now. Even places as established and seriously embedded into the real city as Wrigley are still now trying to transform the area around it, to make it feel more like some of these other places."

The power of The Battery -- and the model to follow

The Truist/Battery project remains distinctive because of the way it came together, all at once, constructed in unused space amid a confluence of super highways. The stadium, the bars and boutiques around it, the office buildings, the hotels, the residential spaces, the theater -- all of it was planned at the outset. This made it not just a rare opportunity from a design standpoint, but it turned the corporate-owned Braves into a real estate developer.

The original project was a public-private partnership between the Braves and Cobb County and let's be clear: The public aspect of this remains controversial. That's not what you'll hear from the Braves, nor the Cobb County government itself, which together tout the success of the project in annual reports.

By now, it's no secret that the dogma among leading sports economists is that the use of public money to subsidize stadium developments for franchises that are in themselves private entities owned by billionaires is generally not a win for taxpayers. The argument is layered, complex, and often laid out in book form.

That the Braves' project involved a great deal of adjacent real estate development might or might not alter that calculus. That very question was the subject of a high-visibility debate between two of the leading sports economics experts in the country in 2022.

Still, the reality is that Truist/Battery has been a resounding success -- for the Braves.

Some statistics about The Battery provided by the team:

• Nine million visitors per year

• An average of 140 minutes spent by visitors -- on non-game days

• 283 non-Braves events held at the development last year (2024)

• 1.675 million square feet of office space, including the current and future corporate headquarters of Comcast, Papa John's, TK Elevator, Gas South and Truist Securities

• 250,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space

• One mechanical bull (not sure why they threw that in, but you've got to love it)

You get the idea. It's a year-round cash cow.

For now, the Truist/Battery project remains a singular development around baseball. But it, too, evolves, as does Atlanta Braves Holdings, which before the season announced the acquisition of "Pennant Park," a six-building office complex adjacent to The Battery on the other side of I-75, connected by a pedestrian bridge.

Nothing says success like an expanding footprint.

"Why do we keep expanding?" Braves development company president and CEO Mike Plant asked. "Because the formula continues to work, continues to support our overall mission and overall objectives for our franchise."

Which means it was only a matter of time before other clubs picked up the baton. The Texas Rangers are the only club to christen a new ballpark since Truist Park arrived in 2017, opening Globe Life Field in 2020 across the street from their old venue, now called Choctaw Stadium and which still, in its post-Rangers existence, looks much more like a baseball park than its successor.

Adjacent and integrated into Arlington's new park is Texas Live!, a mixed-use district very similar in conception and execution to St. Louis' Ballpark Village and developments in other markets. This is no accident, as both projects were developed by the Cordish Company and this is what they do.

As in St. Louis, the build-out in Arlington has been gradual and will continue indefinitely. Local officials have said they imagine an increasingly urban feel to a suburban region that has been characterized for decades by the looming presence of the amusement park Six Flags over Texas. Before the season, a Rangers-themed luxury residential development called One Rangers Way was opened.

Is that a neighborhood in the way we really think about what a neighborhood is, in an urban sense? Not really, but it's early days. The phased approach to ballpark-adjacent development is not exactly what happened in Cobb County, but it is perhaps a more replicable model.

"It all is a little pretend," Goldberger said. "But all of baseball in some ways is supposed to be a fantasy that is removing you from day-to-day concerns."

Most of the ballpark-related development that's actively underway or recently completed in baseball right now fits the phased model, all with some, but not all, elements of the baseball neighborhood that sprang forth in Cobb County.

"You can't take a scissor and cut this 60-acre lifestyle center out and just plop it somewhere else and have the kind of success that we have," Plant said. "There's a lot that goes into creating the opportunity and becoming an opportunity that didn't exist before."

The next ballpark villages

It's happening all over, really. The Phillies are working toward trading in some of their parking expanse for mixed use. The Dodgers tacked on a mini-village to the area of its park beyond center field. The Baltimore Orioles are renovating Camden Yards, and when new owner David Rubenstein was in the process of buying the club, he cited the "opportunity for the team to catalyze development around Camden Yards and in downtown Baltimore."

The common thread for all of these projects is the funneling of revenue from venue-adjacent property back toward the teams, and to keep it coming year-round. If there is one takeaway from this swift ballpark-related tour around the majors, it's that these mixed-use developments are going to look a little different in every market. For better or worse.

"Whatever you don't like about it," Goldberger said. "It's still better than a concrete donut surrounded by 20 acres of parking."

Here are some of the most notable iterations:

St. Louis: Ballpark Village didn't break ground until 2013 -- seven years after the opening of the new Busch Stadium -- but it's been growing ever since. It opened in 2014, beginning with a standard array of food and drink establishments and the Cardinals' Hall of Fame. Since then, a hotel, an office tower and the 29-story residential building that's frequently featured on Cardinals broadcasts were added. Subsequent expansion has focused on residential options.

A chief difference between Ballpark Village and The Battery is its location across the street from the playing venue, but on the exact spot where the old stadium was situated. With the rise of Ballpark Village, old staples around the stadium, such as the now-closed Mike Shannon's Grill, have struggled, though many argue whether Ballpark Village or the COVID-19 pandemic is more to blame.

Still, whereas The Battery and Truist Park were successfully designed to function seamlessly as a unified project, Ballpark Village has the feel of something just kind of dropped into the downtown of a major city. Perhaps that will change over time, especially if the efforts to grow the residential part of the project prove to be successful. But it's going to take a while.

San Francisco: The Giants partnered with developer Tishman Speyer on the Mission Rock development, which sits directly south of Oracle Park, on the other side of the Lefty O'Doul Bridge that spans the waterway where McCovey Cove meets the Mission Creek Channel. It's a 28-acre mixed-use, "seven days a week" community taking shape on what was more or less a big expanse of concrete. It is located between the Giants' venue and the Chase Center, the waterfront arena occupied by the NBA's Golden State Warriors.

When completed, Mission Rock will be a fully-formed European-style neighborhood built with narrow streets and a pedestrian-oriented lifestyle at the forefront. There's already a park along the water, a couple of open apartment towers and a growing inventory of amenities. On the development timeline, it's the polar opposite of the Truist/Battery project: Oracle Park opened 25 years ago.

It's not all milk and honey by the Bay, however. Downtown San Francisco has struggled more than most urban cores since the pandemic and as promising as Mission Rock appears to be -- both as a new community and a lode of revenue for the Giants -- on other sides of the ballpark there is a proliferation of empty retail spaces. And some have questioned whether the Giants have swung too much of their focus toward real estate development.

New York: Parking and chop shops. For decades, that's what described the land in Flushing, Queens, around, first, Shea Stadium and, now, Citi Field. That's changing, and fast.

It's been a 1½ years since Mets owner Steven Cohen announced plans to develop the area around Citi Field, saying at the time, "There's nothing going on. The only thing you can do at Citi Field is get your hubcap changed or maybe get back a catalytic converter. The way I would describe it is 50 acres of cement."

True, but it's nothing $8 billion of Cohen's money can't fix. The to-do list includes revamped park land, high-rise hotels, bars, restaurants, a music venue and various public spaces. The biggest component is a proposed Hard Rock Casino, which moved a step closer to reality last week when the state legislature approved a bill that allows Cohen to repurpose state parkland near Citi Field, on which some of the asphalt sea around the stadium sits.

The project -- called Metropolitan Park -- will render the old mise-en-scene around Mets baseball unrecognizable. Hurdles remain -- the big one being the need for the project to be selected for one of the state's highly-sought-after gaming licenses. There's been community pushback as well from those who don't relish living by a casino. So far, Cohen and his partners have cleared every hurdle.

The project differs from the Truist/Battery development in several ways -- location, financing and both the residential component and types of commerce. Metropolitan Park is less a new urban neighborhood and more a new urban sports-themed resort, featuring baseball and a new home next door for MLS' New York City FC.

Chicago: The most Battery-like notion that's been floated yet -- and perhaps the best opportunity for a team to one-up what the Braves have done -- lies on the South Side of Chicago. When you see it, the first thing you think is that it is remarkable that it's there -- 62 acres of a vacuous, abandoned railyard that abuts the Chicago River and sits immediately south of the Chicago Loop. It's the kind of thing you just don't expect to find in the heart of a dense major city -- land, and lots of it.

For our purposes, the plight of The 78 came onto baseball's radar last year when news emerged that the Chicago White Sox were exploring the idea of becoming one of the developer Related Midwest's anchor tenants. The 78 is located 2 miles directly north from where the White Sox have played baseball since 1910. The current park is visible from The 78 on the near horizon.

The renderings are stunning, standing out even in a genre that specializes in producing eye-popping images. The majesty of the Chicago skyline from that southerly vantage point looms over it all.

You see the trademark pinwheels and exploding scoreboard, translated to a futuristic context. You see a riverwalk with docks for water taxis that would ferry you to the game. You see more of the high-rise housing that's already sprouting up in adjacent sections of the rapidly growing South Loop area.

But flashy renderings are one thing. Pulling off a megaproject like The 78, in a place like the heart of Chicago, is something else. Visits were made to the state capital to pitch the idea. The developers and the team hosted lawmakers on a cruise to the site, but the response was not great, nor are the budget situations at either the city or the state levels.

Later on, one legislator even pitched a bill that would require teams to post at least a .500 record in three out of five years before they could qualify for public financing.

After making quite a splash last year, additional news about the concept had entered a zone of radio silence -- until Monday. That's when Chicago Fire FC owner Joe Mansueto announced plans to build a $650 million privately funded, soccer-only stadium that would occupy the north end of The 78.

Last October, a proposed University of Illinois technology and research hub, which would have served as a co-anchor of The 78 project, pulled out, and the MLS' Fire emerged as a possible replacement. Related Midwest released a statement to the media at the time that read, "We are actively exploring the co-location of dual stadiums for the Chicago White Sox and Chicago Fire, two organizations whose presence at The 78 would align with our vision of creating Chicago's next great neighborhood."

All had been quiet on the south Chicago riverfront since, and it's unclear whether Monday's news signifies the end of a possible White Sox involvement in The 78.

"Related Midwest first approached the White Sox about building a new ballpark on a piece of property they were developing, and we continue to consider the site as an option," a team spokesperson said Tuesday in response to an inquiry from WGN. "We believe in Related Midwest's vision for 'The 78' and remain confident the riverfront location could serve as a home to both teams. We continue to have conversations with Related Midwest about the site's possibilities and opportunities."

In Chicago, stadium-related headlines had been the sole domain of the constantly flip-flopping Bears, a longtime resident of the South Loop.

Will anything become of The 78-White Sox idea? Right now, that's impossible to say. What we can say is that the lease on Rate Field expires after the 2029 season. We can also say that anyone who chose to build a baseball-centric ballpark and surrounding neighborhood on that magically vacant parcel of invaluable space would be creating something like The Battery -- on steroids.

"It's drop-dead perfect," influential sports consultant Marc Ganis told WGN. "What you see they're trying to create here is a new Wrigleyville South."

Dream on ...

It's not clear if anyone is going to pull off a fully realized Battery/Truist project in baseball -- a new park with its own brand-new neighborhood all at once. It is clear that Goldberger's fourth phase of ballpark building is well underway. We aren't likely to see any team float the notion of a stadium -- and only a stadium -- in the future. The realization of these proposals and their ultimate scale will vary from market to market.

In Atlanta, though, the success is evident.

Baseball Prospectus writer Rob Mains had a long career as a Wall Street equities analyst before moving to a higher calling as a baseball analyst. Old habits die hard though, and he has taken it upon himself to cover the Braves' quarterly earnings calls.

Mains gave a presentation on those financials at the SABR Analytics Conference in Phoenix during spring training. The takeaway was that the various entities that comprise what we simply know as the "Atlanta Braves" are doing quite well, as a baseball club and as real estate moguls. That latter role pays off around the calendar, even when baseball is not happening, shoring up the bottom line during periods that are fallow for other franchises.

At least for now, Truist Park and The Battery -- a dynamic Goldberger described as "urbanoid" in his book -- stands alone. It might be the avatar of a new phase in ballpark history, but it is still set apart from other projects that fall under that umbrella.

The audacious plans of team owners will continue, as they always have, but as we've seen in Las Vegas, St. Petersburg, Kansas City and, so far, in Chicago, with big plans come big complications.

"I think [The Battery] is replicable, if only because ultimately there is so much money to be made," Goldberger said. "But it's not like you have to do the whole thing all at once."

Which brings us back to a smiling Rob Manfred, on that sunny afternoon in April of 2017, exalting the Braves' achievement and the buzz that was all around him. He'll be there again in July, when MLB, Truist Park and The Battery host the All-Star Game.

Clearly, Manfred was right. Truist Park is a model for ballpark development. For now though, it remains more a model of aspiration for other clubs, and less one of reality. Still, make no mistake: While a fully-charged Battery replica might be a longshot in most markets, teams will continue to push to get as much juice as they can get from the land that surrounds them.

"You have to come up with a vast amount of equity and take on a pretty good amount of debt," Plant said. "So that's a risk. But it's also the reward. We felt like we had a good idea of what that risk would be back in 2013. As we sit here in 2025, it's exceeded our expectations."