ATLANTA — SunTrust Park hosted its first regular season game to a sold-out crowd of more than 41,000 as the Atlanta Braves beat the San Diego Padres 5-2. Modern amenities and intimate sight lines accentuate massive concourses and exposed brick, culminating in a retro-modern aesthetic made popular after Camden Yards opened in 1992.
“The Braves being the oldest continuously run franchise in baseball, they said, ‘You know what, we’re a franchise with history, we have a lot of tradition, so something too modern wouldn’t feel right for us,'” said Zach Allee, senior associate at Populous, the architecture firm hired to design the stadium. “This was the perfect balance.”
One could argue that the ballpark is essentially a pastiche made up of bits and pieces of a number of other retro-modern parks, but it is nonetheless a snug park with endearing features.
No other park in Major League Baseball can compete with its technological innovations — after all, the last stadium that opened, Marlins Park, did so in 2012.
A baseball stadium’s ideal orientation — halfway between due north and due east, as written in the rulebooks — accounts for sunlight. The sport wouldn’t be particularly fun to watch if the batter is partially blinded every at bat. Populous chose to orient SunTrust Park towards the southeast — which naturally results in more sunlight and less shade throughout the ballpark — because facing SE was the most cost efficient option and provided sight lines of downtown Atlanta.
To compensate for the increased sunlight, Populous built the largest canopy in MLB to overhang the upper deck and provide shade for about 60 percent of the stadium’s seats. Lower deck seats were built with a mesh fabric that allows for easier cooling — the first seating fabric of its kind across all major American professional sports stadiums. In addition, seats at SunTrust Park are, on average, about 30-50 feet closer to comparable seats at Turner Field.
The Braves undoubtedly care about keeping their fans cool, and considering how hot and humid Atlanta can get, it makes sense why they would invest so many resources into ensuring that fans are adequately equipped to battle the elements. In addition to the canopy and the special mesh seating, cup holders in select right field sections actually make your beverage colder if left in, and also have an external USB drive attached to the bottom — the first of its kind across all professional sports stadiums. Look for these cup holders to be implemented in stadiums across America in the coming years.
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Speaking of beverages, what’s baseball without beer? SunTrust Park has its own experimental brewery open to customers with or without a game ticket: ATL Brew Lab. It’s only the second MLB park to have its own brewhouse — the first is the Coors Field stadium brewery that created the immensely popular Blue Moon in 1995. According to Allee and Populous’ Public Relations Coordinator Rich Polzin, SunTrust Park’s in-house brewhouse has similar aspirations — to eventually create their own brand of beer. One of the beers already concocted at SunTrust Park, by Terrapin Brewing Company, is brewed with leftover wood chips from Mizuno baseball bats. By all accounts, a pretty solid beer.
The WiFi is the fastest in MLB, according to the Braves. With 800 hotspots, 200 gigabyte bandwidth and 250 miles of fiber optic cables installed throughout the stadium, SunTrust Park was able to connect 10,708 devices, which engaged in 23,831 sessions and consumed 3,362 gigabytes of data — equivalent to 51,723 downloads of Venmo — during the opener.
LED features prominently throughout the stadium. About 30 LED Panasonic scoreboards are scattered throughout the park, including the main attraction: a 120 by 64 foot, 16 mm pixel scoreboard in dead center field. Others include a 90 by 30 foot scoreboard in left-center field, two LED displays above each bullpen in right-center field and an 830-foot LED screen that stretches from foul pole to foul pole.
A massive LED baseball is located in the plaza connecting the park and The Battery. All LED displays are powered by a single control room, allowing, eventually, for instant synchronization between all LED displays big events. Expect elaborate light shows to take place with each player introduction or important Braves play once the programming is completed.
With all the new amenities at SunTrust Park, it’s easy to lose perspective. There’s a game to be watched, and you need a glove. Mizuno sponsors a first of its kind program where fans can rent out a glove, free of charge, for the duration of the game. All you need to do is swipe your credit card at one of two stations in the park and you can grab a glove and go. If you forget to return the glove, you’re charged the glove’s face value and allowed to keep it.
Tremendous activation by Mizuno at Braves new stadium. Rent a glove for game & test it for 48 hours. You like it? Card on file is charged. pic.twitter.com/nuSlollNxS
— Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) April 15, 2017
But new technologies at SunTrust Park don’t just affect the fan experience, either. Trackman radar technology located high above home plate — which measures everything from spin rate to foot speed to bat angle — was important in determining the wall dimensions of SunTrust Park, according to Allee. The final measurements are 335′ to the left field foul pole, 385′ to left-center, 400′ to dead center, 375′ to right-center and 325′ to the right field pole. The right field wall, at 16 feet, is seven feet, four inches higher than the 8-foot-8 wall extending from center field to left-center, which, in turn, is more than two feet taller than the six foot wall directly down the left field line.
John Schuerholz, vice chairman of the Braves, stressed fairness over all else in deciding on the final dimensions of the park.
“I like a fair ballpark,” Schuerholz told MLB.com. “If a pitcher makes a mistake, a hitter ought to be able to hit a home run. If (a pitcher) makes a good pitch, he ought to be able to get an out.”
SunTrust Park is fair, too, for almost all demographics of baseball fans. Traditionalists will ogle at the nostalgic atmosphere and homages to teams of old. Children will be enamored with the baseball-themed arcade games in the left field concourse, millennials the lengthy beer selection. While the product on the field may not be able to match the pomp and grandeur of SunTrust Park for a few seasons, fortunately for Braves Country, the future seems bright — if their stadium is any indication.