The report that NBC News ran on Monday about Cobb County not having enough money to fund the expansion of their public parks because of the huge sum the county has committed to the new baseball stadium for the Atlanta Braves ; served to conjure up some distinct emotions that I have had regarding this issue.

Cobb County, under the terms of the stadium agreement, will pay $400 million toward the cost of constructing the Braves new stadium, which will be called Sun Trust Park (because Sun Trust Bank purchased naming rights to the facility) which will be located on a parcel of land near the confluence of several freeways in that area about 15 miles outside of downtown Atlanta.

The Braves will be moving out of downtown Atlanta for the first time in the history of the team which now spans 50 years. The team will leave their current ballpark, Turner Field, which is just a 20 year old facility that was created by retrofitting the Atlanta Olympic Stadium used in the 1996 Summer Games held there. That setup was never ideal from the nexus of the plan and the team has cited the increased costs that they have had to shoulder in maintenance on a facility that was not built specifically for baseball as one of the primary reasons for the move.

I must preface all of this by stating that I grew up a Braves fan watching all of their games back when I was a boy on TBS when they were the main TV broadcast outlet for the team. I remember when Tom Glavine, John Smoltz, and Chipper Jones (among many others) came up through their early years and through the prime years of their outstanding respective careers with the Braves. Hank Aaron was, and remains to this day, as my favorite player of all time.

It has not always been easy being a fan of that team and living in New Jersey, but so many other people I know in the Northeast became Braves fans for similar reasons at that time period in the mid to late 1980s because the Phillies were a last place team at that time, the Mets moved all their games to the old Sports Channel platform (which was an added cable charge that my parents would not pay for) and I do not know why but I just could not attach myself to the Yankees. I preferred the National League and so I gravitated to the Braves because I could see all of their games on TBS and I could not be a fan of a team I could not watch on a regular basis.

Whenever the Braves would come to New York or Philadelphia I would try to go to at least one game per season, and in 2006 I was able to attend a game at Turner Field during the 40th anniversary season of the team being in Atlanta. That game and the tour I took of the stadium beforehand remains one of the best sports related memories I have in my life.

However, in recent years I have become very busy writing and covering different sports which overlap with the baseball season. I have been involved in writing extensively about the NBA, the New Jersey Devils and the NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs, and the New York Red Bulls soccer team which has the same regular season as baseball from March to October. It became very difficult to follow the Braves every day and keep up with all of my other responsibilities.

Then I received the news of the stadium deal in Cobb County and I saw it from the day it was announced as being a money grab by everyone involved. The team did not truly “need” a new facility with Turner Field being just 20 years old, and the location chosen in Cobb County is far from the downtown area where the team has all of their history.

Moreover, the site selected in Cobb County is going to create a traffic nightmare and has very limited access to public transportation. The move out of the downtown area is going to create very difficult conditions for fans of limited economic means to be able to attend a game. The team seemingly neglected to consider all of that in a move to the suburbs which has been extremely polarizing for residents in the Atlanta metro area.

The counterpoint to this situation is that the Braves have always felt that they have played “second fiddle” to Atlanta’s NFL team, the Falcons, who recently leveraged the city into a sweetheart deal on a brand new stadium downtown. The Falcons are moving out of the Georgia Dome which was also built for the 1996 Olympic Games into a state of the art retractable roof facility that was recently awarded by the NFL to host a future Super Bowl.

The Braves took the city government’s reluctance to help finance a new stadium or even help improve Turner Field and the accessibility to that facility as a “slap in the face” and made the deal with Cobb County very quietly behind closed doors. The almost secretive nature of the decision to move the team to Cobb County set the stage for some residents in the area to become very upset about the decision.

Furthermore, at the center of that situation was the fact that the area residents felt that they had no input in the decision which has a huge impact on the quality of life in Cobb County. The first issue is the increased traffic on game days and evenings. The ancillary issues came to light much later such as public funding shortages in areas such as education and the parks and recreation maintenance. These are all issues that continue to plague the public perception of the new stadium deal. It is because the move was made due to the influence of greed driven activities.

The Braves took this opportunity in a greed motivating way as well to get a brand new stadium in where they have labeled “a more desirable location for our fan base” which I will allow you to draw your own conclusions from that statement. It was not a necessary move for the team to leave Turner Field and downtown Atlanta at this point, while I do recognize that location had issues too with limited access to public transportation and a bad traffic flow from the parking areas to the freeways. However, the team management will now take this opportunity to increase the prices for tickets, parking, and concessions at the new facility.

The officials in public office in Cobb County have announced that they will have to raise taxes on residents in order to cover the costs of the maintenance of public parks. This is the central issue of what I know upsets me the most about this situation. I have covered the business side of sports for a while now, and I have investigated or detailed the reporting of new stadiums/arenas or proposed new stadiums/arenas for professional teams across all of the major leagues.

Here is the issue I have: in all of that reporting I do not recall any other project that was done at the detriment to other public services or public works to a community such as this one particular deal with the Braves and Cobb County. It is an absolute disaster because it is a short sighted agreement which focuses on greed for both of the key parties involved.

The new stadium is nearing completion at this point but the disappointment I have for the Braves organization after years of being a loyal fan still remains. The manner in which they went about making this deal and the cascading effects from the greed driven nature of this agreement with regards to the residents of Cobb County will be the residue in which the situation will be ultimately judged. In the end, time will tell whether this bold new project will serve to help the organization take a turn toward being a championship caliber team again, or whether it will serve to completely alienate and galvanize their fan base.