Ungrateful? Maybe, but understandable

It’s common knowledge that a lot of Atlanta Braves fans — particularly those who actually live in Atlanta — aren’t happy about the franchise abandoning a perfectly good and less than 20-year-old Turner Field for suburban Cobb County. Even more irksome than the move itself is the secretive maneuvering that made it happen with no public input, but at considerable public expense.

A major beneficiary of all that maneuvering, supposedly, will be Cobb County. Yet its voters apparently weren’t impressed: County Commission Chairman Tim Lee, one of the major players in sneaking a major league baseball franchise across the county line, was trounced in Tuesday’s runoff.

Lee expressed no apologies or regrets in defeat: Luring the Braves, he said, was “the biggest economic development deal in [the county’s] modern history … and will enrich this community long after many of us are gone.”

He might be right. But so, we suspect, is his victorious opponent Mike Boyce, who told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that “people simply want the respect shown to them that if you’re going to use their money, you have to ask them.”

This story was originally published July 30, 2016 at 5:35 PM with the headline "Ungrateful? Maybe, but understandable."