From: deadspin.com

This is a weekly feature in which I (and maybe you, too, readers) detail the various reasons for hating your ballpark. This week: The Atlanta Braves' Turner Field. Photo by Charlie Morn.

New Brave world: Baseball is a popular diversion for the transplanted New England businesspeople known as Atlantans, at least in those odd moments when they're not idling in traffic at the I-85 interchange. Turner Field is made for these people. It is of a piece with its city: bland, corporate, vaguely backward-looking, with a light dusting of half-assed crackerism — John Rocker jerseys, Tomahawk chops, a third baseman named Chipper — to make the place feel identifiably Southern. Like Atlanta itself, whatever character the ballpark may possess was derived largely from the rubble of its former self. Turner, which opened in 1997, is the model mallpark; you can spend an entire afternoon in the fan plaza at the stadium's north end and never have to suffer through the tremendous inconvenience of actually watching a baseball game. The place differs from a Banana Republic only in that a Banana Republic doesn't work so feverishly to sell you so much crap.

There's a lesson here, one that all those Chicagoans clamoring for the 2016 Olympics would do well to heed. The 1996 Summer Olympics dramatically altered the host city, which put itself forever in hock to its corporate community. Atlanta, now brought to you by Coca-Cola. The ballpark that emerged from the wreckage of Centennial Olympic Stadium was a monument to that evolution, edgeless and dull and pimpled with logos. Not even Ted Turner — whose mix of both crass and noble instincts should've made him the prophet to lead America from its stadium malaise — could do anything about that. Here's how the Braves' web site describes The Ted now: "Turner Field combines the nostalgia and the atmosphere of old-time baseball with state-of-the-art family entertainment unlike that of any other park." It's a tribute to Ted Turner's worst impulses, in other words. It's an old movie, sloppily colored in.

It is ironic and a little sad that the park is named for Ted Turner, since little of the zany exuberance or irrepressible joy of its namesake is apparent. Turner Field is, in many ways, the perfect monument to the era of bland professionalism that John Schuerholz helped shape. There is absolutely nothing unique or memorable about Turner Field: no insincere tributes to long-demolished ballparks, no crazily contrived dimensions, no pointless architectural flourishes. It is perfectly serviceable and completely soulless.

Not surprisingly, Turner Field caters to the transplant community it serves. Even the "traditions" are borrowed, as the experience is little more than an a la carte sampling from more baseball-savvy cities: "Thank God I'm a Country Boy" (from the O's), compelled patriotism (from the Yankees; don't go to a Braves game on Sunday if you're remotely free thinking), and the "Day-O" chant from Harry Belafonte's "Banana Boat Song" that's piped into every ballpark in America are all featured.