Braves Chair & CEO Terry McGuirk and President of Business Derek Schiller following MLB's All-Star break discussed SunTrust Park's inaugural season, the progression of The Battery Atlanta mixed-use development and how the Braves' on-field success "comes at a crucial point for the organization," according to a Q&A with Phil Hudson of the ATLANTA BUSINESS CHRONICLE. Below are excerpts from the Q&A, some of which have been edited for brevity.
Q: How do you think things stand halfway through the season?
McGuirk: We are ecstatic at this point in the season. Halfway through, just coming out of [the] All-Star break, if we set all these goals at the first of the year, we would have been dreaming. It all has turned out to be right at expectations and beyond.
Q: Do you think this is the future model for baseball?
McGuirk: The model is the secret sauce and one of the neat parts about this is it's a model breaker. When we started this project, the most fan appreciation experience outside of the ballpark was St. Louis, which was about 100,000 square feet of bars, restaurants and places where fans could go outside of the ballpark. ... We're now today at 1.5 million square feet. We dwarfed anything that ever existed in this kind of a plan of building out a mixed-use project next to a stadium.
Q: How much of the development is complete?
McGuirk: The Battery is about 30 percent complete. ... Pollack Shores does projects all over the Southeast and they would tell you that the uptake on what we've done here is the best they've ever seen and the rents have gotten raised to Buckhead levels sort of ahead of the pro forma that we originally set which were the highest in Cobb County that they'd ever seen. All of those pieces are working extremely well.
Q: How are ticket sales going with the team being as competitive as it has been?
Schiller: We have about 1.5 million people that have come through Braves games. If you look at the totality of the project, well over 2 million. We're at about the 75-day mark of being over with over 2 million people through the project. That's a very healthy number considering we've only been open about 75 days.
Q: How was partnering with Live Nation to bring Billy Joel and Metallica to SunTrust Park?
McGuirk: The concerts have been very successful and we expect to have more (BIZJOURNALS.com, 7/19).
