Atlanta for the opener.....anyone? Bueller?

…heading that way. Probably won’t know for sure until this weekend. I’m in Nashville, so it’s an easy last minute thing. Great bar right beside the ballpark, right next to I-75 and a hotel, that escapes me at the moment. The bar is The Bullpen…a great gathering spot right across the street. Good food and cold beer!

but i’ve heard from many Braves fans in the area that Turner Field has almost nothing around the park for a place to go before the game.

Wish I could join you.

I’ve thought about skipping work to head down for the opener – it’s only 3 hours from here, but there’s nothing I despise more than to drive into and through Atlanta. That’s why I’m going with my church, which has several Cubs fans, driving on our church bus.

Be interesting to see if these guys, who drove down from Chicago for this 2008 game, show back up … and scream all night long the following to Chipper Jones

"LARRY! .. LARRY! … LARRRRY! … LARRY .. LARRRRRY! … You SUCK!"

The crowd will likely look more like this.

Find the Braves fan.

Steve, you sang it well, old friend .. “Chicago Cubs’ got the greatest fans.”

I’m headed there from Tenn. There’s only ONE bar & it’s in the parking lot of the hotel I stay. The best thing about Turner Field is the fact that you can EASILY obtain CUBS AUTOGRAPHS…You gotta get there early for LOU. They come into the stadium RIGHT by the bar………it’s always been fun for me. Another problem is the Cubs have an off day there on Tues. Don’t know why they don’t save those for later in the season, when rain outs are likely to occur. (?) Go Cubs! I herd twice today [on XM The SHOW w/ Ron Dibble] Cubs were picked @ 3rd place…………

You gotta love Braves fans. Absolutely the easiest targets in sports to rag on. How a town this apathetic toward sports has obtained, and maintained, membership is four different pro sports leagues is beyond me.

They call it “Wrigley South”. It will be about 65 to 45 cubs fans to braves fans. You will get harassed by the fair weather idiot Braves fans, who think that they are entitled to win the WS this year because of the Glory of the 90’s. They’ve never gotten over the Maddux/Smoltz/Glavine era. The stadium is nice-ish. It’s nothing like Wrigley. It’s a little sticky (but you would assume that they would clean it for Opening Day). Parking is absolutely miserable. If you want food, good luck finding it close. If I were looking for something down there, I would head a couple of exits up I75/85 to Ponce De Leon Ave. It’s been called “the fat boy’s dream!” Plenty of places to get some good, cheap food and a beer. Atlanta is notorious for traffic, and Monday will be no exception. There is an insane amount of traffic generated from Braves games, so make sure your car is comfy. That’s really about it. You’ll have a hell of a time. The best is when the boys in blue win. There isn’t a better feeling than singing in harmony “Go Cubs Go!” in the tunnel leaving, and watching all of the Braves fan’s faces. It get’s kind of ugly, and you get a lot of 1908’s, but they’ll just be bitter that we’re one game closer to an October Parade.

Any other questions?? Been going to Braves games for 15 years (they have 1 dollar cheap seat tickets! hahaha)

all over the place after that victory. It had been a good hard fought game with a bench clearing dustup, lots of lumber, etc. It had been a great outing and we were in FIRST PLACE.

The few Braves fans listlessly passed by. I was walking with my pastor and our church group and they enjoyed watching me wave a W flag draped around my shoulders and wave a homemade “Go Cubs” sign while I sang with the hundreds of others in the hallways “Go Cubs Go.” I was having fun, son, FUN. I wasn’t taunting anyone personally, just enjoying our victory.

Then some young woman, some vixen with a Buckhead look, with her boyfriend walks past and before I could get out of the way, she reaches up and pulls my sign out of my hands and threw it to the ground and kept walking. I saw her little smirk as she did.

Before reason returned and not even thinking about what I did next, I snatched up off the ground like it was a fallen standard at Iwo Jima and ran up to catch up with her and quickly got in pace with them to lower the sign over her head to eye level. I grinned as she started violently and I thought I saw her boyfriend laugh as I turned away and starting singing “Hey Chicago, what do you say .. the Cubs are going to win today!”

My pastor and my church homies watched the whole thing and were dying. The next Sunday, my pastor asked me to wave the W flag in church to make a homiletical point about standing strong in the face of adversity. AAAAmen, pastor!

Harrassment happens everywhere. So does trash talking. It happens. They’re just “nicer” about it since they’re in the South. During that 2005 game, a Braves fan politely came up to talk to me and I caught pretty quickly that he was, in that typically genteel Southern way, talking trash. “Do you know that the Chicago major league team here is being beaten by a team of farm hands?”

At that time, unfortunately, he was quite right. What do you say to that ,, “Wait til next year?” Oh wait, that would have been the Dark Times. Ugh. Let’s never bring that up again.

if any Braves fan gives you a “1908” taunt, you would think at least in their mind they would think, “Well, we made the playoffs 14 straight years, and only came away with one world championship. And that one championship was in the strike-shortened year of 1995, in the immediate aftermath of the strike, when no one cared anyway.” Granted, they won several pennants, and a couple of the World Series that they lost could have easily gone their way with a break here or there, but the point is, even with that long playoff stretch, the fact that they could not sell out home playoff games (not even close, in fact), they are in no position to trash talk anyone.

44 bucks a head. 9 rows behind the Cubs dugout. Not bad!

I will be there with signs, flags, etc. Got my jersey, long blue sleeved “Go Cubbies” shirt, my ancient vintage Cubs cap one of my brothers bought me back in 1990 after we watched our first and only night game and lots of pent up passion.

This has been one of the most personally challenging and toughest four months of my life and after the longest, loneliest and most miserqble of winters my adrenals need to gush. Who’s pitching on Thursday?

But not so much that I’m going to be a jerk. I never have been a classless idiot as a fan anywhere, and think I carry myself pretty responsibly.