ATLANTA—At first glance, your brain refuses to accept what your eyes behold, like seeing, say, Tim Tebow in a baseball uniform. There, in the middle of Turner Field, the 20-year home of the Atlanta Braves, sits a gargantuan … football field?

It’s true. At the end of this month, the Georgia State University Panthers will take the field against Tennessee State at their new home, and Atlanta fans showing up for games will have the world’s most severe case of déjà vu.

The mound where Smoltz, Glavine, and Maddux once owned the National League is gone. The infield dirt that Chipper Jones used to patrol, gone. The dugout steps where Bobby Cox questioned the ancestry of a thousand umpires … gone, all gone. The Braves have packed up and left for a shiny new palace a dozen miles up Interstate 75, leaving behind a stadium so new that its first event was the 1996 Olympic Games.

View photos A look at Turner Field during baseball days. How many differences can you spot? (Getty) More

The Braves’ move said a lot about the business of sports in the 21st century, a time when public-private cooperation looks less like a poker game and more like a hostage negotiation. The Braves’ departure from Turner Field drew sharp nationwide criticism, but it’s going to pay off handsomely for the team long after rage has faded. The team ditched Turner Field in large part because it didn’t own the property, the major-league equivalent of leaving your trendy in-town rental for a place in the suburbs. And the city of Atlanta, already scrambling to help fund a new Falcons stadium and a renovated Hawks arena, wouldn’t kick in any more money to rework Turner Field to the Braves’ liking.

Thing is, while a landlord can flip an apartment easily enough, finding another occupant for a world-class stadium is another matter. By a stroke of good fortune, Georgia State, located just north of Turner Field, was looking to expand its footprint in the city, and found itself with an ideal opportunity: take over a baseball stadium and convert it into a football one.

View photos Looking from “left field” back toward “home plate” at the former Turner Field. (Yahoo Sports) More

Georgia State announced its intentions to take over the stadium back in 2014, and closed on the deal in 2016. Once the Braves wrapped the 2016 season, work began in earnest to fit a rectangular field into an octagonal hole. Working off several different budgets, starting with $26 million to prepare the field for football, Georgia State started construction in late February and is now within days of completion. Another $6 million to $8 million in so-called “back of the house” improvements at what’s now known as Georgia State Stadium will take place over the course of the next few months.

The field and the seats don’t sync up perfectly; baseball seats are intended to face home plate, and in this configuration, that points fans at the southwest corner of the field. But a newly-constructed grandstand of about 2,500 seats removed from other sections of the stadium stretches along the east sideline in what was once shallow right field, running roughly parallel to the line between first and second base. Behind that grandstand, the old right-field seats arc off uselessly. (The university had considered removing that entire section of the stadium, but the costs associated with both demolition and, if necessary, subsequent construction killed that idea.)

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