So what about the team moving to the other side of the Chattahoochee? We are not unified behind them. The baseball team that stopped being America’s team a long time ago will no longer even be Atlanta’s team. The Braves are a niche team. The red specks on the season-ticket-holders map look like a measles outbreak over the northern arc — Cobb County, Cherokee County.

The club had enough of trying to make it work downtown and they wanted a public handout, which is how it is these days in professional sports. They couldn’t create a retail mecca — without the help of the city, state and county — and have a boomtown on the south side of Atlanta to boost profits and stay competitive with the rest of the teams in their division.

The Braves had advertisements on “urban” radio stations and billboards on the south side of town, but it didn’t produce results. They also couldn’t get their “majority” consistently down I-75 to games. That majority, over and over, said it was because of “the neighborhood” and traffic that they didn’t go to Atlanta.

So a business decision had to be made, and it was made by some men who weren’t here 40 years ago. Like many pro sports teams before them, the Braves found a few good men — Cobb politicians — to fork over the people’s tax dollars without a referendum and proper vetting.

The Braves own 60 acres in Cobb and will use 15 acres for a ballpark and the rest for their retail mecca, or so they hope. The club will be a landlord over development and it will help the organization pay salaries for the millionaire players. The politicians of Cobb County gave the Braves $400 million when the club could not get it from the mayor of Atlanta, or the team’s own billionaire owner. The politicians downtown, meanwhile, twiddled their thumbs, dared the team to leave, and the baseball team called their bluff.

Still, Ted Turner didn’t walk away from downtown when Atlanta, like Mobile, Ala., for instance, went from being a baseball town to a football town. Arthur Blank didn’t run to the suburbs, either, chasing money. His Falcons stayed downtown, albeit with the prodding of some public money. The Falcons’ new football stadium, now under construction, will host Final Fours, soccer, conventions and such, but $200 million of public money for a $1 billion football/multi-use stadium does not compare to over $400 million of the $672 million fleecing in the Braves deal, which had no transparency.

The Braves wanted to own the property around Turner Field, one landowner told me. His property. You will recall in the infamous Memorandum of Understanding between Cobb and the Braves, as reported by the AJC, the Braves wanted power of eminent domain around the new stadium so the county could buy/seize private property for the club.

The Braves also said the lack of rail to Turner Field really hurt and they had to move because of that. It made you scratch your head. There was not — and still is not — a plan to bring rail to Cobb County’s new ballpark. Cobb has fought the Metropolitan Atlanta Transit Authority from crossing into its county as vigorously as a dictator fights rebellions.

Joe Dendy, chair of the Cobb County Republican Party, sent out this statement following the announcement of the Braves’ move to Cobb: “It is absolutely necessary the solution is all about moving cars in and around Cobb and surrounding counties from our north and east where most Braves fans travel from, and not moving people into Cobb by rail from Atlanta.”

It just confirmed that the Chattahoochee is really a moat between Atlanta and the new Braves stadium.

Billye Aaron, the wife of the home run king, is dismayed by what she sees as a fracture in the two societies, not just here, but around the country. We have moved backwards, she said. I think some of it has to do with businessmen who run sports franchises working as hard as they can for the money and doing what they have to do. Mrs. Aaron thinks there is also something far more sinister going on.

“We have lost our way for the moment; hopefully it will not be a lasting thing,” she said. “Race relations are at a tremendous low at this stage, and it is reflective of what the Braves have just done. I hear people saying ‘We have to take our country back,’ as if to say they want to move back to pre-Civil Rights days.”

Mrs. Aaron’s distress is so real she hopes the majestic statue of her husband that sits in the plaza at Turner Field does not move to Cobb County. She said it was nickels and dimes that paid for that statue and it should stay downtown where her husband hit his home runs. The Braves are on record, saying the team wants to move the statue to the new ballpark in Cobb County.

She might soften one day, but she also said, “I don’t know that Cobb County would want it.”

The Braves told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that they want the statue to be a part of the landscape at their new ballpark. They obviously feel they own the statue. Georgia State, I am told, wants the statue if it buys the Turner Field property and develops its own baseball stadium.

A judge, in the manner of Solomon, might rule just to cut the statue in half and see who really wants it.

“I think we have come to a sad place in our history here,” Mrs. Aaron said. “The legacy of the former mayor, Ivan Allen, and all of that group of business leaders has just sort of disappeared. The concern that they showed for bridging the gap between blacks and whites in this community seems not to be a part of the mode of operation these days.

“I think it is reflective of what we see in the country these days. We are caught up in a mood that is so unfortunate and a behavior that shows complete disregard for the feelings of people that was very much a part of this city.”