Turner Field

The Shape Underneath

Turner Field opened in 1997, but the ground was laid for something else first. The building was originally Centennial Olympic Stadium, built for the 1996 Summer Olympics, then retrofitted into a baseball-only facility over seven months. The conversion left its mark on the architecture: the design team of Heery International, Rosser Fabrap International, Williams-Russell & Johnson, and Ellerbe Becket produced an asymmetrical shape with a pointed spike on the south side — a line carried over from the Olympic oval that had been underneath. The stretch of Capitol Avenue passing the ballpark was renamed Hank Aaron Drive, and Monument Grove inside the gates held bronze statues of Aaron, Ty Cobb, Warren Spahn, and Phil Niekro.

The Walk

Aaron was there on the first day. On April 4, 1997, he symbolically walked home plate over from the old Fulton County Stadium site to open the new park, and the northern parking lot — where that stadium once stood — preserved the fence and bleacher wall marking where Aaron hit his record-breaking 715th career home run. That afternoon, the Braves trailed the Cubs 4-2 after the seventh-inning stretch, rallied for one run and then two more in the eighth, and Chipper Jones delivered the single that brought home the game-winner in a 5-4 victory. The park was renamed for Braves owner Ted Turner, and fans knew it as The Ted.

The Run

The stadium hosted the 71st All-Star Game on July 11, 2000, the American League beating the National League 6-3. Four years later, on May 18, 2004, 40-year-old Randy Johnson of the Arizona Diamondbacks pitched a perfect game there — the oldest player in MLB history to accomplish the feat — as the Braves lost 2-0. A 2005 renovation installed a 78-foot-8-inch by 71-foot-4-inch HD video screen that earned a Guinness World Record. Over 20 seasons at Turner Field, the Braves went 951-667 in the regular season and won 10 NL East titles. The park closed after 2016.

Reporting: Baseball Hall of Fame, StadiumDB, This Great Game, online.flipbuilder.com. Park data: MLB StatsAPI and Retrosheet, via the Fever engine.