Baseball’s All-Star Legacy Initiative Helps Atlanta Kids, Vets, Indigent

Baseball’s 95th All-Star Game, scheduled for July 15 in suburban Atlanta’s Truist Park, will be much more than a televised match between leagues.

It will also features a Futures Game involving top prospects, an interactive Play Ball expo – plus a myriad of community projects designed to help veterans, youngsters, and area residents in need of sustainable food and farming.

Designed to promote better access to baseball, those projects involve Major League Baseball, the Atlanta Braves, and the Atlanta Braves Foundation and will cost more than $4 million – adding to the $120 million raised from the 30 teams and Major League Baseball under the All-Star Legacy Initiative.

Third Atlanta Game

Legacy projects will be offered through the week leading up the Midsummer Classic, the third to be hosted by the Braves since they moved from Milwaukee to Atlanta in 1966.

This year’s projects include field and facility renovations at Cobb County’s Rhyne Park softball complex, where three new turf fields, fencing, batting cages, and other upgrades will allow girls to play there year-round, and the Barksdale Club baseball field, used by the Boys & Girls Club of Metro Atlanta.

In addition, a world-class retreat facility for veterans in nearby Fayetteville will involve creation of a Braves-themed mobile warrior fitness trailer that will promote mental and physical fitness among veterans and ease their transition back to civilian life.

Camp Southern Ground also provides programs to aid post-traumatic growth among combat veterans, including 9/11 responders.

The Warrior Fitness Trailer, available free for veterans, is a joint project of Major League Baseball, the Braves, and Camp Southern Ground. It is open to all veterans nationwide.

Also catering to special needs is the new special sensory space, an area of peace and solitude scheduled to open inside Truist Park during All-Star Week.

The space allows fans with sensory and neurodivergent needs to take needed breaks during ballpark activities.

New Food Sources

The team’s influence also extends beyond the ballpark, where a seven-acre innovation farm will provide sustainable and continuous food sources for needy Atlanta Housing residents.

Part farm, part garden,and part orchard, the farm will produce thousands of pounds of fresh produce, nurtured by 100 volunteers from the Braves, Major League Baseball, Food Well Alliance, and Atlanta Housing. Projected to turn blight into beauty on the undeveloped Leila Valley apartment site in southeast Atlanta, its annual harvests will be a perennial reminder of how the baseball world can help the local community.

The All-Star Legacy initiative, launched at the 1997 All-Star Game, also includes funding of three MLB national partners: the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, the Jackie Robinson Foundation, and Stand Up to Cancer.

Aaron Tributes

Among new beneficiaries to be announced in the coming weeks are several non-profits that will receive revenue from a charity 4.4-mile run, co-sponsored by the Atlanta Track Club, honoring the late Braves icon Hank Aaron.

A year-long exhibit on Aaron’s life will conclude its year-long run at the Atlanta History Center after All-Star Week.

The Atlanta Braves previously hosted All-Star Games in 1972 and 2000 but lost the assignment in 2021, the year Aaron died, because Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred reassigned the game to Denver in protest of new Georgia voter registration laws he considered restrictive.