The Braves Play Taxpayers Better Than They Play Baseball
Small towns across the south are paying the bills for Atlanta’s farm system.
By Ira Boudway and Kate Smith | April 27, 2016
Sometime in 2003, when he was the mayor of Pearl, Miss., Jimmy Foster got a visit from a man he’d never met. The stranger, Tim Bennett, came to City Hall, an old brick schoolhouse on Pearl’s church-lined main street. “He just showed up in my office that day,” says Foster, “and started talking about baseball.” Specifically, Bennett wanted to know if Pearl might be interested in building a stadium for a minor league team.
The ballpark, it turned out, was just the kind of project Foster was looking for. Now 62, with gray hair and a potbelly, Foster, who spent 19 years as a policeman in Pearl before becoming mayor, was desperate to help his hometown shed its reputation as a poor neighbor of Jackson. “There just wasn’t a lot of commercial or retail in town,” he says. “And there wasn’t a lot of money.” The sewers, the streets—it all needed attention. “Having a baseball team in Pearl? That was a pipe dream.”
Nobody had sent Bennett to Pearl. He was working in construction and trying to launch himself as a dealmaker. “I was really a rogue,” he says. Now 47, he came to Mississippi from central Florida, where his father ran a lawn-mowing business. “We grew up in a double-wide trailer with six of us and a bunch of dogs and cats,” he says. “And we cut grass for the right people.” One of the lawns Bennett used to tend belonged to a part-owner of the Tampa Bay Rays, and he learned that the franchise’s Double-A team was looking to move elsewhere.
Bennett had no special fondness for baseball and never played, but he saw a chance to make some money: sell a Southern town on a team, get the Rays on board, and collect a piece of the action. He started in Jackson, the biggest city in Mississippi, which lost its Double-A team in 1999. The city wasn’t interested, however, and the Rays’ affiliate wound up moving to Montgomery, Ala. Bennett, close to broke, needed a new team and a new town. If Jackson wouldn’t listen, maybe Pearl, a scruffy suburb of 26,000 next door, would.
“Pearl was the trailer park capital of Mississippi,” Bennett says, “so that basically means it was the trailer park capital of the world.” He went to Foster’s office in City Hall with a blind offer. Bennett didn’t have a team in mind yet, but he figured if the mayor was willing, he could find one. He left with a handshake agreement. “I’ll handle the politics,” he recalls Foster saying. “You handle the baseball.”
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