Atlanta Braves Go To Bat To Feed Health Care Workers During Pandemic

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Atlanta Braves Chef Pete Smithing cooking up some cheese sauce at the ballpark.

The Atlanta Braves were scheduled to continue their nine-game homestand hosting the Arizona Diamondbacks Tuesday night at Truist Park. But as the nation’s coronavirus shutdown stretched into its sixth week, tonight’s contest became the tenth Braves home game to be postponed by the pandemic.

For a Major League Baseball team that averaged close to 33,000 fans per game last season, that means a lot of concession food sitting in boxes, refrigerators and freezers and potentially going to waste. Now, the Braves are planning to put that food to good use by feeding Atlanta’s needy and frontline health care workers.

The Braves are launching two food programs over the next several weeks. The first, the Braves Home Plate Project, is aimed at putting the tomahawk chop to hunger around the city. The second, Meals for the Brave, will provide food to Atlanta’s health care workers on the frontline of the battle versus this disease.

“We miss baseball and would much rather being playing baseball,” Braves Director of Community Affairs and Executive Director of the Atlanta Braves Foundation Danielle Bedasse said. “But these last six weeks, everyone, at every level of the organization has been focused on what we can do to help the community.”

The Braves Home Plate Project will be led by Chef Pete Smithing, who heads up the kitchens at the team’s ballpark. That project will donate more than 25,000 meals in the community over the next four to six weeks with the help of Second Helpings, Meals on Wheels, GoodR and YMCA among 20 partner agencies.

Meals for the Brave will partner with Molson/Coors and Terrapin Taproom to offer meals to early and evening shift workers at Northside and WellStar Hospitals every Thursday through May 7. Seventeen local restaurants will participate in this effort.

Today’s menu called for pulled smoke chicken alfredo with broccoli rabe. Hardly hot dogs and popcorn; 2,500 meals were delivered to the YMCA.

Not an easy task when Chef Pete’s workforce has been reduced from 250 people to seven.

“I thought it was going to be a ‘3’ but it’s a ‘9 or 9 ½ ‘ easily,” Chef Pete answered when asked to describe the level of difficulty in providing so much foot with limited staff. “It just takes time to make that much sauce and to cook that much pasta.”

“Chef Pete has been amazing,” Debasse said. “He’s been really excited about it. He took inventory of what we had and said here’s a menu that we can prepare and everyday it will be a different meal.”

‘It makes my heart happy. I was upset that baseball didn’t happen,” Chef Pete said. “But then it was like, ‘oh what are we going to do with all this food.’”

Another thing the Braves will do with all that food, is to send their Los Bravos food truck to help feed the needy in Chattanooga, Nashville, Gwinnett, Rome and Albany. That initiative will start May 1 at Atlanta’s Shepherd Center.

Meanwhile, the world waits to return to normal and Major League Baseball is waiting just like the rest of us. Hopefully before long we will all be back at the ballpark singing “one, two, three strikes…” coronavirus is out!