MLB Senior Vice President of Global Events Jeremiah Yolkut discusses with Boardroom everything it takes to put together the Atlanta All-Star festivities.
The Major League Baseball world will converge on Atlanta and Cobb County, Georgia, this weekend for All-Star week festivities, one of the league’s crown jewel annual events. Over time, MLB has added to its signature All-Star Game and Home Run Derby, including an HBCU showcase on Saturday, a futures game featuring top prospects on Saturday followed by a celebrity softball game, the MLB Draft on Sunday, a Tuesday player red carpet show, and various community events headlined by an interactive All-Star village.
The mid-summer classic, celebrating its 95th edition, takes place every year at a time when other major sports are out of season, and fans have grown accustomed to looking forward to a huge event, wherever they may be, whether they’re adults on vacation or kids growing up at camp.
“In the sports calendar, it sits there as this time where fans can connect to something bigger than just the day-to-day of baseball,” Jeremiah Yolkut, MLB’s senior vice president of global events, told Boardroom. “You have this blank canvas where there’s this open time, and you’re able to put on this big moment where the industry comes together in one centralized city.”
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It’s up to Yolkut and his team to lead the charge on filling this blank canvas with a series of events and moments that fans in that city will never forget. Read more below on how MLB has to put together this tentpole event years in advance. While MLB plans an All-Star week at least two years in advance, this particular Atlanta event has been in the making for more than five years. The 2021 All-Star Game was originally scheduled to be in Atlanta, following the 2017 opening of Truist Park. However, protests over an election law passed by Georgia that year prompted MLB to quickly relocate the festivities to Denver.
This four-year delay, along with the Braves’ 2021 World Series win, enabled MLB to build a more familiar relationship with local officials, area hotels, and the city’s tourism bureau.
“So it’s actually built a nice camaraderie,” Yolkut said.
The longer MLB has to prepare for an event, with plans long underway for next year’s All-Star week in Philadelphia to coincide with America’s bisesquicentennial, the more optionality it has. That means booking the best hotels, securing their preferred venues for ancillary events, and having more time to plan and execute their vision. This year, the game will be in Cobb County, while teams and players may want to stay in the city of Atlanta itself. MLB reserved 10-12 hotels in Buckhead and 6-8 more in Cobb, while fans will be staying all over the metro area. Yolkut and MLB are working with several different counties, coordinating with local law enforcement and operations due to the wider footprint Atlanta’s event will have than previous editions in centralized cities like Seattle and San Diego.
And while the city footprint is wider, The Battery ballpark village setup in Cobb County that the Braves developed will ensure, Yolkut said, that 80% of the events this year will be within walking distance of each other. One event that won’t be in that area that MLB is excited about is a community 4.4-mile run starting and ending at the Braves’ old Turner Field stadium in Fulton County and snaking through and around Grant Park. The distance pays homage to Hank Aaron, who famously wore No. 44 as a Brave in a legendary career that included 755 career home runs and 25 All-Star appearances.
“We wanted to figure out a way to connect the old and the new here,” Yolkut said. “Being able to go to the old ballpark and see fans running through the streets of Atlanta in and around the Summerhill neighborhood and seeing that connection to Hank is going to be a pretty meaningful experience.”
MLB’s 30-person global events team will oversee the planning and execution of All-Star Week with the help of 100-200 additional staffers from different departments across the league, like communications, marketing, sponsorship, and gaming. The events team had people on the ground beginning to load in the All-Star Village as early as July 2, with the ballpark setup beginning after the Braves’ last home game on Sunday. Optimizing the full experience is generally divided into five primary categories, Yolkut said:
- There’s game presentation, which includes the various ceremonies and video boards across every All-Star week event that dictate the way fans experience the weeklong festivities. “All the people that make the ceremonies happen and the giant flags in the outfield and the stadium flyover,” Yolkut said, “those things are detailed and coordinated with a lot of folks in our office.”
- Event services encompass all the hotels, meetings, and hospitality events taking place.
- Event operations consists of a team overseeing how the ballpark is run, every aspect of transportation, and the logistics of getting all the players and their families to and from events. “It’s all those nuanced details that the public doesn’t necessarily get a lot of visibility on,” Yolkut said, “that has to be top of mind for us because the stars’ experience is really critical to the success of the event. We need to make sure their experience is positive and you’re taking care of them as much as you’re taking care of their partner and their children, who are also joining them on this.”
- There’s the ticketing for all the events, which must be handled in a specific way to ensure all lead commitments are met.
- And MLB’s business and strategy group oversees all the financial components of the event, including the bidding process for future All-Star weeks and collaborating with future host cities to secure event venues outside their respective ballparks.
In addition to MLB employees, Braves staff at Truist Park will operate the venue as they do throughout the season, and staffers from all 30 teams will be on hand to assist as well. MLB has also invested years of work and millions of dollars in All-Star legacy projects, focusing on community, charity, and social responsibility initiatives that will have lasting impacts far beyond the week of the festivities.
If you also include all the folks working at the venues, hotels, the broadcast teams, and all the volunteers who will contribute over the week, thousands of people will contribute to ensuring All-Star Atlanta’s success. Achieving that success comes with obstacles, most notably the transportation and getting sold-out crowds to and from the week’s marquee events, as well as having proper contingency plans in place in case of rain or bad weather that impacts the city.
Once Yolkut and his team plan and execute on the Atlanta All-Star week, there’s a mix of relief and the feeling that he wants to raise the stakes for next year’s game in Philadelphia. But the work doesn’t stop there: After all, he’s got a Speedway Classic and a Little League Classic to plan for August as MLB continues to make memories for millions along the way.
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