PawSox CEO: How about public gives us lots of money, we give them worthless deed to stadium?

Pawtucket Red Sox CEO Larry Lucchino announced yesterday that he wants a new stadium in Pawtucket, paid for with the help of an undisclosed amount of public money — pretty much the same thing he said a year and a half ago when he was last heard from on this matter. But this time it’s different, says Lucchino, because it would be a publicly owned stadium:

The concept of a publicly owned stadium is a “complete reversal” from the team’s failed 2015 efforts to win public support for a privately owned stadium on former highway land in Providence, Lucchino said.

Uhhh. Dude. You know that public ownership of a stadium is mostly just a dodge to get out of paying property taxes, right? If Lucchino were proposing to let the city of Pawtucket actually control the stadium’s revenues, and maybe charge his team rent for playing there, that might qualify as a complete reversal, but needless to say he didn’t propose any of that.

Anyway, I’ve already been invited to appear on one radio show and one webcast (neither of which are at times I can make, unfortunately) to talk about this latest “announcement,” so clearly Lucchino’s statement accomplished what he set out to do, which is to jump-start talk about a new stadium, even after his last stadium funding request was roundly rejected and he promised to shut up about stadiums for five years so he could focus on healing “wounds that were suffered by fans” when he threatened to move the team to Worcester. If I were going on the radio, here’s what I’d say: “Don’t feed the trolls, people.”