Author Archives: Neil deMause

Friday roundup: New Rangers stadium scam movie, Nevada arena petitions rejected over technicality, and many many dumb ideas for getting you (or cardboard cutouts of you) into stadiums this year

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Welcome to the end of another crazy week, which seems redundant to say, since that’s all of them lately. I spent a bunch of it working on this article on what science (but not necessarily your local newspaper) can tell us about not just whether reopening after lockdowns is a good idea, but what kinds of reopening are safe enough to consider. And important enough to consider, since as one infectious disease expert told me, “It’s not ‘open’ or ‘shut’—there’s a whole spectrum in between. We need to be thinking about what are the high-priority things that we need to reopen from a functioning point of view, and not an enjoyment point of view.”

And with that cheery thought, on to other cheery thoughts:

  • If you’re a fan of either sports stadium shenanigans or calamitous public-policy train wrecks in general — and I know you are, or why would you be reading this site — you should absolutely check out “Throw A Billion Dollars From The Helicopter,” a new documentary about the Texas Rangers‘ successful campaign to extract half a billion dollars from the city of Arlington so they could play in air-conditioning. It’s a story that has everything: a mayor who was elected as a stadium-subsidy critic then turned around to approve the biggest stadium subsidy in local history, George W. Bush grubbing for public money and failing to do basic math, grassroots anti-red-light camera activists getting dragged into stadium politics, a trip back to the Washington Senators’ final home game before moving to Texas which they had to forfeit because fans ran on the field and walked off with the bases, footage of that 1994 Canadian TV news story I always cite about how video-rental stores comedy clubs in Toronto were so happy with extra business during the baseball strike that they wished hockey would go on strike too, plus interviews with stadium experts like Roger Noll, Rod Fort, Victor Matheson, Allen Sanderson (the man whose line about more effective ways than building a stadium for boosting your city’s economy gave the documentary its title), and me. Rent it here on Vimeo if you want some substitute fireworks this weekend.
  • Opponents of the publicly funded minor-league hockey arena for the Henderson Silver Knights got enough signatures to put a recall on the November ballot, but have had their petitions invalidated for not including a detailed enough description of their objections on every page. This will almost certainly result in lawsuits, which is how pretty much every battle for public oversight of sports subsidy deals ends — that, and “in tears.”
  • The San Diego city council approved the $86.2 million sale of the site of the Chargers‘ former stadium to San Diego State University, which plans to build a new $310 million football stadium there. Whether this is a good deal for the public is especially tricky, because not only do you have to figure the land value of a 135-acre site in the middle of an economic meltdown, but also San Diego State is a public university, so really this is one public agency selling land to another. It’s all more than I can manage this morning, so instead let’s look at this rendering of a proposed park for the site that features bicyclists riding diagonally across a bike path to avoid a woman who stands in their way with arms akimbo, while birds with bizarre forked tails wheel overhead.
  • You know what would be a terrible idea in the middle of a pandemic that has closed stadiums to fans because gathering in one place is a great way to spread virus? An article telling fans what public spaces they can gather in to catch a glimpse of game action in closed stadiums, and Axios has you covered there! And so does the Associated Press!
  • Sure, hundreds of thousands of people have died and there could be hundreds of thousands more to go, but won’t anyone think of the impact on TV network profits if there’s no football to show in the fall?
  • And speaking of keeping an eye strictly on the bottom line, the NFL is considering requiring fans (if there are any) who attend NFL games this fall (if there are any) to sign a waiver promising not to sue if they contract Covid as a result. But can I still sue if someone goes to a football game, contracts Covid, and then infects me? I’m not actually sure how easily one could sue in either case — since you can never be sure where you were infected with the virus, it would be like suing over getting cancer from secondhand smoke — but I always like the idea of suing the NFL, so thanks for the idea, guys!
  • New York Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner says he wants to see fans at Yankee Stadium “in the 20-30 percent range,” a number and prediction he failed to indicate he pulled from anywhere other than his own butt. Meanwhile, the Chicago Cubs are reportedly planning to open rooftops around Wrigley Field at 25% capacity for watching games this year, something that might actually be legal since while would mean about 800 fans in attendance, they wouldn’t all be in attendance in the same place, so it could get around rules about large public gatherings.
  • If you want to spend $49 and up so a cardboard cutout of yourself can watch Oakland A’s games, you can now do that on the team’s website. If that sounds like a terrible deal, know that with each purchase you also get two free tickets to an exhibition game at the Coliseum in 2021 (if there are any), and if you pay $129 then you also get a foul ball mailed to you if it hits your cutout, all of which still sounds like a terrible deal but significantly more hilarious.
  • If you were hoping to make one last trip to Pawtucket’s 74-year-old McCoy Stadium to see Pawtucket Red Sox baseball before the team relocates to Worcester after this season — it was on my now-deleted summer calendar — you’ll have to settle for eating dinner on the field, because the PawSox season, along with the rest of the minor-league baseball season, has been officially called off. Also, the Boston Herald reports that the Lowell Spinners single-A team won’t be offering refunds to those who bought tickets for non-canceled games, only credits toward 2021 tickets — shouldn’t ticketholders be able to sue for not receiving the product they paid for? I want somebody to sue somebody, already! When will America’s true pastime be allowed to reopen?
  • Here’s a New York Times article on how new MLS stadiums are bucking past stadium trends by being “privately financed, with modest public support for modernizing infrastructure,” which is only true if you consider $98 million (Columbus) and $81 million and up (Cincinnati) to be “modest” figures.
  • I apologize for failing to report last week on the Anaheim Ducks‘ proposed development around their hockey arena, less because it’s super interesting or there is amusing vaportecture than because it’s supposed to be called “ocV!BE,” which is the best name ever, so long as you want to live in a freshly built condo in what sounds like either a randomly generated password or an Aughts rock band.

Mark Davis is a big dumb idiot, Tuesday edition

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If some things about Covid safety are becoming increasingly clear — outdoors is better than indoors, short interaction times are better than long ones, masks are hugely important — there are still a lot of question marks, including how safe outdoor sports are, for both players and fans. For now, most sports leagues look to be committed to restarting this summer, though not all the players may choose to show up: The Colorado Rockies‘ Ian Desmond just became the fourth MLB player to declare he’ll be skipping 2020, something that overshadowed the rest of his eloquent Instagram post focused on baseball’s structural racism, and more defections are likely, as everyone starts deciding for themselves what is reasonable behavior amid a fast-moving epidemic that a month ago seemed to be sparing the South and West but now is very much not.

Of course, if you’re a sports team owner, you get to make decisions for far more than just yourself. And Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis is ready to make all kinds of decisions, based on the latest science — ha ha ha, no, of course it’s based on him wanting to sell tickets, the more glorious tickets the better. And he’s especially steamed that his fellow NFL owners have decided to sell ad signage space on seats near the field this season instead of allowing every single seat to be filled to capacity:

“I can’t imagine telling one fan they cannot attend the opening game of our inaugural season in Las Vegas at the most magnificent stadium that they helped to build, let alone tell 3,500 fans that their seats are gone for the entire season,” Davis said. “Those seats in the front rows are some of our most ardent fans, including members of the famed Black Hole. You think I want to sell advertising on their seats? … We will do everything we can to see that all our fans are able to attend every game this season.”

“They helped to build” is a nice acknowledgement from Davis, given the $750 million he received from Nevada taxpayers for his new stadium, though given that his marketing campaign has been largely geared toward selling tickets to out-of-towners — the Black Hole members mostly still live in Northern California, presumably — maybe that’s not what he’s talking about at all.

But more alarming was the idea that Davis wants to have a full stadium this fall, in a state that is seeing a huge spike in virus cases even as testing rates have not increased. Though he immediately hedged on that as well:

“What Gov. (Steve) Sisolak and the state of Nevada determine to be safe in the face of coronavirus after careful consideration, I’ll abide by,” Davis said. “And at the appropriate time, he may determine that it isn’t safe for 100 percent of the fans to attend. At that point, I have to make a decision.”

If it comes to that, Davis wonders if the best solution might be to play all games without fans.

“Maybe that is the fairest thing to do,” he said. “Maybe it’s all or none, because I’d hate to have to tell any of our fans they can’t go to some or any Raiders games.”

So he’d rather tell all fans they can’t go to games than some fans? Or he just wants to make sure if he can’t sell tickets, no other NFL teams can? (He also griped during his Las Vegas Review-Journal article that “We have potentially 32 different capacities and seating formations. Where is the equity in that?”)

Or maybe looking for any sense in Davis’s statements is a futile scavenger hunt, because there was also this:

While other leagues are creating a bubble component to protect players, the NFL has not. Teams will be in their respective cities, and presumably players and staff will be free to come and go as they please.

“You can keep players from the fans, but you can’t keep players from the players,” Davis said. “That could be our Achilles’ heel. Without some form of bubble, we may be asking for trouble.”

Okay, so to recap: Mark Davis will do everything he can to make sure 65,000 fans are cheek to jowl at Raiders games this fall, but if not he may try to insist that no fans can go to NFL games at all, but players absolutely have to be kept away from anyone other than teammates, such as people in the general public who might be teeming with virus. Which they might have picked up at, you know, some big public gathering, maybe one that involved lots of cheering and shouting that is great at spreading viral droplets? It’s almost as if letting unelected business leaders set public health policy isn’t a great idea — speaking of which, somebody tell Ohio that, wouldja?

Friday roundup: Grizzlies lease has secret out clause, judge orders do-over in Nashville stadium vote, reviewers agree Rangers stadium is super-butt-ugly

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Normally the end of June is when news around here starts slowing down for the summer, but as no one needs reminding, nothing is normal anymore. There isn’t even time to get into sports leagues trying to reopen in the midst of what could be an “apocalyptic” surge in virus cases across the South and West, because busy times call for paralipsis:

  • The Daily Memphian has uncovered what it calls a “trap door” in the Memphis Grizzlies‘ lease that could let the team get out of the agreement early if it has even a single season where it doesn’t sell 1) 14,900 tickets per game, 2) all of its 64 largest suites, or 3) fewer than 2,500 season club seats. (There is at least a “force majeure” clause that should exclude any seasons played during a pandemic.) That could force the city to buy up tickets in order to keep the lease in force, the paper notes, and though talks between the team and city are underway to renegotiate the deal, you just know that Grizzlies owner Robert Pera will want something in exchange for giving up his opt-out clause. Pera has so far said all the right things about not wanting to move the team, but then, he doesn’t have to when he has sports journalists to spread relocation rumors for him; if savvy negotiators create leverage, city officials really need to learn to stop handing leverage to team owners when they write up leases, because that really never works out well.
  • In a major victory for local governments at least following their own damn rules, opponents of Nashville’s $50 million-plus-free-land deal for a new MLS stadium won a court victory this week when a judge ruled that the city violated Tennessee’s Open Meetings Act by approving the stadium’s construction contract at a meeting held with only 48 hours notice, when the law requires five days. The city’s Metro Sports Authority can now just hold another meeting with normal notice and reapprove the contract, but still it’s good to see someone’s hand slapped for a change for hiding from public scrutiny.
  • The reviews of the Texas Rangers‘ new stadium that received $450 million in subsidies so the team could have air-conditioning are in, and critics agree, it looks like a giant metal warehouse, or maybe a barbecue grill, or maybe the Chernobyl sarcophagus. Okay, they just agree that is is one ugly-ass stadium from the outside; firsthand reports on whether the upper-deck seats are as bad as they look in the renderings will have to await fans actually being allowed inside, which could come as soon as later this summer, unless by then Texans are too busy cowering in their homes to avoid having to go to the state’s overwhelmed hospital system
  • Amazon has bought naming rights to Seattle’s former Key Arena (Key Bank’s naming rights expired eons ago), and because Amazon needs more name recognition like it needs more stories about its terrible working conditions, it has decided to rename the building Climate Pledge Arena, after an Amazon-launched campaign to get companies to promise to produce zero net carbon emissions by 2040, something the company itself is off to a terrible start on. The reporting doesn’t say, but presumably if greenwashing goes out of style, Amazon will retain the right in a couple of years to rename the building Prime Video (Starts At $8.99/Month) Arena.
  • The NFL is still planning to have fans in attendance at games this fall, but it’s also going to be tarping off the first six to eight rows of seats and selling ads on the tarps as a hedge against ticket-sales losses. Even when and if things return to normal, I’m thinking this could be a great way for the league to create that artificial ticket scarcity that it’s been wanting for years, n’est-ce pas?
  • Amid concern that the New York Islanders will be left temporarily homeless or forced to move back to Brooklyn in the wake of the Nassau Coliseum being shuttered, Nassau County’s top elected official has promised that “the next time that the Islanders play in New York it will be in Nassau County.” If my reading-between-the-lines radar is working properly, that probably means we can expect to see the Islanders’ upcoming season played someplace like Bridgeport, Connecticut.
  • New Arizona Coyotes president Xavier Gutierrez is definitely hitting the ground with all his rhetoric cylinders running, telling ESPN: “When I took the job, [owner] Alex Meruelo told me finding a solution for where we should be located was priority one through five. I thought it was one through five, and he quickly corrected me and said, ‘No, it’s priority one through 10 for you.'” Shouldn’t that really be one to 11?
  • Here’s an actual San Diego Union-Tribune sports columnist saying voters did the city a favor by turning down a $1.15 billion-dollar Chargers stadium plan, because the city would be having a tough time paying it off now what with the economy in shambles. Of course, $1.15 billion still would have been $1.15 billion even if San Diego had the money, but budget crunches do seem to have a way of focusing people’s attention on opportunity costs.
  • Speaking of which, here’s an article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution about how it’s hard for Cobb County to pay off the construction debt on its Atlanta Braves stadium what with tourism tax revenue having fallen through the floor, though at least the AJC did call up economist J.C. Bradbury to let him say that it doesn’t really matter which tax money was used because “there’s no found money in government.”
  • Both of those are still way better articles, though, than devoting resources to a story about how holding baseball games without fans is going to lead to a glut of bags of peanuts, for which Good Morning America has us covered. Won’t anyone think of the peanuts?!?

Angels owner releases pictures of whatever stadium development idea is in his head this very second

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After getting granted a one-month extension by the Anaheim city council, Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno has come out with his redevelopment plan for the Angel Stadium land he got from the city at a bargain price last winter, and the whole thing is so handwavy that it makes you wonder why he couldn’t have just made a crayon drawing of some buildings and released that on time in May. Let’s see what Moreno’s planning team came up with:

That is indeed a bunch of numbers of things! Can we get any renderings that aren’t just bird’s-eye schematics?

That’s a little better, I guess, though still pretty generic, aside from somebody coloring in the roofs green because that what one does in 2020.

More to the point, there’s nothing that I can find in Moreno’s plans that indicates a timeline: Is he actually committing to building all this stuff, or just sketching out pretty pictures of what it might look like if he decides this is a good idea? (Past “ballpark village” concepts, it’s worth noting, haven’t always immediately panned out as planned, and have sometimes come with requests for more public money to make them happen.) Presumably if the city of Anaheim is selling him the land because they want it developed, there should be some rules about when it will be developed by — maybe that’s still in the “TBD” folder, but if so, what’s the point of releasing this plan now?

As for what will happen to the stadium itself, we learn this from the Los Angeles Times:

The Angels put off for now the decision to renovate Angel Stadium or replace it. If the Angels decide to build a new ballpark, the plan calls for it to be located immediately adjacent to the 57 Freeway, and closer to the Anaheim train station. If they renovate, they plan to open up the outfield and turn it into a grand entrance plaza.

Definitely one of those things! Maybe.

Let’s see, anything else remotely of note here? There’s a guy pointing randomly at the sky outside a bistro called “Bistro,” and oh hey check it out:

Yes, that is indeed Cab-Hailing Purse Woman, though someone has tried to disguise her true intent by placing a giant foam finger over her cab-hailing hand. If this clip-art woman is indeed the key to all sports-related economic development plans, maybe it would cheaper for cities just to buy her plane tickets (on clip-art airplanes, obviously) so she can bestow her presence on their populaces? Do you think she’s based on a real person, and if so does that person get royalties? Did anyone at the rendering software company think to shop around for a purse company that would pay for product placement? So very many questions, so few answers.

Amazing study claims spending public money on sports is good because big cities are big

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One of the basic tenets of sports economics at this point is that there is zero evidence that whether a city plays host to sports teams has any measurable effect on its local economic health. That was the finding back in the 1990s when Joanna Cagan and I first started researching sports stadiums, and it’s continued to be the case in more recent studies — though as academic researchers have told me, it’s hard to get new studies approved when studying the economic impact of sports teams is like studying whether gravity makes things fall down.

So it was more than a little surprising when I was alerted (thanks, David!) to a new study out of Ball State University that claims that investing in luring and retaining pro sports teams has a long-term payoff for cities. According to the university’s press release, Census Bureau data show that if you look at certain long-term metrics, hosting a sports team “has a positive effect on the GDP and the population of the metropolitan area.”

There were some red flags, certainly — for starters, nobody on the study team appears to have any background in economics, rather being an assemblage of IT professors and business students — but still I figured this would be worth checking into. And then I got a look at the actual study itself, and I knew that I had to head straight here to share it with you, because this is one of the most hilariously incompetent pieces of academic work you could ever expect to see. Let’s skip straight to the “methodology” section, which is really where you want to start in any economic research paper:

We argue that not all economic benefits are measurable with typical metrics. Nor are they tangible in terms of their visible impacts on the appearance of the city and its residents. Rather, the main impact of investing in large-scale sports facilities and also hosting professional sports teams appears in the long term.

Okay, so not “typical metrics,” but rather something “in the long term.” What’s your actual data, guys?

In order to see the effect of hosting professional sports teams on the local economy, the correlation between the sum of the number of teams and the GDP of the Metropolitan area is calculated which is given below.

GDP SUM(Teams)
Linear Correlation Table Data Set #1 Data Set #1
GDP 1.000 0.881
SUM(Teams) 0.881 1.000

Table1. Correlation between Team Numbers and GDP

And … that’s it. This entire paper is based on the observation that if you look at which cities had the most economic growth from 2001 to 2018, and which cities have the most sports teams, they’re the same cities.

But, you know, of course they are. The whole reason you choose put a sports team in a city is because it’s growing in relative size and economic activity — it’s why Rochester used to have an NBA team, but doesn’t anymore, and won’t anytime soon. Also, the last two decades have seen a historic rebound of the largest cities in particular, with well-off residents and companies alike recolonizing the metropolitan areas that they largely abandoned in the 1960s and ’70s. So if big cities are doing well over all, and big cities have the most sports teams, obviously there’s going to be a correlation there — it’s like observing that rich people tend to own the most yachts, and concluding that buying a yacht is a great way to get rich.

This is one of the most famous logical fallacies of all time, and is usually summed up as correlation does not imply causation. It has its own Wikipedia page, with some terrific examples, the best of which may be this one:

Example 1

Sleeping with one’s shoes on is strongly correlated with waking up with a headache.

Therefore, sleeping with one’s shoes on causes headache.

The above example commits the correlation-implies-causation fallacy, as it prematurely concludes that sleeping with one’s shoes on causes headache. A more plausible explanation is that both are caused by a third factor, in this case going to bed drunk, which thereby gives rise to a correlation. So the conclusion is false.

I reached out to Ball State’s PR spokesperson to see if the authors would be available to answer some questions about their work, but I haven’t heard back. In the meantime, I talked to College of the Holy Cross economics professor Victor Matheson, who agreed with me on the correlation vs. causation error, and added:

It is unfortunate that they didn’t understand the huge statistical error they were making here, but that’s what being a student is all about – learning by doing and recognizing mistakes so you don’t make them again in the future. What is concerning here, however, is that two Ball State professors also put their name on a paper that is clearly wrong and allowed it to be issued in such a way that the general public could read it despite its obvious flaws. Perhaps they were just trying to do something out of their area of expertise and didn’t understand why the analysis was wrong, but I
certainly wouldn’t put my name on a paper about computer technology or information systems unless I was very sure that I wasn’t doing something that would instantly make me look very foolish.

If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that at least this paper doesn’t seem to have resulted in a flurry of media coverage that grabs at the man-bites-dog nature of the headline without looking into whether the paper itself makes any damn sense. In fact, I thought twice about whether writing about this would be giving the paper more attention than it deserved — but it is still a fascinating case study in how bad ideas can take on a momentum of their own, eventually enlisting an entire public relations apparatus to put them out into the world and defend them. Thank goodness we have professional journalists out there to tell legitimate research from utter gibberish — oh wait…

MLB’s aborted restart shows sports owners only get the “evil genius” thing half-right

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On Friday I reported how plans to restart American pro sports leagues were hitting snags in the form of rising Covid caseloads in major sports states like Arizona, Florida, and Texas, and since then things have gotten oh so much worse:

Now, there’s no reason you can’t hold a sports season even with a few players testing positive — it’s what soccer leagues in Europe are doing, figuring that if you keep testing and quarantining anyone who turns out to be infectious, the rest of the league can continue more or less as normal. But Europe has way, way less virus than much of the US right now: Even the United Kingdom has a daily new cases per capita figure that’s barely 5% of that in Arizona, so fewer Premier League players are likely to be getting infected when they go to a local restaurant or grocery store (“community spread,” in the epidemiology lingo), meaning there’s less risk of a surge of cases that would require an entire team to be sequestered for two weeks.

This is the whole reason MLB was considering its “bubble plan,” wherein all the teams and game officials and TV crews and hotel workers and everyone else necessary to support them would be walled off in a single location, something that it soon became clear would be entirely unworkable. The NBA is looking to do its own version of a bubble, but as that includes things like being allowed to leave the “campus” for excused absences without having to quarantine on your return, it’s clear that this is more a “let’s figure out something workable and cross our fingers” plan than something that’s actually airtight from a public health standpoint — if that wasn’t already clear from the fact that the NBA is locating its bubble in Orlando and not New Zealand.

There is also always the possibility of just rolling the dice and figuring if some players get infected, so be it — they’re relatively young and healthy, so most of them probably won’t get very sick. But that can’t be said for coaches, or game officials, or players with preexisting risk factors (have we discussed here how half of the US adult population has high blood pressure?), or family members who are going to continue to be in contact with players, whether they’re in a bubble or not? Even setting aside whether sports leagues want to be responsible for exacerbating the spread of a deadly disease in the general population, it would be very bad if they ended up telling Dusty Baker he has to decide between risking his life to show up for work and staying at home watching cowboy movies. (Not that plenty of other workers aren’t being asked to do the same thing, but that’s not great either.)

As it looks increasingly like the US is headed toward a patchwork of outbreak scenarios, with some regions seeing low caseloads while others face second waves or even first waves that never ended, it’s probably impossible to have any kind of sports that involves travel and maintain any kind of safety from infection for those involved. That leaves several unpalatable options: 1) gather all the players in one spot with low infection rates and try to play a quick season before they go stir-crazy and miss their families; 2) damn the virus and go full speed ahead, and hope you still have enough players to finish out the season after they start getting quarantined or head for the hills to avoid getting infected; 3) cancel everything and wait for a vaccine — or at least for infections to get down to a low enough boil that contact tracing can keep them under control, something that isn’t getting off to a great start what with states reopening even while caseloads are still high.

It would arguably make more sense, even just in terms of self-interest, for sports team owners to take the lead by saying, “We’re not restarting nothing until the virus is under control,” in hopes of encouraging local leaders to pursue a plan where in a couple of months we might be in a place — like Spain and Germany and even the UK are in now — where resuming sports might be a reasonable gamble instead of a desperate dice roll. But then, long-term thinking is never what sports team owners were known for; the botched restart plans are just another reminder that rich people may know how to throw their money and power around, but that doesn’t mean they’re always going to be smart about it.

Oakland reportedly ready to sell Coliseum site, remember when that was A’s owners’ biggest problem?

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The Oakland city council is reportedly (according to “sources close to the talks” who spoke with the San Francisco Chronicle’s Phil Matier) now ready to sell the city’s half of the Oakland Coliseum property to the A’s owners, after the Covid economic crisis has left the city desperate for cash:

The decision came Thursday in a closed session and marks a stark change from last October when city leaders filed suit in an attempt to block Alameda County from selling its half-share of the 155-acre East Oakland site to the team…

Council members are barred from discussing what goes on in closed session, but sources close to the talks said the city’s deal would mirror the county deal and net about $85 million spread out over a yet-to-be determined number of years…

“For me it is about looking at how things have changed when it comes to money,” Oakland City Councilman Noel Gallo said before the meeting.

“After the coronavirus shutdown, we are looking at a very, very serious budget deficit, and they are saying it could cost us $6 million just to maintain the site,” Gallo said. “We don’t have that kind of money. This way we can get some badly needed help.”

As discussed before, this isn’t a terrible idea: $85 million spread out over a few years seems pretty close to fair market value, and if it would get the A’s to start paying property taxes on the Coliseum property, all the better. Yes, there are still state laws requiring that public land for sale be used at least in part for affordable housing, and there’s still the whole issue of whether the Coliseum site would be used for development that would then help fund a new A’s stadium at Howard Terminal, or if a stadium would be built instead on the Coliseum site, or how exactly land value and demand for new development will even work in a post-Covid world. Many, many devils in the details in other words, all of which will presumably be haggled over by the two parties in the middle of a rapidly shifting health and economic disaster — watch out for information asymmetries, that the only advice I can give.

Friday roundup: Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it for 150 years edition

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Happy Juneteenth, the most quintessentially American of holidays, in that it celebrates both the nation’s ability to right seemingly intractable horrific historic wrongs through grassroots action faster than anyone ever could have dreamed, and also its ability to then revert to virtually the exact same horrific wrongs in all but name for the next century or so. We got issues.

And speaking of issues — if that’s not too inappropriate to compare the enslavement of an entire people with the siphoning off of tax dollars for sports, which it probably is, but segues gotta segue — here are a bunch regarding stadiums and arenas that reared or re-reared their heads in the last week:

Newly renovated Nassau Coliseum dies of arena glut, after short illness

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So this happened, or is happening, or is reported to be happening based on “people familiar with the matter”:

The Nassau Coliseum, the Long Island arena that hosted professional hockey games and rock concerts, is turning off the lights.

Billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov’s Onexim Sports and Entertainment, which operates the arena under a lease from Nassau County, is planning to shutter the venue indefinitely while it seeks investors to take over operations and pick up the remaining debt on the building, according to people familiar with the matter.

Onexim has told potential investors that it would turn over the lease in return for assuming roughly $100 million in loans on the property, said one of the people, who asked not to be named because the discussions were private. The firm, which is laying off arena employees, could also surrender the lease to its lenders, the person said.

Onexim released a statement saying that the Coliseum’s value “will be best realized by other parties” and blaming the Covid pandemic for the move, but the Coliiseum has other, much bigger problems: It just underwent a $180 million renovation to modernize it so it could compete with other New York–area venues for concerts, then saw a whole new arena start construction at nearby Belmont Park. The last time something similar to this happened, it was Newark opening the Prudential Center just down the turnpike from the Meadowlands Arena (or whatever it was called right then), which resulted in the latter arena closing and turning into a state-subsidized movie soundstage, because there really aren’t enough events to go around in the tristate area to fill five arenas. Prokhorov clearly saw the writing on the wall then — he put the arena up for sale right after the Islanders arena was approved — so declaring Operation Shutdown is the next logical step, even if maybe loudly declaring that your arena can’t make any money is not the absolute best way to find buyers for it.

The immediate impact, of course, is that the New York Islanders now have nowhere to play (once having a place for sports teams to play becomes a thing again), as the team had only just announced earlier this year that it would be playing the 2020-21 season in Nassau after giving up on Brooklyn’s Barclays Center. (Okay, also it may mess with this summer’s planned drive-in movies in the arena parking lot, but I’m guessing somewhat fewer people will be concerned about that.) Newsday speculates that the team would have no choice but to return to Brooklyn for a season if the Coliseum remains shuttered once the next NHL season starts up sometime next winter, because its old lease says it has to play games at either the Coliseum or Barclays, but it will likely take lawyers with a fine-tooth comb to determine what that means if Nassau remains padlocked. Not that the Islanders would have many other options, though I suppose if pandemic-related bans on fans are still in effect come January 2021, they could always play at some college rink or in Iceland or something.

While the pandemic didn’t create venue glut, it certainly seems to be forcing some hard reckonings with it: The Rose Bowl is also reportedly trying to figure out how to stay afloat amid tons of other Los Angeles–area stadium options, with everything on the table from adding miniature golf to shutting down entirely, though the latter would be a last resort. (The Rose Bowl is also getting $11.5 million in emergency cash from its owner, the city of Pasadena, which is not going to help with Pasadena’s massive schools budget gap.) There’s been an awful lot of blinkered optimism about letting a thousand sports venues bloom and crossing fingers there’ll be enough events to go around; that was never going to work, and the pandemic is quickly making clear that the resulting shakeout is likely to hit the oldest venues the hardest, even if they’ve been recently renovated. Score one for the investors who rolled the dice on building the new Belmont Park arena, I guess, since they’re effectively grabbing a slice of a limited market by driving a competitor out of business — though New York state might want to revisit its economic impact projections for the public money it’s pouring into the Belmont site, now that it turns out it’s just likely to end up replacing one Nassau County arena with a shinier one.

What questions should we ask to make sure the Orioles don’t screw over taxpayers in Camden Yards lease talks?

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The Baltimore Orioles‘ lease on Camden Yards expires at the end of the 2021 season, which will only surprise you if you hadn’t realized the stadium that birthed the retro steel-and-brick trend was coming up on its 30th birthday. (Or hadn’t realized that the Orioles rent, not own, which has to do with Camden Yards also helping birth the put-the-stadium-in-the-public’s-name-so-you-can-duck-paying-property-taxes trend.) The Angelos family — increasingly brothers John and Louis, since their father Peter is now 90 and in poor health — has an option for a five-year extension but is considering negotiating a whole new lease, which has perked up the local media’s ears as to what it will mean to the team, and my ears because lease negotiations are typically a great place to hide public subsidies if you want.

So, what do we know so far, and what should we be trying to find out? From the Baltimore Sun:

The team and the authority — the landlord of the Orioles and Ravens on behalf of the state — have a “mutual acknowledgment” that they want to negotiate a new lease before the current one expires, officials from both sides said.

Sure! Cost and revenue certainty is always a good thing, so getting the O’s lease situation locked down for the long term would be good for both sides. Assuming, that is, that the terms are favorable for both sides, which is kind of an impossibility in any contract negotiation, so the devil is very much going to be in the lease details.

While the sons could one day own the Orioles, uncertainties about the club’s future stewards had created buzz that the team could leave Baltimore, a small-market city relative to others in Major League Baseball.

“Buzz” is a bit of an overstatement: There was that time last year that a former Sun columnist reported a “rumor” that the Orioles could move to Nashville, mostly because John Angelos has a house there, and, uh, that’s pretty much it. If you’re wondering, Nashville is slightly smaller than Baltimore in TV market size, and has never been seriously floated as an MLB expansion candidate; the Orioles are currently drawing terribly, but they’re also playing terribly, and were 6th in the AL in attendance the last time they were good, and Nashville doesn’t have an MLB stadium or plans for one, so it’s probably not the first thing on any Angelos’s mind, even if John might enjoy being able to roll out of one of his beds and go see a ballgame. But the “Uncertainty!!!1!” paragraph is a staple of these kinds of articles, so they had to stick in there.

The club has spoken publicly about its hopes of capitalizing on the stadium’s popularity by using it increasingly for non-baseball activities such as music or other year-round activities.

Again, reasonable, though there aren’t really a whole lot of non-baseball activities you can use a baseball stadium for. The Sun notes that Camden Yards hosted a Billy Joel concert last summer, but Billy Joel is 71 years old, so probably not going to be still touring at the end of a long lease extension. But sure, maybe some expansion of the Orioles’ right to hold non-baseball events, and then split the proceeds with the state, might be worth discussing.

Until last year, the stadium authority was paying about $15 million a year in debt service — principal plus interest — on the 30-year bonds issued to pay for Camden Yards. The bonds were paid off at the end of 2019 at a total cost of about $450 million, according to David Raith, the stadium authority’s chief financial officer.

The stadium authority will continue to receive $15 million a year in state lottery proceeds for various other stadium projects, including improvements to the Camden Yards warehouse, and to pay off $32 million left on the original bond deal for M&T Bank Stadium, home of the NFL’s Ravens. M&T Bank Stadium, which opened in 1998, cost about $310 million, including debt interest.

Okay, now we’re getting somewhere: Camden Yards was paid for with state lottery proceeds, and now that the initial construction debt is finally paid off but the lottery money continues to flow — for some reason Maryland didn’t set the payments so they’d go back to the state’s general fund once the stadium was paid off and be available to pay for other things during lean times — the Orioles could have their eye on it to fund “improvements.”

In fact, the Angeloses have been talking about publicly funded upgrades to Camden Yards since 2015, when it was reported that they wanted to retrofit the stadium with concourses where fans can see the game (or at least the airspace above the game) from the hot dog lines, and VIP club spaces at field level, neither of which were things anyone was thinking about when the building was built in 1992 — and neither of which may be things that anyone prioritizes in a post-Covid world, either, but presumably the Orioles owners can work that out once they’ve secured the money.

And again, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing: Upgrades to stadiums are nice enough, so long as enough new revenues result that there’s a way both the Orioles owners and the public can come out ahead. The worrisome part would be if the Angeloses try to fob off such improvements as necessary “maintenance” — which the state is on the hook for under the current lease, and yes that’s the lease that the team owners want to tear up and renegotiate, curse you and your logical consistency — that’s required to get the team to stay put in Baltimore, which could end up resulting in state taxpayers throwing good money after bad.

All this is very preliminary, obviously, but it provides a guide to how to monitor the Orioles lease talks: If the framework is “Here’s how we can make the stadium bring in more money, and how to share it equitably between the team and the public,” that’s great; if it’s “Here’s what state taxpayers need to do to keep the team happy so we don’t run off to, uh (throws dart at map), Nashville,” then that’s what got Maryland into this three-decade-long budget hole to begin with. The time to start asking questions of the state of Maryland about how it’s going to get a fair deal for taxpayers is now, while the terms of discussion are still being framed. I remember Season 5 of The Wire well enough not to count on the tattered remains of the Baltimore Sun to do this job, but maybe somebody somewhere? I’m available for freelance assignments and/or bar mitzvahs!