Category Archives: Arizona Diamondbacks

Friday roundup: More Carolina Panthers stadium demands, D-Backs explain Vancouver move threat, and giant soccer robots

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Good morning, and thank you for taking a break from your coronavirus panic reading to patronize Field of Schemes. Please wash your hands for 20 seconds with soap and water, and we can begin:

D-Backs execs visited Vancouver as relocation threat, maybe, sometime? Stop the presses!

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A brief reminder of how our modern journalism ecosystem works: First, a reporter or editor happens upon a piece of information, either through independent reporting or (more commonly) because they get a press release or read about it on another news site. Then the first question they typically ask themselves is: Will our readers click on this headline as it whips past them on social media or Google News or whatever? (In the lingo of the biz, “Will it traffic well?”) Next: How long will it take to pull together enough information to write it up and send it out into the world, and will this be fast enough that readers won’t already have clicked on everyone else’s story and been sated by then? And finally, maybe, on occasion, if there’s time: Is this important news that will help people understand the world around them?

And so we end up with stories like this one, from Canada’s SportsNet:

Report: Diamondbacks explore Vancouver as possible contingency site

Another Canadian city has emerged as a possible host for an existing MLB franchise, this time on the country’s West Coast.

A report Wednesday by The Athletic‘s Sean Fitz-Gerald says the Arizona Diamondbacks have visited Vancouver’s BC Place Stadium to explore it as a possible host site in case of a structural emergency at Chase Field.

Click through to the Athletic piece, if you can make it past the paywall, and you find that the only listed source for this information is Arizona Diamondbacks exec Joe Garagiola, Jr., who told the site that “While working at Major League Baseball, I provided the team with numerous possibilities, including Vancouver. Club executives visited there to determine the reality of making it a contingency plan.”

Now, D-Backs CEO Derrick Hall just last week declared that the team owners had “tapped the brakes” on moving away from their current stadium in Phoenix, so the appearance of this story now is either one of two things: 1) some old saber-rattling team execs were doing in 2018 during the fight to get let out of their stadium lease early, which is when the whole “structural emergency” gambit was first raised, or 2) some new saber-rattling team execs are doing in 2020 after realizing that Hall might have just undermined his team’s leverage to demand whatever they might want to demand. We can’t know without knowing whether this was a piece of old intel that The Athletic’s Sean Fitz-Gerald dug up, or something that was newly leaked to him — and since he gives no further information about how this scoop, such as it is, landed in his lap, readers remain in the dark as to who was up to what when.

In either case, the idea that the Diamondbacks might move to Vancouver is now out there in the social mediascape, just as the idea that they might move to Las Vegas was last fall, and as lots of teams have been rumored to be moving to lots of cities just because somebody got on a plane for a day trip somewhere and then returned. (One of the Vancouver trips underlying the Athletic report, apparently, was to go see a Mumford & Sons show.) This is not responsible journalism — certainly not without including the relative media market sizes of Phoenix and Vancouver, which will tell you something about the likelihood of any kind of permanent move — and makes it all too easy for news outlets to be played by sports franchise owners seeking to create headlines for their own ends, but that’s the world we live in, now more than ever.

Friday roundup: D-Backs, Angels hedge on new stadium plans, NJ demands 76ers repay 0.5% of tax breaks, and other foolishness

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Another busy Friday where I need to squeeze in the news roundup when and where I can! (Also, yeah, New Yorkers already knew this about Mike Bloomberg, who also was responsible for this.)

Friday roundup: Developers pay locals $25 each to hold pro-arena signs, a smoking and farting winged horse team logo, and do you even need a third thing after those two?

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It’s been another week of pretty bad news, topped off by a private equity firm somehow buying the entirety of .org domains, meaning every nonprofit website will now have to be licensed from an entity whose sole mission is to squeeze as much money from them as possible. The stadium and arena news, by contrast, isn’t all terrible, so maybe it qualifies as cheery? You be the judge:

  • The Richmond city council voted Tuesday to put off a decision on a $1.5 billion downtown development that would include a new arena (public cost: $350 million), after a contentious hearing where both supporters and opponents held signs espousing their opinions. Or espousing somebody’s opinions, anyway: Some locals holding “yes” signs later reported that the project’s developers paid them $25 a pop to do so. City council president Michelle Mosby replied that if anything people were just reimbursed gas money, which 1) only makes sense if everyone there drove their own car and had to travel like 250 miles round trip to get to the hearing and 2) isn’t really any less corrosive of democracy anyway.
  • If you’ve been wondering how Inter Miami plans to build a temporary 18,000-seat stadium in Fort Lauderdale (later to be turned into a practice field) between now and March and figured it would have to involve throwing up a bunch of cheap metal bleachers, now there’s video of construction workers doing exactly that. Also laying down the sod for the field, which I thought usually takes place after the stadium is more or less built, but I guess if they can build the stadium without treading on the field, no harm in doing so now. This all raises questions of whether the stadium will feel excessively crappy, and if not why more soccer teams can’t just build cheap quickie stadiums like this without the need for public money; I guess we’ll know the answer by springtime one way or another.
  • When the state of Minnesota agreed to pay for the Vikings‘ new stadium with cigarette revenue after electronic pulltab gambling money didn’t come in as expected, it still kept collecting the gambling cash; and now that e-pulltabs (which are just lottery tickets, only on a tablet) have taken off, there’s debate over what to do with the cash that the state is collecting, about $5 million this year but projected to rise to $51 million by 2023. The Vikings owners want the money used to pay off their stadium debt early, while some lawmakers would like to use the revenue to fund other projects or reduce taxes on charitable gambling institutions now that it’s no longer needed — all are valid options, but it’s important to remember that the state already paid for most of the stadium, this is just arguing over what to do with the zombie tax that was left over after the financing plan was changed. (It would also be nice to know if e-pulltab gambling has cannibalized revenues from other gambling options, thus making this less of a windfall, but modern journalists have no time for such trivialities.)
  • The city of Wichita is spending $77 million (plus free land) on a Triple-A baseball stadium to steal the Baby Cakes from New Orleans, and have been rewarded with the Wichita Wind Surge, a name that’s supposed to reference the city’s aviation history or something but actually means “storm surge,” which isn’t a thing that they have in landlocked Kansas? It also features a logo that looks like a horse and a fly got caught in a transporter accident, which the team’s designer explained with “The nice thing about Pegasus, however, to me, was the fact that it’s got a horse in there.” A local designer responded with a sketch of a winged horse smoking a cigarette, drinking a beer, and farting, which by all accounts is much more popular with Wichitans. (The sketch is, I mean, though I’d love to see a poll asking Wichitans, “Which do you prefer, the name Wichita Wind Surge or farting?”)
  • San Diego State University’s plan to buy the city’s old football stadium and its surrounding land for $87.7 million has hit some “speed bumps,” namely that city economists have determined that the price could be below the land’s market value and $10 million of the sale price would have to be set aside for infrastructure improvements for the university’s development. “There’s also the matter of the $1-per-month lease that, as proposed, may not adequately protect the city from expenses or legal risk,” notes the San Diego Union-Tribune. Given all these uncertainties, the city’s independent budget analyst called SDSU’s proposed March 27 deadline “very challenging,” not that that’s stopped city councils before.
  • Saskatoon has enough room under its debt limit to finance either a new central library or a new sports arena, and regardless of what you think of how badly Saskatooners need a new library, it’s still a pretty strong example of how opportunity costs work.
  • The Phoenix Suns‘ new practice facility being built with the help of public money will include a golf simulator for players, because of course it will.
  • Speaking of Phoenix, the Arizona Republic has revealed what the Diamondbacks owners want in a new stadium; the original article is paywalled, but for once Ballpark Digest‘s propensity for just straight-up paraphrasing other sites’ reporting comes in handy, revealing that team owners want a 36,000-  to 42,000-seat stadium with a retractable roof and surrounded by a 45- to 70-acre mixed-use development and a 5,000-seat concert venue and good public transit and full control of naming-rights revenue and public cost-sharing on ballpark repairs. And a pony.
  • “Will Raiders football hike your home value?” asks the Nevada Current, apparently because “Is the moon made of green cheese?” had already been taken.
  • And last but certainly not least, your weekly vaportecture roundup: The New Orleans Saints‘ $450 million renovation of the Superdome (two-thirds paid for by taxpayers) will include field-level open-air end zone spaces where fans have ample room enjoy rendered people’s propensity for flinging their arms in the air! The new Halifax Schooners stadium designs lack the woman hailing a cab and players playing two different sports at once from previous renderings, but do seem to still allow fans to just wander onto the field if they want! It should come as no surprise to anyone that even Chuck D can do a better job of drawing than this.

Friday roundup: New sports venues, new sports venue threats, and our dwindling journalistic resources

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Deadspin’s Albert Burneko is a national treasure whether he’s writing about sports or movies or punctuation, and his takedown this week of a Fivethirtyeight article that asserts there are too many minor-league baseball teams is very much no exception. Drop whatever you’re doing — which is reading this post, so okay, drop whatever you were going to do after that — and read it now, whether you care about the purpose of sports as entertainment or the role of the media in management-labor relations or the increasing propensity to reduce human beings to measures of technocratic efficiency. With the demise of the alt-weeklies, there are fewer and fewer outlets eager to combine tenacious reporting and big-picture analysis and engaging writing toward the end of helping us understand the world we live in beyond “here are some potentially viral things that happened today,” so we need to cherish those that remain while we can.

And with that, here are some potentially viral (in the not especially infectious sense) things that happened this week:

Diamondbacks courted Henderson, Nevada for a $1B stadium (then stopped, but still)

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Um:

Last year, Henderson [Nevada] officials quietly began a push to lure the Arizona Diamondbacks from the team’s Phoenix home to their city, records obtained by the Las Vegas Review-Journal show.

Um:

According to the presentation, Henderson hired a consultant to conduct a financial analysis, assuming the ballpark would have 32,000 seats and space for 4,000 standing-room-only ticket holders. The Diamondbacks would serve as the primary tenant for a 30-year term and the stadium would be publicly owned and exempt from property tax.

The consultant estimated the ballpark would cost about $1 billion to construct.

Um:

On Jan. 4, [Derrick] Hall, the team’s CEO, sent Derrick an email with the subject line, “Have not forgotten you!”

“Hopefully there is still strong interest there as we go through the MLB motions,” he wrote.

Let’s be clear about one thing: Given the relative sizes of their media markets, the Arizona Diamondbacks owners are extremely unlikely to leave Phoenix for the Las Vegas area anytime soon. (The last contact between the two parties was apparently in February.) But that doesn’t mean they won’t play footsie with Nevada as a way of scaring Phoenix into coughing up that new stadium that they badly want it to, just as it won’t stop Henderson — a small city near Las Vegas that is best known for paying to build a Vegas Golden Knights practice facility and previously suing a developer who promised to build an NFL stadium there but didn’t — from getting free media impressions by exchanging a few emails with an MLB team exec.

Still, it’s another sign that there are still plenty of cities out there eager to fill the threat gap that MLB has had ever since putting a team in Washington, D.C., and that MLB teams are happy to have them do so. The D-Backs’ stadium demands have been in a bit of a holding pattern of late, but I’ve got a feeling they’re likely to heat up real soon now.

Friday roundup: Rangers fans don’t like nice weather after all, Orlando re-renovating renovated stadium, Dan Snyder has a $180m yacht

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Today is site migration day — cue the jokes about how Field of Schemes should be hosted half the time in Montreal and half the time in Tampa Bay — so if things look a bit weird after 2 pm Eastern or so, that’s to be expected. Rest assured that the site will be back to normal soon, hopefully later today but certainly entirely by Monday; or actually better than normal, because the whole point of this exercise is to have a zippier, more reliable platform so that you can get your immediate fix of stadium news without having to refresh or even wait multiple milliseconds for images to load.

And speaking of your immediate stadium fix, here’s the rest of this week’s news:

  • The Texas Rangers are building (read: mostly having the citizens of Arlington build for them) a new stadium just so they can have air-conditioning so that fans will go to games, but the Fort Worth Star-Telegram points out that the team has been winning and the weather has been nice this spring, and fans still aren’t showing up.
  • MLS commissioner Don Garber said that he “could see [Las Vegas] being on our list for future teams,” which is literally the most noncommittal thing he could say, but he still gets headlines for it, so he’s gonna keep saying it.
  • Here’s an article about how building a whole real estate development that will turn a big profit will help the Golden State Warriors make more money, if anyone wasn’t clear on that concept already.
  • The Orlando city council approved the $60 million in renovation money for Camping World Stadium (née the Citrus Bowl) that they said they would last fall. Since the stadium doesn’t even have a regular sports tenant — it is only used for the occasional soccer friendly, college football game, or concert — it’s hard to call this a subsidy to anyone in particular, but it’s still probably a pretty dumb use of money, especially since the stadium was just renovated once already in 2014.
  • There is no actual news in this Page Six item, but if you thought I was going to pass up a chance to link to an article that begins, “Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder roared up to Cannes Lions in his $180 million yacht as ad sources speculated he’s in town to find a title sponsor for the team’s new stadium,” you’re crazy.
  • Construction on the Las Vegas Raiders stadium was momentarily halted last week when it turned out one of the parts didn’t fit, which probably isn’t a big deal in the long run — in fact, the ill-fitting steel truss was adjusted and reinstalled a few days later — but that doesn’t mean we can’t make Ikea jokes.
  • The Arizona Diamondbacks owners have hired architecture firm HKS, who designed the Texas Rangers’ new park, to design a new stadium for them if they choose to build one, and you know what that’s going to mean: lots of renderings with Mitch Moreland and his wife in them.

Diamondbacks execs still can’t decide what kind of stadium to request for their 21st birthday

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Exhibit A in evidence that the Arizona Diamondbacks owners are still trying to figure out exactly who they want to shake down for what in terms of stadiums:

“It’s been limited to this point just because we haven’t felt an urge or a need at this point. So, [I] see it maybe accelerating a bit in the near future, but we also have to focus on downtown, too, which we haven’t done enough of, to see if it’s a viable option to stay. There’s still a lot of work to do there. What it would look like if we were to retro or refurbish [Chase Field] and if there’s any sort of development opportunities around it. But I think the day of standalone stadiums is not nearly as popular a move or model as what we see now with mixed use and with multiple acres. We just have to see what’s out there – you know, land availability, proximity, partnership opportunities, what the abilities are downtown. There’s a lot for us to do.” —Diamondbacks CEO Derrick Hall last week

And Exhibit B:

“Once the agreement was reached — how the Diamondbacks decided what needed to be done … I just wouldn’t know the facts,” [MLB commissioner Rob] Manfred said during a spring training media event last week. “I have every confidence that Chase Field will be in condition to be a major league facility this year.”

The commissioner said he would leave it up to the Diamondbacks to comment on whether the team has begun talks for a new stadium site.

“It really is a local matter,” he said.

“It’s a local matter” is what commissioners say when nobody is asking them to use their muscle to extract stadium concessions — or when the league as a whole is cutting loose an unfavored owner to drift in the wind, but given that Manfred already used his bully pulpit on this subject two years ago when he said the team’s current stadium wouldn’t remain “major league-quality” without significant upgrades, that’s clearly not the case here.

What seems to be going on is that now that Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick has successfully used the threat of a lawsuit over stadium maintenance to get out of his lease five years early, he’s now taking his time figuring out what his next move should be. The key phrase in Hall’s statement then becomes “We just have to see what’s out there” — there are a bunch of municipalities in the Phoenix area that team execs could try to play off against each other, as well as deciding whether to try to leverage the lease expiration to get a whole new stadium or maybe a renovated one with new development rights or whatever. Being a kid in a candy store is fun, but if you can only choose one multi-hundred-million-dollar jumbo box, you’re going to want to think carefully about your decision.

Reminder: All this is about replacing or upgrading a stadium that just turned 20 years old last year. Please, everybody, stop asking me if the stadium shakedown business is fated to slow down soon now that “everyone already has a new stadium.” Rod Fort’s old observation remains astute: There’s no reason for a sports team owner not to want a new stadium every year, so long as he’s not the one paying for it.

Friday roundup: Neo-Expos seek public land for stadium, Hawaii mulls new stadium to host nothing, D-Backs spend bupkis fixing supposedly crumbling stadium

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So very, very much news:

  • Would-be Montreal Expos reviver Stephen Bronfman has reportedly settled on federally owned land in Peel Basin near downtown as a prospective stadium site once a franchise is obtained, through expansion or relocation. Mayor Valérie Plante called the idea “interesting”; other than that, there’s been no word of what Bronfman would pay for the land or how the stadium would be paid for or really anything involving money, so sure, “interesting” is a fine evaluation of this news.
  • Charles Allen, the D.C. councilmember whose district includes RFK Stadium, calls the site “a very wrong choice for an NFL stadium,” and instead would like to see housing and parks there. Mayor Muriel Bowser disagrees, so this is going to come down to a good old council fight. Too bad Marion Barry isn’t around anymore to make things interesting.
  • Hawaii is considering spending $350 million in public money on a new football stadium to replace Aloha Stadium because, according to state senator Glenn Wakai, “It’s kind of like driving a Datsun pickup truck that is just being run into the ground. At a certain point, time to get a new pickup truck.” Given that Aloha Stadium currently hosts nothing much at all other than University of Hawaii football, it’s more like spending $350 million to replace your pickup truck that just sits in the driveway with a new pickup truck, but far be it from me to interfere with Sen. Wakai’s attempts to bash Datsun for some reason.
  • Halifax is still considering whether to spend $120-140 million on a stadium for an expansion CFL team, maybe via the magic of tax increment financing; University of Calgary economist Trevor Tombe points out that a TIF isn’t magic but just “makes the subsidy less transparent, less obvious that it indeed even is a subsidy” — but then, pulling the wool over the public’s eyes is a kind of magic, no?
  • The Oakland Raiders have a “very real” chance of playing 2019 at the Oakland Coliseum, according to … this Bleacher Report headline, but nothing in the actual story? What the hell, Bleacher Report?
  • Arizona Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick has claimed that the team’s stadium would need $8 million in upgrades over the winter, but has only spent $150,000. Which isn’t totally a gotcha — team execs say they’re conserving the stadium maintenance fund to spend on future repairs — but it does poke a bit of a hole in their argument that the stadium is in such bad shape that MLB could order the Diamondbacks to leave Arizona.
  • Austin residents will get to vote in November on whether the city can give public land to a pro sports team owner without a public vote, but it’ll probably be too late to affect the deal to do that for Austin F.C. owner Anthony Precourt. It’ll come in handy next time Austin is in the market for a pro sports team, I guess, though then the owner will probably just figure out a different way to ask for subsidies. “Better late than never” doesn’t work that well when it comes to democracy.
  • Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi said he’s “not sure that there’s much space for public consultation” on a redevelopment project to include a Flames arena, though he added that “it would be very interesting to hear from the public on what they think the right amount of public participation in this should be, and certainly there will be an opportunity for the public to have their voices heard but it might not happen until there’s something on the table.” It’s hard to tell whether that’s a justification or an apology — and keep in mind that Nenshi was deliberately shut out of the committee negotiating any deal — but there you are.
  • MLS commissioner Don Garber just got a five-year extension, and — quelle coincidence! — the league is now talking about expanding to 32 teams by 2026. Whether this is really a Ponzi-esque attempt to paper over weak financials with a constant influx of expansion fees won’t be entirely clear until the expansion finally stops and we see how the money looks then, but one thing is increasingly clear: It’s kind of crazy to throw stadium money around in hopes of landing an MLS franchise when it’s increasingly clear every reasonably large city in the U.S. is going to get one sooner or later.
  • And finally, Amazon pulled out of its $3 billion tax break deal with New York yesterday, and it sounds like it’s because its execs were tired of taking a PR beating around the company’s anti-union stance and contracting for ICE. Some New Yorkers are celebrating victory, others are retreating into the Casino Night Fallacy, and as always, The Onion has the final word.

Diamondbacks switch to fake turf so they can crank their a/c, Rangers may follow suit

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Also on Friday, the Arizona Diamondbacks owners, who have been shopping around to get a new stadium to replace 20-year-old Chase Field since negotiating an out clause to their lease back in May, have announced that they’ll be switching their current stadium to artificial turf next year, as they apparently just discovered after two decades that grass needs sunlight and water:

The decision to swap live grass to turf, of course, came after failed attempts at finding grass that grew well in the desert. The team would keep the Chase Field roof open during the day, allowing the sun in, but even closing it in the late afternoon before night first pitches made for a hot game-viewing experience with the air conditioning cranked up.

Arizona tried a new strain of grass this past season, and while it looked better than in years’ past — when the outfield would develop brown, dry spots where outfielders stood — it still played hard.

“It looked good and when you talk players, when you talk to our facility staff, it still didn’t play well and still wasn’t very healthy out there,” [Diamondbacks CEO Derrick] Hall said…

The move to synthetic turf will save the team money on its water bill and electric bill.

The team expects a 90 percent savings, or two million gallons, in water consumption.

The irony here, of course, is that the Diamondbacks demanded a pricey retractable roof when it got its stadium built back in the ’90s in large part so it could open it to the elements to allow natural grass to grow. (The Houston Astrodome famously had to turn to newly invented artificial turf — dubbed Astroturf as a result — after its initial plan to grow grass under a roof with glass windows turned out to be a disaster.) Of course, they didn’t know then how much fans would demand that the roof be closed as much as possible to let the air-conditioning kick in, or for that matter how crazy hot it would get in Phoenix now that we’ve broken the earth’s climate. But still, irony.

Notably, the Texas Rangers owners still haven’t announced whether their new retractable-roofed stadium will feature grass or artificial turf, and team officials there may keep a close eye on how the D-Backs’ new turf plays next spring before making a decision. Given that the whole point of the Rangers’ new stadium is to have air-conditioning, though, and that Texas occupies the same Anthropocene climate as Arizona, you have to think they’ll be leaning hard toward plastic grass. Which makes you wonder why anybody bothers with moving roofs anymore anyway — they’re crazy expensive and hardly ever opened to the elements in warm-weather cities — but I guess it’s hard for even sports team owners to pass up stuff that looks so cool from passing airplanes.