After the Arizona Diamondbacks lawyer’s statement in court this week that the team could be forced to move out of Arizona if the county won’t pay to fix leaky air conditioners was met with derision and people pointing out there aren’t exactly any better markets to move to, team CEO Derrick Hall attempted to walk the threat back yesterday. It was exactly as hilarious as you would expect:

“Over a month ago, we had a huge power outage with the heat downtown and, when the power came back on a Sunday before a day game, our chill system, our air-conditioning system, went down and we had huge gushing and rushing water leaks throughout the entire ballpark in major spots,” Derrick Hall told Doug and Wolf on 98.7 FM, Arizona’s Sports Station on Thursday.

Hall said the team was able to open the park and play that day, but it was a close call.

“That’s near-catastrophic and if we did not have air conditioning that day, we can’t play baseball,” he said…

The league’s plan could involve moving the team, but Hall said that would only be temporary.

“There’s nowhere to play in the marketplace if something like that happens indoors and in the summer, so I think Major League Baseball is talking about an emergency or a contingency plan and, again, they do have the ultimate authority,” he said.

Okay, so if the a/c didn’t work, the D-Backs might have had to postpone a game — something that only happens dozens of times over a typical season already. But supposedly MLB needs to have a “contingency plan” so that if the a/c doesn’t work on some future date, it would immediately fly the teams to another city and … yeah, this doesn’t make any sense at all. Just admit that your lawyer was trying to levy a ridiculous threat that the team would leave town without a county-renovated stadium and be done with it, okay?

“Obviously, [owner] Ken (Kendrick) and I would never want to leave Arizona. This is our home,” he said. “This is where we want to be.”

Sure, close enough. That’s the traditional paratrooper gambit, anyway.

Sports team owners trying to get other people — mayors, league commissioners — to make move threats for them is a time-honored tradition, but “if we don’t get a new stadium, the league might force us to move” is a rarely employed gambit. Which makes it all the more jaw-dropping that the Arizona Diamondbacks are now alleging that if Maricopa County doesn’t fix leaky pipes at Chase Field, MLB could force the team to leave Arizona:

Leo Beus, an attorney for the team, raised the MLB specter as he argued to a Superior Court judge that the case should be decided quickly because the team is “facing a crisis.”

“Major League Baseball … they’re very, very concerned,” Beus said, noting he has spoken with six of the league’s top lawyers. “If Major League Baseball decides they want to create issues for us, there might not be baseball at all in Arizona.”

“We’d like to keep the franchise in place, we’d like to make peace with Major League Baseball, not that we’re at war,” he continued. “We don’t know where that’s going to come out. They’re very concerned.”

Okay, so. Beus’s main gripes are over two incidents in June, one where a sewage pipe burst in an office (ew) and another where a power surge caused an air-conditioning system to flood suites and other areas of the stadium right before a game (less ew, but it meant the a/c was off for the game, which is pretty ew in Phoenix). But the D-Backs’ court battle with the county isn’t over whether the stadium needs to be maintained; it’s over who will pay for maintenance, which the team says is the county’s job (to the tune of $187 million), and the county says is on the team. (The latter is what the county’s agreement to the team appears to say, but I am not a lawyer, let alone a judge.)

All of which brings us to our quote of the day, from Maricopa County’s attorney, Cameron Artigue:

“This (lawsuit) has nothing to do with the water leaks and the merits of Chase Field,” he said. “The Diamondbacks are the facility manager. When a pipe breaks, that is a Diamondbacks problem. And that is, in fact, what happened. They got out the mops and they mopped it up, and life goes on. It’s a big facility and sometimes pipes break. So what?”

Anyway, if anyone really thinks there’s a chance that MLB is going to force only its second franchise relocation in 45 years because a couple of stadium pipes broke, I have some Mets World Championship bets for you to place. Chalk this up to “Lawyers Say the Funniest Things” — come to think of it, “we’d like to make peace with Major League Baseball, not that we’re at war” would make a pretty good quote of the week, too.

Back in February, soon after the Arizona Diamondbacks sued Maricopa County to get out of their Chase Field lease because the county was refusing to pay for $187 million in maintenance and upgrades (most of them items that the lease appears to say are team responsibilities), MLB commissioner Rob Manfred chimed in that “to be a major league-quality stadium,” the stadium “needs work.” Apparently he thinks no one was listened then, because yesterday, he said it again:

Manfred spoke at the ballpark and reaffirmed statements supporting the club that he made during spring training. He said for Chase Field to remain a major league-quality stadium, substantial capital expenditures must be made. He said if they aren’t, there may come a point when the franchise seeks an alternative home.

Manfred said Major League Baseball has reviewed studies of state-of-the-art ballparks and determined what is required in renovation and capital investment.

“We concur wholeheartedly with the Diamondbacks’ position that there are substantial needs here with respect to this stadium, to keep it as a major league-quality stadium,” Manfred said.

This is, let’s remember, exactly the job that sports commissioners are hired for: Dropping vague move threats when team owners are too worried they’d get burned in effigy if they did so themselves. Manfred got off to a slow start in the blackmail-enabling department, but he seems to be getting the hang of it now. (That bit about “we’ve done studies of what state-of-the-art means” is an especially nice touch, since “state-of-the-art” is an inherently undefinable term that just means “whatever the next guy down the road has that this owner wants.”) Who he’s trying to convince, given that this is going to be decided by a court and not public opinion or an elected body, is anyone’s guess, but at least he’s proving that he can learn to be a more competent shill.

The art and craft of writing headlines is a tricky one: Do it well, and you have something that is both enlightening and intriguing at a glance, long enough to tell the meat of the story while short enough to fit on social media, not to mention in print if your news outlet does that as well. Do it poorly, and you just end up confusing readers, or even misleading them entirely.

Which brings us to this, from yesterday’s Arizona Republic:

Could a lucrative contract keep Arizona Diamondbacks at Chase Field?

My first thought: Well, sure! Give the D-Backs a rich enough deal, and they’d probably agree to play games in the Chase Field swimming pool.

But by “lucrative contract,” it turns out, the Republic headline writers don’t mean with the team. Rather, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors was set to discuss a new stadium management contract yesterday, to determine who will replace SMG in running non-baseball events. The D-Backs owners are in the midst of a lawsuit trying to get the county to pay $187 million for a bunch of upgrades they say the stadium needs (and which the county says the team should pay for if they want them, since it’s not the county’s job according to the lease); part of the lawsuit gripes about how the stadium “isn’t being utilized anywhere near its potential” for non-baseball events, but now a team rep is saying that who the county picks to run the place isn’t going to stop the lawsuit, because duh:

“It’s not going to affect the lawsuit,” [Diamondbacks attorney] Leo Beus told The Arizona Republic. “… At this stage, we just need the ability to look elsewhere.”…

Beus said whoever wins the new contract would not reassure the team. Team officials do not believe any contractor can generate enough money from events to fill the financial gap between the stadium’s reserves and the anticipated cost of repairs.

In other words, just adding a few more concerts isn’t going to stop the D-Backs owners from suing for $187 million, which makes total sense if they think they have a shot at winning. Beus added that they’re only suing for “the ability to talk to other alternatives so we don’t risk our franchise altogether when they don’t do the capital repairs they’re required to do,” which is pretty hilarious for a franchise worth an estimated $1.15 billion and that had an estimated $47.2 million in profits last year, but nobody ever said that lawyers had to be 100% honest.

Oh, and as for that county meeting, they ended up sending both bidders back to the drawing board and reopening the bids, because they weren’t happy with the offers. Which isn’t all that likely to do much better given the limited number of venue managers out there and the limited amount of money you can make staging concerts at a baseball stadium, but hey, worth a shot.

The owners of the Arizona Diamondbacks have started off 2017 with a bang as well, moving forward with until-now-idle threats by filing suit to break their lease with Maricopa County on Chase Field, on the grounds that the county owes them $187 million in repairs and upgrades:

Diamondbacks Managing General Partner Ken Kendrick said the team attempted to resolve the conflict out of court.

“We have made a promise to our fans, who have been partners with us on the building of this stadium and our franchise, to provide the best experience in all of baseball in a safe and welcoming environment,” he said in a written statement. “The inability of the Maricopa County Stadium District to fulfill its commitments has left us with no other option.”

Kendrick and his corporate overlords indeed no doubt saw this as their only option after county officials told them where to stick their stadium upgrade demands — whether than makes it a good option is another thing entirely. But given that the county report that identified the $187 million in needed (maybe “desired” is a better way of putting it) improvements in the first place also noted that $145 million of that was specifically on the team’s shoulders, it seems like the D-Backs owners are going to have an uphill battle in court, if they indeed plan to proceed to court and not just make this a negotiating gambit.

Anyway, expect the upcoming months, if not years, to now focus on questions of how to “solve the Diamondbacks stadium standoff” and where the team might try to relocate to if it successfully breaks its lease (which otherwise prohibits any move until 2028, or even talking about a move until 2024), much as we’ve seen in recent years with the Tampa Bay Rays. Which, come to think of it, is probably all the team owners want at this stage: to get people talking about replacing a 19-year-old stadium like it’s an urgent priority. There’s crazy, and then there’s crazy like a fox.

The bizarro plan to have private investors buy Chase Field, home of the Arizona Diamondbacks, from Maricopa County and maybe build a new one already wasn’t going well when the putative investors never showed up to any meetings, though they did have their lawyer send a letter to the local newspaper. And now it’s really not going well, as recounted by the Arizona Republic’s Rebekah Sanders:

• The Diamondbacks undermined investors by releasing to The Republic notes from a discussion that Stadium Real Estate Partners II had asked to remain confidential. According to notes by an attorney representing the team, attorneys representing the investors criticized the “structural integrity” of Chase Field and the anticipated high cost of repairs — as much as $180 million. Touring the ballpark “scared the s*** out of” the investors, according to the notes. “Putting money in this aging facility is a waste.”

• The investors hoped to use the Government Property Lease Excise Tax incentive program to avoid millions of dollars in property and excise taxes on a new stadium, according to the notes. No property taxes are currently paid at Chase Field since a government entity — the county — owns the land.

That’s a lot of tea leaves to read, but it sounds like: 1) the Diamondbacks owners are more interested in making a case for their stadium upgrade demands than for a sale plan that was the county’s idea in the first place, and 2) the private investors didn’t really know what they were getting themselves into, other than “hey, let’s get a stadium and get subsidies for it somehow,” which is working the D-Backs owners’ side of the street.

The problem remains much the same one as with Donald Trump’s infrastructure privatization scheme: If a project isn’t making any money, just shifting it from public to private hands isn’t going to suddenly make it more profitable, unless there are new subsidies involved. The only real hope for this stuff is that you find a private developer who’s able to come up with an innovative way of making money that the government hadn’t thought of (not likely, but possible) or who’s dumb enough to throw money at a gamble that’s likely not going to pan out (also not likely, but possible); the danger is that either you have to subsidize the project up front, or that the private entity goes belly-up and leaves its public partner holding a half-billion-dollar bag, which is all too possible. So it might actually be easier for all concerned if these private buyers bail on the plan, and just leave the D-Backs owners and the county to keep fighting it out over who’ll spend on what — if nothing else, that kind of subsidy battle is way easier to understand.

UPDATE: The plan is now totally dead. In lieu of flowers, send ideas for fixing Shelby Miller.