Category Archives: Toronto Blue Jays

MLB commissioner: Diamondbacks stadium “needs work” to be “major league,” capisce?

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The Arizona Diamondbacks owners ramped up their war of words this week over their lawsuit to get out of their Chase Field lease unless Maricopa County provides $187 million for renovations, with both team president Derrick Hall and MLB commissioner Rob Manfred saying they would not be shackled to a rusted girder. Hall first:

“Love Chase Field, hope to be there for a long time,” Hall said on Arizona Sports 98.7 FM’s Bickley and Marotta show Tuesday. “We just see we’re coming to the cliff that they brought to our attention about four or five years ago … We just need a partner that can truly be a partner and can be there a long time and address the capital needs of that stadium.”

And then Manfred took a break from declaring war on the fundamental rules of his sport to save 14 seconds a game because millennials, man to chime in:

Manfred, speaking at a news conference Tuesday, said that “to be a major league-quality stadium,” Chase Field “needs work.”…

“We take very seriously the obligation to have a major league-quality facility in each and every market,” the commissioner said.

“It’s absolutely clear from the material that’s been made available to me there are serious maintenance needs that need to be met with respect to the stadium.”

Okay, so a couple of things. First off, a lot of the Diamondbacks’ wish list is for things like upgrading scoreboards and refurbishing luxury suites — stuff that is nice, but isn’t exactly a measure of being “major-league quality” — and most of the rest is for annual maintenance costs that the team should be spending every year anyway. (Yes, it’s not major-league quality if there’s no toilet paper in the restrooms, but that’s hardly the building’s fault.) So Hall and Manfred are deliberately fudging the difference between “obsolete” and “needs somebody to buy new lightbulbs.”

But even if the stadium did need (whatever “need” means here) major upgrades, there’s the question of why should this be county taxpayers’ problem? One might think that if a stadium is getting older (every stadium is getting older, as are we all), that’s something for the team to address. Like, say, the owners of the Toronto Blue Jays are looking at:

The retractable roof must also be replaced in the coming years, along with other less exciting upkeep tasks for a stadium that first opened in 1989, which is why [team president and CEO Mark] Shapiro insists the entire project must be viewed holistically.

The Blue Jays have hired a design firm and at this point, “what we do have is themes that through focus groups and through research and through industry trends and analysis provided clear ideas of what we would be looking to achieve in a re-envisioning – and I call it a re-envisioning rather than a renovation – of the stadium.”

“No. 1,” Shapiro continued, “would be to turn the stadium into a ballpark. Very simply that would be a top priority for us, which means (providing) a modern ballpark experience for our fans.

Okay, so the Blue Jays own Rogers Centre, whereas Maricopa County owns Chase Field. But the latter is basically a fiction designed to let the D-Backs out of paying property tax; the team gets all revenues from the stadium, even if it doesn’t have its name on the deed. And besides, that’s what leases are for, to determine who’s on the hook for future maintenance and upgrades — and the lease (which prohibits the team from moving through 2028, by the way) certainly appears to say that it’s up to the Diamondbacks owners to cough up the money in this case.

Determining that for sure, of course, is up to a court to decide, which is what Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick is suing to make happen. Until then, though, there’s plenty of room for negotiating through the media, and that’s what commissioners are for, so hey, why not? If it keeps Manfred from spending his time ruining extra innings, it might even be a mitzvah in disguise.

Dunedin Blue Jays spring-training study fails to understand how hotel rooms work

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The Pinellas County Commission is preparing to vote on a request from the Toronto Blue Jays for $81 million in upgrades to their spring training facility in Dunedin — I know, I don’t know where you find $81 million worth of upgrades to a spring-training park either, but anyway — and Noah Pransky’s Shadow of the Stadium has delved into the economic impact projections that the team is using to justify the public expense. A previous city report projected $80 million a year in annual economic impact from the Jays’ presence, a figure that’s tough to jibe with numerous studies showing the actual effect of spring training teams on spending to be near zero; Pransky previously revealed that that study had assumed that anyone visiting Dunedin in March was there for baseball, which, um, no.

So is the new report by the city of Dunedin (the Jays paid half the cost) any better? It claims to only count tourists who said they were there just to see baseball, which is an improvement. However, it still counts every ticket sold as one added hotel room sold — which is wrong both because visitors may attend more than one game per trip, and also because hotel rooms can hold more than one person each:

The new report projects $21.4 million in annual economic spending, which at current hotel and sales tax rates means only $1-2 million a year in actual tax receipts, and if you then have to divide by 6-8 … let’s just say nobody in Pinellas County should be planning on seeing that $81 million again.