Category Archives: NFL

Friday roundup: Deadspin est mort, vive Deadspin (also baseball may be dead again, film at 11)

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This was another shitty week in what feels like an endless series of shitty weeks, but with one undeniable bright spot: On Tuesday, the former staffers of Deadspin announced the launch of Defector, a new site that will be everything the old Deadspin was — sports and news reporting and commentary “without access, without favor, without discretion” — but this time funded by subscriptions and staff-owned, so safe from the threat of new private-equity owners decreeing that they stop doing everything that made the site both popular and worthwhile. I’ve already explained why I thought Deadspin desperately mattered for anyone who cares about sports’ role in our greater lives, or just likes great writing that makes you both laugh and think; you can read here my own contributions to the old site before its implosion (not sure why the article search function is listing every article as written by Barry Petchesky, who knows what the private-equity people are up to). Needless to say, launching a DIY journalism site in the middle of the collapse of the entire journalism business model is an inherently risky prospect, so if you want to give the Defector team a bit more of a financial foundation to work from, you can subscribe now. I already have.

But enough good news, let’s get on with the parade of sadness and horror:

Rams stadium’s new artificial lake deemed “gentrification,” but that’s only half the story

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Writing a post based on a news story based on tweets is not exactly my favorite way of doing journalism, but in this case, I think it’s warranted. Newsweek, which still exists after passing through a series of ownership changes that included a bizarre money-laundering scheme, reports that residents of Inglewood are increasingly griping on social media about how the Los Angeles Rams‘ new stadium is getting all kinds of fancy gewgaws while the city’s schools remain underfunded; one declared of the team’s new artificial lake: “This is gentrification.”

https://twitter.com/ch1chi_xoxo/status/1288718599532589056

As someone who’s written books on both stadiums and gentrification, I think I’m uniquely qualified to nitpick this, or at least to delve a little deeper into the implications of stadium-led redevelopment.

One of the arguments often made by community members opposed to sports projects — or any kind of big development projects — is that they will price existing residents out of the neighborhood. The evidence that sports venues actually make a neighborhood a more enticing place to live is fairly weak: Stadiums bring excitement and crowds, but also public drunkenness and traffic problems. And while you can definitely find plenty of examples of stadiums that saw luxury housing rise up around them, luxury housing has been going up in cities all over America as part of the Great Inversion; as I noted a couple of years ago, the New York Jets having their stadium on Manhattan’s then-low-rent West Side rejected didn’t stop developers from coming in with a new plan that put up tons of new luxury housing, with the help of a few billion dollars in taxpayer funds. Sometimes the causality even runs the other way: Stadium builders target a neighborhood because they think it’s primed for gentrification and they can reap the benefits by speculating on land around their new venue.

If anything, what stadiums do to smooth the way for gentrification is what might be termed the bulldozer effect. As I discovered in researching The Brooklyn Wars, one of the biggest reasons why big development projects or rezonings can lead to hikes in housing costs and displacement of existing residents — even when you might think that building lots of new housing should lead to lower rents in simple supply-and-demand terms — is that they provide an easy excuse for the demolition of neighborhoods, or at least large stadium-sized parts of neighborhoods, that are standing in the way of rapid gentrification. With cities increasingly attractive places to live for people with money, for all the same reasons they grew so big in the first place (easy access to jobs and culture, mostly), the only real thing keeping them from gentrifying even faster is the distaste of many suburbanites for living next to the black and brown people with low incomes who settled there when their parents and grandparents decamped for the suburbs in the first place — at least if there aren’t a few local artists or white dads with baby strollers around to make the place feel like it has “potential.”

Which, finally, is where the artificial lake comes in. It isn’t receiving any public money that I can tell, but by carving out a chunk of Inglewood and repurposing it as a playground for the moneyed classes (or at least for people who can afford football tickets, who tend to be pretty well-off), it creates a bubble of perceived safety that allows other developers to market Inglewood to newcomers who might otherwise turn up their nose at living next to Inglewood residents. In fact, this is exactly what Inglewood Mayor James Butts said he was hoping for when he compared the stadium to the Genesis device in Star Trek: Wrath of Khan that turned a lifeless planet into a utopia, which really is an odd way to refer to the city of more than 100,000 human beings that you are supposedly representing.

New stadiums and artificial lakes, then, are less about directly luring people to cities, and more about rebranding them. Which surely must seem tempting to mayors who Google their own cities and are met with this:

All of which would be fine and great if Inglewood could be made less dangerous in a way that allowed current residents to benefit from the improvements, rather than risk being priced out as a result. (In fact, the crime rate in Inglewood has already been dropping pretty dramatically.) But in an America defined by massive and still-widening inequalities in wealth and income, that’s hard to pull off, at least not without freezing rents and banning evictions.

In the anthology New York Calling, labor historian and musician Philip Dray memorably recalled a time when he first moved to Manhattan’s Lower East Side (artist on the block! quick, tell your friends looking for cheap city apartments!) and went to a block association meeting about the city’s offer to install new street trees on the sidewalk:

All the white people want the trees, but the Hispanics are against it, saying that prettifying the block will just drive the rents up. The whites are kind of numb — how can anyone not like trees?

This is America: A land where people are afraid to have nice things because they’re afraid it will just make someone with more money want to take them away from them. That’s not the only reason why stadiums continue to get built while teachers have to make GoFundMe campaigns to buy books for their students, but that’s pretty much impossible to understand without it.

Friday roundup: The baseball gods are very, very angry

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Happy baseball season, everybody! Last night the New York Yankees were leading the Washington Nationals 4-1 when MLB commissioner Rob Manfred came out to explain the new playoff system in which 16 teams will make the postseason and the only advantage you’ll get from winning your division is home-field advantage in empty stadiums, at which point the baseball gods tried to kill Manfred by hurling lightning bolts at him and the game had to be called. This really could not be a more auspicious beginning.

Anyway, stadium and arena news, that’s what you’re here for:

Buccaneers could get $10m in federal money to let people go to NFL games in middle of pandemic

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The Hillsborough County Commission is set to vote tomorrow on spending $10 million in federal CARES Act money to equip the Tampa Bay Buccaneers‘ stadium with stuff to make attending games there … the word The Athletic uses is “safer,” but we’ll be the judge of that. Among the stuff that would be paid for with the public funds:

  • Touchless ticket scanners: $502,475
  • A new public-address system in parking lots so that fans can hear when it’s their turn to enter the stadium: $250,000
  • Stanchions and barriers to “set up queuing inside the stadium for escalators, ATMs and other areas”: $225,000
  • 6,600 traffic cones to mark off (socially distanced?) parking spaces: $50,000 (checks out: apparently traffic cones are crazy expensive)
  • Conversion to touch-free toilets, sinks, and soap and paper-towel dispensers: $788,000
  • PPE for stadium staff ($300,000), “employee protection guards” ($550,000), and reconfiguring the press box and other areas to make it easier for people working there to socially distance ($550,000)

So on the one hand, all these seem reasonable things to do if you’re looking to reopen a sports stadium anytime soon, and arguably even good investments for the longer-term future, assuming we’ve all recognized now that everyone communally touching the same items is a vector for all kinds of microbes. And the CARES Act money is earmarked for projects to improve “public safety,” at least according to The Athletic, though I can’t actually find the language in the bill itself. (It’s really long.)

On the other hand, the CARES Act money is finite, and Hillsborough County is looking at choosing to spend what cash it has on a publicly owned facility that mostly benefits a private sports business. (The University of South Florida also uses it for college football games, if there are any college football games this year.) Bucs owners the Glazer family stand to make a ton of extra revenue if they’re able to sell tickets this season, but it doesn’t sound like they’ll be on the hook for any spending to allow that to happen.

There’s also some curious information in The Athletic about the timing of the upgrades:

The agenda proposal calls for the first and largest phase of the project to be completed by Oct. 31 (about midway through the NFL season as currently scheduled) and the balance finished by the end of the year.

So at least half the season would be played without all the new fancy sinks and such, and the entire project would be completed just in time for the football season to end. But it would still come in handy for the 2021 season, if an effective vaccine still eludes us by then, and if it turns out to be safe for people to gather together so long as they don’t all touch the same things, which already doesn’t seem to be what science says.

In short: Spending $10 million in public on stadium upgrades to keep football fans (possibly) safer is arguably better than spending it on new clubhouse toasters, but maybe not absolutely the highest priority. And at worst, it can be seen as endorsing social-distancing theater: Should a county government really be spending any money on abetting the reopening of public gathering places in a state that has had more new cases in the last ten days than the entire country of China has since the pandemic began? Tune in tomorrow to see if that question gets raised by the county commission, or if it’s all just Hey, the federal government gave us this money, so it doesn’t really cost us anything, right?

Washington to finally ditch “Redskins” name thanks to naming-rights sponsor, of all things

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Well, after years of not happening at all, that happened fast: Washington NFL owner Dan Snyder is set to announce today that he’ll be ditching “Redskins” as the team name, effective … well, we’ll get to that in a second.

The interesting part here is what it took to change Dan Snyder’s mind: not years of complaints that it was offensive to Native Americans to use a racial slur as a nickname, but rather when the team’s corporate partners, including naming-rights owner FedEx, announced they would pull out of their sponsorship deals if the name weren’t changed. Which, sure, was the end result of the broader campaign to change the name — and the broader campaign for breaking down systemic racism in general — but it’s an important lesson that when you want your message heard, you need to pick a messenger who rich dudes will listen to.

So far the naming-rights revolution has been pretty one-sided: Team owners sign contracts with corporations to slap their names on buildings that in most cases taxpayers paid for and own, and everyone goes home happy. (Except the taxpayers. And sometimes the naming-rights sponsor.) This current Washington situation does, though, make clear one downside to making everyone say a corporate name when referring to your stadium and relying on that as a revenue stream: People have to associate your stadium with good things for that to be worth something, and genocide is experiencing a dip in popularity at the moment, so if you want to keep earning money, you may have to listen to what the people paying you money are demanding. It’s the same principle, really, as every boycott ever, going back to the one that helped end slavery.

The next task, then, is for Snyder to pick a new name, which he’s apparently already done — except that in the time he was refusing to consider a new name, he was so adamant about his position that he neglected to secure a backup plan:

Two people with knowledge of the team’s plans said Sunday that the preferred replacement name is tied up in a trademark battle, which is why the team couldn’t announce the new name Monday.

The presumed new name is either Redtails (after World War II’s Tuskegee Airmen) or Warriors (after the broader group of people who drop bombs on things), though that hasn’t stopped lots of Twitter jokes about how Snyder must want to call his team Lady A too. This would not be the first time that a team name was determined in part by not wanting to pay off a trademark squatter: The Tampa Bay Devil Rays reportedly got their name after owner Vince Naimoli balked at paying $35,000 for his preferred name of Tampa Bay Stingrays, which led to a name that everyone hated so much that they eventually became the Rays, which the team’s logo eventually retconned to be about the sun instead of a fish.

For the time being, then, the team will continue to be called the “Redskins,” and presumably FedEx will keep making naming-rights payments in good faith that eventually either Snyder will cough up the money for Washington Warriors or will pick a name that he can get for free. Look, here’s a whole list of ’em! I think I’m gonna go now and trademark the Washington Dooming Bearcats, just in case.

Friday roundup: I, for one, support our new dancing robot overlords

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Happy Friday, everybody! Let’s see what’s going on:

While I’m sorely tempted to stop right there, we do have some other news this week to cover, so let’s continue:

  • Oak View Group, the operator of the New York Islanders‘ new Belmont Park arena currently under construction for a planned opening next year, is reportedly interested in taking over operations of the Nassau Coliseum as well, according to Newsday “sources.” I mean, so would I if the price were right, and given that current operator Mikhail Prokhorov is $2 million behind in rent and threatened with eviction, OVG probably thinks it can get a good deal here, but still it’s hard to see this as anything other than throwing a few pennies at shutting down a rival so as not to risk any competitors making a go of it.
  • Kennesaw State University economist J.C. Bradbury has looked at the impact of the new Atlanta Braves stadium that “was intended to serve as an anchor for further economic development in the suburban business district of Cumberland that would ripple throughout the county,” and found that local commercial property values actually went down relative to similar properties elsewhere in the Atlanta metro area. Bradbury theorizes that businesses may not want to locate near all the traffic congestion of a sports stadium, or be scared off by the tax surcharges put in place to help fund the $300 million public cost. “This finding is consistent with the vast literature on the economic impact of sports venues and events,” concludes Bradbury, which is economistese for “We told you so, over and over and over again, but you wouldn’t listen.”
  • Restaurant owners in Edmonton are so desperate for business that one declared himself “super-excited” at the prospect that visiting NHL teams might place some takeout orders, and the Edmonton Journal sports section is so desperate for hockey news that it ran a whole article about it. Wait, that was in the business section? These are not glorious times for journalism.
  • The National Women’s Soccer League used a forgivable loan from the federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program to help pay players when its season shut down, which sounds like (and is) a subsidy but is also exactly how the PPP is supposed to work: covering salaries to keep people from being laid off during a pandemic, thus keeping the economy from collapsing even more than it is otherwise. Sure, it would have been nice if the program hadn’t run out of money before most businesses could access it, but given that the maximum player salary in the NWSL is $50,000 a year, it’s hard to complain too much about them being less deserving than anyone else.
  • The way the PPP was not supposed to work was for companies to hold onto employees and then lay them off as soon as they’d certified for the forgivable loans, but that’s what New Era did in Buffalo, and now Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz is so mad that he’s refusing to call the Buffalo Bills stadium by its New Era-branded name, which will totally show them.
  • Lots of NFL teams are planning for reduced capacities at games this fall, while the head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers is preparing for his players to “all get sick, that’s for sure.” And that’s the state of the NFL in a nutshell right now.
  • Hawaii can’t spend $350 million on replacing Aloha Stadium with a new stadium and redeveloping the area around it because somebody made a typo in the legislation and wrote 99-year leases instead of 65-year leases, everybody laugh and point!

Congress to consider bill offering RFK Stadium land to NFL team once it drops “Redskins” name

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There’s been talk for years that one condition of Washington’s NFL team getting a new stadium in D.C. would be changing its name from a pejorative term for an entire race of people based on their skin color, and now that the George Floyd protests have led to a mass rethinking of corporate racist imagery from Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben to possibly the Cleveland Indians, the time seems more ripe than ever for Washington team owner Dan Snyder to consider ditching “Redskins” as well. But where past discussions were always more in the “get rid of your godawful team name and then we’ll talk” vein, yesterday D.C. Congressional representative Eleanor Holmes Norton declared that she’s introducing a bill to … well, let’s start with how NBC Sports Washington reported this after Norton went on its football podcast yesterday (not yet posted on its website as of Tuesday morning, it looks like), then try to unpack what it actually means:

D.C. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton is prepared to bring a bill to Congress to buy the federal land that houses RFK Stadium in an effort to get a new facility built for the Washington football team.

As soon as the Redskins change their name.

“I certainly will. This is unused land. Unused Federal land. And the District can’t afford, because we have a height limit, to have any land go that goes unused. I couldn’t get this bill through even when Republicans controlled the House,” Norton said Monday. “So I now believe I can get it through only after the name is changed for the good of the District of Columbia.”

Speaking exclusively with the Redskins Talk Podcast, Norton explained that a new stadium on the RFK site will make a tremendous economic impact for both the citizens of D.C. and for Redskins owner Dan Snyder.

“Everybody wants to come to the nation’s capital. Events benefit tremendously by coming to the nation’s capital,” the congresswoman said. “But you’ve got to have a place to hold those events. There was only one place to hold those events. And [not having] that place has – for no good reason – cost all those involved, including the District of Columbia, but above all Dan Snyder, a boatload, indeed a fortune, in revenue.”

So, the first part of this makes no sense: Congress doesn’t need to buy federal land, because it’s already federal land. If this is the same bill that Norton proposed back in March 2019 and later nixed by the White House — which she seems to be implying by saying “this bill” — it was actually to sell the RFK Stadium land to D.C. for fair market value once the team name issue was resolved, with D.C. presumably figuring out from there what it wants to offer to Snyder in terms of a stadium deal.

As for a stadium making “a tremendous economic impact for the citizens of D.C.,” there’s tons of reasons to believe that’s not true; yes, D.C. has more to gain by luring in people from outside the city since so much of the local population would otherwise stay home in the burbs, but that still doesn’t likely raise the impact level to “tremendous.” And in the abbreviated quotes provided, Norton doesn’t appear to be leaning heavily on that part anyway: She’s more trying to dangle that “boatload” of revenue in front of Snyder in hopes of getting him to agree to this quid pro quo.

That’s something that’s seemed unlikely for years, since Snyder loves the team name so much that he’s resisted all attempts to change, including pleas from a giant water-drop mascot, while trying to buy Native American support with a foundation donating to tribal causes; as one FoS reader originally from the D.C. area noted to me this morning, a football name change there would feel like a seismic shift akin to the Berlin Wall coming down. But then, that’s how historical change tends to happen — either not at all or all at once — so maybe this will be the moment that Snyder chooses to go along with what many people have been clamoring for and change the name. Let’s just hope that he doesn’t manage to leverage that decision into getting paid handsomely with public dollars in exchange for doing what other corporations are doing just because it’s right — or because they want to look like they’re doing what’s right, anyway.

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?!?

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: