September 30, 2004
Le plus ca change...
More Expos news than you can shake a stick at today, so let's get to it:
- The Washington Post reports that once D.C.'s stadium bonds are retired (D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams' office hopes this could be in as little as 20 years), the ballpark taxes would be rescinded, but the team would continue to pay its $5.5 million a year rent. According to my back-of-the-envelope (okay, I actually used an online present value calculator) calculations, this could be worth maybe another $15-20 million in present value, but not nearly enough to tip the balance of the overwhelmingly generous stadium deal that I reported on Tuesday.
- Speaking of generosity, the Post also quotes a source at last week's baseball executive council meetings as saying, "People were amazed that the District had done the deal that they did." Post writer Peter Whoriskey speculates that D.C. could have cut a much better deal for taxpayers, had they noticed that Virginia's competing bid was falling apart. It's not like it was exactly a secret.
- In the midst of an excellent analysis of D.C.'s sweetheart deal with MLB (and no, not just excellent because he quotes me), ESPN.com's Darren Rovell reveals that at least one sports marketing expert believes the team "can easily get $100 million for 25 years" in a naming-rights contract. That would knock another $1.5 million a year off the team's costs, or about $20 million in present value - nicely balancing out those future rent payments noted above.
- Derek Zumsteg of Baseball Prospectus (no registration/subscription required for this one) notes that MLB's reported annual-revenue guarantee to Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos is "easily the worst deal MLB has made with anyone, ever":
You can field a bad team (or the A's) for $40 million dollars. If you run a lean, mean organization, you can run your team's operations on another $40 million. Eighty million in expenses with $150 million in guaranteed revenues leaves $70 million a year in guaranteed profit.
Teams have been destroyed for far less, run into the ground for the tiny guaranteed profits that baseball's misguided revenue sharing offered. Imagine what could happen with this sort of motherlode.
Zumsteg foresees years of lawsuits, and ultimately an MLB buyout of the clause, either of which sounds like a pretty good bet. - Bob "Nostradamus" Nightengale of Baseball Weekly reports that Angelos' compensation package will actually be "a sliding scale based on any decrease in attedance." But then, Nightengale has never been right about anything before.
- Jayson Stark of ESPN.com reports informed sources as saying "MLB could be stuck with this club anywhere from another six months to (better grab the smelling salts) two years." At best, if the D.C. city council passes a stadium bill quickly and then MLB picks a new owner shortly after that, the Expos could be in new hands by next spring - way too late to sign any free agents to improve this year's pathetic squad. Or, for that matter, to sell any tickets: "There's not one person working on selling a baseball ticket right now," one sports exec told Stark. "There's not one person working on selling a suite, or a marketing deal, or a sponsorship. And there's already too little time to do all of that right."
- Stark further notes that the pending Expos move is a good news/bad news scenario for those baseball boosters in San Jose, quoting another unnamed exec: "The precedent is now in place. So if they'll do it for one team, they have to do it for everyone. This doesn't make it impossible [to move a team into another club's neighborhood]. It just makes it really expensive."
- As for what the D.C. team will be called, a third incarnation of the Washington Senators looks unlikely, both since the mayor hates it and since the Texas Rangers took the rights to the name with them when they skipped town in 1972. A petition is being circulated to call the team the Washington Grays, after the Homestead Grays, an old Negro League team that played some home games in the District; Mayor Williams supports this name as well. The Toronto Star, however, says that "the team will likely keep the name Expos until new owners take over." The Washington Expos? What's next, the Utah Jazz?
- And finally, to answer the question that I'm sure all of you are really wondering: Youppi lives!
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