June 30, 2006

Sacramento, Kings can't agree on arena funding

The latest plan for a new Sacramento Kings arena lasted all of two months, as the city and the team put a halt to talks yesterday on an arena plan to put on the November ballot.

The reason, according to the Sacramento Bee: "The two sides failed to reach an agreement on a host of complicated issues that included such fundamental items as the cost of a new arena and how much the Kings' owners - the Maloofs - would pay." That doesn't actually sound so complicated from this corner, especially given the previously discussed Katrina effect; Darrell Steinberg, the former state official who was the Kings owners' representative at arena talks, told the Bee: "If you're going to cast blame anywhere, one word: inflation."

Current local officials, meanwhile, seemed intent on serving their public duty to make the Maloofs' case for them. "Arco [Arena] was a place that never met contemporary standards from the day it opened," said Sacramento County Supervisor Roger Dickinson, who was the county's negotiator in arena talks, while vice mayor Rob Fong declared, "I think they have to consider [relocation] if they don't get a new arena." It was not reported whether Dickinson and Fong also taped "Kick Me" signs to their backs before entering the negotiating room.

June 28, 2006

Mr. DuPuy goes to Miami

MLB COO Bob DuPuy met with South Florida officials yesterday to discuss the stalled plans for a new Florida Marlins stadium, and afterward did his best to sound upbeat. "By no means have we given up on getting a new ballpark here," DuPuy told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel while attending a Marlins game at Dolphin Stadium. "While there remain issues to be resolved and economics to be solved, we're going to work to try get it done."

Added DuPuy: "This is a good young team and we'd like to see baseball thrive here and it's not going to thrive in this ballpark." If two two world championships in the past nine years is failure to thrive, I don't want to see what success looks like.

June 27, 2006

Kibbles 'n' bits

I know it's not a Friday, but ... it's summertime? Whatever excuse you care to give me, here's another sampling of small news items from around the stadium and arena world:

• The Florida state department of community affairs has thrown a stumbling block in the way of plans for a Marlins stadium in Hialeah, refusing to approve Dade County's master plan for the site on the grounds it may strain the county's water resources and overwhelm the area with traffic. Hialeah and the county have promised to spend $45 million on a reverse osmosis plant for the site, but the state still needs convincing. Add in that the stadium still faces a $100 million funding gap, and the Hialeah stadium plan looks to be ... I suppose "dead in the water" would be absolutely the wrong term to use here.
• That temporary Olympic stadium in Chicago looks to be a go, as building - and then partially dismantling - a 75,000-seat track-and-field stadium just south of the disfigured ruins of Soldier Field is reportedly part of the city's official bid for the 2016 Games. "When the Olympics are over, part of the facility will be left as a legacy to the Olympic Games and to track and field," Michael Segobiano, Chicago's director of marketing, told the Chicago Tribune. One can only hope it will be made out of plaster and lit by Nikola Tesla's phosphorescent lamps.
• The great D.C. garage debate continues, with members of the D.C. Zoning Commission ripping into Mayor Anthony Williams' plan for mixed above- and below-ground parking garages alongside the new Washington Nationals stadium. (To recap the controversy in brief: Below-ground expensive, above-ground ugly.) "How much time was put into this plan?" griped commission member Greg Jeffries. "It has to be five days or seven days. It just does not seem like it's fully developed." Added his colleague Michael Turnbull: "We have this fear that we're going to build this temporary thing for 50 years that's not going to look good." The city council is scheduled to vote on the garage plan on July 11; contractors say they need to begin construction by August 1 to have the stadium ready by Opening Day 2008.
• The Boston Red Sox have won their years-long battle to have the state spend $55 million on traffic and transit improvements in the area around Fenway Park. Because everybody's doing it!

June 25, 2006

Mets to get train station, too?

The public costs associated with the New York Mets and Yankees stadium projects just keep adding up: With the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority having promised to build a Metro-North commuter rail station alongside the Yankees' stadium (at a cost of $40 million, according to the latest press reports), Mets backers are now pushing for them to get a train station, too. "It shouldn't be so difficult to see a game," said MTA board member Mitchell Pally, noting that fans from Long Island currently have to either switch trains or (gasp!) take the subway in order to get to Shea Stadium.

Pally's solution, according to Newsday: to explore the feasibility of "building a Long Island Rail Road station on the main line at Shea." One problem: The LIRR main line (it's the gray one) doesn't go anywhere near Shea. The MTA told Newsday it could have a feasibility study complete by its board meeting this Wednesday; unless the feasibility is "none," this should be mighty interesting.

In related news, there have been several reports of late that the Mets were moving construction equipment into the Shea Stadium parking lot during last week's homestand - which seems a bit premature, since the IRS ruling on whether stadium bonds are legal is still likely months away. I called the Mets twice last week, learning from one press flunky that they were just "moving equipment into position" for when construction can begin; and from another that the trucks in question were just for "soil samples," not for actual excavation. I haven't had time to hop the 7 train this week, so if any of my Queens readers could pop by and report on what's actually sitting in the Shea parking lot, I'd be much obliged.

Nets arena taps $100m, sun's life-giving rays

The state of New York has approved $100 million in subsidies for developer Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards project, which would include a Brooklyn basketball arena for the New Jersey Nets, according to the New York Post. The money, said the Post, was included in a last-day-of-session budget agreement - the New York legislature loves to vote on controversial bills then skip town before anyone notices - by which "Gov. Pataki set aside $34 million of economic-development pork money he controls, while the Assembly and Senate committed $33 million each." Presumably this means that the money is coming out of various discretionary funds, instead of via the normal budget process - I'll see what I can find out once legislators are back in their offices tomorrow.

In related news, a study by the Pratt Institute has revealed how the Ratner project would cast shadows across most of Fort Greene from September to March. The author of the study, architecture professor Brent Porter, told the Brooklyn Papers: "In the winter, suddenly there'll be no light across most of Fort Greene most of the day. ... I'm speaking out because I won’t take this crap anymore. These shadows are a serious environmental impact."

And if that's the quote of the week, the story also gave the Brooklyn Papers' Gersh Kuntzman the chance to pen the lead of the week:

Bruce Ratner has been accused of many things, but now he's being accused of stealing the sun from the sky.

And you know who Kuntzman presumably has in mind.

June 21, 2006

New stadium garage plan for D.C.

The Great D.C. Parking Garage Quandary continues, with the latest plan from the city being for a combination of above- and below-ground parking, surrounded by condos, to be sited just beyond the left-field wall of the new Nationals stadium.

Problem #1: Nationals president Stan Kasten called the announcement of the new plan "premature," and said the team still has additional unanswered questions. Problem #2: The D.C. Zoning Commission must sign off on the plan, and "sources close to the process said approval is not certain," according to the Washington Times, which noted that the commission historically prefers below-ground parking for big projects. Problem #3: The stadium parking would all be above-ground, with the subterranean (couldn't type "below-ground" yet another time, sorry) spots reserved for condo owners - meaning that it's effectively the same amount of above-ground parking that the city said was unacceptable in the first place.

As for Nats fans being treated to a view of parking garages from inside the stadium, the city promised that "special architectural treatments" would shield patrons from having to spot any actual vehicles. Maybe they could paint it with retro-reflectum.

Jets/Giants naming rights to hit $20M/year?

As the New York Jets and Giants prepare to market the naming rights to their planned new stadium in the New Jersey Meadowlands, various guesses are being made as to what those will be worth: The teams told investment bankers earlier this year that the stadium name could bring in $17.6 million a year, while unnamed "experts" tell the Bergen Record the fee could go as high as $20 million. Either would be a record, according to the New York Times, which notes that O2's annual deal for London's Millennium Dome runs $12 million a year, while the U.S. record is $10 million per for the Houston Texans' Reliant Field.

Giants co-owner John Mara also told the Times that he expected an "extraordinary deal" given that the rising steel prices have left the teams now looking at between $1.1 billion and $1.2 billion in construction costs. I'm sure that'll be a big selling point: "Put your name on the most expensive stadium ever!"

June 17, 2006

Minneapolis to subsidize Target Center losses

The Minneapolis city council voted yesterday to have the city cover half the annual losses of the Target Center on non-basketball events, up to $1.2 million. The home of the Timberwolves is owned by the city but operated by an arm of the team's ownership, which says it's losing money on the management deal it signed just two years ago.

"We don't have the choice of not supporting this building: We own it," city finance director Pat Born told the Minneapolis Star Tribune earlier this week. That's true enough, though somewhat disingenuous - when Midwest Entertainment Group, which is controlled by Wolves owner Glen Taylor, took on responsibility for running the place, it was for better or for worse, not with the intent of pocketing any profits while fobbing off losses on the public. (Well, that might have been their intent, but you know...) It's unclear what MEG could do if the council told them to stick their red ink where the sun don't shine, unless maybe there's the fear that Taylor would have MEFG declare bankruptcy and ditch the management contract entirely, leaving the city with no one willing to soak up the arena's mounting losses.

In the larger scheme of things, this is still fallout from the city's disastrous bailout of the Target Center in 1995, when it bought the debt-ridden structure from the Wolves, who had built it, for $54.6 million, thus saddling the public with years of future debts. Things only worsened when neighboring St. Paul built the Xcel Energy Center for the NHL's Wild a few years later, forcing the two venues to compete for acts. (The old Met Center in Bloomington had previously been demolished specifically to reduce competition with the Target Center.) "It does bring up the question of how many entertainment venues the Twin Cities can support," Minneapolis councilmember Elizabeth Glidden told the Minneapolis Observer. You listening, Washington state?

Finally, with the Wolves running arena operations, but the new bailout plan applying only to non-basketball revenues, there's likely to be the opportunity for all sorts of funny business about what constitutes "losses": If Taylor can't find a way to shift all his costs into the "non-basketball" column, and all his revenues into the Wolves column, he's not even trying. The new lease says that the city and MEG will keep negotiating how to manage the arena beyond May 2007; one hopes that Minneapolis will cut a better deal at that point, but if history is any guide, that ain't too likely.

Tiger Stadium to be dismantled before developer is found

Another bit of disturbing news about Detroit's plans for Tiger Stadium, courtesy of this morning's Detroit News:

So far, though, officials have no developer or architects. They'll solicit architects in a few weeks, while requests for bids from developers would come by late fall or winter.

And:

Seats, signs and other artifacts would be removed around September and should be up for sale to the public by October, [Detroit Economic Growth Corp. president George Jackson] said.

I'm sure many Detroiters, knowing their city's track record on knocking things down and not replacing them, are worrying what I'm worrying: Tiger Stadium could be stripped and gutted by the fall, only for the city to fail to find a developer who wants to build those condos the mayor wants. At which point it would be too late to save what would now be an empty shell, and Detroit would find itself with one more vacant lot - and you can't have too many of those, apparently.

LATE NOTE: You can hear me discussing the fate of Tiger Stadium, as well as other stadium goings-on, on this week's Baseball Prospectus Radio (mp3 download here, I come on about halfway in).

June 16, 2006

Tiger Stadium to be razed for condos?

A verdict on the fate of Detroit's Tiger Stadium is expected in the next few days, and, as promised by Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, it looks to involve a cigarette and a blindfold. Kilpatrick told the Detroit Free Press yesterday that he's endorsing a plan to demolish the 94-year-old ballpark as early as this fall, and replace it with low-rise condos and retail shops. "The future of the Michigan and Trumbull site will honor and preserve the memory of Tiger Stadium," declared the mayor.

Not hardly, say others, who note that while the playing field will be preserved (in altered form), the actual building won't be - though there's talk of keeping a few relics like the locker rooms, press box, or a single row of seats - and that Detroit is lousy with already-vacant lots where condos could be built without knocking down a national landmark. "To totally tear it down and just save the grass, you've really lost the opportunity to market a historic site that could be a tourist attraction," Bill Dow of the Tiger Stadium Fan Club told WWJ radio yesterday (listen to the interview here). "People are going to drive by and basically see a minimall with apartments on top."

To add insult to injury, while the condos would be privately funded, Detroit taxpayers would pay the razing the stadium, which is estimated to run between $3 million and $6 million. Sharp-eyed readers will recall that a Tigers ticket tax was supposed to go towards both upkeep and demolition costs of the old park, but that money is now gone, and no one's sure what Tigers owner Mike Ilitch did with it.

If this truly is the end for Tiger Stadium - and as several locals have pointed out, development plans in Detroit tend to move at glacial pace when they move at all - then baseball will lose one of its most underrated, spectacular places to watch a ballgame. Opened in 1912 and expanded over the ensuing decades, Tiger Stadium is a throwback to the days when every fan, from the field level to the cheap seats, was close to the action: sportswriter Thomas Boswell once wrote of how it was watching Jack Morris pitch from the upper deck at Tiger Stadium that taught him the true meaning of a pitcher keeping hitters off-balance by changing speeds. As onetime Tigers employee (and current Friends of Yankee Stadium proprietor) David Gratt wrote on the third anniversary of the old ballpark's final game:

On the one hand, as former Tiger Frank Tanana noted when asked his feelings about Tiger Stadium, "It's just a building." But buildings are important because they help shape our experiences of the world around us. And now, after three years, the reality finally starts to sink in. It isn't really noticeable at first. Other things take precedence, so it's easy not to think about it for a while. But then something will trigger the reminiscence. It could be the sizzle of sausages frying up, or the smell of freshly cut grass, or the color of the clouds at twilight. It could be a trip to a place like Shea Stadium, soulless and circular, surrounded by a sea of parking, with upper deck seats so far from the field that the action becomes almost inconsequential. It could be a winter conversation about the upcoming season, or watching kids play catch in the spring. And the memories come flooding in: sitting in the upper deck with friends on a warm summer night with the open sky above; the hiss of the ball as the relief pitchers warm up next the stands in another lost game; a beleaguered outfielder running behind the flagpole, trying unsuccessfully to corral a triple; a jam-packed park, late in the season, klieg lights reflecting off the players' helmets, crisp white uniforms contrasted against black caps and the murky chiaroscuro of the upper deck, deep in shadow.

And you want to go back. But now you can't.