November 07, 2011
Royals to sell Kauffman naming rights, split cash with stadium's public owners
Kansas City's NBC affiliate is reporting that the Royals are on the cusp of a deal to sell naming rights to Kauffman Stadium, their 38-year-old ballpark that currently bears the name of the team's founding owner. According to the report, the deal is with a bank that will pay between $3 million and $6 million a year for the next 21 years to have its name on the building, just in time to get its name in the papers during next year's All-Star Game, which will be held in K.C.
The report also notes:
Sources say according to the lease, half of the money will go to the Royals, half will go back to the Jackson County taxpayers to pay for stadium maintenance.
That's good news compared to most cities, where teams demand 100% of all naming-rights money as part of their stadium deals. Though given that the stadium is owned by Jackson County, and local taxpayers just spent a couple hundred million dollars to renovate the place in 2006, it's hard to see why the Royals should be getting any money at all — especially when the public's half of the naming rights boodle won't come close to paying off the $8.5 million in operations costs taxpayers are on the hook for under the 2006 lease revisions.
But, hey, at least it's something. And this way maybe the windfall will let the Royals afford to sign ... um, one-third of Paul Maholm?
For the love of god no. As a long suffering Royals fan, I supported the name chane from Royals to kauffman back in the day but this is just stupid. Why must everything in this country be festooned with some sort of corporate branding. It's just sad.
Posted by Jmauro on November 7, 2011 09:52 AM
Jmauro-
Money.
Exposure is worth a lot, so people are always willing to sell it.
You could argue for regulation of this sort of thing with a "commons" argument.
Take billboards. Building and placing a billboard next a road has say a net value of $1,000 to a company, now they just need a location. The pain from giving up the land and having the sign is say $500 for the land owner. So the company pays the land owner $750. Now they are both "$250" richer.
Except the eyesore of the billboard is a cost of say $0.001 to every car who passes it, and the road has 10,000,000 cars pass a year. So now you have a $10,000 yearly cost distributed among a bunch of people. The harm to each driver is so small that it is not worth acting on, but the overall effect is to make everyone but the business and the landowner worse off. Now multiply that by the 2000 billboards of more you find in the average large American city.
Anyway that is the framework for regulating things like this. Do fans feel enough pain from selling of names to justify changing the regulations regarding it?
Posted by Joshua Northey on November 7, 2011 10:44 AM
Peckerwood Stadium has a nice ring to it.
Posted by D. Duke on November 19, 2011 11:48 PM
It looks like this was a rumor started by Arvast Bank. The Royals are denying it. mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20111107&content_id=25930490&vkey=news_mlb&c_id=mlb
Posted by Jmauro on November 20, 2011 06:15 PM