June 06, 2011
Legislative clock running down on Vegas stadium and arena deals
It's getting late early out there in Nevada, as the state assembly adjourns tomorrow, leaving little time to hash out the details of the complicated arena tax-increment financing bill that three developers are seeking to take advantage of (and a fourth is seeking to have amended so it can get in the running).
So far, legislators seem wary — "it is kind of hard to get all these bills like this at the last minute and often extremely difficult to get them through," said state senator Sheila Leslie — but that's not necessarily a major obstacle: "Typically, agreements are not made until the end," local AFL-CIO official and former state legislator Danny Thompson told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. "That is the way this place works."
Of course, the Nevada legislature has been called into special session five times in the last six years, so as we're seeing in Minnesota, it ain't over even when it's over.
March 09, 2011
Contraction's just another word for nothing left to lose in stadium campaigns
I neglected to post a link yesterday to my latest Baseball Prospectus column on MLB's renewed specter of contraction. Skipping right to the stadium content:
As in 2001, much of this is likely being driven by stadium games. Back then, it was the Expos and the Twins that were in the midst of multi-year, till-then-fruitless campaigns to get public money for new stadiums in their home cities; the only reason the Twins were on the contraction list in the first place, despite being in the nation's 14th-largest media market and having a reasonable record of on-field success (they'd go on to win a division title in 2002), was that Pohlad was looking to either scare Minnesota taxpayers into coughing up stadium cash, or get a quick payoff to make his years-long stadium fight into somebody else's headache.
Likewise, on many levels contracting the A's and Rays makes no sense at all. The two Bay Areas are 6th and 14th nationwide in TV market size (Tampa-St. Pete snuck past Minneapolis-St. Paul in 2005); even if you split the S.F.-Oakland-San Jose 7.4-million-person megalopolis in two and grant the A's the smaller slice, that's still a bigger market than most teams have to play with. Both teams have been successful on the field; the Rays weren't that far below league-average in attendance last year, and even the A's routinely drew 2 million fans a year before Wolff decided to artificially reduce capacity by tarping off the Coliseum's entire upper deck. If Kang and Kodos were to land on earth with a mission of wiping a major-league baseball team off the map, they could make a far better case for, say, the Pirates, who play in the 24th-largest TV market (and shrinking), have only drawn 2 million fans once in the last 19 years (2001, when PNC Park opened), haven't smelled October baseball in just as long, and are likewise getting $60 million a year in combined revenue-sharing and central fund money.
The difference, of course, is that the Pirates already have a new stadium, while the A's and Rays are still in the hunt for them.
Much, much more if you click the link, including a 61-and-counting comment thread arguing about the best way to solve baseball's revenue sharing problems, or whether they're even problems that need to be solved in the first place.
October 27, 2010
Baseball writer Bill Shannon died tragically in a house fire at his New Jersey home yesterday morning, at the age of 69. Shannon was best known around New York as an official scorer for the Mets and Yankees, but I knew of him first and foremost as the co-author of the masterful book The Ballparks, which I got at around age 10 and continue to refer to on a regular basis, though its spine is now held together with tape. It's no exaggeration to say that Field of Schemes, and fieldofschemes.com, wouldn't exist without my learning from Shannon an appreciation of the long history of the places where baseball has been played.
Here's a sample from Shannon's preface, written in 1975, that's stuck with me ever since I first read it as a young fan. The story has changed since then, but the sense of critical perspective — the insight — remains true:
Governmental involvement in America's architecture appears inevitably to produce uninspired uniformity and dulling sameness. It has largely done so with ballparks. To justify huge public expenditures, public officials created the oval or circular "all-purpose" ballpark, which theoretically caters to all outdoor sporting needs in the community. In reality, it generally caters to none well and to all with mediocrity. Publicly financed activity has given us ballparks without personalities.
In large measure, this is what this book is about — the personalities of ballparks. Despite the best efforts of planners, even today's newest parks still have their own small idiosyncracies, weather factors, hitting backgrounds, playing surfaces, and wind currents, all varying slightly.
Without doubt the best of the governmental plans for ballparks is New York's reconstruction of Yankee Stadium. It will leave us with a great sports landmark structurally mauled somewhat beyond need in our view. But some Yankee Stadium is better than none, and that seemed to be the alternative choice.
My condolences go out to Shannon's family, his friends, and all who knew him from the press box. This has been just an awful year for people dying too young.
April 09, 2010
Block that meme: When big is small
First line of a New York Times story today by Ken Belson on the new Jets and Giants stadium:
If the trend in baseball stadiums is intimacy, in football, it is grandeur.
I've railed against this before (including the last time Belson proferred it), but let's just put a stake in this right now: New baseball stadiums are not generally more intimate than the ones they replace. Do they have fewer seats? Yes. Is there less foul territory, putting the front rows of the lower deck closer to the action? Yes. But by any normal definition of intimacy — which is to say, fans in general being closer to the game — new baseball stadiums ain't it: With wider legroom and expanded luxury seating, the average seat is usually farther from the field than in older stadiums — and that's even with new stadiums typically having fewer seats.
Now, there are certainly benefits to having more legroom, especially if you're a fan of the taller persuasion. But for all new baseball stadium's attributes, "intimacy" is simply not one of them, no matter how much MLB PR flacks and their enablers in the media try to push it. A better word for the spacious concourses, upgraded video screens, and ubiquitous cupholders they offer might be ... grandeur?
March 25, 2010
MLB.com really, really wants to be taken seriously as an independent news site — it's why every article carries the tagline "This story was not subject to the approval of Major League Baseball or its clubs," hoping to convince you that despite being owned by MLB, it's real journalism.
And then it goes and runs an article like this one, headlined "New ballparks can mean new hope for teams." Oh, yeah? What's your evidence, reporter John Schlegel?
A new ballpark promises many things, from a vastly improved fan experience to the revenue potential to help retain or acquire players. It promises a new visage of a team's home, a new identity -- literally, a new face for the franchise.
But it doesn't promise success on the field. It doesn't promise titles. Those still must be earned.
Okay, that's slightly confusing, given the headline. "New hope" would imply that the teams actually have hope of improving on the field—
A ballpark happens to be an excellent vehicle that teams moving in the right direction on the field can use to take the franchise to the next level.
Okay, that's more than slightly confusing. You still have to "earn" success on the field, but a new ballpark can help you "take it to the next level." (Only the first level is earned, I guess, and for the rest you can use cheat codes.) Let's skip a few paragraphs ahead and see if this gets any clearer:
Target Field will be the 18th ballpark built as a replacement for an earlier MLB home since Baltimore's Oriole Park at Camden Yards and Chicago's U.S. Cellular Field (then New Comiskey Park) opened almost 20 years ago to start the trend of new ballparks. ... Eight of those first 17 teams improved in the standings their first year in their new ballpark, three stayed the same and six took a dip.
That's a pretty weak correlation — there's no way to know exactly how weak without knowing about the performance of teams that didn't build new stadium (more about that in a minute) — and if nothing else, an indication that moving into a new home isn't a magic bullet for on-field success.
In some places, a new ballpark has been like a magic bullet, pure and simple.
Eeeagh!
The Orioles and White Sox found remarkable success right out of -- or into -- the gates. The Orioles reached the AL Championship Series twice and reeled off nine seasons of 3 million or more in attendance. The White Sox set a single-season attendance mark the first year, reached the ALCS the third year and reached the World Series in 2005.
But perhaps nobody made a ballpark into a springboard to success quite like the Indians, who moved into Jacobs Field in 1994, leaving one of the more dreaded buildings in baseball for one of the finest.
The Tribe went to two World Series and reached the playoffs six of the first eight years at Progressive Field, then known as Jacobs Field or The Jake. Combined with the Quicken Loans Arena next door, the sports complex transformed downtown Cleveland, not just a baseball club, setting an example for San Diego and other cities to follow.
Let's take these examples one at a time. The Orioles made the ALCS twice at Camden Yards, yes — in 1996 and 1997, their fifth and sixth years in their new home, which is not quite exactly "out of the gate." Though it is compared with the White Sox' 2005 World Championship, which was apparently sparked by the moved from Comiskey Park to U.S. Cellular Field, notwithstanding that it happened fifteen years later.
As for the Indians, they indeed started winning games at the same time as they moved into Jacobs Field, but now we're down to one example — and there are plenty of counterexamples. These are conveniently listed in the chart accompanying Schegel's article, along with some unintentionally comic attempts at describing the success teams have had since getting new digs:
2003 Reds - Great American Ball Park - No winning seasons yet
2001 Brewers - Miller Park - Reached playoffs in 8th year
2001 Pirates - PNC Park - No winning seasons; hosted All-Star Game
Missing, meanwhile, is a corresponding chart showing what teams that didn't move into new stadiums did on the field. That list would include "Boston Red Sox - Won first two World Series since 1918," "Chicago Cubs - Went to postseason two years in a row for first time since 1908," and "New York Yankees - Won four World Series titles in five years." (Two of those teams hosted All-Star Games at their aged parks, too, if that's your measure of success.) It'd be just as fair to cherry-pick the Red Sox as the Indians, and use them as evidence that the way for teams to get to the "next level" is to not build new stadiums.
In Baseball Between the Numbers, published back in 2006, I actually examined the won-loss records of all teams that had opened new stadiums from 1991 up to that date. The conclusion: In the first five years in a new park, teams on average won 5.5 more games per season than in the last five years in their old park. This made sense, I wrote, because "a team is more likely to sign a Barry Bonds — or, to use the actual example of Cleveland, give long-term contracts to Jim Thome and Kenny Lofton — if it knows the people turning out to watch him are paying $25 per ticket instead of $15."
Of course, I added, "a $500 million stadium is an awfully expensive way to pick up five and a half games in the standings." But when you're presented with a magic bullet, it would be gauche to look at the price tag.
February 12, 2010
Effect of new baseball stadiums on winning: zilch
Jeff Lubbers at Baseball Daily Digest takes a look today at the on-field effects of moving into new stadiums for baseball teams. In their first year at a new home, he finds, starting with Camden Yards in 1992, teams have spent an extra 15.3% on payroll over the previous year, as they availed themselves of heightened revenues to bulk up their talent on the field. (The Minnesota Twins, notes Lubbers, are already at work on that this offseason, acquiring Jim Thome, Orlando Hudson, and J.J. Hardy, though those were mostly at bargain prices.)
And the impact of all this new talent? Writes Lubbers:
Excluding the 2009 Twins of all the teams in the above table their collective record in the last season of their old homes was 1,421-1,430 for a winning percentage of .498. Their collective record in the first season of their new homes was 1,394-1,405 for a winning percentage of ... .498.
While that's a pretty effective debunking of the "stadiums will bring a winner!" myth, there are a couple of ways I'd love to see this study improved. First off, it generally takes more than one year to turn a franchise around; when I did a similar study a few years back for the Baseball Prospectus book Baseball Between the Numbers, I used win percentages for the five years before and after moving to a new stadium, and found that a new home was worth on average about 5.5 wins a year — still a relatively small payoff, but measurably positive. It'd also be good to see how much that 15.3% payroll hike compares to the baseline increase in player salaries, which until recently were rising substantially year to year even for teams without new homes. [CORRECTION: Lubbers does note that the average annual payroll hike for all teams is 7.49% — I missed it somehow on first read.]
Finally, one number I'd love to see added: Change in average ticket prices at new stadiums. Again from BBtN, 11 of the top 14 single-season ticket price hikes between 1991 and 2004 came with teams moving into new digs, topped by the astounding 103% single-season rise in average prices when the Detroit Tigers moved from Tiger Stadium to Comerica Park. New stadiums make players richer, even if they don't make their teams (much) better; but fans are paying through the nose for the privilege of watching their pricier teams play .498 ball.
If anyone has some Excel time handy and is interested in running such a study, you can find all the raw data needed at Rod Fort's site. Or I might give it a shot myself over the weekend, if no one beats me to it.
August 03, 2009
Baseball to baseball fans: It's not about you
The New York Times' Bats blog confirms what everyone already knew: Diehard baseball fans hate what the game experience has become, and teams don't care.
Some of the most frequent unsolicited comments on the Bats blog are along the lines of, "I wish they'd turn down the music" or, "Stop telling me when to clap!"
"What happened to going to the game for the sake of the game?" asked Dave Weickert, a 40-year-old video engineer from Old Bridge, N.J., who takes his 9- and 10-year-old children to four or five games a year. "Do I need pizza races down the aisles between innings? No, no I don't. And if the players want to hear their songs every time they come up, get an iPod like everybody else I work with.
"It can be very distracting, and at the risk of sounding like a cranky old man, it's just too loud. Baseball has always been more of a pastoral experience — a good day at the park with your friends. You could even sneak in a conversation. Not a trip to the discotheque."...
[Tampa Bay Rays VP Darcy Raymond] recognized that the old-school fan might not appreciate the piped-in smell of bubblegum.
"You're really coming to see a show," he said. "To some people, the traditionalist, it may be sensory overload. If you're not into a sensory experience, the Trop is not for you. We're a new-school team."
This recalls a conversation I had many years ago with a sports economist and baseball fan, who related a talk he in turn had with a sports marketer. After the economist made similar complaints that he just wanted to go to a ballgame to watch the ballgame, the marketer replied, "Oh, yeah, you're what we call a 'traditional fan.' Let me tell you something: There aren't that many of you."
More to the point, diehard fans will keep showing up to games regardless, while more casual one will just go do something else if they're bored. And so sports, like Congress, ends up being run to cater to swing votes.