Even MLB doesn’t pretend the All-Star Game brought $100m to Atlanta, so why does the media?

access_time personNeil deMause

The MLB All-Star Game was last night, and the word being used to describe it most in headlines is “historic,” which is the nice way of saying it was tied after nine innings and decided by a mini–home run derby because baseball changed the rules in 2022. And the thing about history is that it can be good or bad, or both depending on your perspective, so it’s a fair word for everyone to describe what unfolded last night.

What hasn’t changed, meanwhile, is the torrent of article that accompany every major sporting event these days, claiming the true historic event is the rain of economic activity that falls from the sky as a result:

According to preliminary estimates, the All-Star Game and surrounding events are expected to generate at least $50 million in economic activity for metro Atlanta. Statewide, officials believe the number could approach or surpass $100 million, comparable to what Georgia was projected to lose when the 2021 All-Star Game was relocated.

This is the kind of reporting that causes sports economists to lose their shit. The impact of sports mega-events has been studied to death at this point, and the findings show that while events like All-Star Games or Super Bowls obviously draw tons of fans, they often drive away other visitors who steer clear of town during the event, cost significant amounts of public money for hosting and supporting the event, divert money and attention from other things cities could be investing in, and siphon off much of their benefits to out-of-town interests. And when pressed back in 2021 on the source of their economic projections for an Atlanta All-Star Game in particular, the league and county officials who boasted of them already backed away from them, with the county saying they came from the Braves and MLB, the Braves saying they came from the league, and the league denying any role in calculating them at all.

USA Today sportswriter Gabe Lacques visited The Battery, the bespoke neighborhood that the Braves built in a wooded area alongside their new suburban stadium that opened in 2017 with the help of more than $300 million in county money, and found that while it’s a success from a team real estate development standpoint, generating $67.3 million a year for the team, it hasn’t done much for the county, and certainly not for the Atlanta metro area as a whole:

Certainly, Cobb County captured the revenue that used to go to Fulton County when the Braves played there. Yet much of the activity – a night at the movies, a mid-range dinner, a round of drinks with the boys or the baddies – simply would have occurred somewhere else minus The Battery’s existence.

“You built a department store,” says JC Bradbury, an economist and associate professor at Kennesaw State. “We already have seven of those in Cobb County. It’s not transformative for development when you look at a county that’s a ($64 billion) economy. It’s a rounding error.

“Even though they’re always touted as a great economic engine, they’re not. And the data bear this out.”

Bradbury has already crunched the numbers and found that the county is losing about $15 million a year in tax revenue on the Braves stadium development, a figure that didn’t make it into any of this week’s coverage, not even USA Today’s.

And, hey, what was all that way back up above about “when the 2021 All-Star Game was relocated”? Also not mentioned much, in an event that celebrated Henry Aaron breaking Babe Ruth’s career home run record while downplaying the groundbreaking civil rights aspects of the moment, was the fact that Atlanta was originally supposed to host the All-Star Game in 2021, but MLB took it away because of concerns over Georgia’s draconian new voting laws that threatened to disenfranchise many Black voters. What ever happened with those laws, anyway?

In fact, voting rights experts say, conditions have only worsened for potentially disenfranchised voters….

A Brennan Center for Justice analysis of the 2022 midterms revealed that the racial gap between white and Black voters was the largest in at least a decade.

As opponents of the bill indicated, reducing the amount and availability of drop boxes would have a disproportionate impact on voters in areas like Fulton County, where they were abundant during the presidential election but much scarcer in the wake of SB 202.

MLB commissioner Rob Manfred’s explanation of why he changed his mind despite the laws that led to the 2021 cancellation not changing one bit: “I made a decision in 2021 to move the event and I understand, believe me, that people had then and probably still have different views as to the merits of that decision. What’s most important is that the Atlanta Braves are a great organization. Truist Park and The Battery are gems in terms of the facilities, and Atlanta and Georgia have been great markets for us for a very, very long time.”

All that reporting is again courtesy of Lacques, who is shaping up to be the hero of All-Star week journalism, along with folks like Craig Calcaterra and Bradbury. Much like last night’s game itself, the impact of the All-Star Game looks exciting and historic on the surface, but it leaves out a lot of the story.

Share this post:

Ohio really does plan to fund Browns and other stadiums by seizing billions in money it owes to private individuals

access_time personNeil deMause

Remember how the Ohio legislature proposed borrowing $600 million from the state’s unclaimed property fund to use on a new Cleveland Browns stadium and repaying it with money from an omni-TIF collecting all kinds of tax money from in and around the stadium, and then the bill passed and it was described as providing “$600 million for the proposed Cleveland Browns domed stadium in Brook Park using unclaimed funds,” and I said it wasn’t really because that was just where Ohio would be borrowing the money from temporarily? Well, about that:

The $600 million for a new Cleveland Browns stadium that the state is raiding from the state’s unclaimed property fund won’t be repaid to the fund, and the state will eventually seize any unclaimed funds held longer than 10 years….

Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer initially reported that under the plan, first proposed by Senate Republicans, such tax revenue would be used to return the $600 million to the state’s unclaimed funds account, which includes private property from things like inactive bank accounts, old safe deposit box holdings, and uncashed checks and insurance policies.

But, in fact, money seized for the new Sports and Cultural Facility Fund will never be returned to the pot of unclaimed funds.

And beginning in 2036, any unclaimed funds that have been held by the state for 10 years will automatically be diverted to the new development fund for construction work on other sports stadiums and cultural facilities around Ohio.

That’s, uh, real different, Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer! Under the final budget bill, the news sites report, stadium-related taxes will continue to flow into the state’s general fund as usual, meaning Ohio actually will be funding a new stadium for the Browns — and possibly new or upgraded buildings for the Cincinnati Bengals and Columbus Blue Jackets and who knows who else — by seizing money it’s been holding on behalf of people who left it in inactive bank accounts, old safe deposit box holdings, uncashed checks, or the like, and handing it over to sports team owners.

If you think that sounds of dubious legality, you’re not alone: Attorneys including former Ohio attorney general Marc Dann (never mind for the moment how he became former) have filed a class action suit on behalf of the owners of the unclaimed funds, saying “that’s private property that the state has decided to take for itself.” Previous to the new law, anyone with money in the accounts could claim it in perpetuity — instead, Ohio will now be able to seize anything left in the fund for ten years, and use it to pay off the sports stadiums.

States laying claim to unclaimed property after a set period of time is actually pretty common in other states, where it’s known as “escheatment,” (The word comes from an Old French term for inheritance, not from the word “cheat,” though I’m sure plenty of people will still make that connection.) Northern Kentucky University law professor Ken Katkin told WLWT that “there’s a lot of smoke here, but I think there’s no fire,” and said he expected the class action suit would face an uphill battle.

Even so, there’s another question here, which is what happens if enough people start filing claims for their unclaimed money that Ohio doesn’t have enough left to pay for its unending series of stadium projects? That’s pretty unlikely for just the Browns — the fund currently sits at a staggering $4.8 billion, and Browns owner Jimmy Haslam is only asking for $600 million of it — but if enough team owners eventually demand a cut, and publicity about the unclaimed property fund leads enough people to start reclaiming their money before the ten-year clock runs out, it could eventually be an issue.

For now, though, Ohio legislators look to have found a way to funnel billions of dollars of public money to private sports team owners without breaking the state budget, by taking the money from an escrow account where it was holding it on behalf of private individuals. Even if courts end up ruling that’s just legal escheatment, it’s money the state could have used for literally anything else — but sports team owners were shouting the loudest, so they’re the ones who end up getting the benefit of all those uncashed checks.

Share this post:

New Rays owners to build stadium in either Tampa or St. Pete, maybe probably

access_time personNeil deMause

As of a month ago, Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg was said to be in “advanced talks” to sell the team to a group led by Florida developer Patrick Zalupski, who would then presumably restart talks to build a new stadium in the Tampa Bay area. Today — well, let’s let the Athletic headline tell the story:

Sale of Rays expected to be final by September, team likely to stay in Tampa area: Source

That’s impressively vague, in that even when citing the report to an unnamed source (“a person briefed on the process,” according to the Athletic story), they still find it necessary to hedge with “expected to” and “likely.” Evan Drellich and Ken Rosenthal go on to say that Zalupski has agreed to a $1.7 billion purchase “in principle” it’s “expected to be completed as soon as September,” but still this is more moving from “advanced” to “very advanced” talks than actual solid news.

And as for where the team will play, that’s an even more impressive cavalcade of maybes:

Zalupski is expected to keep the team in the Tampa Bay area, with a strong preference to be in Tampa rather than St. Petersburg….

The sale could hasten a conclusion to the Rays’ long-running search for a new stadium.

You know who else had a strong preference to play in Tampa rather than St. Pete? Stu Sternberg, until it turned out Hillsborough County didn’t have enough money to pay for most of a stadium there and he didn’t want to himself, at which point he pivoted to the $1 billion St. Petersburg subsidy deal that he later backed out of because reasons. So basically we’re back to square one on where the Rays will play, only with a new owner who St. Petersburg officials don’t hate so much — which could easily make an important difference, as anyone can say who remembers how the Detroit Tigers being sold from one pizza baron to a different one with more real estate connections helped jumpstart that team’s stadium demands.

As for Zalupski, aside from him paying (sorry, being expected to pay) a remarkably high sale price for a distressed property — $1.7 billion would be just under what the Baltimore Orioles sold for last year — aside from his own real estate background in building single-family homes that only sometimes explode, he doesn’t have much of a track record to go by. The Tampa Bay Times’ Marc Topkin, always eager to find something nice to say about the local sports team owner, enthuses that Zalupski “has been involved in pro sports,” by which he means that his company Dream Finders Homes once owned naming rights to the Jacksonville Jaguars‘ practice facility and he “has earned an invitation to Jaguars owner Shad Khan’s superyacht.” Zalupski and Dream Finders are also major donors to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, though DeSantis has already vowed not to spend any money on a Rays stadium except for “roads and exits.” We’ll have to wait and see, which is really the case with all of this story from the sale on down, at least until some sources are actually willing to go on the record with something.

Share this post:

Royals owner opens talks on North KC stadium subsidies to go along with his $750m from the state

access_time personNeil deMause

Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman has tax subsidy offers in hand from two states — $700 million and up from Kansas and $750 million from Missouri — but he hasn’t had much to say publicly of late about where in either state he might want to build a stadium, let alone how much more in city and county money he would want on top of his state checks. On Friday, however, North Kansas City in Clay County took a step forward as a potential Royals stadium site … well, two steps forward … well, two baby steps forward:

  • Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe signed the Clay County Sports Complex Authority bill into law. When this was first introduced back in May, it was intended to set up a county sports authority and seed it with enough state tax money to pay off an additional $200 million in stadium expenses; now the bill just says that the state legislature “may” contribute $3 million a year toward the sports authority, provided that the county provides matching funds. (It actually says the county must “contribute at lease [sic] $3 million per calendar year”; can’t wait to see if there are any hilarious unintended consequences of that typo.)
  • Clay County Western Commissioner At-Large Jason Withington posted on Facebook that “Just before the July 4th holiday, Clay County, Missouri Government received a term sheet from the team outlining their vision for a potential deal at the #NKC site. This is a big step, but there’s still plenty of work ahead as we move forward in negotiations.” What’s in the term sheet? Withington and other commissioners didn’t say, though he did reveal that it was (in the Kansas City Star’s words) “at least eight pages long and centered on a potential North Kansas City stadium,” which makes one wonder if Clay County commissioners have trouble counting past eight.

Neither of these steps are all that significant. The sports authority would be a necessary step for a North K.C. stadium, but the amount of money included is trivial (and nonguaranteed). County commissioners, meanwhile, stressed that the term sheet only represented the start of talks: Clay County Presiding Commissioner Jerry Nolte said, “We should be optimistic, but it’s not like there’s something imminent,” while Withington added, “I just wanted people to know, hey look, we are negotiating with the Royals. Yes, we are having conversations with the Royals. We are not close to a deal, but we are having conversations.”

Kicking the tires on Clay County seems to be Sherman’s way of launching a bidding war between Kansas City and North Kansas City for his team’s affections, even while he’s still conducting a similar bidding war between Missouri and Kansas. It’s a tough dance to pull off, but with potentially well over a billion dollars in public money at stake once city and county funds are included, you know that he’s going to do his damnedest to pull it off, just like any other red-blooded American billionaire with tax dollars in his eyes.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Commanders warn DC council “Don’t make Trump come in there,” plus Blue Jackets could join the line for Ohio subsidies

access_time personNeil deMause

Okay, that’s done, Friday roundup, let’s get to it:

Share this post:

What does that big Defector article tell us about Diamond Baseball Holdings’ plans for minor-league domination?

access_time personNeil deMause

We’ll get to the regular Friday news roundup in a bit, but first I want to take some time to dig into yesterday’s long Defector article on Diamond Baseball Holdings, the private equity company that in the last few years has bought up a staggering 35% of all minor-league baseball teams. This is the kind of big reported piece that Defector and its predecessor Deadspin used to specialize in, but that hardly anyone seems to have the time to write, or read, anymore. And with DBH’s rampage across the minors one of the enduring mysteries of the modern sports world, I wanted to give it a careful read and see what solid conclusions we can draw about the future of the minor leagues, the role of private equity in sports and the greater world, and anything else we can learn along the way.

Starting at the top:

  • Defector has a long history with private equity, having been founded by refugees from Deadspin, whose parent company was bought by PE firm Great Hill Partners, which promptly drove the staff to quit en masse through its incoherent micromanaging. The article starts off, in fact, with a link to an interview with former Deadspin editor Megan Greenwell about how the experience inspired her to write a book about PE, in which she paints the entire industry as a bunch of rich dudes who glom on to anything they think they can extract a profit from — news sites, hospitals, dental offices for some reason — and impose policies more geared toward a quick cash grab than any sensical long-term business plan. (As just one example, Great Hill told Deadspin editors that they needed to insert sports scores on the top of their page, said Greenwell, because “their only version of success for a sports website was ESPN, and so their goal for us was make us ESPN, which didn’t make sense on several levels.”)
  • The road to Diamond Baseball Holdings’ rapid expansion was laid in early 2021, right after MLB took over control of the minors. Previously, no one owner could control more than one team in any league — the Defector article doesn’t say, but I’m assuming this goes back to the bad old 19th-century days of “syndicate ball,” when one baseball owner could buy two teams and move all the best players to one, leaving the other to rot on the vine and become the 1899 Cleveland Spiders. Now, MLB and its MiLB arm had agreed, there would be no such limit, only an overall cap of 50 total teams that one owner could hold, with no more than 14 at each minor-league level.
  • Into this breach stepped DBH, either with the explicit or implicit approval of MLB. (There’s a long confusing section about a slide deck that may or may not incriminate MLB officials in helping DBH get off the ground, but either way it’s clearly what the league intended to enable by watering down the rule against multiple ownership.) The company immediately started buying up teams willy-nilly, including ten teams in one day in December 2021: the Mississippi Braves, Gwinnett Stripers, Augusta GreenJackets, Hudson Valley Renegades, Iowa Cubs, Memphis Redbirds, Oklahoma City Dodgers, Rome Braves, San Jose Giants, and Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders.
  • At the same time, MLB eliminated 43 affiliated franchises, casting some into the void and forcing others to reinvent themselves as independent league teams or as members of “draft leagues,” new circuits where amateur players would be invited to play for free to compete for attention in the majors’ annual player draft. This not only saved MLB teams money on paying player salaries, it created an abrupt game of musical chairs for minor-league cities to be left with affiliated teams — something that, as I wrote for Defector at the time, allowed MLB to bump up its stadium requirements, “sending signals to jettisoned cities that the best way to get back into the league’s good graces is to build a new stadium.” And that went for cities in fear of being jettisoned, too: As this week’s Defector piece recounts, several  teams (the Hillsboro Hops and Richmond Flying Squirrels among them) extracted public stadium cash in part by holding the threat of being evaporated, or just moved to a now-vacant city, over the heads of local officials.
  • DBH is owned by the PE company Silver Lake, which also owns a major stake in Fanatics, the apparel company whose questionable production standards led to the infamous see-through MLB uniforms of 2024. Not mentioned by Defector: Silver Lake is also a major investor in Oak View Group, the stadium and arena developer whose CEO Tim Leiweke abruptly resigned this week after he was indicted on federal bid-rigging charges for allegedly conspiring to get Legends Entertainment to drop out of bidding to operate the University of Texas’ basketball arena in exchange for getting lucrative subcontracts.
  • “Who were these people? And why would private equity be interested in minor league baseball?” Employees for DBH teams say they don’t know; longtime minor league baseball owner Miles Wolff said to the The Nation last year, “Do you understand how Diamond Baseball hopes to make money? I’m mystified.” That Nation article, incidentally, largely concluded that DBH’s business plan was to cash in on stadium subsidies in the freshly depleted minors, noting that “in the three years DBH has been in operation, DBH-owned teams have extracted nearly $300 million in public money from local governments throughout the country, according to the Maine Center For Economic Policy.”
  • Defector goes on to speculation that DBH is looking to either increase minor-league teams’ bottom line by hosting lots of concerts (fine as far as it goes, but good luck with that) or by building up Wrigley-style entertainment districts around minor-league stadiums — both of which are all the rage among all sports franchises, so while DBH may indeed be doing so, they’re almost certainly not alone.

All of which leaves us with the original question: What is DBH up to, and is it something specifically related to the evils of private equity, or just what any red-blooded rich dudes looking to fill their pockets would do? The article leaves off without ever really answering the question — though it does at least help establish the timeline by which MLB set the stage for a corporate takeover of the minors, all the better to maximize profits by exploiting minor-league cities and fans. What this means for the future of the minor leagues remains uncertain, though Megan Greenwell would surely warn that it’s not likely to be good.

Finally, one small editorial gripe: I know that headline writing is all SEO keywords these days, but it still seems like a huge missed opportunity not to have titled this story “Yo, Bum Rush MiLB The Show: The Story of PE.” There used to be an art to this stuff, dagnabit. Now if you’ll excuse me, I gotta go yell at some clouds.

Share this post:

Bears execs ask if fans would pay $600 for “VIP tailgating” with hand-carved meats

access_time personNeil deMause

The Chicago Bears management has begun polling Chicagoans — both ticket buyers and “an external panel the Bears purchased to represent fans outside of their database and non-fans” — about what they would want in a new stadium, and WGN-TV reporter Eli Ong has taken the poll so you don’t have to. What did he find out?

  • The survey starts with some push-polly PR glurge about how “a new, enclosed stadium located in Chicagoland” would “host Bears home games, serve a variety of community needs, and attract approximately 20 top-tier sports and entertainment events each year from around the world” and “feature improved seating options and upgraded amenities, including better concessions, expanded concourses, modern technology, and more.” Sounds great already, who’s paying for it? Hello?
  • Next up was “a checklist of events the Bears think I might be likely to attend before and after a Chicago home game,” followed by a separate section about “VIP Tailgating.” Ong describes this in detail: “An exclusive VIP pre-game hospitality area, located conveniently outside the venue … could feature a climate-controlled environment with a variety of open seating options for socializing and dining. VIP pre-game hospitality buyers would enjoy high-end food and beverage offerings such as hand-carved meats, oven-fired pizzas, and a fully stocked bar with signature cocktails, craft beers, and fine wines to enhance the pre-game festivities.” Would you be interested in “an all-inclusive [presumably meaning with a ticket included] VIP Tailgating pass” at $600? How about $500? $400? [EDIT: It’s also possible that “all-inclusive” means per season, and the $150 “a la carte” pass would be per game. You’d think the Bears would have just said “season” vs. “per-game” then, but marketers do have their reasons.]
  • The survey closed out with a question about how one felt about the construction of a new Bears stadium, ranging from very positively to very negatively, and three single words to describe why one felt this way. Let’s see, “extortion” is just one word! As is “hellbears.”
  • Ong doesn’t include the full survey, but WLS-TV fleshes out some more of it, including a request for feedback on “hypothetical season ticket packages that are priced anywhere from $1,400 for a reserved seat to nearly $14,000 for a club seat with lounge access and food and drink included. Those packages come with a one-time membership fee, ranging from $1,400 to more than $132,000, though the Bears say no pricing decisions have been made.”

If anything, it’s kind of weird that Bears officials are only asking fans these kinds of questions now, years into their stadium push — you’d think that if you’re trying to build a multi-billion-dollar stadium and figuring out how to pay for it with only billions of dollars in public subsidies, you’d want to know how much you can extract from your fans for pregame pizza. But sending out the survey now does have the bonus effect of making the stadium push seem like it has momentum — the Bears are building a new stadium, they’re just figuring out what kind of signature cocktails to offer! — something that has been extremely lacking of late. Ong says he received the survey courtesy of a Bears spokesperson, so clearly somebody in the organization thinks there’s no such thing as bad publicity, at least not when you’re desperate to find a city willing to offer you a billion dollars or more to dance.

Share this post:

Broncos owner may seek tax money for stadium, but it’s okay because he’s really rich

access_time personNeil deMause

There hasn’t been too much detail so far about how Denver Broncos owner/Walmart board chair Greg Penner plans to pay for the new stadium he may or may not want to build, but now there’s at least a hint: The Denver Post has revealed that Broncos execs and Denver Mayor Mike Johnston’s office reached out to the Denver Urban Renewal Authority last year to ask about using tax increment financing:

Those conversations were “very limited,” [Denver Urban Renewal Authority executive director Tracy] Huggins said, but the parties specifically mentioned Burnham Yard, the industrial area near La Alma Lincoln Park that has drawn increasing buzz as a possible landing spot for a new Broncos stadium.

“There were, in total, maybe three conversations,” Huggins said. “Again, (it was) both the city and the Broncos just really wanting to understand what would it mean, and how we would do it.”

TIFs are all the rage in stadium financing right now, as they serve the dual purpose of providing tax money to pay for a team owner’s stadium bills while simultaneously insisting it isn’t real tax money, because the team touched it on its way to the public treasury, making it like an isosceles triangle. There’s no way of knowing how much city money Penner could be seeking via a TIF — it all depends on whether this would be a traditional TIF that just diverts property taxes, or an omni-TIF like in Ohio that siphons off every tax imaginable (or at least both property and sales taxes, which are explicitly allowed by Colorado TIF law), and the Post didn’t get into that level of detail with Huggins.

The Post did assert, though, that there’s no need for Denver residents to worry, because Penner is very, very rich:

It’s unlikely that any Broncos stadium redevelopment would rely on a large sum of public money, as the Walton-Penner group is widely regarded as the richest ownership group in the NFL.

Josh Harris, the 12th richest owner in the NFL, and his $7 billion subsidy demand have entered the chat. If there’s one truism in stadium media coverage, it’s that when someone says not to worry about what the public cost will be, it’s generally a good idea for taxpayers to hold on to their wallets.

Share this post:

Can Trump bigfoot DC into approving $7B Commanders stadium deal? An investimagation

access_time personNeil deMause

One of the frustrating aspects about trying to write about the Trump administration — actually one of the less frustrating aspects all things considered, but still pretty frustrating — is what in olden times used to be called Kremlinology: deciphering what the nation’s leader actually means by parsing every nuance of what he says. So I’ve been avoiding weighing in on the “Will Donald Trump intervene in the Washington Commanders stadium situation question?” until more facts are in, but it looks like we’re unlikely to get any, so away we go:

As covered last week, D.C. council president Phil Mendelson said he heard that Commanders owner Josh Harris had a “Plan B” for expediting approval of his proposed $7 billion–plus stadium subsidy, and that was to get Trump and/or Congress involved somehow. Once that was out in the journosphere, someone asked Trump about it over the weekend, and he answered, sort of:

“It’s a very important piece of property; it’s a great piece of property,” he said. “So, we’ll see. But if I can help them out, I will. You know, ultimately, we control that; the federal government ultimately controls it. So, we’ll see what happens.”

On Tuesday, Trump added some more:

“We could run DC. I mean, we’re looking at DC,” Trump said during a cabinet meeting Tuesday, where he was holding court at length in front of cameras. “We’re thinking about doing it, to be honest with you. We want a capital that’s run flawlessly.”

Divining what’s going on in Trump’s head from this, let alone what he’s actually likely to do, is pretty much impossible. The federal government “ultimately controls” D.C.’s budget, but 1) that’s Congress, not the White House, and 2) unless I’m mistaken, even Congress doesn’t have the power to pass its own spending bills for D.C., only to approve or block the city’s own budget measures. And Trump’s second statement appears to have been about combatting crime, not building a football stadium, if it can be said to be “about” anything at all other than pwning a Democratic city leadership.

It is true that Harris has been an informal Trump advisor as well as recently giving the president a custom jersey and calling him “the ultimate Commander,” which is a proven way to get on his good side. It’s not clear what Trump can do to force the D.C. council to pass a stadium bill this month rather than putting it off until the fall, though: Threaten to cut even more of the city’s funding than he already has? Abduct Mendelson and send him to El Salvador? It’s not like there’s even $7 billion in the D.C. budget that he could try to expropriate and give to Harris — the money being promised is mostly in the form of an insanely sweetheart lease deal on federal land controlled by D.C. — though that’s not to say he won’t try issuing an executive order insisting that it happen anyway.

Bowser chimed in this week with her own vague intimations, replying to a question about House oversight committee chair James Comer, who pushed through the legislation that transferred the RFK stadium site to D.C.’s control: “He authored the legislation, spearheaded through the Congress, helped with it in the Senate, and I don’t think he’s willing to see it die at the Council of the District of Columbia.” Implying … what exactly? That Congress could try to repeal that legislation and then give the land to Harris itself? That Bowser is just invoking the name of a Congressperson and warning the council, “Don’t make Comer come in there?”

Most of this is almost certainly just politicians answering questions posed to them by the media with tough-sounding talk, so it’s unlikely there’s some grand scheme at work here. It is true, though, that Harris and Bowser desperately want to get this stadium deal finalized before anyone starts asking too many questions, so if vague threats can serve as a two-minute warning to make the council feel some urgency, no harm in throwing some out there. We may know more as Harris and Bowser’s self-imposed July 15 deadline for council action approaches, but it’s impossible to predict without a much more robust Kremlin-to-English dictionary,

Share this post:

Kansas helpfully provides December stadium deadline for Chiefs and Royals to threaten Missouri with

access_time personNeil deMause

We all know by now that “a savvy negotiator creates leverage” is the basis for pretty much all sports team move threats: Whether an owner is seriously considering relocating or not, they’d be foolish not to at least kick the tires on another city or state in hopes of lighting a fire under local elected officials to fund a new or renovated stadium to “keep the team in town.”

What this leverage-making ends up looking like in practice is a long game of chicken, where two (or more!) sides issue ultimatums, hoping that those across the table will be afraid of seeing what happens if they don’t meet them. And while sports team owners aren’t always good at this, all evidence is that elected officials are much, much worse.

Which brings us to the meeting of the Kansas state legislature that took place yesterday to address the state’s year-old measure offering $1.4 billion-plus worth of future state tax money to the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals if they moved across the border from Missouri. The STAR bond offer came with an expiration date: June 30, 2025, by which time the team owners needed to decide if they were taking the money or not — as Kansas House Speaker Dan Hawkins said last month, “We gave them a year to get it done, and in a year, you know, they kind of keep messing around, going back and forth, and you extend it, and that’s what they’ll do. You know, the pressure is off. Then it could take another year and come back again.”

Would Kansas legislators stick their guns? Do you even need to ask?

Kansas lawmakers voted to extend the deadline for the state’s STAR Bonds, giving the Kansas City Chiefs and Kansas City Royals more time to work out stadium deals.

The offer expired June 30, but the Legislative Coordinating Council met Monday to discuss an extension.

The committee unanimously voted to extend the deadline, meaning the offer is technically good for another year, which was the only extension option in the bill language.

Cue the pressure being off! Though not entirely off: The Legislative Coordinating Council, a group of eight legislators who meet to do legislature stuff when the rest of the legislature is off at the beach, approved a provision introduced by Hawkins that says the council won’t consider any stadium plans that arrive after December 31, 2025. Unless, you know, they change their minds again and decide they need another extension to ensure the ball crosses the goal line.

Again, all this gamesmanship is common, but it always seems to end up working out in favor of the teams. Take the then-Florida Marlins, whose owner Jeff Loria made an annual habit of threatening that this was the last chance for local officials to provide him with stadium funding — then when legislators declined to do so, he’d be back the next year asking again. Yet Loria still ended up getting everything he wanted, while repeatedly calling owners’ bluffs never seems to make elected officials realize that they can start reducing their offers, not increasing them.

Hawkins no doubt meant that December 31 deadline to be pressure on Chiefs owner Clark Hunt and Royals owner John Sherman to pick a damn state already, but we’ve already seen how deadlines function in this stadium war: The last deadline of June 30 was used by the team owners to get Missouri legislators to rush to approve $1.5 billion in state subsidies for the teams, lest they accept Kansas’s offer. With both Hunt and Sherman now seeking even more money on top of that from city and county governments, is there any doubt in anyone’s mind that “Approve more taxpayer money by December 31 or else” will be the message in Missouri — even if Hunt and Sherman are nowhere near ready to pull the trigger on an “or else,” not when they can keep the bidding war going?

Tl;dr: In an extortion racket, deadlines always end up benefiting the extortionists. “If you don’t accept our money, we’ll let you kill the dog” isn’t nearly as effective a threat, for some reason.

Share this post: