In need of a laugh this morning, and not in the mood for tiresome selfie-related hoaxes? Allow NBC San Diego’s Derek Togerson to come to your rescue with his essay on how if San Diego loses the Chargers, it’ll end up just like Baltimore:
[Baltimore Stadium Authority Chairman John] Moag is a friend of former Padres owner John Moores and was loosely involved in the construction of Petco Park, so he has seen how things work in both places.
“Baltimore is a big small town, not unlike San Diego in that respect,” he said when asked to compare the situations. Then he offered another sobering observation.
“It was an enormous, enormous blow to our culture.”
If you want to hear a lot more from Moag, the guy who as much as anyone was behind Maryland spending $300 million in taxpayer money on new stadiums for the Orioles and Ravens — he says bringing in the Ravens has created $600 million a year in economic impact, and nobody (in this article, anyway) is going to tell him otherwise! — by all means, click through. If the mere notion of San Diego being one NFL team away from being Baltimore (they both have large Navy presences!) is enough to tickle your funny bone, time to go play some Google Pac-Man.
San Diego’s gonna need a talented ex-journalist to OJ the city (love it so much he decides to kill it) before it becomes Baltimore.
I think the 0 got stuck on his typewriter.. Let’s do the math. 600 million divided by 9 games 66.67 million per game. Divide that by 55000 attendees equals 1,212 dollars per attendee per game or 5,000 dollars per family of four per game to watch a crummy team.
The baseball stadium was on-line by the time Moag entered the picture with the Maryland Stadium Authority. Herb Belgrad was the guy heading the MSA when that happened. Moag’s role was much sharper — he came in and started threatening the NFL owners that Baltimore’s lucrative (as in, here’s gobs of money, take it if you want it) football end of the package might not be there forever. He also made vague anti-trust noises. Soon enough, the Browns outpaced the Bengals & Bucs to grab at the Inner Harbor mother lode, and the rest is history. Moag then took his show on the road as a consultant to show other markets how to ‘get it done,’ so to speak. I think he’s not MSA head any more.
Thanks, Charlie, for the correction. I remember Moag being around the MSA in the early ’90s (I think he was even the very first interview I did for the book Field of Schemes, though I’d have to dig up my notes), but had forgotten he came on board after Camden Yards was done.