Happy baseball season! Unless you’re a Miami Marlins fan, in which case it’s already ruined. But anyway:
- The Texas Rangers owners say they won’t tear down their 24-year-old stadium once they build their new one next door so they can have air-conditioning. What on earth will they use an empty baseball stadium for? “We will look for tenants to occupy the office building and now we’re entertaining ideas and how to retrofit the rest of the park,” says Rangers VP Rob Matwick. “What that will be, I don’t know. Right now we’re just fielding ideas and there has been a lot of interest.” Uh-huh.
- Morocco is touting its “very low gun circulation” as a plus for its 2026 World Cup bid against North America. Also it would spend $15.8 billion on new stadiums and infrastructure, which might actually be even crazier than U.S. gun laws.
- The Marietta Daily Journal says the Atlanta Braves‘ new stadium has been a huge success for Cobb County because the formerly undeveloped land is worth more now that the Braves owners have developed it, which isn’t how economic impact works at all. But I guess it’s nice that the traffic hasn’t been a nightmare, though you have to wonder how it’ll be once the Braves are good enough for people to start going to games again.
- The Pro Football Hall of Fame’s $1 billion expansion project is over budget and in financial trouble — in case you couldn’t have guessed that from “$1 billion expansion project” — and there have now been “discussions among local officials about potentially having to increase sales taxes to help fund the project.” Man, I gotta find me a way to become considered too big to fail.
- Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley still wants to build a soccer stadium in the West End despite everyone else considering that plan dead. A lawyer who fought against previous Cincinnati stadium deals calls this F.C. Cincinnati situation “madness,” which is about right.
- Building a football stadium creates stadium construction jobs, at least for a while! Hey, you know what else creates temporary jobs? Natural disasters. Clearly we need more of those.
- NFL commissioner Roger Goodell can’t stop hoping that the Buffalo Bills owners will get with the program and demand a new stadium, saying the Pegulas are “in the very early stages” of stadium planning. The Bills lease has an opt-out clause in two years, but team officials say they have no plans to use it. Don’t tell Roger, it’ll only make him sad.
- A developer trying to buy county-owned land in Bayville, Long Island swears he’ll build a $120 million minor-league hockey arena there even though he doesn’t have any investors yet, apparently under the impression this will make people take him more seriously.
- “Will the $1.1 billion Vikings stadium look like a bargain?” asks the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Ian Betteridge has your answer!
County land for the potential hockey arena is in Metford. Its the developer who is from Bayville.
Also even if Long Island is expensive why would such an arena need to cost 120 million for what will probably end up hosting an ECHL team?
Thanks for the correction. You mean Medford, right? (For all I know there’s a Metford on Long Island too. That’d be just like them.)
Yeah Medford. Don’t know why I keep pronouncing/spelling it Metford.
Neil…any word on whether or not the existing “globe life park” subsidies will transfer over to the Rangers with the new stadium hotel and entertainment district next door… Or would their vacancy change things…
You know what else is a bargain? That Mercedes I’ve been eyeing. I mean, have you seen the price tag on Lamborghinis??
“The Pro Football Hall of Fame’s $1 billion expansion project is over budget and in financial trouble — in case you couldn’t have guessed that from “$1 billion expansion project” —””
WTF is going on? I have seen a lot of misguided “tourism generation” spending over the years, but that is just an insane amount of money on a museum in a rough part of the country economically which most people only care to go to once if at all. How on earth are they conceivably generating enough traffic for that? I doubt it would pencil out if the museum was in Chicago or New York, much less Canton.
Will the HOF threaten to move to another city? Scranton, PA would be an excellent location for the POF HOF.
It is a sad commentary when people believe that stadiums, museums, and shopping malls can have a “transformative” effect on cities when actual tax-paying employers leave.
Industrialists have been replaced in our society by real estate developers, who struggle to explain who exactly is going to shop or visit.
That it is. The greater insult is that the developers don’t even seem to need to explain how this will be better in order to get approval (and sometimes, public funding).
Perhaps this is the twilight of the human race after all.
“Morocco is touting its “very low gun circulation” as a plus for its 2026 World Cup bid against North America.”
This, while gun-controlled Chicago and its very HIGH gun circulation wants no part of World Cup 2026 (and FIFA’s decade-spanning concessions). Sounds like a win-win.
The games would not have been played in the high gun part of the city. It’s not like people are walking up and down Michigan Ave and Grant Park firing off rounds at each other.
That would make an awesome biathlon event, though.
Nah, we did something similar in “68, and it did not go over well.
IF at first you don’t succeed…
Chicago is surrounded by unrestricted gun jurisdictions. NYC has gun regulation, so do the surrounding areas, and gun death rates are really low.
The Ranger’s old stadium will get retrofitted alright, into a parking lot.
Will it need publicly funded air conditioning to keep the cars cool?
As long as the Air Conditioners have the same personality as the one from Brave Little Toaster.
I feel their pain, it seems such a shame to tear down a perfectly good ballpark.