Friday roundup: Possible Suns arena renovation funding plan, A’s and Rays still promising stadium news by year’s end (but don’t hold your breath)

When it rains, it pours, and this week provided a deluge of stadium news:

• Fox 10 Phoenix is reporting that Phoenix city officials and the owners of the Suns have reached a “tentative deal” on splitting the cost of arena renovations, which would have gotten its own item here if anyone other than that one news outlet based on no named sources were reporting it. Also any deal would still require approval by the city council, so really this is just “Suns owners and lame-duck mayor of Phoenix have almost agreed on what to put in an arena renovations funding bill, but won’t tell us what it will be yet.” Meanwhile, lawsuits continue over Phoenix refusing to release any details of what the Suns are seeking in renovations or anything about the team’s finances.
• Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg still has only until December 31 to tell St. Petersburg if he wants to move out before 2027, while Hillsborough County is telling county commissioners there won’t be any news about a potential stadium in Tampa until after the new year. This means Sternberg will almost certainly have to negotiate an extension on his opt-out clause; one hopes that St. Pete Mayor Rick Kriseman will demand a bigger payoff this time in exchange for doing Sternberg a favor, but maybe Kriseman figures his city will benefit enough from getting the Rays out of their hair and getting to develop the Tropicana Field site that asking for cash on top of that would just be greedy.
• Here’s an ESPN article on how real-estate deals are helping the Golden State Warriors and other NBA teams afford money-losing arenas, which doesn’t really make sense because if that were really the case the NBA teams could just be doing the real-estate deals and staying in their old arenas and keeping all the real-estate profits instead of blowing them on new arenas, but I guess this is why I don’t normally go to ESPN for my real-estate economics news.
• Speaking of the Warriors, they’re also helping boost their profits by selling $100 monthly passes to get into the arena but not actually see the games. I would ridicule them for this, but ever since the Dallas Cowboys sold $200 tickets to sit outside the stadium and watch the Super Bowl on TV, I no longer consider anything too ridiculous for sports fans to put up with.
• The Oakland A’s owners say they’ll announce their preferred stadium site by the end of the year, to which former A’s exec Andy Dolich replied, “I have no doubt that the A’s will announce their site by the end of the year. They did so in 2006 for Cisco Field, in 2009 for Diridon Station, in 2011 for Victory Court, in 2013 for Coliseum City and in 2017 for Peralta College.” Ouch.
• Part of the Milwaukee Brewers‘ retractable roof was making a weird clicking noise, but don’t worry, they’re fixing it, this totally won’t turn into a demand for taxpayers to build them a new roof, not when the stadium is only … 17 years old? Okay, it won’t turn into a demand this year, anyway. Probably.
• In case you’re wondering what lease extension extortion money looks like on the minor-league level looks like, the Binghamton Rumble Ponies just got $5 million in state and city money for stadium upgrades in exchange for signing a new lease through 2026, which is less than major-league teams have gotten away with, but still pretty damn sweet if you’re the owner of a Double-A team.
• Though when you consider that the Single-A Potomac Nationals just got $35 million from the city of Fredericksburg, Virginia for a whole new stadium with just a 30-year lease, maybe Binghamton got off relatively easy.
• The San Francisco 49ers stadium’s turf is still a slippery wreck, but the difference is now people are blaming California wildfires. The 49ers ownership was so smart to get all their stadium money from fans up front before anybody got a look at the new place.
• The Oakland Raiders still don’t have a place to play next year. Too bad for them the probable labor stoppage isn’t coming until 2021.