Running late after staying up reading that damn Rams/Chargers article, so going to have to rush through the week’s remaining news a bit. I’m sure you all will add the requisite snarky remarks in comments:
- The Oakland A’s stadium lawsuit may be over and done, but the team’s plans for a new stadium at Howard Terminal still face a bunch of hurdles, including setting up a special tax district around the site to pay for infrastructure costs that could run up to $200 million. It is clearly way too soon to say what will happen with this project, and also way too soon to call it “privately funded,” especially given how few details we have on what the infrastructure money would pay for.
- Remember how Baseball Prospectus’s Rob Arthur calculated that MLB teams tanking was responsible for about one-fifth of baseball’s attendance drop, and I speculated that much of the rest of it was an intentional calculation that it’s better to charge fewer fans more for tickets than more fans less? Well, Arthur has now crunched the numbers and found that another 40% of the attendance drop is due to high ticket prices, but teams are still making more money on the price hikes than they lose from the falling attendance. This is undeniably a self-inflicted wound, in other words, so please everyone stop asking what’s wrong with baseball.
- Two developers who want to bring a USL team to Buffalo say they need a new stadium to do it, and New Mexico lawmakers are talking about helping fund a $100 million USL stadium in Albuquerque, and the owner of Raleigh’s USL and NWSL teams says a new publicly funded stadium is needed to make Raleigh a “great city” and Jacksonville is considering providing land for a new stadium for a NPSL soccer franchise that didn’t even field a team in 2019. Soccer may or may not be the sport of the future, but it’s definitely the subsidy game of the present.
- Forbes’ Mike Ozanian reports that three unnamed sources have told him New York Mets owners Fred and Jeff Wilpon haven’t coughed up any money yet toward the new Long Island arena they’re building in partnership with the Islanders owners, which Ozanian calls “unusual” and I call so very, very Mets.
- After an outcry from local politicians, the New York Yankees, MLB, and Nike have reached an agreement allowing independent stores around the Yankees’ stadium to keep selling team merchandise, so I guess either local pressure can work or this was a pointless restriction to begin with or both.
- An Oklahoma City Thunder exec says a sales tax hike that would fund among other things $100 million in upgrades to the team’s arena is needed to provide the venue with “long-term viability.” (The arena is all of 17 years old.) City councilmember David Greenwall is asking for “data” to prove this — what a dork, amirite?
- Nashville S.C.‘s stadium construction is still on hold for now, in case you have a bet down or anything.
- “Nats Park Helped Remake A D.C. Neighborhood. Could A New Stadium At RFK Do The Same?” asks NPR. That’s easy: 1) no, it didn’t, and 2) Betteridge, man.
- The NWSL’s Sky Blue F.C. is moving its home games from a hard-to-reach stadium on Rutgers University’s campus to the New York Red Bulls‘ arena in Harrison, N.J., which is good news for fans of pro women’s soccer in the New York area, but mostly I’m mentioning it so I can point out that USA Today’s new corporate owners apparently aren’t only phasing out the print edition, but also phasing out proofreading headlines to make sure they’ve spelled the team’s name right.
- San Antonio could give the Spurs tax breaks for a new practice facility, because of course it could.
- This week in vaportecture: New renderings of a renovated Phoenix Suns arena include a humongous video board, lots of spaces crowded with clip-art people instead of being empty in “before” photos, and, as commenter NotMyGlendale points out, a guy with three arms.
- A $250 million publicly subsidized water polo stadium in Irvine, California? A $250 million publicly subsidized water polo stadium in Irvine, California.
Neil. What are your thoughts on a Tampa Orlando shared team
Building two stadiums for one team makes no sense, from either a marketing or economic standpoint.
It doesn’t. But if it were to happen it makes more sense than montreal
It absolutely doesn’t make more sense to build 2 stadiums for 1 team in dystopian Florida cities than it does to build 1 stadium for 1 team in Montreal.
I live in Orlando. A team shared between Orlando and Tampa would be an abject disaster in both cities, due to factors that probably require an entire dissertation to detail in full.
Just because the two cities are supposedly close to each other (they’re actually as far way from one another as Philly is from NYC and as Milwaukee is from Chicago) doesn’t mean there’s a definitive link between the two of them
“… factors that probably require an entire dissertation to detail in full.”
No dissertation needed: Florida’s a great state for baseball players, not so much for baseball fans.
The ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey makes more sense than the Tampa- Montreal plan.
Though building two stadiums in cities whose residents could easily drive to the other is impressively nonsensical too. Maybe we could have the Rays thrown into space by a sentient computer and be done with it?
As discussed in this forum some time ago, if the city of Oakland wants the A’s at Howard Terminal (and no, I don’t understand it either…) it would be foolhardy for the A’s to simply refuse to consider building there.
It almost certainly will cost a staggering amount. But if the city wants the ballpark there and is willing to defray most/all/more than 100% of the additional cost of them being there, you “definitely take that meeting”.
I am not saying that that is right or fair, but even the most ardent anti subsidy campaigner would do the same if they were the owner of the franchise.
What doesn’t seem to be widely understood yet is that the level of subsidy being discussed right now won’t come anywhere close to being enough to prepare the Howard Terminal site for a ballpark, not to mention other proposed development. The cost of site prep is going to be astronomical, far more than what it was for any other stadium in the league.
This is just one of many, many issues (plus close to 15 years of following their stadium search saga)that causes me to take the position that I won’t believe the A’s will build at Howard Terminal until I actually see ground broken.
They may not. The point is that they would be foolish to reject the idea out of hand when the city wants them there. We don’t really know what the city’s plan is, other than to have the site redeveloped. It seems unlikely they can subsidize this location to the level that will be needed, but so long as both parties are talking about it openly and honestly, I see little harm in continuing to discuss and evaluate it.
It is entirely possible that once even preliminary estimates are in one or both parties will decide HT won’t work.
The problem is that they are neither discussing it openly nor honestly.
Drone flyover of Raiders stadium in progress from a month ago… still very much in progress.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rARNdBDZ6A
Now 9-10 months is a long time, but there’s a fair bit of work to be completed…