Happy Friday! Since Monday is a holiday for most FoS readers, this site will be taking that day off as well, and — sorry, you don’t want to hear about the future, only the past? That’s probably understandable, given the future, so off we go to the (extremely recent) past!
- MLB’s minor-league downsizing and league-wide demands for stadium upgrades continues to pay dividends, as Reading’s Stadium Commission met Wednesday to discuss a $15 million renovation of the Fightin Phils (Double-A, no apostrophe) stadium that would be funded with $3 million each from the city and county, plus $7.5 million from the state of Pennsylvania. (The Philadelphia Phillies owners, who own the Fightin Phils, would kick in $3 million as well. Yes, that’s $16.5 million total. No, the Reading Eagle didn’t explain the discrepancy.) Commission chair James Schlegel said, “We don’t want the moving trucks out here like the Baltimore Colts in the middle of the night,” but also acknowledged that the Phillies haven’t actually committed yet to staying in Reading long-term if the money is spent on upgrades to the Fightin Phils stadium, which just received $10 million in renovations in 2011: “We should have some assurance from the big club, that after all of this is done, that they are not going to say, ‘Well, Trenton is a little closer.’ Then we kind of look like fools.”
- Speaking of which, a whole bunch of cities that saw their minor-league baseball teams vaporized last winter are now looking to lure independent-league teams, which is likely to require, you guessed it, more stadium renovations. Among them: New York City, whose Economic Development Corporation, which was pretty much set up to do this sort of thing, is set to spend $8 million upgrading Staten Island’s 20-year-old ballpark so it can host unaffiliated ball instead of the Yankees‘ Single-A team, with a new Atlantic League team set to pay … nope, no details on rent payments or whether they’ll help cover the cost of replacing the seats and field, surely the as-yet-unnamed team with no owners will agree to a fair deal on that later, once the money is already spent and it’s too late for the city to back out.
- It’s NBA playoff season, so of course it’s time for lots of articles on how people going to basketball games spend money. Do any of these articles talk about how people also spend money when not going to basketball games, or even ask a single economist who’s researched the topic? You’re asking a lot of our nation’s beleaguered journalists, pal.
- Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno’s sweetheart deal to purchase the land under Angel Stadium from Anaheim may possibly violate state affordable-housing law, but the city has a plan for that: Get the state legislature to pass a special law to make it legal. Nice to have friends in high places.
- Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker says that state funding for a new Chicago Bears stadium at Arlington Park is “not something we’re looking at right now,” which would be a lot more reassuring if he hadn’t added those last two words.
- Finally, the nonprofit Financial Accounting Standards Board has decided to revise its rules for accounting principles — no, don’t stop reading here, this gets interesting and important, I swear — and not to require corporations to report tax breaks as subsidies, something that Good Jobs First calls “missing the bottom of the budget iceberg, because tax expenditures for economic development dwarf appropriated spending.” For more on why that’s important, see GJF’s Greg LeRoy’s brand-new interview with CounterSpin on a giant Texas tax break for oil companies that helped cost Texas school systems $290 million a year until it was finally repealed earlier this year. Who do those oil companies think they are, a baseball team?
I never understood why all the minor league teams didn’t just stick together and tell MLB no! What was MLB going to do? Train hundreds of minor leaguers at their spring training complexes? That wouldn’t have lasted long. Too bad the former MiLB commissioner had no spine. And yes, the COVID financial hurricane put MiLB teams behind the 8 ball but what was a couple more months of pain as opposed to saving your team a bundle worth? We will never know…..
It will take time, Jorge, but I believe it is possible that this decision (contracting dozens of MiLB teams) will give rise to truly independent minor leagues.
MLB has (of course) held on to the best markets they could. But what they have failed to grasp is that they have done the ‘exact opposite’ of what their predecessors did with respect to the old Pacific Coast League, for example.
Granted, all of the teams vaporized were in smaller and less desirable markets than the PCL of the 1950s. But they have still left cities that want baseball with none. Nature abhors a vacuum, even in baseball.
We likely won’t see the full result of this corrupt and short sighted decision for 20 or more years. The vacuum has been created, we have but to wait to see if, when and how it is filled.
On an adjacent note… anyone else wondering how deeply the NFL owner’s club breathed a sigh of relief when neither Bezos or Musk bid to buy the XFL (such as it is)?
Not that they couldn’t start their own leagues if they wanted to, of course. And build their own facilities to play in. And outbid the NFL for talent etc etc.
Gilded Ages such as the one we are living through can be double edged swords, even for the ultra rich.