Maryland authority wants to spend $1.4b in state money on Orioles, Ravens, minor-league baseball stadiums

This came out of nowhere, and for some reason got reported in two separate articles by the same Baltimore Sun reporter: The Maryland Stadium Authority, which built and owns the home stadiums of the Baltimore Orioles and Ravens, is set to propose state legislation to establish a pair of giant stadium spending funds: one a $1.2 billion pool for stadium upgrades for the two Baltimore teams, and the other a $200 million fund to renovate the minor-league baseball stadiums of the Aberdeen IronBirds, Bowie Baysox, Frederick Keys, Hagerstown Suns, Delmarva Shorebirds and Southern Maryland Blue Crabs.

Stadium authority chair Thomas Kelso told the Sun that the Orioles and Ravens spending — more than three times what it cost to build those teams’ stadiums in the first place — is necessary to ensure that the teams don’t leave town, though Orioles ownership has promised that “the Orioles will never leave Baltimore” and the Ravens have only just started talks for a lease extension once their stadium turns 30 years old in 2027.

“The longer we can extend the life of these stadiums, the better it is for Baltimore City, Maryland and the teams, and that’s part of the goal here,” said Kelso. “The way people watch sports continues to morph from more traditional ‘buy a ticket and sit in a seat’ to something that’s completely different. And our teams need to have that flexibility.”

As for the minor-league stadium spending fund, a different MSA official, executive director Michael Frenz, told the Sun: “Major League Baseball has reorganized their minor league system. Cities have lost teams, and the primary reason has been the adequacy of their facilities. This will help Maryland’s municipalities keep their minor league teams.”

In fact, three of the teams eligible for the funding are not part of MLB’s affiliated minor-league system: The Blue Crabs have always been part of the independent Atlantic League (now an MLB “partner” league); the Keys got bounced to the unpaid college-player MLB Draft League; and the Suns currently don’t exist, though they’re set to join the Atlantic League next year in a new stadium that the Maryland legislature approved spending $59.5 million on last year.

To pay off the potential $1.4 billion in stadium renovation debt, the stadium authority would be allowed to tap into future state lottery revenues — money that currently goes to state education spending and the state’s general fund, as well as finishing paying off the state’s $20 million a year in debt on the Orioles and Ravens stadiums. “If we took the lottery out, we couldn’t afford what we provide now,” state Department of Legislative Services director Warren Deschenaux said in 2015, a quote that hopefully will be brought up in the upcoming legislative debates over the MSA’s stadium spending bills.

This mammoth spending plan is far from a done deal: The MSA can only ask for the money, and it’s up to the legislature to determine whether to provide it. But this is clearly an attempt to frame this as “Let’s address all of our sports teams’ ‘needs’ in one $1.4 billion fell swoop, never forget what happened with the Colts” — even if the true lesson of the Colts’ midnight relocation should be “if you’re going to use eminent domain to try to keep a team in town, sign the bill before the moving trucks have time to pack up.” And the Orioles and Ravens are unlikely to leave town, and certainly unlikely to leave if they were only offered a fraction of $1.2 billion in taxpayer money. And one of the minor-league teams that the MSA is afraid baseball will jettison has already been jettisoned, one was never part of organized ball to begin with, and the third is already getting a new state-funded stadium.

There are plot holes in this that you could drive a fleet of Mayflower moving vans through, in other words, but that hasn’t stopped this sort of public spending before, and with Gov. Larry Hogan already warning that he intends to dump a huge pile of money on the Orioles to get them to renew their lease at America’s favorite stadium, that has to give the MSA’s proposal a leg up as it heads to the legislature. More reaction to come soon, I assume, but suffice to say that another huge front has just opened up in the forever war over sports subsidies.