Friday roundup: Orioles owners get millions from state for no reason at all, plus whose relatives to hire as stadium lobbyists

Happy Friday! Just a heads-up that I’m going to be traveling some in the next 2-3 weeks, so there may be days when posts happen at weird hours or not at all. (Next week’s Friday Roundup stands an excellent chance of being a Saturday Roundup, for example.) On the bright side, I plan on picking up and mailing the Vaportecture prints before I hit the road, so those of you who’ve donated to the site will have something to entertain you on otherwise FoS-less mornings.

That’s all in the future, though, so let’s see what the recent past has in store:

• Here is a lovely story about how the Baltimore Orioles owners decided that the lease they signed agreeing to give 45% of revenues from baseball events to the state didn’t work for them anymore, and asked the state to let them keep all the proceeds from a recent Paul McCartney concert. And the state stadium authority said sure, fine, it’s only money, at least we’ll get sales taxes! No, really, that’s what Maryland Stadium Authority chair Thomas Kelso said: “It’s a great thing. We take no risk and we make 8% of the total amount of tickets sold.” Except the other way, the way that the team owners agreed to, was to provide 45% of the actual concert revenues — if I’m reverse engineering the math right, that’s $4.5 million that the state of Maryland just handed over to the Orioles management because they asked. Time for me to move to Maryland and start asking the state for free money, they’re just giving it away!
• WTVF-TV in Nashville has looked at the list of lobbyists hired by the Tennessee Titans owners to push for their new $2 billion stadium plan that could get $1.2 billion in subsidies, and hey, check it out, it’s the wife of the chair of the state Senate Finance Committee and the daughter of the state’s Commissioner of Tourist Development! The TV station tracking down the finance committee chair and asked him if there were ethical concerns here, and he said “Ah, no” and “There are rules in place for our kind of relationship, and I follow all of them” and he surely doesn’t know why his wife landed a ton more lobbying contracts right after she married him, jeez, you journalists and your questions, get a life already!
• Speaking of Nashville, were you wanting to read an op-ed in the Tennessean newspaper by Nashville Mayor John Cooper about how spending $1.2 billion on a Titans stadium won’t really cost taxpayers anything because otherwise the city would have to spend “tens of millions of dollars per year” on renovations and anyway sales and hotel taxes aren’t really “your” tax money so don’t worry about it? That’s what you want from your news outlets, right, turning over space to local elected officials for long press releases without any context or asking them any questions? No need to answer, consider it done!
• And finally from the Protestant Vatican/Hot Chicken Capital, turns out there isn’t enough parking at Nashville S.C.‘s stadium and the team has stopped running shuttle buses and fans are having to walk home when they can’t get a rideshare. Clearly the team needs a new stadium, the old one isn’t fan-friendly and is … 11 days old? That’s practically a century in stadium years, bring on the bulldozers!
• The Erie County legislature has approved the first $100 million of its $250 million in spending on a Buffalo Bills stadium, but hasn’t yet voted on the full memorandum of understanding. The Bills owners were only supposed to receive $75 million up front originally, but the legislature upped this to $100 million because, writes the Buffalo News paraphrasing county chair April Baskin, “it became more clear that putting money down toward the stadium now will free up millions more in the future to redirect toward other county priorities.” Buffalo News, have you met the Tennessean? I bet you guys would get along swimmingly.
• New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft is spending $225 million of his own money on a renovation of his 20-year-old stadium, which will include “a new and enhanced lighthouse in the north endzone” and “a new fan-activation area on the lower plaza” and other things that maybe make sense if you are either a Patriots fan or a marketing executive. Such is the state of the world that we feel obligated to call this a good thing because Kraft didn’t ask the state of Massachusetts to pay for this, though given Kraft’s past experience this is almost certainly because the state of Massachusetts likely would have told him to go pound sand. (Yes, despite Massachusetts being one of those East Coast states without California-style voter referendum laws. I never said that the map of the Progressive movement explained everything!)
• I hate linking to the New York Post because I don’t want to give them the clicks, but also I like dragging them in public, so: Here’s a New York Post article about how NBA teams are hiking ticket prices even while attendance is falling. The Post portrays this as either a savvy move to make up for falling revenues or maybe a risk of alienating already-alienated fans, but … maybe they got the causality backwards, and attendance is falling because ticket prices are going up, like microeconomics says is supposed to happen? Or, wait, hang on, the Post “calculated average ticket prices by dividing gate receipts by paid attendance,” so maybe this is just a sign that more casual NBA fans are staying home to watch on TV, leaving pricey-ticket buyers disporportionately in the seats? The Post is a terrible excuse for a newspaper, any and all basic logic errors are possible!
• KSHB-TV in Kansas City wanted to know if building new stadiums for the Chiefs and Royals was a good idea, so they talked to team executives, a guy from the city’s downtown business council, two people at a moving company, two sports radio hosts, and me. Kansas City diner patrons should rightfully be feeling unrepresented right now.