Friday roundup: How much economic impact won’t the Super Bowl have, and other dubious sports news

“Under the present regime, there is no real downside risk to posting.” I probably should have spun this off into its own post, and added some anecdata about how when I post two items in one day it always seems like one of them gets overlooked, but then I would have to come up with an additional headline and post again to social media so screw it, just go give Tom Scocca the clicks, he needs ’em now that he doesn’t have a day job again.

Anyway, you probably skipped that to go straight to the bullet points, and here they are:

• Tampa Bay Rays execs really are working through the “Art of the Steal” playbook from Chapter 4 of Field of Schemes: After promising that a new stadium in the exact same place would help the Rays draw more fans and sign better players, team president Brian Auld hauled out the Two-Minute Warning, asserting that “to be comfortably playing on opening day in 2028, in a new ballpark, we’ve got to have most of these details ironed out by this time next year.” Yes, the Rays’ lease expires after 2027, but lease extensions are a thing that exists, so really this is an utterly fake deadline — but one that can help put pressure on a city council that otherwise might be tempted to ask questions like “Um, how much money are we supposed to put into this thing exactly?”
• New York Knicks and Rangers owner James Dolan still wants the city council to grant him a perpetual operating permit for Madison Square Garden, but may be running into trouble now that local electeds have taken note of his engaging in war with law firms suing him by using facial recognition technology to bar their lawyers from attending games. Though state senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal does float the idea of giving Dolan his permanent permit in exchange for him dropping this new facial-recognition policy and just going back to being his usual kind of asshole, so maybe Dolan isn’t that dumb a negotiator after all?
• Hosting the Super Bowl could bring Arizona as much as $1 billion, KTAR-FM reports in a story that had to be corrected because the headline initially said $2 billion even though the story didn’t. Also its only source was a guy from the Arizona Chamber of Commerce, it confused economic impact with actual state revenue, and it failed to note that previous attempts to find out where inflated Super Bowl impact figures came from turned up no sign that they’re based on any real data, but I’m sure those corrections will be added soon.
• Twin headlines this week: “A’s expected to visit Las Vegas to meet with resort operators” and “California floated cutting major Southwest cities off Colorado River water before touching its agriculture supply, sources say” — in the latter case, California officials proposed studying what would happen if Las Vegas and Phoenix were entirely cut off from using the river, which given that Vegas gets 90% of its water from there probably doesn’t take all that much study to imagine. Will any of these schmancy new sports gambling services give me a betting line on Las Vegas being completely depopulated before the Oakland A’s move there? Because I’m ready to put down some cash on that.
• University of Pennsylvania city planning professor Akira Drake Rodriguez writes in a WHYY-TV op-ed of a proposed Philadelphia 76ers arena on Market Street near Chinatown, “The chain restaurants and corporate entertainment experiences bring a crush of people, traffic, and congestion in the hours when an event is happening, but in the time when the space is empty — which is most of the time — they are devoid of life, and surrounded by massive open space that’s energetically dead.” That’s pretty much what happened in D.C. with the Washington Capitals and Wizards arena, and it’s pretty much what happens with every other sports venue, so, yup. (Rodriguez also notes that arena construction can be used to kickstart gentrification, which, also yup.)
• The owners of the Staten Island Yankees and two other minor-league baseball teams that were vaporized in MLB’s takeover and purge of the minors are appealing a court ruling that MLB’s antitrust exemption makes it immune to prosecution, and the U.S. Department of Justice has weighed in with a friend-of-the-court brief saying yup, that’s not what the antitrust exemption was meant to do. A court hearing is expected to be held, I dunno, sometime, Reuters doesn’t mention it, maybe this article was written by its bots?
• Speaking of which, the Asheville Tourists want public stadium money, and the South Bend Cubs want stadium money, and Nolan Ryan’s son wants stadium money for the San Antonio Missions, and Leland, North Carolina may want stadium money to lure the Down East Wood Ducks there, so MLB’s minor-league downsizing is very much going according to plan.
• Did you know that the world’s fourth-oldest major-league baseball stadium is faced with demolition over the objection of local residents because the city government considers it “decrepit” just because it’s 97 years old? Maybe so if you follow Tokyo’s Yakult Swallows, but click the link above if you want to read more — there’s no details on how much a new stadium would cost or who would pay for it, but there is lots about how the plan was announced only in a “teeny tiny notice in a ward publication that normally nobody ever reads,” which should be a familiar scenario to some U.S. readers.