Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman is in full campaign mode for a downtown stadium, and he talked to KMBC-TV this weekend to … answer questions about his plans? I guess we can call it that, even if the resulting interview was awfully light on answers, and lacked a lot of important questions as well:
“It is a huge, huge decision for us,” Sherman said.
Well, duh. But letting Sherman get away without a followup — How much of this is up to you, and how much depends on whether the state and county and city governments come up with a pile of cash? — isn’t exactly A+ journalism.
The team held two listening sessions last week with the public to discuss the plans for the planned ballpark district.
“That was really the first step, to go to the public first, and now we’re starting that phase of talking to political leaders,” Sherman said.
So, really, you haven’t talked to any political leaders yet? The incoming state senate president just said that stuff about how he’d like to give you money because a new stadium brings “vibrance” without even having seen your PR presentation yet? That’s certainly possible, but it would be useful information to have, if someone had bothered to ask about it.
He reiterated that the team would ask to continue the current 3/8th cent sales tax voters passed to fund improvements at the Truman Sports Complex.
And how much tax money would that redistribute to Sherman, exactly? Is he expecting he would have to split the proceeds with the owners of the Chiefs, like he does now? Would he want to create some kind of tax increment financing district to kick back property taxes, too, as he’s hinted before? If he’s planning to put in “hundreds of millions” and the total project cost (including both a stadium and surrounding development) is $2 billion, does that mean more than a billion dollars would have to come from the public? It’s entirely possible that Sherman would just shrug and say “too soon to say” to all of this, but you gotta at least ask, man.
He also said there was no timeline to reveal where the ballpark might be located.
“Kind of hard to answer on the site selection because we are diligently working on a few,” Sherman said.
This is almost less important to ask more about since site selection always comes down to “whatever we can get our hands on cheap and use to get local legislators salivating over ‘revitalizing’ something,” but still there are a few things that would be nice to know: What area or areas is he looking in, what are his criteria for choosing, will he select one site first before working out financing or just narrow down to a short list?
“One thing I want our fans to know is if they think we’re distracted by this and not focused on baseball, that’s not the case. I get up every morning really thinking about how we play and how we can get better,” Sherman said.
Don’t really think any Royals fans think the problem is you’re distracted by a stadium push given that the team has been terrible since well before Sherman bought it in late 2019, but if Sherman really wants to emphasize how he wakes up from nightmares about trying to convince Bobby Witt Jr. to work a walk now and again, sure, fine.
My normal caveats for dragging journalists apply: I get that in this current world they have to produce a crazy amount of content in not enough time and don’t always have the bandwidth to think through every story (though I just wrote the questions above in about 10 minutes), and I also get that asking tough questions of the local sports team owner is a good way not to get invited to interview him again (though that can be fun, too). But I often do wonder how much of the very bad journalism we see on stadium deals is because journalists aren’t being allowed to do their jobs, how much is because they don’t know how to do their jobs, and how much is because they’ve drunk enough of the just-rehash-the-press-release Kool-Aid to pretend that this is their job.
Journalists, I know a bunch of you read this site: Please chime in with your thoughts in comments. (You can be anonymous if you like.) A lack of incisive media coverage is one of the main enablers of owners of sports teams and other businesses getting billions of dollars a year in public funds without much real oversight, so it would be nice to know where to pin the blame, if anyone feels like sharing.
At least that reporter in Hillsboro is asking the tough questions, unfortunately his target is not a billionaire sports team owner, but I guess, baby steps?
Even though it is now over 50 years old, Kauffman Stadium is still one of the nicest ballparks in MLB. Many rankings have it in the top 1/2 of their lists. It shows when properly maintained and upgraded, stadiums can last more than 20 years. I get the new economics, but what a shame to throw out a ballpark that is better than 1/2 of the current ones in operation. I guess if the Royals can trick the city into throwing money at them, why should they care about Kauffman.
I’m not sure “new economics” is the best term for it, at least not unless three-card monte counts as economics. But otherwise, yeah, 100%.
And the problem is that a *bad* replacement can wreck everything. The White Sox have had Not Comiskey Park for 32 years now and it almost always ranks at the bottom of people’s ratings, ranging from “it’s too boring” to “at least you can see the city”.
Replacing something just for the sake of replacing is risky business, which is often ignored by politicians and sports owners.
Don’t get me started on the horror that is new Comisky…..
I hate this. I get wanting to replace a dump like Tropicana, but Kauffman is one of the best stadiums in the league. Since the renovation, it’s my favorite ballpark. It’s an absolute gem.
I do sometimes wonder if it would get anywhere for sports fans to share these kinds of sentiments with city officials. Then I try to imagine myself, 20 years ago, contacting the mayor of Detroit to say “I’ll visit your city every couple of years if you leave Tiger Stadium standing, but probably never be back otherwise” (all true), and that conversation doesn’t end very satisfyingly.
Listen to the fans?
LOLLOLLOLLOLLOL
Neil, that was actually one of the things the Tiger Stadium Fan Club tried to tell city officials, who weren’t listening anyway.
Detroiters who haven’t lived elsewhere often don’t understand that a lousy reputation Detroit has–some of it is not merited but some of it is. The one thing we had in Detroit proper where people would say, “You’re lucky you have that and we wish we had something like that in our town” was Tiger Stadium.
You go to Chicago or Boston and one thing you think about is taking in a game at Wrigley Field or Fenway Park. Even if you don’t go it adds a lot of flavor. A renovated Tiger Stadium, maybe with a Detroit baseball museum, you’d have something worth seeing. When people thought about Detroit you’d think about that.
Instead we have a new stadium which is like most of the other new ones but a mediocre example of it. The only people who’d think, “Let’s go to Detroit and see Comerica Park” are the sort of people who are on my Ballpark Chasers Facebook group.