There’s a long article in the Baltimore Sun this morning on the Baltimore Orioles owners’ plan to arrange a lease extension in exchange for $600 million in public cash, which would be used to redo not just their Camden Yards stadium but the surrounding area. Much of the piece consists of rehashing team execs’ interest in replicating the “ballpark district” created for the Atlanta Braves around their new suburban stadium — which we’ve known about for a while now — though it doesn’t exactly make clear how that would work in the considerably more crowded confines in Baltimore:
The footprints in Baltimore and Atlanta are comparable in size. The Battery is nearly 80 acres (the main campus, including the ballpark, is 57 acres) and the stadium authority-owned Camden Yards complex is 85 acres. Of course, half of that land is occupied by the stadiums. M&T Bank Stadium is 20 acres, Oriole Park is 21 acres and Camden Station is 27 acres, per property records. The remaining 17 acres include several parking lots.
That “of course” is a huge caveat: The Braves owners had a huge swath of undeveloped land to deal with, while the Angelos family members who own the O’s are looking at trying to squeeze in a whole lot of mixed-use development onto a few parking lots that are shared with the Ravens stadium next door. How that would work is left entirely as an exercise for Sun readers.
The fun part of the article, though, is when it gets around to revisiting the throwdown over the Braves project between economists J.C. Bradbury, who conducted an economic impact study and found it was a massive money pit for Cobb County taxpayers, and Andy Zimbalist, who was hired by the Braves to craft a rebuttal and said maybe it won’t be a money pit if everything breaks right. The Sun then asked both Bradbury and Zimbalist what they thought of the Orioles plan, and got these replies:
“[This] appears to be one of the worst financial deals in recent memory,” Zimbalist said.
Bradbury has repeatedly studied the downsides of publicly funding stadiums, which remains a common practice nationally. He calls it a “curious example of persistent government failure.”
I would be tempted to say that when you have a stadium project that even Andy Zimbalist can’t find a way to say nice things about, it is truly a disaster — but then, Zimbalist’s conclusions have often seemed to depend on who’s cutting his checks. In any case, right now Maryland is pursuing an O’s stadium plan that zero economists who’ve studied stadium plans think is a good idea, and that’s before it’s even been established if the $600 million would be in exchange for just a 15-year lease extension like the Ravens agreed to, which at $40 million per lease year would be by far the most expensive lease extension in MLB history, surpassing even the proposed Milwaukee Brewers deal. You might think that’s something The Sun could have explored in its article, but it would have left less room for rhetoric about how “it’s immensely unlikely the team would actually relocate” but “the eleventh hour approaches,” and sports journalism can’t have that, now can it?
Zimbalist said of the Braves development: “it won’t be a money pit is everything breaks right.”? LOL
Left himself a little wiggle room I see.
He should’ve been more colorful and added “…and pigs fly.”
Sigh, economists are so not colorful…..
I agree, I don’t recall voting on this $600 million. I can think of many better uses for the money, and I’m a fan of both sports teams and the city.
I was an oral season ticket holder for 20 years along with several other people and left in 97, when I can no longer buy the antics of the owner Peter angelos.
It’s amazing to me that the team, which owes hundreds of millions of dollars to the Nationals, over MASN TV rights that Angelo’s himself negotiated, now wants to screw over Maryland taxpayers as well.
How many people remember that the Ravens stadium was built for money. It was allocated from municipal employees like teachers, firemen and police but in a midnight deal was given over out of lottery profits to the Ravens ,to build that stadium.
I’ve left you all my life and I’m aware that a lot of people in Baltimore don’t like Washington DC. But there’s no senator or congressman that has anything on this money grab.
Pretty sad.
My understanding is that the Inner Harbor area, which was once one of America’s great tourist traps, has gone to seed and now there’s a lot of anxiety that the whole area around that is in trouble.
And, of course, Baltimore hasn’t had a lot of positive headlines in recent years.
In light of all of that, they want to bring as many people to Camden Yards as possible and, apparently, will pay any amount of money to try to make that happen.
It’s throwing good money after bad, I suppose, but I can understand the psychology of it.