I published four posts in the first four days of this week despite a router (finally replaced last night) that was doling out packets with an eyedropper, and now the internet itself isn’t letting me consistently load the site, so you’ll forgive me if the Friday roundup is a bit perfunctory or late, won’t you?
On with the news, typed out for now in a Notes file:
- Sports subsidy advocates like to argue that spending tourist tax money on stadiums doesn’t really cost local governments anything because it can only be spent on tourism projects anyway, but what then of news that a Tampa Bay Rays stadium in St. Petersburg could eat up all the county hotel tax money that is needed to replenish the county’s beaches?
- The New York Times’ new non-union sports department has an interview with Oakland mayor Sheng Thao about how she met with MLB commissioner Rob Manfred after he claimed there was no stadium offer in Oakland for the A’s to present him with 31 copies (one for him and one for each MLB owner) of her city’s stadium offer. Thao said she wanted “to ensure that the [relocation] committee understands all of our deal points” and also said that “absolutely” she would consider improving her offer. All of which could just be covering all her bases so she can say she tried, but also could be playing to the crowd of MLB owners who’ll be voting on the A’s-to-Vegas move, in hopes that at least eight of them are fearful enough of trading a top TV market for MLB’s smallest, or just hate John Fisher enough, to vote “no,” either of which is certainly possible.
- Baltimore Orioles execs have started lobbying Congress for federal money for “revitalization efforts” in the Camden Yards area, according to disclosure forms uncovered by Politico. How much money they want isn’t the kind of thing listed on lobbyist disclosures, but it’s definitely fresh territory in terms of public funding asks, albeit expected once Joe Biden announced a ton of federal infrastructure spending and sports teams smelled blood in the water.
- Milwaukee Brewers business operations president Rick Schlesinger has provided a list of some of the reasons team execs want about $350 million in state money to renovate the stadium, and they include: 22-year old boilers, obsolete field chillers (?), and TV wiring that needs to be upgraded to fiber optics. Damn, I should have kept renting — under sports logic, I apparently could have demanded that my landlord pay for my new router…
- Charlotte mayor Vi Lyles says spending $120 million on a new tennis center is about “creating jobs in this community” WFAE’s race and equity desk asked if that’s really so, but didn’t ask any actual economists who might be able to answer the question, so gotta give this a B-minus at best.
- NBA commissioner Adam Silver says the league will consider both Seattle and Las Vegas for expansion teams once the league signs a new TV rights deal in 2025. Both cities have new arenas already, so maybe they can get away without building even newer ones, though I dunno, Climate Pledge Arena will be five years old by then, who knows how the field chillers will be holding up.
Okay, I can access the site again, going to hit publish on this before Mercury goes back into retrograde. Stay cool, and see you Monday!
1. Way to go moderately old school and using notepad to write your piece. If only it was with an actual notepad and a pen… as always, thanks for pushing through. And to your comment about renting and asking for a router upgrade, I think you should take it up with your municipality. You provide a necessary service.
2. The beach needs a bigger lobbying group
3. Manfreds recent comment about expansion discussion – after the rays and A’s situation is settled – made me wonder if the math might change. Letting the As move while not exacting more cash from a potential market, and being unable to use that market as a possible place to move sure smells like the Vegas deal isn’t a slam dunk. Or a home run if you will. But who knows?
4. It’s funny how infrastructure can mean literally anything. See my previous note about your router.
5. You have to figure the climate pledge arena will need to upgrade to be more green or climate friendly.
Exactly Neil! Thao’s presentation simply a “Hey, I tried” exercise of CYA for her constituents and Oakland-only A’s fans. As for MLB owners who are “fearful” of leaving the ginormous Bay Area media market for tiny Vegas, one thing is certain (has been for over 20 years actually)… NOTHING IS HAPPENING IN POOR A$$, MASSIVE BUDGET DEFICIT OAKLAND. If the owners want to stay in The Bay, they need to find a way to make the ENTIRE BAY an option for the A’s. We shall see..
If Oakland is as awful as you claim, why are 1 bedroom condos in downtown on the market for $500,000? That seems pricey for a city where you claim “NOTHING IS HAPPENING”.
Well, nothing except an offer of $775m toward a new stadium – more than anywhere else has offered (not that there seems to be a lineup of host cities trying to court Gapman & Robbing)
False JB. Go over to newballpark.org and read his “Apples and oranges” piece for a harsh dose of reality. That is all; happy Friday ;)
$775m > $600m.
Even in our “QAnon/alternate facts/only the blog I create from my own basement is the real truth” world, math hasn’t changed.
That’s also a reason why, contrary to the internet, Oakland does not *need* major pro teams.
Tony, while I respect your passion ….could you please turn it down a notch
Overblown rhetoric notwithstanding, if FoS posters thinking something is true made it actually true, the A’s would have been playing in San Jose in 2009 (Antonio).
And also in a new 50-50 public/private funded stadium on the coliseum site in the late 1990s (me).
And possibly back in Philadelphia where they belong (anyone? anyone??)
“…if FoS posters thinking something is true made it actually true…”
And several MLB teams would now be located in “Portland!” ;)
That’s more of a Greensboro kind of idea
Housing in the Bay Area, including Oakland, is red hot right now. The right to build 3,000 or so homes is worth a LOT of money. That opportunity is just not there in LV. As others have noted, it’s odd the Fisher is settling for a ballpark only deal when he could have had so much more.
While Oakland has its problems, it is right there in the center of the well-off Bay Area. I used to work in Jack London. That area is really changing. The number of high-end housing projects and fancy coffee shops going up around there is significant. The office space I worked in overlooked the harbor and was really cool, expensive too.
Fisher is probably letting Oakland’s bad reputation lead him to making a poor business decision. Giving up what he had offered to him in Oakland for the shaky deal he has in LV just doesn’t make sense.
I also regularly want to bring up the problem of trying to cool a huge baseball stadium down to a reasonable temperature when the weather outside is 110 degrees or higher. (Forecast high for the next five days in LV is 116, 118, 116, 113 and 113. It does get down to 109 near the end of the month.)
Having worked for a billionaire failson before, I honestly think it has less to do with anything involving Oakland’s reputation and more to do with the fact that he feels like he got more love in Las Vegas. And that he can go do something bold that will set him apart from his family.
Which it will, but not in the way he thinks.
Good point! He sure as hell has burned some bridges in Oakland. I don’t know how he’d recover from what’s happened to date.
There’s always a thrill to be had with a new team. He’ll get that in Vegas. I just don’t think it will be a large or a long-term thrill.
We aren’t too far off the limit of current refrigerants to reject heat into the desert air… but we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it (or before).
It’s an excellent point to keep raising, Vinnie. Air conditioning large stadia can be done, certainly (Phx does it as do other desert cities around the world), with current technology. But it is NOT cheap.
Fisher will be building a stadium at nearly twice the price of the one he could have built in Oakland. And the operating costs will be significantly higher. He’d better hope that MLB welfare payments don’t ever drop…
They seem to manage to cool giant stadiums in the desert fairly well. I mean they are already doing that at Allegent.
I know it can be done. I just question the cost of it especially during the summer. Unlike football, baseball plays through the worst of the summer.
The heat all has to go somewhere. Where does it go?
Incidentally, I’ve not heard anyone mention Allegiant as a temporary home for the A’s. I’m sure it would be ill-suited, but all of their options are ill-suited.
The 29 other owners need to tell the billionaire Giants / Fidelity Templeton owners that their territory is Marin, San Francisco and San Mateo Counties. The A’s territory is Alameda and Contra Costa. Everything else is open. If the A’s move to Las Vegas that should be just in time for the Brewers to move out of obsolete, decrepit Miller Park and into the Bay Area.
Your leaving out Santa Clara County which is where San Jose is. I believe the Giants own the rights to that too. If not, the A’s would already have moved there. They did try very hard to do so.
I live in Fremont where the A’s also tried to move to. Fremont is the city in Alameda County closest to Santa Clara County. I always said that was not a coincidence.
Yes, the Giants got Santa Clara as their exclusive territory when they were trying to move to San Jose. The A’s owners at the time gave it to them (possibly in hopes of having SF and the East Bay to themselves), and neglected to include a rights reversion clause.
LOL! I didn’t know that part of it.
I remember while working in Sunnyvale (just to the east of SJ) our CEO bought a large block of tickets for us to go to a weeknight game in SF. We had to leave at like 3 to beat traffic and people complained about how late they got home afterwards.
SJ shouldn’t be in the same market area as SF. The Bay Area can handle two teams.
Those San Jose rights used to belong to the A’s. There is a long sad tragic story behind the A’s losing those rights…..
FWIW I think the onerus-ship group really dropped the ball by not getting everyone they needed on side for Fremont.
It’s in Alameda county and, theoretically at least, the owners would have been much more on side with the team moving “within” their existing region (trying to remember if the Braves move to Cobb County even required a vote???).
Would the Giants have complained or pulled strings to try to derail it (or… did they)? It’s certainly possible, but I’m not clear how the A’s moving within Alameda county or Oakland would have been anyone else’s business… especially when they would have been moving further away from the Giants actual home base.
But, as usual for this franchise, they announced something without doing much of the legwork needed to make it happen (land acquisition & the consent of adjacent landowners etc). And failed.
They may well fail to get the LV deal to the finish line as well. This organization is nothing if not consistent.
I lived through that in Fremont and was one of the few who publicly spoke out against it. It might have been good for the A’s, but they wanted to add in over 3,000 homes too. The homes alone would have had enormous impacts on traffic, schools. etc.
I wasn’t an elected then. The whole Council had star fever and was all for it.
You are right that the deal ultimately failed because of the adjacent landowners. The ballpark would have shared parking with a CostCo, Lowes, etc. Those businesses said no. When the land owner doesn’t want the deal to happen, it ain’t happening.
Do you think there was a compromise to be made there though?
I always thought that if the A’s organization hadn’t been so ham-fisted about the way they played it, they might have been able to allay the fears of the other parties by reducing the amount of other development and building at least some of their own parking (multilevel) while allowing their “neighbours” to use the team controlled parking for free or a modest monthly fee on non-game days.
They wouldn’t have been the first wanna be developer to ask for 3,000 homes and settle for 1200 plus commercial.
I really thought there might have been a deal to be made there, but they completely bungled it (again).
John, replying to your comment here since I can’t reply to your comment (?).
There were huge problems with the location they couldn’t overcome. There was not enough room for parking, and transit was nowhere nearby. Kinda like Howard Terminal, you’re pinned against the bay with the whole thing fed by one adjacent freeway (880), a freeway that is already over capacity. NUMMI (now Tesla) complained it would impact their operations.
I believe the then current City Council would have approved whatever was asked of them. It just wasn’t workable.
What about that huge surface parking lot at Warm Springs BART? Isn’t that still in Alameda County? A stadium, parking garages for thousands of cars retail and hundreds of apartments would fit on the site and surrounding area. With the fabulous weather during baseball season in that part of the Bay Area (no need for winter clothes in July like at Giants games) there is no need for a roof.
Once the Pacific Commons site was nixed, they did try to go right next to Warm Springs BART. Being close to a well-off neighborhood, the opposition was well-funded, smart and organized. They got about 1,000 people out to their first protest. There was no such opposition with Pacific Commons.
They did have the space and the BART station nearby, but there was really no room for a big retail or residential component.
The project never really got going. It was dead only a few months after the idea started.
What I found interesting is that then owner Lew Wolff wasn’t really involved. He sent his son to all of the meetings instead. That said a lot.
Here’s one I don’t think you’ve covered yet.
MLSE (owner of the Maple Leafs, Raptors, Toronto FC, Argonauts, and Marlies) says it doesn’t have to pay taxes for BMO Field (where TFC and Argos play) because it is only a “user,” not an owner or a renter.
That’s handy.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/toronto-property-tax-owing-mlse-1.6896953#:~:text=Maple%20Leafs%20Sports%20and%20Entertainment%20%E2%80%94%20owner%20of%20the%20Toronto%20Maple,to%20the%202019%20tax%20year.
Not new enough for Las Vegas, apparently — Oak View Group is proposing a new “NBA-ready” arena as part of a $10 billion development proposal south of the Vegas strip. https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/whos-got-next-planned-las-vegas-arena-could-be-home-to-nba-team-2794857/
Hey it’ll be privately paid for, good for them.
“It’s called the Urban Sombrero”.
“Well, maybe people won’t see it”
“I put it on the cover”
“well, nobody looks at… the cover….”
I mean, why pay for beach upgrades? Nobody goes to seaside resorts for the …. beach….
“It combines the spirit of old Mexico with a little big city panache.”
Great Seinfeld reference.
Just in case you were interested in the San Antonio Spurs replacing their 21 year old arena so that they could get a new one downtown AND were worried about the Double-A San Antonio Missions not having a new stadium downtown, have I got good news for you:
https://www.expressnews.com/business/article/spurs-new-downtown-arena-wemby-18177478.php
Neil – a little confused here. I though Stadiums created hubs which revitalize the surrounding community. What’s this needing funds to revitalize the Camden Yards area or is this just a trick to raise funds for the Raves’ stadium
Apologize, I’m sure team owners would never resort to tricks.
Thank you for the reminder to cancel my subscription to The Athletic.
Brian, I’m sorry, but why? Did I miss something in the articles/comments above? The Athletic was founded so journalists could be paid a good wage for their work. I hope the staff got a piece of the proceeds when it sold but hey, I’m a dreamer.
For $7 a month it has a lot of great articles and I love its baseball coverage. I just hope the Grey Lady doesn’t kill it with a thousand paper cuts (pun intended)…..
We’ve heard that story before.
It’s losing money. They will probably kill it.
https://awfulannouncing.com/online-outlets/layoffs-vicious-cycle-killing-sport-journalism.html
At least the Athletic journalists were getting paid. When Ariana Huffington sold the Huffington Post for $350 million dollars all the volunteer writers went
UH, WHAT?????