Newspaper says Brewers could move without stadium subsidy, according to nobody in particular

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel dropped a bombshell on Friday:

The Milwaukee Brewers could start looking for a new home this fall if state and local officials fail to reach agreement by then on a taxpayer-funded package to fund improvements to American Family Field required in the team’s lease with the state

Huge if true! Sure, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred had hinted at a move threat for the Brewers previously, but for team execs to actually openly say that the team could relocate without stadium subsidies is — hang on, there was something more to that sentence:

The Milwaukee Brewers could start looking for a new home this fall if state and local officials fail to reach agreement by then on a taxpayer-funded package to fund improvements to American Family Field required in the team’s lease with the state, sources say

Excuse me? This entire article — which also specifically suggests the Brewers could move to “the boomtowns of Charlotte, North Carolina or Nashville, Tennessee,” more on that in a second — turns out to be based entirely on statements by unnamed people, identified only as “sources with knowledge of the dynamic” and “a source familiar with negotiations,” with no one going on the record about a move threat at all. This is, in newspaper lingo, fucked up, and a clear, if sadly not uncommon, violation of ethical standards.

For those of you unfamiliar with the planet Earth and its journalism, the use of unnamed sources is a way for news outlets to report on things even when the people feeding them the information don’t want to go public because they, say, might get fired if they did. The danger is that sources might also hide behind anonymity to use journalists’ desire for a scoop to plant fake news, or at least their spin on real news, in stories without anyone being able to verify it, because everyone involved can publicly deny having said anything.

And so, there are supposed to be guardrails to stop the abuse of unnamed sourcing. For example, the Society of Professional Journalists’ ethics policy states:

If the only way to publish a story that is of importance to the audience is to use anonymous sources, the reporter owes it to the readers to identify the source as clearly as possible…

When someone asks to provide information off the record, be sure the reason is not to boost her own position by undermining someone else’s, to even the score with a rival, to attack an opponent or to push a personal agenda.

The Journal-Sentinel clearly doesn’t do the former here: The paper didn’t even indicate whether the source was on the team side of negotiations or the government side, meaning there’s no way for readers to decide for themselves if this might be, on the one hand, the Brewers’ owners trying to rattle a move-threat saber, or on the other, state officials trying to justify a subsidy deal that now could be as high as $430 million on the grounds that “we had to do it, or they were going to move to Charlotte.” As for the latter, there’s no way to tell from the article whether the Journal-Sentinel’s sources are pushing a personal agenda, and indeed plenty of reason to suspect that the move threat was leaked in order to gin up fear among Brewers fans that the team might leave.

All we know for now, then, is that someone, presumably someone in the state of Wisconsin, says that relocation is on the table for the Brewers, or at least that they’re trying to create leverage by asserting that it is. The one direct quote from the paper’s unnamed source — “The Brewers genuinely want to stay, it is only a question of whether they’ll be able to with the [stadium] district broke” — suggests a subsidy advocate either with the team or in state government who is trying to paint the team as the good guys, who genuinely don’t want any paratroopers to be set on fire, but things break, don’t they?

As for the extremely specific threat that the Brewers could move to Charlotte or Nashville, that’s completely unsupported in the article, not even cited to unnamed sources. Charlotte, at least, is genuinely fast-growing, increasing in population at the fourth-fastest rate in the country between 2010 and 2020, jumping all the way to 15th-largest city in the U.S. Nashville has been growing at a somewhat slower rate, though is still doing better than Milwaukee, which has been shrinking in population in recent decades.

That’s all in terms of the population of the cities proper, though. In terms of metro area, which is far more important to selling both tickets and TV subscriptions, Milwaukee’s is growing at about 0.5% a year, compared to Charlotte’s 5% a year and Nashville’s 2.5%. Charlotte currently sits 21st in TV market size, Nashville 27th, and Milwaukee 38th, so there’s at least some argument that a move by the Brewers to one of those two cities wouldn’t be entirely crazy.

There’s one other important factor, though, that isn’t even mentioned by the Journal-Sentinel article: Neither Charlotte nor Nashville has a major-league baseball stadium, not even one unfathomably ancient like Milwaukee’s, which opened way back in 2001. So moving to one of those cities would require Brewers owner Mark Attanasio to first come up with a billion or so dollars to erect a new stadium — certainly something that Nashville might be willing to help with, given past recent performance, but still not clearly a financial upgrade over staying put even if Wisconsin were to contribute something less than $430 million in renovations.

None of this is unusual in the stadium game, of course — there’s a reason the non-threat threat is one of the key items in the standard stadium playbook as listed in Field of Schemes the book. But it is at least a little alarming, if not entirely surprising, to see a major newspaper playing along with the threat without questioning it in the slightest, let alone without following journalistic ethical principles by saying, “Yeah, if you want to throw that allegation out there, you’re going to have to be willing to say it by name, what do we look like, stooges willing to turn over our news coverage to anyone in a position of power who wants to get something into the headlines? Maybe don’t answer that.”