Happy end of the week! Surely some other news of note happened in recent days, but you chose to come to this website, so you’re looking for different news, maybe some bleak Utah minor-league baseball renderings? And that is but the beginning of the smorgasbord of stadium and arena items on tap! (Yes, you can have a smorgasbord on tap, I’m a professional wordsmith, you’ll just have to trust me on this one.)
- Reporting live from Tampa Bay Rays owner Stu Sternberg’s colon, the Tampa Bay Times’ Marc Topkin has a love letter to the Rays’ new stadium design, gushing about how much more “intimate” it will be thanks to only having 30,000 seats and “70% of the seats in the lower two of three seating levels.” Getting rid of the worst seats doesn’t actually make the view from the remaining seats any better — getting rid of intervening luxury seating might accomplish that, but there’s no indication Sternberg plans to do that — and having 30% of the seats in a third deck actually sounds like a lot for a 30,000-seat stadium (the Pittsburgh Pirates‘ stadium holds 38,000 and doesn’t have a third deck at all), but team officials blurted all this stuff out and Topkin wrote it down and printed it verbatim, that’s the job of a journalist, right? (UPDATE: FoS reader Andrew Ross points out that the Times actually squeezed this story onto its front page alongside the other notable news of the day.)
- Cleveland’s stadium agency is on the hook for nearly all upkeep of the Guardians stadium and Cavaliers arena, and the alcohol and cigarette taxes that are supposed to pay for them are running dry, so someone is going to need to find more money to spend on the teams. (Right now Cavs owner Dan Gilbert is fronting his team’s arena costs, and the city and county will have to pay him back.) Some of the work includes upgraded elevators and escalators for the Cavs, kitchen equipment upgrades and new in-stadium TV screens for the Guardians, and a special film on the new glass wall at the Cavs arena to keep birds from flying into it which will have to be replaced every five years, not all of which really seem like “capital repairs” to me, but from the sound of things whoever negotiated these leases on behalf of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County did an absolutely horrible job that is allowing the team owners to bill the public for any and all upgrades, can lawyers be found guilty of malpractice? Make a note to check into that.
- Speaking of malpractice, the Baltimore Banner managed to write about the Ravens‘ new stadium upgrades with only the briefest of mentions that state taxpayers are picking up the entire $430 million tab, and not mentioning at all that Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti can avail himself of another $170 million or much more after that. The headline the Banner chose to roll with: “M&T Bank Stadium’s premium areas will soon reach new level of luxury.” Turns out corporate-run nonprofit journalism isn’t necessarily any better than corporate-run for-profit journalism, maybe we need a better model?
- I’ve been sadly neglecting the throwdown in Indianapolis between Indy Eleven owner Ersal Ozdemir, who was planning to build a new stadium for his USL-but-wants-to-be-MLS team with $112 million in state money, and Mayor Joe Hogsett, who now wants to use the money for a different soccer stadium on a different site for a different wannabe MLS ownership group. The City-County Council is set to vote on authorizing legislation for a new “professional sports development area” (read: super-TIF district) on June 3; if it’s approved, it would then go to the state legislature for a final vote.
- New York Mets owner Steve Cohen’s plan to build a casino in his stadium parking lot, despite it being public parkland, is likely dead after state senator Jessica Ramos said she won’t support any casino project in her district when 75% of residents say they don’t want one. The state legislature could still pass casino authorizing legislation over the local representative’s objections, but that rarely happens, and anyway the state casino location board is unlikely to hand out a casino license to a project on such shaky ground, so probably New Yorkers will get to gamble somewhere other than the Mets parking lots, which Cohen is vowing will remain parking lots until the sun burns out, because it’s the prerogative of a sports team owner to throw a hissy fit.
- A stairway flooded during heavy rains at the St. Louis Cardinals stadium, time to build them a new one, that’s how it works, I don’t make the rules!
“70% of the seats [are] in the lower two of three seating levels” off a prospective stadium in a notoriously poor region — look up the rankings of median incomes for the 50 largest US metro areas, and you’ll find Florida cities at or near the bottom in all of them — located basically nextdoor to a stadium that the locals already don’t go to.
I’ve seen some morbidly hilarious real estate hustles in my time living in this state, but this might be right up there with the best/worst of them.
But if you do the population on number of gators in side the city limits Florida cities are right on top. How many gators does New York City have? 10 maybe. Tampa metro area, hundreds of thousands.
I thought that Tampa Bay Times front page was so hilarious — “hey, everyone is going to be looking at the front page today, this is a great opportunity to push some stadium propaganda.” And I bet they did it for free, too!
So, stadiums first went big to try and get more butts in seats because gate revenue was so important. Than the big data revolution hit the live events industry, where everyone realized you can make more money with fewer attendees who pay more money per visit. (As an Orange County kid, RIP to the old days when Disneyland let locals stack numerous discounts because they wanted Southern California families to pad their attendance numbers). But now, it seems like it’s swung way in the opposite direction. 30k is awfully small for a ballpark, and as was brought up for the proposed Vegas A’s stadium (I wish I could remember which baseball writer wrote about this), that small capacity allows for no overflow for when a marquee opponent is in town to compensate for when only 10k sickos show up to watch a Tuesday night tilt against the Rockies.
Call me crazy, but I get the sense that this hyper-focus on only a few high-dollar folks and hoping they’ll shell out a few hundred bucks per visit is going to bite a lot of teams in the ass in the not-so-distant future. Having done market research consulting for theme parks and some pro sports clubs, cost is the single biggest complaint cited by would-be visitors, and is often the main reason why a family will go to the aquarium than a ballgame. How many of these teams demanding tiny-ass venues now will be crawling back in 10-15 years asking for 15%+ expansion in low-cost seating to maintain viability? I know that firms have warned clients that focusing on only high-dollar customers comes with an extremely low margin for error, not to mention that going to a live event usually leads to more commercial engagement in the immediate weeks that follow. But all any American business executive hears is that they can make more money with less overhead (fewer employees needed to service fewer customers) and they dive headfirst.
Ice-cold take: don’t be shocked if some of these teams feel the pinch at the gaye entirely of their own making in the next decade, and will then ask for handouts using faux-egalitarian “make the game more accessible to all fans” arguments as they try to hit a Goldilocks balance of size and dollar spent per fan in their venues.
A 30,000 seat ballpark with 3 levels of seating is nuts. You need really like 1.5 to do it nicely (with a little more outfield seating then most parks).
Just to add to your list of wacky journalism, you should see
https://www.governing.com/urban/the-hidden-value-cities-get-from-subsidizing-stadiums
A case of arguing of markets must work therefore they do work. And they even name check you!
This guy also managed to get the publication date of Field of Schemes wrong: There were editions in 1998, 1999, and 2008, but none in 2002 like he claims.
The whole Indianapolis vs. Indy Eleven tiff is hilarious as Republicans and donut county transients are all behind the Eleven Park purely out of spite for the Democratic mayor because they all hate anyone who is a member of “the Democrat Party”, and suddenly the Brickyard Battalion, the support group for the Eleven, has transformed into a propaganda machine for the team, while opponents of Eleven Park have rightfully cited that no league is going to want the logistical nightmare or bad mojo of building on a freaking cemetery! The league is already dealing with Inter Miami’s golf course stadium BS. Meanwhile, wanting to finally get rid of the wasteful legacy of heliports to bring on the possibly wasteful legacy of soccer stadiums(?), the Indianapolis International Airport did approve of shutting down the heliport, which very existence is being defended like your children who don’t want you to send the toys they stopped playing with to Goodwill.
Joe Hogsett has presented his campaign with an aura of mystery, by deflecting all questions about possible ownership groups and everything that could give him potential allies by saying “well, we’ll reveal it once we approve the stadium site”, frustrating even supporters who would love to rally behind this MLS team. Perhaps he’s being held at gunpoint and may need to tell everyone he was in a boaking accident? I dunno. What should be a fruitful moment in city history is very, very messy.
You’re right that much of the Indy public sentiment sides with a millionaire developer seeking more gov’t money to fund his stadium rather than even considering that the Indy mayor is acting in the best interest of the taxpayers. Why? Likely because the Mayor – Hogsett – is a democrat and people are gullible enough to believe that the vaportecture renderings were going to become reality.
Sadly, even in these small stadiums there will be little legroom…..
Legroom is the last thingyou want in a stadium – for a little more spaciousness, you make everyone behind you have a worse view.
Oh, does this involve math and angles and architecture and stuff? I will decide to trust you-easy call.
On my annual Astros visits
I made sure to book an aisle seat behind either dugout.
Worth the extra money even though I’d end up spending way too much time at the bar/smoking area next to the Crawford Boxes LOL…..