It’s been another week, and, yeah, it sure has. Feeling this very strongly this morning, you all go on ahead and read this week’s bullet points while I get my second wind.
- The Athletics have new Las Vegas stadium renderings (pretty similar to the last batch, only with more entourage) and a new president, Marc Badain, who formerly worked in the same role for the Las Vegas Raiders before abruptly quitting. Badain’s role in getting the Raiders’ stadium built (with $750 million in public money) and the fact that the Nevada legislature is coming back into session this year have people speculating that Badain could be on board to go back to the state for more cash to fill owner John Fisher’s budget hole; there’s no actual evidence that’s in the works that I can tell, but this entire project has been little more than tea-leaf reading for close to two years, why stop now?
- New Houston Texans president Mike Tomon says he doesn’t want a new stadium, just renovations to the old one. The Houston Business Journal reports: “As far as funding potential renovations to NRG Stadium — which, coupled with projects around NRG Park and maintenance, could cost billions of dollars — Tomon said it’s too early in the process to determine what that would look like.” Lobbying strategy still hazy, ask again later.
- The A’s and Tampa Bay Rays playing in minor-league stadiums this year are “cautionary tales of what happens when big, complicated challenges are met with half-measures and inaction,” writes ESPN’s Jeff Passan, who apparently missed the parts about how the A’s are in Sacramento because they alienated Oakland officials enough to torpedo talks of a lease extension there and the Rays are in Tampa because a hurricane blew their roof off, and neither of those things would be changed even if local officials hadn’t engaged in “inaction,” which they actually didn’t. Friends don’t let friends read Jeff Passan think pieces, is the lesson here.
- San Antonio’s “Project Marvel” that would include a new Spurs arena, convention center expansion, and other crap has “tepid” 41-36% support, according to a new poll. The plan could be up for a public referendum as soon as this November, so that undecided 23% should start reading up on the details ASAP.
- The San Jose Giants have agreed to extend their lease from 2027 through 2050 in exchange for $5 million in public stadium upgrades, and I’m going to go out on a limb and call this not that bad — the Single-A team has even agreed to double its rent payments from $20,000 a year to $40,000, which is next to nothing but not completely nothing. It’ll probably come out next week that San Jose has to turn over development rights to 10,000 acres of land or something in addition, but until then I’m filing this under “could have been so much worse.”
- Someone wrote in to Cincinnati Enquirer sports columnist Jason Williams to ask if Hamilton County residents could have a re-vote on the tax hike that is paying off the Bengals stadium, and Williams replied, not a bad idea, it could be expanded to help fund a new arena, too. Pretty sure that’s not what the letter writer meant, Jason.
- There’s actual video of actual cranes doing actual work to build Inter Miami‘s new stadium, maybe this thing will actually open eventually, even if the 2026 target date still seems ambitious. Or it could be the latest fake video, for all we know, hard to trust anything coming out of south Florida these days.
The San Jose giant are a single A team not AAA. The haven’t been a AAA team since the 70’s or 80’s
Thanks, will fix — Giants AAA team is the RiverCats, duh.
San Jose Giants’ stadium was built in the 1940s as a WPA project.
… via Fremont, Laney College, Howard Terminal et al….
The move is utter hubris on Fisher’s part. Oakland was “so terrible” that he had to refuse $495m to move to Sacramento (and maybe, one day, Vegas for a negative net subsidy of $1.3Bn).
Passan is liberally applying lipstick to the pig, but it is still a curly tailed oinker.
I am hoping that Vegas pols refuse to pony up more cash for this Failson Folly. They have already sunk too much promised money into this boondoggle.
And it shows its age. SJ Muni is a fine place to spend a summer night, but several cities lost their teams in organized baseball with facilities far better/more modern than Muni. All I can think of is at the Giants told the powers that be to leave San Jose alone. Objectively they wouldn’t have the made the cut.
Is anyone actually shoveling dirt on the Tropicana site or is this just a matter of retouching renderings to take to Carson City?
I wish Passan would have added how the A’s could have redeveloped the Coliseum site for a manageable amount of money since the infrastructure was already present, but played hardball and ended up in Sacramento.
I wish Passan’s hair had its own social media accounts so I could know what it’s thinking.
Arguably, Oakland is useful to the national corporate media as an easily-cited “mismanaged left-wing city,” alongside Portland, Minneapolis, and probably still Detroit as well. ESPN doesn’t necessarily have to be on board with this program, but the House of Mouse is certainly looking to control costs, and even a relatively senior guy like Passan has to be thinking about his employability by other outlets.
That didn’t prevent Disney-controlled ESPN from giving a 9-figure contract to Stephen A. Smith.
Counterpoint: how many more heads will ESPN eventually chop off to help pay off that contract?
$5 million for a 23 year extension for the San Jose Giants is a little more than $200K per year. The San Jose Giants have been drawing a little over 200K fans per year. So its a subsidy of $1 per fan.
I am assuming most of the fans are people who couldn’t afford go to a San Francisco Giants game or Sharks or 49ers. So its basically a funding an recreational activity for people who can’t afford more expensive activities
A’s DH Brent Rooker says that he recently bought a house in Sacramento… does he know something we don’t about where the team will be playing a few years from now, or is he just reading the tea leaves like the rest of us and concluding that the team might be in Sacramento for more than three years?
Just like with the Coyotes, playing in a college or minor league facility endlessly will be way to much of an embarrassment. The worst case scenario in Tampa is the roof gets fixed and the Rays go back to Tropicana. Although Nashville and Charlotte aren’t the largest markets, they’re probably better than Vegas. Fisher would probably be better off paying the full price of a stadium in Charlotte, the population of North Carolina is 10 million, compared to hundreds of miles of wasteland surrounding Vegas in every direction.
Perhaps he didn’t find a rental home he liked? He has a family so probably wants more than a starter home. The team’s there for at least 3 years, CA housing appreciates crazily, so it could be better to buy even for a short time.
About every 15 to 20 years the California housing market hits the skids. 2028 would be 20 years since the last time …..
LOL, “hits the skids” is relative, depending on where in California you are. It usually entails not appreciating quite as fast, not cratering.
Might want to actually look at the historical data on that DrewN. I bought a house in 1988 and by 1991 the house was worth less than I paid for it for a few years (I wasn’t under water because I’d put a good sized down paymenton the house). In the 2008 this was absolutely not the case. There were whole housing developments where were worth 50% less than they had been in 2007. Another house I bought in 2006 was again worth less than I paid for it by 2008 (but again not below my loan size because of the down payment). There were some houses in pretty nice area’s that got repossessed by banks in the late 2000’s early 2010’s. Now at this point these houses have high values again but the 20 year mark from the last crash is coming up….
Yeah, the last severe housing downturn was during the Bush recession in 2008, maybe there will be one caused by the impending Trump recession.
Didn’t he just sign a $50m deal? Granted it was with Fisher who will surely try to welch on it somehow…
However, if I had that kind of cake I’d make sure my family is very comfy in their new (and not at all desired I am sure) home city.
Let’s say he is unlucky and loses $1m on a sale when the A’s move (back to Oakland or to LV or Austin or wherever…).
I don’t think he’s going to care that much. And he may even make money on short term ownership, who knows?
To me the best part of Passan’s semi accurate semi hagiography surrounding the Rays and Athletics “stadium issues” (the main one being that neither owner wants to pay much toward a stadium…) is the embedded link to Doolittle’s article on what an MLB at 32 teams might look like, based less on wild speculation than an actual look at the issues that lead to the current alignment and playoff structure, and how they may be resolved (or not resolved) in a different configuration.
https://www.espn.com/mlb/insider/story/_/id/39604300/mlb-expansion-32-teams-realignment-playoffs-divisions
I would like to think that 4 eight team divisions will get serious consideration… but I think it more likely that MLB owners will scoff at that and create 16 two team divisions so that half of them can call themselves “division champions” every year.
No-one else will, but that’s not what matters in today’s world.
The other obvious solution would be to expand by 4-6 teams over a period of, say, five years and maintain the weird 6 division layout. More chaos, worse baseball, but more money.
I wouldn’t rule out 18 two team divisions in that scenario either… just imagine:
18 billionaires who haven’t lifted anything heavier than a crab puff since they were teenagers all getting to stand on a rostrum and be feted with a championship trophy for their athletic prowess… really, don’t all other considerations pale in comparison?
There are barely enough ballplayers to fill 30 big-league rosters … the major leagues are heading toward a lockout before Xmas 2026 … and you’re talking about expansion?
MLB is talking about expansion. It’s MLB’s not-so-quiet intent to expand as soon as the A’s and Rays have new stadiums.
I guess Manfred was starting to feel left out in the race to be the worst commissioner in team sports. I just don’t understand the logic of having 2 broke baseball owners make stadium decisions. For the life of me I don’t get why Manfred is jumping through hoops to green light Fisher’s move to a city in which no one wants him in except for the grifting politicians, when MLB would easily get a billion dollars in expansion fees from Las Vegas. Yet MLB isn’t even charging Fisher relocation fees to build a stadium that is way too small and he won’t own (the Stadium Authority will own it), won’t have any parking and on land owned by a gaming REIT, that somehow plans on building a resort. All this on barely 9 acres.
Then you have the situation in Tampa/St. Pete, where Sternberg just blew MLB’s expansion and extortion plans completely out the water. He broke a precedent of turning down over a billion dollars in public cash because he doesn’t have the money to come up with his portion. Perhaps said owners/MLB float him the cash, similar to what the NFL does with its G-4 program. Now Reinsdorf can’t extort Chicago for the cash he wants to build his own ballpark (not that Chicago or the State of Illinois has any money, plus the Bears want their billions first).
Amazing how the Dodgers can constantly renovate their stadium using their own money. What a concept. Granted, they’re printing money from multiple income streams.
“I guess Manfred was starting to feel left out in the race to be the worst commissioner in team sports.”
Manfred has been leading that race for quite a while. He’s just extending his lead now.