All kinds of news of the week to cover this morning, and I already lost a couple of hours getting up early to yell at my senator’s window about this fiasco. Let’s start with the Tampa Bay Rays‘ own fiasco, and then work backwards:
- Now that Rays owner Stu Sternberg has said he doesn’t actually want the St. Petersburg stadium that he wanted, everybody would like him to sell the team now, please, with even St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch saying, “I have no interest in working with this ownership group.” Rays co-president Matt Silverman replied: “The team’s not for sale.” Meanwhile, Tampa Mayor Jane Castor said of possibly building a stadium in her city that “we will dust off our proposal and present it to the Rays and hopefully start some conversations,” which probably isn’t quite the bidding war that Sternberg would like, especially since the last time we heard from Castor on this issue, she was reminding the Rays owner that she had better things to spend money on. But maybe he’ll be impressed enough by her collection of Rays jerseys to pay for a stadium himself — anything is possible!
- If you didn’t have a parlay down on the old Arizona Coyotes owners suing to get their $3.5 million arena security deposit back on the grounds that the NHL forcing them to move the team was a natural disaster like a hurricane, you really should have, that was the obvious next step in this absurdist plotline.
- Shh-not-Sacramento Athletics owner John Fisher is looking to start excavation work at the site of his Las Vegas vaporstadium ahead of actually finalizing an agreement to build it, in the hopes that if some money falls out of the sky he’ll be able to get it ready in time for the 2028 season, if there is one. And if the Vegas tourist economy doesn’t turn out to be a bubble that’s ready to pop, which it just might be showing signs of.
- There’s a new advocacy group demanding that Hamilton County not spend public money on pro sports stadiums, so it can spend it on a new sports arena instead. The director of the nonprofit Hamilton County Growth Alliance won’t say who’s funding his campaign, but we can probably make an educated guess.
- Detroit is paying the owners of Detroit City F.C. $5.9 million to tear down the abandoned hospital they bought in order to build a new soccer stadium, because it “removes blight.” Note to self: Buy more eyesores and get the government to pay me to tear them down so I can build stuff that I want to build anyway.
- Manchester United owner Jim Ratcliffe may be proposing to build a stadium underneath an insane giant tent with his own money, as is the way mostly in Europe, but don’t sleep on how he’s demanding billions of dollars of redevelopment spending by the British government to “revitalize” the area around it, as is the way in the U.S.
- Organization formed to promote moving Madison Square Garden to another site in order to rebuild Penn Station propose plan to move Madison Square Garden to another site in order to rebuild Penn Station, film at 11.
- If you still want to hear me rattle on about more stadium stuff, check out this week’s Blazing Musket Podcast, where I was interviewed about both BOS Nation F.C.‘s proposed soccer stadium and the general state of the sports subsidy world. Learn how the best defense against a bad billionaire is a good billionaire, or at least another bad billionaire who hates the first one!
I read on a Penn State fan site (onwardstate.com) that PSU is selling naming rights to Beaver Stadium to help finance a $700 million renovation. A home remodeling company is buying the rights for $50 million for 15 years.
Uni-watch.com is reporting that New Era will be selling Nashville Stars hats, with advertisements saying “first potential expansion team to be granted an official New Era Cap”.
“get in on the ground floor!”
They are just naming the field West Shore Homes Field. So it will be West Shore Homes Field at Beaver Stadium. James Beaver was governor and a civil war hero.
Nobody will actually call it that, but there will be a logo near the 20 yard line.
According to the AD, $10m up front and $40m over the rest of the 15-year-deal. He said, this was really the only offer on the table right now.
It’s upsetting to us who live here because PSU has not had corporate names on things. We’ll get over it. The next target for a naming deal should be the Bryce Jordan Center. Nobody likes that place anyway.
It is unclear if this is purely a marketing deal or a “donation.” The press release obfuscated that, I thought. Maybe under the new staff-less IRS it won’t matter.
Onward State frequently misreports stuff, btw, so be wary of that.
The usual right-wingers on the board insist they could have made more money by renaming it for Joe Paterno. Details of that “plan” included selling 100,000 tickets at $1000 a piece to the naming ceremony. That was their plan. OWS reported that without pushback.
They are just naming the field West Shore Homes Field. So it will be West Shore Homes Field at Beaver Stadium. James Beaver was governor and a civil war hero.
Nobody will actually call it that, but there will be a logo near the 20 yard line.
According to the AD, $10m up front and $40m over the rest of the 15-year-deal. He said, this was really the only offer on the table right now.
It’s upsetting to us who live here because PSU has not had corporate names on things and we remember when attending events was much cheaper. But the athletes were not getting paid back then nor did they have cover a scholarship for every athlete, which they will be doing soon.
We’ll get over it. The next target for a naming deal should be the Bryce Jordan Center. Nobody likes that place anyway.
It is unclear if this is purely a marketing deal or a “donation.” The press release obfuscated that, I thought. Maybe under the new staff-less IRS it won’t matter.
Onward State occasionally misreports stuff, btw, so be wary of that.
The usual right-wingers on the board insist they could have made more money by renaming it for Joe Paterno. Details of that “plan” included selling 100,000 tickets at $1000 a piece to the naming ceremony. That was their plan. OWS reported that without pushback.
Ahhh, Ratcliffe.
Yet another non-resident for tax purpose billionaire demanding tax dollars (not his own, of course) be used to subsidize his crumbling businesses.
Hubris, thy name is…
Fisher is just trying to get Vegas on the hook for the rest of the stadium, right? It seems fairly obvious that he just wants to have a hole in the ground so he can go back to the legislature and say, “do you want this to get built or be left with a hole? Well then you better pay for the rest of the stadium then because I can’t.” It seems like such an obvious scam that it’s surprising that nobody is blocking the construction of this stadium until Fisher comes up with the money.
Given how narrowly the current deal passed the state legislature, that doesn’t seem very likely to work. But I guess it’s more likely than the magic private investor fairy showing up with a bunch of suitcases packed with twenties, so sure, why not?
I didn’t say it was smart. But I don’t see what else his end game is here. People only start construction projects they don’t have the money to complete if they’re looking for someone else to magically swoop in an finished it for them.
Oh, yeah, I wasn’t doubting that that may be what’s going on here. Just, you know, LOLFisher.
Baiden has experience lobbying Carson City. Fisher’s last play is to try to get an additional $700 million and/or location change.
I’m not sure Baiden did much direct lobbying — for the Raiders, that was our old pal Jeremy Aguero. It looks like Baiden’s main role was signing up “founding sponsors,” which if he can pull it off for the A’s could mean a couple hundred mil. (Or not, since MLB in Vegas would have a fraction the exposure of the NFL there.)
Exactly, Ian. The city should not permit him to do any work on site until they have all reasonable assurances that he has the means and ability to complete the building.
If this is truly a $1.7bn project, a $100m-175m construction bond guaranteeing completion should not be an issue for the proponent. It can even be structured so that the bond is refundable when he reaches the point in construction that only the value of the bond remains left to do… meaning it is not a “barrier” to any phase of the construction.
I still keep going back to when MLB openly courted local rich people to put in a bid for a Las Vegas expansion team. There are multiple huge lots of vacant land next to properties owned by the likes of billionaires Phil Ruffin and Steve Wynn that local officials have been practically begging to get developed (namely, adjacent to Circus Circus and Encore). If one of these guys had wanted to build a new casino/resort/ballpark extravaganza complex, they could have easily done so.
The fact that none of them did should have been a massive red flag. If they determined they couldn’t make money off an MLB team and ballpark in a city where they can get whatever they want and have the capital to make it happen, who in their right mind believes that Gap Boy would? It’s madness.
It is. And MLB themselves have called the Vegas market “iffy”.
Failson Fisher’s Folly is down to nothing but hubris. He honestly thinks he is smart because his parents started a business that was incredibly successful.
In my (limited) experience with very rich people, this is not that unusual… they tend to believe that there is a fundamental reason they are wealthy beyond good luck and timing. They do not get that other people worked just as hard (or harder) and due to factors beyond their control, failed or peaked at a much more modest level. This is mainly true of inheritance based wealth, but not exclusively. Lots of people who made a ton of money think that makes them smarter than the rest of the world. There is no evidence that that is the case.
Most are conservative enough to not risk their windfall/earnings/parental nest egg on a fool’s errand. Some are not.
Musk is a prime example. How many Tesla fanboys are out their singing his praises as “one of the great minds of our time”.
In fact, he has serious behavioural issues (some medical, some not). He is wealthy because his payment startup was bought by Peter Thiel, and because he managed to hire really smart people to work at Tesla and SpaceX.
He appears on the path to bankrupting at least two of his companies as we speak, but doesn’t seem to notice or care.
This reminds me of how the Vegas rumor mill loves these grandiose ideas but they never come to fruition because the numbers don’t make sense.
Right now there’s been all these rumors about _______ buying up different plots of land to build a new high end luxury resort. Tilman Fertitta, Disney, Amazon, Steve Wynn etc etc.
The problem with that idea is that there are 2 fairly new high end properties, truly designed for the wealthy, that are empty most of the time. But all the rubes are like “oh yeah Vegas needs another high end resort!”
Regarding holes, I will refer you to this now-classic, but very much not family friendly, comic strip: https://achewood.com/2007/07/03/title.html
It is entirely possible that in his older years, John Fisher has evolved into a “hole man.” After all, his baseball franchise is quite accurately described by the title of Lyle’s favorite magazine in the cartoon.
Whoops wrong link: https://achewood.com/2007/07/02/title.html
Kinda kills the joke but oh well.
Detroit urbex and paranormal enthusiasts in shambles.
The hole in the ground threat didn’t work in Sin City.
Vegas is used to having construction projects stall for 15 years +. The new north strip casinos (Resorts and Fontainebleau) were abandoned shells or empty lots for years upon years.
There’s a an empty lot that a fake NBA arena developer has had the same grading permit Fisher has for the trop site. The All Net arena has had that permit for a decade
This whole thing with Madison Square Garden just baffles me. #nonnewyorker
Didn’t they renovate MSG in the 90s, and then renovate it again to the tune of a kabillion dollars just recently?
And they want to move it to renovate Penn Station? It’s been like 14 years since I’ve been in Penn Station, so, okay. But shouldn’t they have done all this at the same time, the last time?
Unfortunately, MSG is where Penn Station used to be, so to rebuild it, they’d need to tear down the arena. Which, as you’ve noted, keeps getting renovated.
The mistake was putting MSG there in the first place in the 1960s, and then giving it a perpetual tax break that never expires. (That part was literally a mistake: Mayor Ed Koch went to his grave swearing he thought he was signing a time-limited tax break.) The arena doesn’t own the land under it, it just has an operating permit that needs to be renewed every decade or so, which has left this all to get re-argued over and over and over.
Wait, isn’t MSG on top of where Penn Station CURRENTLY is? Not where it used to be?
It is on top of the rat’s maze of what the current Penn Station is. The hope is to restore a grand Penn Station in the same location where it was before demolition.
Right, it’s on top of the underground part of Penn Station. The actual station was torn down in 1964.
https://www.nyhistory.org/blogs/penn-station-masterpiece
I did not know that, thank you.
So they want to rebuild the above-ground portion and make Penn Station like it was back in the day, which means NOT just renovating the underground part and means MSG is in a gots-to-go situation.
Despite having a billion in reno like 12 years ago.
But, hey, sports is important, y’all.
I took my best shot at untangling the history of this here, back when the Penn Station stans were looking at a different relocation site:
https://hellgatenyc.com/madison-square-garden-penn-station-move-to-hudson-yards/
Didn’t they just recently expand Penn Station back above ground but across the street? Or was that an expansion of Grand Central Terminal?
They built a new entrance in the old post office building across 8th Avenue, which was designed by the same architect as Penn Station. It’s much more pleasant than the old station, but it cost way too much money and can only be used for Amtrak trains, because the NJ Transit and LIRR train platforms don’t extend under that building.
I get that old Penn station was beautiful and had it survived it would be celebrated as one of the great transit hubs in the world.
But it got torn down, the replacement was crappy. The arena built on top though is awesome though, has great accessibility. MSG is an iconic arena because it sits on top of a train station in the middle of New York City. It’s just so easy to attend an event there.
The tax breaks/lease renewal situation is bad, probably will never be fixed, but this idea that old Penn station needs to be rebuilt cuz it was an architectural wonder is silly.
As far as New York transit mistakes people should be more upset about- the LIRR should have been extended from Brooklyn to the World Trade Center terminal that the Path trains from New Jersey use. They really could have made that more of a hub while rebuilding the World Trade Center site. I think Spitzer might have killed that development?
How would that even work? The Atlantic Avenue LIRR terminal is two miles or more from the WTC, and the trains would have to pass under a river crossing that is already jammed with subway and car tunnels. It would be an engineering nightmare.
The bush administration was willing to give $2 billion toward the project. From the bits and pieces of the feasibility study I can find it would have required a new tunnel from Brooklyn to the WTC. It would have combined “one seat service to JFK, leaving every 6 minutes” with regular LIRR service stopping in Brooklyn, and Jamaica.
If New York transit wasn’t such a mess of different agencies- the big thinking crazy idea would have been to extend PATH to Brooklyn as well.
Instead they went with the Second Ave Subway.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nycrail/comments/10nyxt3/2004_feasibility_study_to_connect_lirr_to_world/
Reddit notwithstanding, that Pataki proposal was never going to happen. NY officials love to announce implausible new transit connections to the airports, only to quietly abandon them when the price tag turns out to be monumental.
From the LA Times article on Vegas: Steve Hill, the president of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, mentioned another factor. “We are starting to see a little bit of weakness in the more value-centric side of the market,” Hill told me.
That is some masterful hedging and qualification. Hill is certainly working hard for his paycheck(s) there, although I hesitate to pass final judgment on whether or not he’s earning it.
How ironic it is. A site /blog that exists to expose/ report on government waste and handouts, never misses an opportunity to take shots at Republicans and Trump who are on a current mission of ending/cutting back on just that. Trump could sign an executive order banning public money going towards sports teams and stadiums, and Neil would do an “investimigation” about that being an abuse of power and a threat to democracy. LOLOLOL
I would happily credit Trump if he decided to go after stadium subsidies with the same zeal that he’s cutting things like school funding and cancer research. Given that he instead keeps doing stuff like this, though, pretty sure we’re never going to find out:
https://www.fieldofschemes.com/2017/12/22/13278/friday-roundup-trump-rescued-stadium-tax-break-sacramento-mls-group-needs-more-cash-more/
You’re so close, and yet. This site isn’t about *just* government waste – that’s a symptom, but not the disease. Really, the stadium subsidy game is about a massive transfer of wealth via the government. It’s about taking billions of dollars from taxpayers (e.g. the many, including middle-lower class payers who’ve had to shoulder more of the taxation due to decades of reconfiguring the tax code) to those who are already fabulously wealthy, using sports teams as an excuse to scam gullible, spineless, and corrupt politicians and deceive a public that couldn’t possibly be expected to understand the minutiae of municipal property tax credits, development rights, or lend-lease laws. The title of this website and its predecessor book sum it up pretty well.
Now, why does this distinction matter? I know the dopamine rush of thinking you landed a “gotcha!” on some news site or journalist because they said something you didn’t like. We’ve all been guilty of it at some point that is the hellscape of the internet. But the irony that you are cheering on the fabulously wealthy to engage in their own form of naked wealth transfer from middle and lower-class to benefit themselves shouldn’t be lost on you.
We’ve all been scammed before, and we’ve all believed lies fed to us from politicians. Anyone who claims otherwise is, well, lying. This isn’t some partisan thing either, as political tribalism is how this ongoing mass theft is allowed to perpetuate at all levels of government. Hopefully you realize the scam goes way beyond stadiums and you start to ask some serious questions. It doesn’t give you the momentary dopamine rush, but I promise you it’s more rewarding in the long run.
Ian, I wish I were as calm and even-tempered as you. Well said.
Trump is not “cutting waste.” He’s destroying the public sector and education so that his cronies and credulous zealots can have all the power in this country.
I would say more but Neil would, rightly, delete it.
Well, I don’t know if your podcast appearance affected/drove this at all, but I’d take credit for it if I were you…
https://www.espn.com/soccer/story/_/id/44252061/nwsl-expansion-team-bos-nation-fc-new-name-boston
Stadium situation still seems a little shaky though. It’s a small facility, so it’s not like work can’t be done quickly… but you do wonder about stadium readiness for next season.
I think I actually managed to get through the entire podcast without making fun of that terrible name, so I can’t really take credit. (Also, “BOS Nation” was picked to be an anagram of “Bostonian”? Couldn’t they have called them the Onion Bats instead?)
I wondered about that too.
I assumed this name was picked by fans as part of the now standard owner-manipulated public naming contest, where it beat out the three other (owner selected) candidates:
a) “Boston Cheeto-Vultures”
b) “Boston Tea-Vineyarders”
c) “Boston Fightin’ Blue Crabs”
Since a new name is coming, your candidate still has a chance…
They should have been the Anti-Bosons
And just when we thought the Rays situation couldn’t get any dumber….according to the TBTimes they’ve been pushing a proposal to fancy up the Trop and extend the use agreement for another 10 years. Cost estimated at $600M…with $400M from the City and County and $200M from the team. The City and County didn’t jump at this offer. Yet.
Oh, and supposedly there’s vaportecture for this genius idea, but it’s not in the article.
…I suggested years ago that they could replace the metal panels on the outside with glass (they’re not structural) and it would brighten the place up. But that was before they spent 20 years telling everybody it was a dump.
The Trop should be upgraded for half what a new stadium would cost. I oppose more subsidies. Start the bargaining with: The team needs to pay their own way. The team turned taxpayers from supporters to opponents.
A new contract should not include development rights to the Gas Plant property.
Thanks to NoHomeRun.com for truth telling that kept the city council from pouring on more subsidy.
Lo and behold my friends. As predicted, Fisher is looking for investors to pony up $550 million. This is definitive proof he has no money. If you include the supposed loans from the bank and his family and the public’s contribution, Fisher will be contributing less than $100 million (and I’m being generous with that figure). MLB needs to grow a pair and end this facade.