An Oregon state senator has introduced a bill to increase the state’s spending on a possible Portland MLB stadium from $150 million to $800 million, provided Portland gets an expansion team whenever MLB next expands. The source would still be funneling player income taxes to pay off stadium bonds, yet another Casino Night–style funding scheme that is both risky and not really free money, for reasons we’ve covered here before. (The increased figure would rely on rising player payrolls since the initial $150 million plan was approved more than 20 years ago.) The $800 million figure is apparently meant to compete with Utah’s proposed $900 million in property tax kickbacks for an MLB stadium in Salt Lake City; expansion city bidding war, activated!
Denver’s NWSL franchise is planning to build a 14,500-seat stadium, and “the ownership group is paying for the stadium in its entirety,” according to the Denver Post. Also according to the Denver Post, four paragraphs later, a tax increment financing district is already in place on the team’s proposed stadium site, meaning the team would recoup property taxes worth some number that the Denver Post didn’t deign to mention. The city would also be on the hook for buying $24 million worth of land for the stadium project, but Denver Mayor Mike Johnston says “the city would always own that public space and that could come back to us for repurposing in 50 years from now if the stadium were to move,” so really it’s an investment, see?
Will the Tampa Bay Rays draw more fans this season, despite playing in an 11,000-seat minor-league stadium, thanks to now being on the side of the bay where more people with more money live? Doesn’t look like it, based on the fact that opening day is one week away and hasn’t sold out yet. It doesn’t help that Rays management raised average ticket prices by 30% in response to the smaller capacity, which could complicate efforts to use the 2025 season to answer the age-old question, “Is it St. Petersburg, or is it just Florida?“
Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne says the financing plan for a new Cleveland Browns stadium would require average ticket prices to rise to $800 over 30 years in order for the math to work, while a Browns spokesperson says this isn’t true, and nobody’s showing their math, that’s no fun! (Yes, this website is predicated on the notion that math is fun. I’m sorry if you’re learning about this late.)
A Massachusetts judge heard arguments this week in a lawsuit charging that a new stadium for BOS Nation F.C. (soon to be renamed, finally) violates a state law requiring a two-thirds supermajority of the state legislature to approve any new uses of land taken for conservation purposes. The Boston mayor’s office insists that tearing down a public school stadium and rebuilding it as a pro women’s soccer stadium that public school students would still get to play in is really the same use — cue the Ship of Theseus debates!
The Eugene Emeralds are absolutely, positively moving out of Eugene after 70 years, uh, just as soon as they find somewhere else offering to build them a new stadium. Until then, they’ll still be playing in Eugene. But they’re gonna leave, just you watch! Don’t call their bluff, voters who rejected giving them $15 million last May!
Florida sucks for baseball more than anything though. The wealthy people who would make up a season ticket base in other cities, don’t spend anytime in Florida during the summer.
NFL in Florida seems to do well enough, Tampa bay Lightning are the blueprint for running an expansion franchise in the sun belt.
It’s really hard to find anywhere that an NFL team wouldn’t do well. Most popular sport in the US by far, with only eight games a year — if you can’t sell out your season, you’re not really trying.
Florida does have an NFL team that plays a “home” game in London every season. So it’s not exactly the healthiest situation. Wouldn’t call that a Florida problem though, more of a “way too small and poor of market to get an expansion franchise and only way for league to keep its value/revenue on par with the other teams” situation
Al speaks of the Jacksonville Jaguars, whose Everbank Field is getting a major renovation. Funded by taxpayers as is common in Murica.
FWIW an NFL team now has 8 or 9 home games depending on the season.
I have a significantly higher opinion of Jacksonville than most, and believe it has much more going for it than people think… but even with that, I still think the city might have been better off letting the Jaguars go in the long-run.
Not because Jax is an unsuitable market for an NFL franchise as some claim, but because they’ve been run so thoroughly into the ground under current ownership that it’s arguably dragging the entire city’s Q rating down with them.
(And also because I want off this “narcotic,” but that’s a different story.)
Kei- I mostly agree. No reason why an NFL franchise can’t succeed in a smaller market like Jacksonville, and by the financial metrics they are a success. But to be on the field successful you need much better ownership then what they have. The Khan family sports properties all seem poorly run.
If Florida “sucks” in that regard, then it should keep sucking these teams give us a reason not to. And maybe people in other cities should take some lessons from us, as well.
Only in pro sports are fanbases and markets excoriated for *not* supporting an obviously substandard product. If anything, there should have been even fewer people at Jaguars games, at Magic games, at Marlins games, etc etc over the last 10-15 years based on some of the teams they were all fielding during that stretch.
The bigger factor for me is ownership; namely, the type of people who own pro sports franchises based in Florida. Go up and down that list of names, and you’ll mostly find absentee out-of-towners who don’t see their teams as anything other than perpetually appreciating financial assets, as just another stream of easy, passive income in their extensive portfolios. But even that’s less galling than the near-total lack of engagement, affinity, or even basic goodwill they have with the communities their teams are based in.
Generally speaking, people in places like Orlando, Tampa/St Pete, Jacksonville, and Miami/South Florida — especially the life-long residents of those places, most of whom have been out-crowded in their own neighborhoods by transplants — want their hometown to be connected to something bigger than itself. But there are also millions of us here with fully operative bullshit detectors, fine-tuned and hard-wired by years and years of seeing carpetbagger behavior from people who know the cost of everything in this state but the value of nothing that we all hold dear.
We’re not even asking these people to have the same level of fondness for the place that we do, let alone demanding it. Even a baseline level of appreciation will do, at this point. But when the likes of Shad Khan, Stu Sternberg, the deVos family, and the succession of Marlins make it clear to us that they don’t see the communities they’re linked to as anything more than gigantic ATM’s, we won’t hesitate to respond in kind — with our hearts, and with our wallets.
The problem though is native born Floridians are such a small percentage of the population their opinion in both sports and politics doesn’t mean a whole lot. I believe native Floridians are about 35% of the population, and dropping. The state has prioritized being the waiting room for the afterlife and a place for foreigners to hoard real estate. It’s just not a serious place.
My own bias as an Orlando resident aside, the number of new schools in construction is imo a decent proxy for the type of population growth happening within a region.
Using senior high schools specifically as an example: Orlando/Orange County has had to build reliever schools for reliever schools in recent years, and the same has happened (albeit to a lesser degree) on the south side of Jax — but otherwise, the number of regular, non-magnet high schools has remained relatively the same in metro areas with major sports franchises in it.
As you alluded to, the state on the whole might be adding a ton of people, but a hefty percentage of the new arrivals are either waiting to meet their maker, or just trying to ease into retirement life. And even the younger cohort (relatively speaking, of course) are the types of folks who like where they live now, but not as much as they love where they’re originally from.
For what it’s worth… Stephen Ross bought the dolphins because he wanted to own an nfl franchise. And he was able to tell the story about how he went to high school in Miami so he’s “connected.” Even though he left and never came back.
He routinely donates large sums in other communities, to the university of Michigan, etc.
But he doesn’t really contribute to “Miami” but asks fans for their support. Its kind of a one-way street.
And now he’s planning on doing more high end construction in south Florida because of the friendly business environment, and is using the fact that he owns the team to play up the idea that he loves Florida.
It’s just so … expected in a way. That seems to be how this goes.
Arizona. Plenty of tickets are available for the opening series against the Cubs. Cub fans will dominate, just like Blackhawks fans took over Coyotes games and Packers fans fill every corner of the valley. When the Cardinals stink and they don’t have an opponent like da Bears or Cowboys, there are lots of empty seats.
Which also reveals how much of a lie this whole “______ fans travel well” line really is. Yankees and Steelers and Lakers and Blackhawks fans aren’t traveling from their home cities by the thousands just so they can literally follow their teams. Those teams just have fans everywhere in America, including in the cities where they happen to be playing a road game.
Yeah very few teams “travel”. The fact is that there’s 3-4 franchises in the North American major sports that have national fanbases, and the rest don’t and probably never will.
My observation is that the only fans who really “travel” with their team are college football fans, and that only works because of the relative regionalization of the sport and the small number of away games which are almost always at least a week apart and on Saturday afternoons. Most “out of town” fans in American sports, particularly the pro sports, are people who live locally but don’t support the local team for whatever reason. And not all of them are transplants. A lot of them, particularly in Florida, are local natives who either adopted out-of-town teams before the local expansion team was founded, or actively rejected the local teams during their long periods of embarrassing futility and hostile ownership.
Cubs fans definitely travel. Summer vacation plans often get made around the road schedule. I’m here in AZ now, tons of non-AZ type Cubs fans in for the last blast of ST games and the opening series.
Personal observation is that Packers and Steelers fans travel really well, far above the expected local contingent.
There’s Steelers bars in every city. The Paris of Appalachia has a pretty widespread diaspora and they were really good in the 1970s when the NFL first gained popularity.
The 4 important teams of the late 60s/70s have huge national fanbases (Steelers, Cowboys, Raiders, Packers). That’s no coincidence.
Spring training is a different animal because it’s an event in itself. The games are held in a different environment to the regular season, they’re all in sunny touristy areas while Northern weather is still generally cool and gloomy, the venues are relatively close together, tickets are pretty cheap, so it’s easy to make a week of it traveling around Florida or Arizona watching the big leaguers playing in minor league parks. And even in the regular season, I’m sure there are Chicagoland fans who will go to St. Louis or Milwaukee for a series, especially on the weekend. But those big crowds of Yankees or Red Sox fans that would fill Tropicana Field when they were playing the Rays? Those are mostly local residents.
And yet when spring training was canceled during a work stoppage, hotel stays in Florida didn’t go down. So either the number of people traveling to Florida just for spring training is minuscule, or other tourists are normally staying away because the baseball tourists take up all the hotel rooms.
Just go to Portillos in Tempe and the place is packed with Cubs fans from Chicago during spring training. Hotels are packed and expensive during spring training, as are flights to Phoenix in March. Many of the fans are also snowbirds who would clearly spend the whole winter in Arizona anyway. If spring training was canceled, many of the Cubs fans would still come for the nonstop sunshine and hundreds of golf courses. The small number of rooms canceled would quickly be filled, and I have seen how fast cancelations are snapped up in February and March. A much larger concern is all the Canadians are fleeing the valley this week, possibly never to return, merci President demented idiot.
As a Packers fan from Portland originally, I can say with a huge amount of confidence Packer Nation is very strong no matter where you go
The Rays have always been high on their own supply when it comes to ticket prices. Always.
Answer: among the theories posited…Florida sucks.
The Marlins don’t draw, either.
For the NFL unless its a winner on the field, they don’t draw (and then its just people who want to be seen or visiting fans)/
For the NBA its similar.
Could be true for other places too, of coruse.
* NBA & NHL
Florida sucks for baseball more than anything though. The wealthy people who would make up a season ticket base in other cities, don’t spend anytime in Florida during the summer.
NFL in Florida seems to do well enough, Tampa bay Lightning are the blueprint for running an expansion franchise in the sun belt.
It’s really hard to find anywhere that an NFL team wouldn’t do well. Most popular sport in the US by far, with only eight games a year — if you can’t sell out your season, you’re not really trying.
Florida does have an NFL team that plays a “home” game in London every season. So it’s not exactly the healthiest situation. Wouldn’t call that a Florida problem though, more of a “way too small and poor of market to get an expansion franchise and only way for league to keep its value/revenue on par with the other teams” situation
Al speaks of the Jacksonville Jaguars, whose Everbank Field is getting a major renovation. Funded by taxpayers as is common in Murica.
FWIW an NFL team now has 8 or 9 home games depending on the season.
I have a significantly higher opinion of Jacksonville than most, and believe it has much more going for it than people think… but even with that, I still think the city might have been better off letting the Jaguars go in the long-run.
Not because Jax is an unsuitable market for an NFL franchise as some claim, but because they’ve been run so thoroughly into the ground under current ownership that it’s arguably dragging the entire city’s Q rating down with them.
(And also because I want off this “narcotic,” but that’s a different story.)
Kei- I mostly agree. No reason why an NFL franchise can’t succeed in a smaller market like Jacksonville, and by the financial metrics they are a success. But to be on the field successful you need much better ownership then what they have. The Khan family sports properties all seem poorly run.
If Florida “sucks” in that regard, then it should keep sucking these teams give us a reason not to. And maybe people in other cities should take some lessons from us, as well.
Only in pro sports are fanbases and markets excoriated for *not* supporting an obviously substandard product. If anything, there should have been even fewer people at Jaguars games, at Magic games, at Marlins games, etc etc over the last 10-15 years based on some of the teams they were all fielding during that stretch.
The bigger factor for me is ownership; namely, the type of people who own pro sports franchises based in Florida. Go up and down that list of names, and you’ll mostly find absentee out-of-towners who don’t see their teams as anything other than perpetually appreciating financial assets, as just another stream of easy, passive income in their extensive portfolios. But even that’s less galling than the near-total lack of engagement, affinity, or even basic goodwill they have with the communities their teams are based in.
Generally speaking, people in places like Orlando, Tampa/St Pete, Jacksonville, and Miami/South Florida — especially the life-long residents of those places, most of whom have been out-crowded in their own neighborhoods by transplants — want their hometown to be connected to something bigger than itself. But there are also millions of us here with fully operative bullshit detectors, fine-tuned and hard-wired by years and years of seeing carpetbagger behavior from people who know the cost of everything in this state but the value of nothing that we all hold dear.
We’re not even asking these people to have the same level of fondness for the place that we do, let alone demanding it. Even a baseline level of appreciation will do, at this point. But when the likes of Shad Khan, Stu Sternberg, the deVos family, and the succession of Marlins make it clear to us that they don’t see the communities they’re linked to as anything more than gigantic ATM’s, we won’t hesitate to respond in kind — with our hearts, and with our wallets.
The problem though is native born Floridians are such a small percentage of the population their opinion in both sports and politics doesn’t mean a whole lot. I believe native Floridians are about 35% of the population, and dropping. The state has prioritized being the waiting room for the afterlife and a place for foreigners to hoard real estate. It’s just not a serious place.
My own bias as an Orlando resident aside, the number of new schools in construction is imo a decent proxy for the type of population growth happening within a region.
Using senior high schools specifically as an example: Orlando/Orange County has had to build reliever schools for reliever schools in recent years, and the same has happened (albeit to a lesser degree) on the south side of Jax — but otherwise, the number of regular, non-magnet high schools has remained relatively the same in metro areas with major sports franchises in it.
As you alluded to, the state on the whole might be adding a ton of people, but a hefty percentage of the new arrivals are either waiting to meet their maker, or just trying to ease into retirement life. And even the younger cohort (relatively speaking, of course) are the types of folks who like where they live now, but not as much as they love where they’re originally from.
Kei. That is a good summary.
For what it’s worth… Stephen Ross bought the dolphins because he wanted to own an nfl franchise. And he was able to tell the story about how he went to high school in Miami so he’s “connected.” Even though he left and never came back.
He routinely donates large sums in other communities, to the university of Michigan, etc.
But he doesn’t really contribute to “Miami” but asks fans for their support. Its kind of a one-way street.
And now he’s planning on doing more high end construction in south Florida because of the friendly business environment, and is using the fact that he owns the team to play up the idea that he loves Florida.
It’s just so … expected in a way. That seems to be how this goes.
Yep. According to the 2020 census, about 36 percent of Floridians were born in Florida.
Arizona. Plenty of tickets are available for the opening series against the Cubs. Cub fans will dominate, just like Blackhawks fans took over Coyotes games and Packers fans fill every corner of the valley. When the Cardinals stink and they don’t have an opponent like da Bears or Cowboys, there are lots of empty seats.
Which also reveals how much of a lie this whole “______ fans travel well” line really is. Yankees and Steelers and Lakers and Blackhawks fans aren’t traveling from their home cities by the thousands just so they can literally follow their teams. Those teams just have fans everywhere in America, including in the cities where they happen to be playing a road game.
Yeah very few teams “travel”. The fact is that there’s 3-4 franchises in the North American major sports that have national fanbases, and the rest don’t and probably never will.
Right on.
My observation is that the only fans who really “travel” with their team are college football fans, and that only works because of the relative regionalization of the sport and the small number of away games which are almost always at least a week apart and on Saturday afternoons. Most “out of town” fans in American sports, particularly the pro sports, are people who live locally but don’t support the local team for whatever reason. And not all of them are transplants. A lot of them, particularly in Florida, are local natives who either adopted out-of-town teams before the local expansion team was founded, or actively rejected the local teams during their long periods of embarrassing futility and hostile ownership.
Cubs fans definitely travel. Summer vacation plans often get made around the road schedule. I’m here in AZ now, tons of non-AZ type Cubs fans in for the last blast of ST games and the opening series.
Personal observation is that Packers and Steelers fans travel really well, far above the expected local contingent.
There’s Steelers bars in every city. The Paris of Appalachia has a pretty widespread diaspora and they were really good in the 1970s when the NFL first gained popularity.
The 4 important teams of the late 60s/70s have huge national fanbases (Steelers, Cowboys, Raiders, Packers). That’s no coincidence.
Spring training is a different animal because it’s an event in itself. The games are held in a different environment to the regular season, they’re all in sunny touristy areas while Northern weather is still generally cool and gloomy, the venues are relatively close together, tickets are pretty cheap, so it’s easy to make a week of it traveling around Florida or Arizona watching the big leaguers playing in minor league parks. And even in the regular season, I’m sure there are Chicagoland fans who will go to St. Louis or Milwaukee for a series, especially on the weekend. But those big crowds of Yankees or Red Sox fans that would fill Tropicana Field when they were playing the Rays? Those are mostly local residents.
And yet when spring training was canceled during a work stoppage, hotel stays in Florida didn’t go down. So either the number of people traveling to Florida just for spring training is minuscule, or other tourists are normally staying away because the baseball tourists take up all the hotel rooms.
Just go to Portillos in Tempe and the place is packed with Cubs fans from Chicago during spring training. Hotels are packed and expensive during spring training, as are flights to Phoenix in March. Many of the fans are also snowbirds who would clearly spend the whole winter in Arizona anyway. If spring training was canceled, many of the Cubs fans would still come for the nonstop sunshine and hundreds of golf courses. The small number of rooms canceled would quickly be filled, and I have seen how fast cancelations are snapped up in February and March. A much larger concern is all the Canadians are fleeing the valley this week, possibly never to return, merci President demented idiot.
As a Packers fan from Portland originally, I can say with a huge amount of confidence Packer Nation is very strong no matter where you go