It’s been another exhausting news week, so if you need a pick-me-up, please enjoy some videos of how I spent last weekend. Sometimes we all need a musical reminder to hang on to your humanity.
Once you’re sufficiently fortified, here’s what else happened this week in the world of sports stadium and arena shakedowns:
- KCUR, the Kansas City NPR station, has calculated how much the Chiefs and Royals are worth to Missouri economically by adding up all the taxes paid at the teams’ sports complex and declaring that to be how much local government would “lose” if the teams moved across the border to Kansas — which, as we’ve discussed here before, isn’t how it works at all, as at least some spending would shift to other activities on the Missouri side of the state line by people who don’t want to drive to Kansas, while Kansas wouldn’t gain all these taxes because the teams’ presence would similarly “crowd out” some other local spending that would otherwise happen. “Studies suggest that the pool of entertainment dollars doesn’t grow with a new stadium or a new location for a team, it just shifts around,” admits the report, which then says “taxes are different” because “when sales or withholding tax leaves a state or city, it creates new revenue somewhere.” I think we may now have enough data points to conclude that KCUR isn’t very good at this whole journalism thing, and while it’s tempting to enjoy some schadenfreude at the news that they’re about to lose around 10% of their funding, it’s less satisfying when you consider that funding cuts are probably only going to make them worse at it.
- Also in Kansas City news, former Kansas City parks and recreation commissioner David Mecklenburg says that if the Royals build a stadium on top of a public park, that would be bad for public parks, yup, checks out.
- While walking around the RFK Stadium neighborhood distributing yard signs urging the D.C. council to approve the Washington Commanders stadium deal, an organizer with the pro-stadium group run by a pro-stadium lobbyist said that “a lot of residents really support this deal,” and WTOP just printed it right on their website like that without fact-checking, this really hasn’t been a great week for stadium reporting.
- The St. Petersburg city council, as expected, officially stuck a fork in the Tampa Bay Rays stadium deal at the Gas Plant District yesterday, four months after team owner Stu Sternberg walked away from it despite it including $1 billion in public cash and tax and land breaks. The council will now explore other possible uses of the site, which it really should have done to see if it could get a better deal before agreeing to the stadium plan last summer, but better late than never.
- Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeff Lurie is polling fans on whether they would like to see a new or renovated stadium, without, according to one FoS reader who got the survey, mentioning who would pay for such things, though it did hype the “enhanced tailgating and pre-/post-game entertainment options” that would result, this is surely not a push poll.
- If you want to see hundred of photos of the final days of Detroit’s Tiger Stadium in 1999, presented for some reason as a breakneck video slideshow, the Detroit Free Press has got you covered.
- Tourism rates are falling in Las Vegas, and while this may not actually be significantly bad news for the Athletics‘ plans to move there — a lot of MLB team value is based on TV revenue, which is more about local fan base than tourists — it’s still not great.
- USA Today’s Bob Nightengale says MLB doesn’t plan to consider Oakland for an expansion franchise as commissioner Rob Manfred previously hinted after all, writing that “Major League Baseball believes the strongest two expansion markets remain Salt Lake City, Utah, and Nashville, with no plans to put an expansion franchise back into Oakland,” no sources at all on that, that’s just how professional baseball columnists roll.
- And finally, in non-stadium subsidy news, a local development agency giving a $9.3 million tax break to a group so secretive that it’s been code-named “Project Sasquatch” sounds like it has to be Iannucciesque satire, but nope, it’s really happening in Georgia’s Fulton County, thanks to the county’s IDA signing a nondisclosure agreement. If only the real Sasquatch had required an NDA from Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin, our culture could have been spared all of this.
It does feel like we deserve all of this. This is where we are, no matter how many times we point out to elected officials and journalists and pundits that handing over billions of taxpayer dollars to billionaires without a proven return is just stupid and counterproductive, it keeps happening and the populace just shrugs.
This is why we deserve it. Everything.
wrong link for vegas tourism.
Thanks, fixed! (Though I bet Vegas tourism rates would go up if you could see Sasquatch there.)
It’s almost like people don’t want to spend money traveling to America, when you threaten to either invade, or in general are jerks to visitors and sending them back for mean tweets or inconsequential misdemeanor crimes.
That’s part of it.
Also, Vegas is not as cheap to visit as it used to be.
The hotels and casinos may make more money focusing on the wealthier customers, but that will bring total visits down. Not good for the A’s.
Also, gambling is everywhere now. You don’t have to travel out to the middle of the desert to fritter away your kid’s college fund on games of chance.
Gambling venues are everywhere now. From your friendly local Native American tribe to the casino you carry around in your pocket.
So much of the arguments for putting a team in Las Vegas (and Orlando, for that matter) is based on “they can get tourists to fill the stadium.” Royals fans aren’t flying over to LV by the thousands for a midweek series in May; Nationals fans won’t be traveling with the same volume for the series in Orlando, either. And if either of those fans do turn up to those games, they’ll all be locals who only had to drive 10-15 miles to get there.
There’s also the reality that the economies of cities that are highly dependent on tourism can go through some *really* low lows, and that the mean and median incomes in those types of cities is BUPKIS even in the best of times — but those are obviously more higher-level conversations.
The “baseball in a tourist locale” experiment has been tried many times, going back to the 19th century. It doesn’t work. A recent example of this is the failure of the Atlantic City Surf of the Atlantic League.
Hey, when the USA Today is printing Nightengale gems like this:
“If the Padres are going to play deep into October, eventually they’re going to have to start beating teams with winning records”
Subscription sales are bound to be flying off the wall/over the fence/across the goal line etc.
And all this in an article entitled “18 biggest questions” for MLB… wow. Just wow.
I don’t think expansion is inevitable. Expansion
dilutes the value of every other franchise, which is why they demand a big expansion fee.
That number is getting so big that it just might just not make sense for these marginal markets.
And I can’t imagine MLB would expand until Tampa Bay and Vegas are finally resolved.
I think baseball expansion happens but it’s like MLS expanison- it’s not because the product is doing well, it’s a just a cash grab for the current owners.
Baseball has a ton of cash poor owners, it’s really Selig’s legacy that so many people who have no business owning a baseball team now do.
The move for them would be to expand, and then sell. The what if is really “are their any idiots who would buy a franchise in a small market and invest crazy money into marketing and building a stadium?” I’d say maybe….
The old Atlanta Thrashers come to mind here. Turner brings them in to the NHL. Sell to group who couldn’t get it together and the next thing you know Winnipeg is back.
I didn’t actually mention expansion in the OP at all, but it’s worth discussing:
It will happen. Not because it is necessary. Nor is it even desirable from anything but a financial perspective.
It will happen because it is money (and lots of it) in owners pockets – especially those owners who overpaid for their own teams or bought expansion teams (some time ago, now) in markets that really could never support them.
It’s absolutely true that the markets available aren’t worth the price that is being charged (we don’t know what it is yet, but it will be staggering… maybe $1.5Bn?), but that was true during the last round of expansion as well.
The NFL and NBA are different animals because of the pooled (and massive) TV revenue (although places like New Orleans and Jacksonville will always be the poor sisters even with the benefit of national tv contracts and shared revenues).
Of the last six NHL expansion franchises sold, how many have really been successful financially?
Which of the last four (or eight) MLB expansion franchises does anyone long to own at a price of $1.5Bn or more?
Arizona, Tampa, Colorado, Miami, Toronto, Seattle (II), Montreal, San Diego, KC and Seattle Pilots (which honest Bud the used car dealer spirited away to Milwaukee in the middle of the night before he decided owners shouldn’t be allowed to do that because it is so wrong. Hey, you can’t say the man doesn’t learn…).
Some have had good periods and a couple make money reliably (though not enough to justify a purchase price of even $1bn, let alone what they will probably sell for eventually). But most are middling markets that only existed because of the bigger idiot theory… and even then sometimes those owners have not managed to find a bigger idiot when they needed one.
Noted shill-for-hire Jeremy Aguero is a backbone source for the Vegas tourism article, and the gist of it is pitching Fremont Street/downtown as the “affordable” areas. Nothing we haven’t seen before.
The idea that salt lake city with the metro population of 1.2 million is more viable than Oakland with the bay area population at 10 million is a joke. Mlb will deserve whats coming to it with genius moves like that.
Agreed.
Even Nashville, the “it” city for all pro sports now that Vegas is ‘full’ is marginal.
Yes it is growing fast. It’s also still a pretty small city (35th in metro pop – right in with Indianapolis, Cleveland, Virginia Beach, Jacksonville & Milwaukee).
Nashville is indeed growing fast, which is to say that it’s been adding, by the thousands, out-of-towners with no real affinity to the city, and that the percentage of people native to the Nashville is quite low. Places like these are mostly inhabited by people who like where they live but love where they’re originally from.
That’s part of the problem that pro sports teams across the Southeast have always had in terms of fan support; even hyped-up places like Atlanta and Miami are effectively medium-size markets because of the sheer number of out-of-towners driving their numbers up. Any new MLB franchise that the league decides to set up in Nashville (and/or Charlotte) would discover those realities themselves.
Nashville is also among the sprawliest cities in America.
That makes it harder to get people from all over the area to come to ballpark 81 times a year.
This is a real problem for these sunbelt-ish cities. You just don’t have a high number of people within a reasonable distance to the ballpark.
I don’t think that matters in the long run.
California was once mostly people from somewhere else and that did not prevent their teams from building fanbases.
If the teams are competitive and the ballparks are places people want to go, they’ll build their own fanbases over time.
You’re right about the California teams. That also happened during a time when people had few recourses to follow their hometown teams beyond some box scores or the odd nationally televised game, and before things like cable/pay TV and social media made it exponentially easier for transplants to keep tabs on their teams even after moving.
To use an example from another league: I would even go as far as to argue that Sunday Ticket is the biggest obstacle to the Sun Belt NFL teams’ efforts to build larger local fanbases.
That’s just throwing a pair of names. The truth is, there are pretty obvious red flags with all of the cities that have been brought up as MLB expansion candidates. By no means does the supposed “failures” of existing markets guarantee future success of new ones.
I am going with the decline in Vegas tourism being down to tourists learning that John Fisher might be moving there (he just bought a $30m house, as many will have heard… though that doesn’t mean he will be taking up full time residence).
Anyone else wondering if MLB is really going to allow another 2-3 seasons in Sacramento given the way things are going?
West Sac is not the only place where 6pm local first pitch games feature triple digit temps, but it is not going well at all for the A’s (dis)organization. The $100 tickets are trading for $20 or so and the games I have watched at SHP generally feature at least 2,000 and possibly 3-4,000 empty seats.
No one expected a glorious three year stint at a temporary minor league home with subpar facilities all round… but this is a complete disaster for Major League Baseball.
MLB SUCKS! A crappy, over priced, under talented, over hyped product. The pitching sucks now and wait until they expand. There’s not much talent now. Certain teams will never be able to compete unless by an act of GOD.
Someone point out to Manfred that the Bay Area has a humongous TV market, and that the coliseum holds the record for most fans at a MLB playoff home game, and then get him to explain why he clearly doesn’t give a crap about Oakland. Could it be the blue collar thing? Because that’s the only thing I can think of; it makes the embattled commissioner of Major League Baseball look entirely cruel.
The only folks who have expressed interest in buying the A’s WANT the team to stay in Oakland.
The Coliseum has the record for most fans at an MLB home playoff game?
Like, outside a World Series? ‘Cause the Dodgers drew 92,706 on Oct. 6, 1959.
The NLCS record is 65,829, set in 2003 in Miami. The ALCS record is 64,406, set in 1982 in Anaheim.
Oakland’s top postseason crowd is 55,861 for an ALDS game against the Yankees in 2001. But they did draw 54,005 for a wild card game against Tampa Bay in 2019. Is that what you’re talking about? The highest crowd for a wild-card game? Of which there were 16 all-time? Confused.
The size of the market has nothing to do with it. If it did, the A’s would still be there.
To get back into the mix, Oakland will have to find a committed owner and resurrect its stadium plan.
Yes, they were willing to give away a fortune for the Howard Terminal deal, but it’s not clear that is still on the table or if the local politics are still aligned behind that kind of giveaway.
SLC seems to be in the “Sorry mom, the mob has spoken” phase, with a lot of political momentum behind spending whatever it takes to become a “big league” city.
I disagree. If TV money doesn’t matter to owners, to the MLBPA, then why is so much time dedicated to TV agreements?
It is easy to say that TV markets don’t matter, when a team unceremoniously leaves a city with one of the largest markets.
I would suggest that any of us attempting to draw conclusions from the Oakland/Athletics saga is foolhardy.
The only conclusion that can be drawn is that there was NOTHING the city could have offered Fisher that would have enticed him to stay – something he had Lou Wolff admit for him publicly waaaay back in 2009 (“there is no Oakland option”).
The fact that he then deployed a truly idiotic strategy created (self created, with help from former GBL failmaster Dave Kaval) to accidentally leave his team homeless and playing in a shitty triple A stadium in the middle of a desert is simply the icing on the cake of incompetence. If there is a lesson in this it is that MLB should be more careful whom they welcome into the owner’s club (Marge Schott, Frank McCourt, Sternberg, Nutting, Fisher etc…)
There are several interested parties in a new Oakland MLB franchise. Whether any of them are willing and able to plunk down the expansion fee and work out a deal to build in the coliseum parking lot I do not know, but there is a path to doing so if the prospective ownership groups want to.
MLB may not ‘want’ to return to Oakland (although today’s Oakland is gentrifying… which all sports leagues love…), but if an ownership group and stadium plan is in place and a $1.5Bn check is waiting, does anyone seriously think they will not consider a market of ~4m people and focus on two or three markets the size of Spokane/CdA, Indianapolis or Rochester instead?
Yes, wild card. My bad; neglected to mention that…
Having “a humongous TV market” counts for nothing when linear TV is collapsing more quickly than expected.
If MLB intends to go with disbursing streaming TV revenues based on how many individual subscriber your team has, rather than an NFL “everyone gets an equal cut model,” then the number of eyeballs in a market matters A LOT. And so far it looks like that’s the way things are headed.
I don’t see that 100% reliance on streaming mindset a being a good move; it doesn’t paint MLB in a good light.
The death of television is being prematurely declared.
The RSN model is a relatively recent creation… I (and perhaps you as well) can remember a time when local OTA stations bid for the rights to MLB broadcasts… and in those pre RSN days the Yankees local media rights brought in more money than they ‘claim’ to generate from YES now (this is simply an accounting trick done to make the Yankees look less profitable and the network more successful).
It’s absolutely true that RSN fees have peaked. That doesn’t mean baseball will not be on tv or that teams will be giving their games away for free.
The method of delivery will change. The amount MLB generates from those deliveries is unlikely to drop significantly, however.
I used to pay for 2 or 3 cable carried stations that brought me baseball. I now pay MLB directly… and get all the games for the cost equivalent of maybe 3-4 months of the cable packages I used to have to buy.
Yet I’m quite sure MLB’s “John related revenue” is higher under the current lower priced model than it was when I was paying a couple of superstations and two sports networks for significantly fewer games every year. Since I am watching the same RSN feeds that I used to (for the most part), I have to assume MLB.tv compensates those networks in some way (even though I am out of their market and could not buy their service directly if I wanted to).
Having a large media market always counts. It’s how you exploit it that really matters, and that is what MLB is struggling with at the moment.
As Neil points out above, the fundamental issue isn’t going to be whether teams make money from televised games, it’s how that money is split. There will have to be some kind of pooling/equalization of streaming revenue for the model to work. Part of that negotiation will be dealing with the long term problem of small and midsized market holders simply farming the subsidy and not reinvesting in their teams (pause to consider that MLB has recently approved a franchise relocation from a market of 4-5m people to one of 2m SOLELY so the incompetent owner can continue to receive $60m in annual revenue sharing payments…)
I completely understand why the 8-10 teams in MLB (or the NHL, for that matter) that are trying to win and paying to put a competitive product on the field are angry that their RS checks are being taken out of the ‘business’ as annual profits by some smaller market (or just uninterested) owners. I would be too. That needs to be fixed once and for all.
But that is a separate problem from the 8 or 10 largest/best markets in any sports league needing other teams to play against… a 12 team sports league with six of it’s franchises in NY, Chicago and LA is not sustainable.
It will be really interesting to see how MLB navigates this issue with all the competing interests involved. If MLB had ever had a Pete Rozelle type figure who could whip the vote and, at least in general, have owners do what is in the best long term interests of the game itself I would be much more confident than I am with the present bumbling fool-in-chief.
We’ve come a long way from Landis, Frick, Ueberroth, Giamatti & Vincent. And not in a good way.
I can’t believe the Eagles are starting to whisper about a new stadium. It was built in 2003! It’s younger than nearly all of their players! Do we not build things to last? SHEESH (*makes old man disapproving face*)
The concept of welfare for billionaires seems to be enduring…. but I assume you are talking about actual physical structures rather than scandalous practices like robbing from the poor to give to the rich.
Philadelphia is a city in crisis … municipal workers just returned to work following a strike … the transit system will have reduced service come August and curtailed further come January … yet the winners of the most recent Super Bowl want a government-funded sportsball palace to replace the one they already got.
Such is how revolutions are fomented.
Philadelphia is a city in crisis? That’s news to Philadelphians like me. We had a ten day trash strike that ended weeks ago. Was that the “crisis”?
The fact is that the Eagles could shake down some level of government but it likely won’t be the city/county. It would be the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and it would probably be done in cahoots with the Steelers or Pirates who are small market teams. I don’t see the city putting in much money to benefit any sports team, beyond possibly some road money. They weren’t going to put in any direct money in the proposed Sixers arena.
There’s absolutely no way Nashville has a better chance than Portland does at this point. Both Portland and SLC have stadium deals and public funding to back those up, Nashville does not. They also won’t be building one with public funding either after what happened with the Titans new stadium (and Nashville SC before that). Not only that, but Nashville doesn’t even have a site pinned down and both SLC and Portland already have that locked down as well. Also take a look at the MLB team map. Lots of teams where Nashville is in a short area of travel. As for Portland and SLC there’s very little in terms of teams in that gap. Its a pretty easy choice. As to HOW he thinks Nashville is a better option I have no idea…..Utah I fully understand, but Nashville? Nah that’s not happening.