Royals owner admits “urgency” in stadium deal is fear of missing out on taxpayer money

Speaking of deadlines, Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman hasn’t set any for his long-running campaign for a new baseball stadium somewhere in or around the K.C. area, but he still surely knows that without creating some sense of urgency, everyone is likely to wander off and start focusing on other things to do with billions of dollars in tax money. And so on Monday, Sherman did his best to say that the clock is ticking, without ever quite explaining what will happen if time runs out:

“I’ve got a great sense of urgency on this. Time is not our friend. When the Chiefs made their announcement [to move to Kansas] in December, there was a whole new wave of enthusiasm on the Missouri side. And don’t mean they weren’t working hard [before], but from the governor on down, there’s a lot of effort being put forth.”

If that was a little on the vague side, what Sherman said next was far more saying the quiet part loud:

“When I’m talking about urgency, that’s to me a business tenant that I think you should always employ in any organization. When you have a window of opportunity, you better run through it because those windows close. I feel the same way about the stadium.”

Leaving out the odd image of running through a window of opportunity, Sherman appears to be admitting here that the urgency is all on his end: He knows that whatever stadium offers are on the table — more on that in a second — may not be there forever, and that he’d better grab one while he can. After all, eventually someone in Missouri government may notice that he already has a perfectly well-liked stadium that was renovated in 2009, while the threat of the state of Kansas spending billions of dollars on the Royals after just doing so for the Chiefs both is unlikely and wouldn’t really hurt Missouri. And once that realization strikes, Sherman runs the risk of any plans for public funding evaporating entirely.

At this point, with Clay County and Kansas both showing little interest, Sherman really only has one offer, from Kansas City, Missouri, and we’re not sure exactly what it is. KCMO mayor Quinton Lucas said last week that “we will get a deal done in 2026 that’s fair and transparent for our taxpayers, our future and our team,” without actually specifying what that would look like. (He’s denied claims by a state legislature that it would involve funneling half a billion dollars through K.C.’s Port Authority.) One would hope that, now that Sherman has acknowledged that his window is closing, Lucas can use that as leverage to strike a stadium deal that’s actually fair to taxpayers — though he still has a ways to go in the “transparent” department.