Welcome to the end of another programming week, one that was way busier than you’d expect for the dregs of summer. Let’s get through the rest of the week’s news and get you out of here for the long weekend:
- Also eager to get out of town for the long weekend, apparently: The Las Vegas Stadium Authority, which voted unanimously Wednesday to give $75 million from a “waterfall” reserve fund of hotel tax money to the Raiders, to be used mostly toward a $158 million upgrade of an entry plaza. The authority took this action after just two public comments and none from the authority board members themselves, in what local podcaster Dayvid Figler called “the fastest meeting in the history of $75 million giveaways.” Board chair Steve Hill presented the plan as in response to the “need to keep driving all those great results that Jeremy presented,” referring to Jeremy Aguero, the paid sports team consultant and hotel management degree holder who for some reason gets to do all the economic analyses of sports projects in Nevada. (Hill, of course, is an unregistered sports team lobbyist too, Las Vegas is truly a growth coalition at its finest.)
- The Kansas City council put off a rezoning vote for a new Royals stadium district again, because they want to wait first to get all the city’s mega-TIF districts finalized first. The council could have waited to figure out how it’s going to pay for its $1.1 billion share of the project before approving the money, but there was democracy afoot, had to nip that in the bud.
- The Royals deal is still facing not only a potential April public vote — plus a likely lawsuit over whether the city can move ahead regardless of the results since it already approved the Royals deal — but a lawsuit charging that the state money being used for the project was passed illegally; the Missouri state supreme court is currently mulling whether that suit can move forward.
- Chicago Bears officials are finally getting around to asking fans if they would still buy tickets if the team moved to Indiana, and are they taking the opportunity to sell fans on a “surrounded by restaurants, entertainment, and green space, creating a true gameday destination” with “one of the most robust gameday tailgating environments in the NFL”? You bet they are!
- New Tampa Bay Rays owner Patrick Zalupski says his new $2.3 billion stadium, built with the aid of $2 billion in public money, will enable him to move the team’s payroll into the top 10 to 15 in MLB, after years at the bottom. That’s never really happened before with past MLB stadiums — there are some lovely charts showing this in J.C. Bradbury’s new book, wait for it — but there’s a first time for everything.
- Speaking of Bradbury, he has a nice article over at The Conversation analyzing why we’re seeing so many new NFL stadiums being built with public money right now when economists and taxpayers alike think they’re a bad idea. Tl;dr: It’s the leases, stupid (and the stupid leases).
- The NHL’s attempts to pit Houston and Austin against each other to compete for a expansion franchise have at least started to pay off, with Houston Mayor John Whitmire saying this week that “We’ll definitely be a better location than Austin” and “If you talk to the sports franchises in town, I think they’d tell you we’re great partners.” Still no word on what kind of money Houston (or Austin) might offer toward a new hockey arena, but you know that’s what Gary Bettman is waiting to hear.
The Rays claim of an increased payroll is almost assuredly an empty promise. MLB is going to cancel baseball in order to get a salary cap put in place. Pretty soon all teams will have the same payroll.
The MLB owners may or may not cancel baseball, but they are not going to get a salary cap.
Yours is the first semi-professional opinion I’ve seen that has the owners “losing” the showdown with the players. Just to recap, the received wisdom is that:
1. The owners have far deeper pockets and have prepared for a lockout
2. The majority of players don’t have the money to endure such a lockout
3. The majority of players will realize that a salary floor will mean more to them then unrestricted salaries for the few
Where do you see the fault lines that will result in the owners settling without a cap?
Baseball’s union wins more often than it loses. (The 1994 strike was a rare non-win, but it DID prove to owners that, unlike the NFL, you can’t just put any guys you can find out on the field.)
And a salary cap has long been a line in the sand. I don’t know what management would have to give up to get the MLBPA to agree to one.
Marvin Miller is long dead, and I don’t know about the current union’s leadership. But both sides know how much revenue the game generates and what there is to lose.
Like you, I can’t say I follow baseball closely enough to know the ins & outs of their labor strategies. I note they just had their first ex-player as union leader, though he later became the first ex-player union leader to resign after revealing he’d been having sex with his sister-in-law, who he also employed in the union, amidst a federal investigation.
From this I conclude that I am now going to follow baseball more closely.
The owners have tried to get a salary cap in every CBA, and always failed. The union has great solidarity on this issue, whereas the owners are split into big- and small-market factions who have different incentives for how much of the season they’d be willing to trash just to get a cap. There might be more tweaking of the luxury tax, but a hard cap/floor model is extremely unlikely.
More on this from Marc Normandin, who follows the baseball labor situation more closely than anyone:
https://www.marcnormandin.com/2026/02/27/rumored-mlb-salary-floor-figures-are-unserious/
Seems like the Bears would get much more accurate information by looking at attendance data for teams that have actually moved over the years. I would guess actual research, and not angry fans from Illinois, would tell them that the teams on balance do just fine.
Their fanbase with the money for tickets is north and west of the city, and that means getting to games will be a brutal hump from the ‘burbs over some of America’s most congested highways, but even my friends with season tickets are only making the trek a few times a year (and selling their seats to the other games). Even if attendance dips when the team sucks, and the team sucks far more often than not the past few decades, but I’m sure that the numbers will work for the Bears with more luxury boxes or whatever (Hammond will be taking a bath on the stadium regardless, even if they host the next 10 Super Bowls).
So, given that anyone can fill out this survey and the folks most likely to do so are the ones who want to shit on the Hammond move, what is the point? With the Goodell visit and now this, seems like they want to be in the news and gin up some support for the seemingly dead idea of public financing for the Arlington Heights site (which, clearly, is the one the Bears prefer– they did snap it up as soon as the racetrack that operated there for 100 years announced it was closing, and apparently Papa Bear Halas tried to buy the site when the team had to move out of Wrigley Field in the 1970s).
Could the Bears possibly be trying to lay the foundation for saying no thanks to Hammond? “Gee, we loved the site and are grateful for the offer of $1 billion dollars, but our fans have spoken and they hate Hammond, golly, do we want to do right by our fans and we just hope we can make something work in Illinois.”
Which would probably go over great with Illinois fans, and, if combined with a rare trip to the playoffs this season (good luck with this season’s tougher schedule) will probably see our various electeds rushing to give them billions.
Then again, the citizens of Chicago and Illinois have been fortunate the Bears have handled every phase of their relocation planning with stunning ineptitude, so probably shouldn’t assume that this is three-dimensional chess by the McCaskeys.
Although it’s probably just a stunt, I filled out the survey anyway.
I said that although I live in the far northwest outreaches of the Chicago suburbs, a move to Indiana wouldn’t make me less likely to go to games because I already don’t go to any because of cost.
Even a stadium “set along the shores of Wolf Lake”? Someone actually wrote that?! Yikes!
Sportsball media sure want the Bears to get their new government-funded palace in Indiana. When USA Today wrote about the team’s stadium plight, the story brought up Arlington Park only in passing and did not mention that Hammond is adjacent to Gary. (Where the power was out for 2 weeks after a severe windstorm.)
Re the Bradbury article, he contends there (and in the intro to his new book) that the chief cause of exorbitant stadium subsidies is that “politicians value the perks that professional sports provide.” And he supports this premise with the observation that none of the NFL franchises opening new venues in the next 5 years relied upon owner threats to relocate their teams to competing markets. There’s some merit to his argument: as one example, the Cleveland Browns were able to extract $600 million from the Ohio legislation without resort to a “team relocation outside the region” threat. But I’d caution against minimizing team relocation threats as a factor in driving big stadium subsidies. I believe that team relocation threats have played—and are playing— major roles in recent and pending subsidies to the Kansas City Chiefs, Tampa Bay Rays, and Kansas City Royals. Hence my ongoing campaign to revive The Professional Sports Franchise Relocation Act of 1998.
But…really…where were the Chiefs, Rays and Royals going to go? The Chiefs actually DID (or do plan to) move across the state line, so that threat didn’t make Kanas City, Mo. sit up and take notice. The Royals are going where? Greensboro?
The Rays were going where? Nashville? Where the populace has already ponied up for stadiums recently? Orlando? Puhleeze. There’s no place to play anywhere. You literally have to be willing to actually move and have a place to move for such a threat to have any teeth.
I do not agree that relocation threats – subtle or overt – have played or are playing major roles in those three teams’ current stadium dramas.
For those asserting that team relocation threats are routine bluffs, try explaining that to Oakland fans of the Warriors, Raiders, and Athletics.
With the Warriors as an exception, each of those was a less popular team in the Bay Area. They didn’t actually own the market. And the Warriors just moved a few miles across the water. Oakland is to SF as Brooklyn is to Manhattan.
The better (somewhat) recent example might be the Sonics. But Seattle seems to have done just fine, grew like crazy, and replaced the basketball team with a hockey team instead. So, there’s that.
Teams absolutely do move – especially in the NFL, where local TV market size doesn’t matter, so you can have a team in, say, Green Bay and it’s just fine. But for every team that moves, there are probably 20 that at least hint about moving and don’t. And we don’t know how many of them, if any, would have gone through with it withiut a new venue. (The Marlins threatened to move every year for ten years, and never got close to doing so.)
Yes, teams move. And yes, the economics of the NFL are unique.
But outside of the NFL, in the 21st Century of the “big 4” sports, the Expos, A’s, Grizzlies, Hornets, Sonics, Thrashers and Coyotes moved outside their TV market.
The Expos, Thrashers, Grizzlies, and Coyotes had low attendance and were in markets that maybe weren’t that attractive in the first place, either because they were small or because hockey is possibly not too popular in extreme heat. Some wanted new stadiums. Some didn’t. But it’s hard to argue stadiums were why they moved.
The Hornets were in a decent market but moved because the owner had a…ummm….PR issues. And the NBA moved in an expansion team in the same stadium and then renamed that team the Hornets.
That left the A’s and Sonics. Hence, the argument that only the Sonics actually moved because of their stadium.
It seems the Lesser Ishbia has announced his plans to build a new White Sox stadium.
I have to say this is a new era of vaportecture, because the mockup makes this lovely destination look like a prison:
https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/white-sox-minority-owner-proposes-new-ballpark-mixed-use-development-in-south-loop/3985312/
Why would Houston need a new arena when the Toyota Center was already built to accommodate hockey.
An NHL team playing in the Toyota Center would be secondary to the Rockets in terms of scheduling, premium seat revenue, in-arena sponsorships, etc. It would be tough to pay off the expansion fee as a tenant with no control over revenue (save for ticket sales).
They don’t need it, but they want the $$$$.
J.C. Bradbury brought up the new Buffalo Bills stadium built with lots of taxpayer money. While New York politicians patronize “a publicly subsidized luxury suite”, ordinary people have to put up with obstructed views. And the playing surface had to be resodded after only 2 preseason games.