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Do record-breaking Commanders and Chiefs deals mean other cities need to pay more for stadiums? An investimagation

access_time personNeil deMause

Other news outlets are starting to pick up on what a crazy year this was for sports stadium deals: Just in the last couple of days we’ve had headlines reading “Sports stadium deals hand even more taxpayer money to billionaires” and “Public subsidies for stadiums are exploding.” The lessons that writers are taking from the eye-popping subsidy deals for the Washington Commanders and Kansas City Chiefs, though, are, uh, interesting.

Let’s start out with that first article, which ran on the nonprofit-owned Stateline news service. It noted the record-breaking numbers for the Commanders and Chiefs stadiums, then quoted sports economist Geoffrey Propheter as saying that these deals will end up doing a favor to other team owners seeking their own stadium deals, because “now teams can look at the Kansas deal and say, ‘Hey, what we’re asking for is not nearly as bad or as crazy or stupid as what Kansas is offering.’” It also quotes another stadium expert (that’d be me) as noting that in both cases, the elected officials who landed the stadium deals had been “negotiating against themselves,” since nobody else was offering the many billions of dollars that Kansas and D.C. ultimately came up with — and “the more they get away with that, the more their fellow owners are going to be emboldened to ask for the same thing.”

So far, so good: Because sports team owners often successfully employ the “all the other kids are doing it” argument, the Chiefs and Commanders deals are likely to lead to more multibillion-dollar stadium subsidy demands. But this brings us to article #2, by Tampa Bay Times columnist John Romano, which takes that conclusion to some unlikely places.

Romano is a weird one in the stadium coverage landscape: He’s been critical of Tampa Bay Rays ownership for demanding too much in stadium talks, but has also been an advocate for Rays stadium subsidies so long as they’re kept to a half billion dollars or so. Here, he takes the record-breaking stadium subsidies and runs with them, predicting that it could lead to a higher public price tag for a new Rays deal:

For the typical taxpayer on Main Street USA, the real culprit is your crazy neighbor in Kansas. Or Washington D.C. Or any number of other desperate municipalities.

We’re not talking about the actual cost of construction — which is significant and rising daily by itself — but the public funds/enticements that are being tossed around so towns can either lure or retain baseball, football, hockey and basketball teams.

The Chiefs and Commanders deals — and, for some reason, the Atlanta Braves deal with Cobb County, which Romano also throws into the mix — raise the prospect that “municipalities could recoup their initial investment with funds from property taxes on new construction, liquor taxes in new bars and restaurants, and a variety of other fees and taxes that would not otherwise exist without the project,” something Romano terms an “intriguing idea” before immediately noting that economists consider it “a load of hooey.” Still, there are “intangible” benefits from hosting a sports team, says Romano! Though “critics suggest that concept is also vastly overrated”! The answer must lie somewhere in the middle, or at least in just dumping the two arguments into a Word document and letting readers figure it out for themselves!

If Romano column is disappointingly bothsidesy when it comes to evaluating the alleged benefits of stadium deals, the headline it ran under put its finger definitively on the scale: The full hed is “Public subsidies for stadiums are exploding. Can Tampa Bay keep up?” That’s a very different question than whether “keeping up” is even worth it, and it makes it sound like the challenge here for elected officials is to find a way to meet the new stadium subsidy thresholds, regardless of whether they make any economic sense. After all, as Romano argues in his conclusion, it’s really all about what the guy next door is offering:

As history has shown, it only takes one desperate community armed with municipal bonds to completely change the landscape — and the zip code — of a baseball or football team.

Yeah, if Tampa Bay doesn’t come up with three or four or six billion dollars, the Chiefs and Commanders deals show that the Rays might … move to the next city over? Which would also be in Tampa Bay? “Cities are bidding more and more billions of dollars to secure stadium deals” is pretty obvious; “cities need to bid more and more billions of dollars to secure stadium deals” is a very different thing, especially when they’re bidding against themselves.

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Friday roundup: Bucs want “major renovation,” won’t say yet who’d pay for it

access_time personNeil deMause

Today’s main event will be the liveblog of day two of the sports economics conference at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, which tons of presentations on stadiums and stadium-adjacent topics, but first here’s the regular Friday weekly news r0undup, written entirely on Thursday! If anyone’s roof blew off this morning, it’ll just have to wait till Monday.

  • Tampa Bay Buccaneers owner Joel Glazer wants a “major renovation” of his stadium once the Bucs’ lease expires in 2028, funded by, uh: “We’re going through a phase right now where we’re assessing the stadium and what might be needed. And I know [Hillsborough County and the Tampa Sports Authority are] assessing the stadium and what might be needed, and once both of us are done with our assessments, then we come together and go talk about it, work through things.” Asked last summer about Bucs stadium funding, Tampa city spokesperson Adam Smith said team execs “haven’t approached the city about anything like that” and “we don’t expect them to”; either that was code for “paying for this is the county’s problem” or Smith really believes in the power of positive thinking.
  • Unlike the [Sacramento] Athletics, the Tampa Bay Rays have managed to sell out their 10,000-seat minor-league stadium in their opening series, even at prices running more than $100 for every seat that comes with an actual seat. Tampa Bay Times columnist John Romano blames this on the Rays needing to make up for “a potential loss of revenue from ticket sales, concessions, luxury boxes and the associated costs of relocating for a year,” not the desire to capitalize on artificial ticket scarcity. It’ll be interesting to see if those high prices hold up once the Florida summer heat hits — for what it’s worth, there are still plenty of seats available for next week’s series against the Angels.
  • Speaking of the Rays, the clock officially ran out on their St. Petersburg stadium deal on Tuesday, and now owner Stu Sternberg is free to shop around for another city that wants to give him a billion dollars. Anyone? You in the back? You were just stretching your arms? I see.
  • Cincinnati Bengals VP Katie Blackburn was asked what’s up with the team’s lease that’s set to expire in 2026, and replied, “We could, I guess, go wherever we wanted after this year if we didn’t pick the up option up. So, you know, we’ll see.” NFL move-threat stan Mike Florio of NBC Sports called this “a powerful, loaded comment“; one might also argue that it’s exactly the kind of vague non-threat threat that you issue when you don’t actually want anyone noting that no cities have newer stadiums ready to offer. Potato, potahto!
  • The Jacksonville Jaguars need a place to play for two years while the city of Jacksonville is paying for stadium upgrades, so they’re asking Orlando to play them to play there, cool, cool.
  • A Massachusetts judge ruled that the demolition and reconstruction of White Stadium for the Boston Legacy F.C. can move forward, though opponents say they’ll continue to fight against it. (Boston Legacy, btw, is the new name for the much-derided BOS Nation F.C. women’s soccer team, presumably meant to honor the easiest way to get into Northeastern.)
  • Chicago Bears president Kevin Warren says the team is now focused on building a stadium in Arlington Heights, except for the portion of its focus that is on the Chicago lakefront. More news as actual news comes in, not just attempts at leverage plays.
  • Los Angeles elected officials are finally starting to get steamed about how the 2028 Olympics are being planned in a city that is recovering from disastrous fires, though so far it seems to be mostly about where the sailing competition will be held. If history is any guide, the real outrage won’t come until the Games actually begin.
  • Wondering how the affordable housing promises attached to the Brooklyn Nets arena are going? Does “Empire State Development (ESD), the gubernatorially controlled authority that oversees/shepherds the project, says it might enforce the $2,000 a month penalties for each unbuilt apartment, though that process may be fraught” answer that question? If you’re wondering why ESD only “might” enforce the penalty clause that was designed to make sure developers actually build what they promised, ESD VP Arden Sokolow says that if the state fined them, “you wouldn’t be getting any housing there,” whereas this way … oh, would you look at the time, we’ll have to cut off questions there!
  • Former Anaheim mayor and illegal helicopter registrant Harry Sidhu was sentenced to jail time for deleting emails to hide them from an FBI investigation into soliciting bribes related to a proposed Los Angeles Angels stadium deal — if you had “two months in federal prison plus a $55,000 fine” in the betting pool, you’re a winner!
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Rays execs again blame city and county for stadium delays, while further delaying stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

Tampa Bay Rays co-presidents Brian Auld and Matt Silverman waded back into the stadium wars late last week, and the Tampa Bay Times scrambled all its reportorial jets to cover it. For those who haven’t been following, the Times has three writers who’ve been working on the Rays’ stadium story: baseball beat reporter Marc Topkin, who is historically a mouthpiece for Rays leadership; sports columnist John Romano, who is more a “can’t we just find a solution here” guy; and St. Petersburg reporter Colleen Wright, who actually reports the news. All three were on display over the weekend, and they did a classic job of describing the elephant:

  • Wright kicked things off on Friday by reporting on how Auld and Silverman went on a team-sponsored radio show Thursday night and again blamed St. Petersburg and Pinellas County officials for delaying their stadium financing votes from October to December following Hurricane Milton, which they said “effectively broke the deal.” City and county officials, in turn, were “expressing growing impatience” with Rays execs, wrote Wright, with County Commission chair Brian Scott, a strong supporter of the stadium deal, saying,  “If you can’t make a deal work with $600 million in public funding [Ed. Note: more like $1 billion actually], then you’ve got a business model that’s not sustainable. That’s not something that public dollars are going to fix.”
  • Romano followed up Saturday evening with a column on how “Mayor Ken Welch and a handful of city council folk were just about the last allies the Rays had in the universe and now they’ve managed to tick them off, too.” And while “to a degree” the Rays ownership’s anger was justified, he wrote, because the county commission did delay their vote until new members came on board, those new members “realized their error” and decided they didn’t want to be blamed for “the bungling of a $6.5 billion redevelopment deal” and approved the funding anyway. This is Rays owner Stu Sternberg’s last chance to get a stadium in the Tampa Bay area, Romano argued, and if that doesn’t happen, either 1) Sternberg will move the team, 2) Sternberg will sell the team to someone who moves it, or 3) Sternberg will sell the team to someone who gets a new stadium built locally. (The idea that maybe the Rays don’t actually need a new stadium, or at least a new stadium that costs $1.3 billion plus whatever the Trump steel tariff surcharge will be, seems not to have crossed Romano’s mind, despite his writing that it’s likely “the team will not see huge profits upon the opening of a new stadium” because nobody really wants to go see Rays games.)
  • A few hours later, Topkin chimed in by turning over all his column inches to Silverman, who said “we have four years to figure this out” and “we’ve always wanted to be here” and “we’re going to try to figure it out,” but that Rays execs are still deciding whether to go ahead with the new stadium deal by March 31, after which it turns into a pumpkin and everyone goes back to square one.

It was all really quite the case study in the breadth of U.S. newspaper coverage, running the gamut from straight-up team boosterism to even-handed reporting. And even more than that, it’s a reminder of how daily news outlets seldom convey a perspective that isn’t held by someone in a position of power: We have Topkin telling us how Rays execs see the stadium fiasco, columnist Romano expressing how Mayor Welch and other pro-stadium councilmembers see it, and Wright reporting on the perspective of city and county officials as a whole. The idea of consulting economists or budget experts, or just regular local residents who still haven’t been asked what they think of the deal, is crazy talk — who even are those guys?

Meanwhile, none of this gets us any closer to understand whether Sternberg and Friends are truly set to walk away from a $1 billion check because they just realized stadiums are expensive or Florida gets hit by hurricanes or something, or if they’re waiting to see if St. Pete officials will sweeten the deal if they hold out until March 31. That sure doesn’t sound likely given the latest statements by local elected officials — don’t forget, even Welch indicated two weeks ago that he’s ready to walk away from the stadium deal if Sternberg doesn’t live up to his end of things — but we’ll see. The power of “let’s just get things done” is powerful, especially when it’s posed as the sensible middle.

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Friday roundup: St. Pete council says loud parts quiet on Rays stadium, A’s Vegas plans get even murkier

access_time personNeil deMause

Another week has run its course, but before we get to the remaining news tidbits, we have one new news item to attend to:

The St. Petersburg city council took up its discussion of a Tampa Bay Rays stadium project yesterday, and team execs led by releasing a pile of new renderings, no doubt figuring correctly that even if they don’t show much more than the old renderings — we still don’t see the inside of the stadium, for one thing — they’d still dominate the news coverage. Rays execs still had to answer questions at the council “workshop,” though, and questions there sure were, including about guarantees that affordable housing will be built, why the city should be on the hook for $142 million in infrastructure costs, whether the community benefits agreement could provide more community benefits, and whether the projected tax revenues to pay for the whole mess depend on monkeys flying out of J.C. Bradbury’s butt.

Nobody on the council appears to have asked the “$1.5 billion in public subsidies, really?” question, though. Tampa Bay Times columnist John Romano, who’s staked out a position as a critical-but-not-too-critical advocate for the deal, called this “refreshing” because “no one attacked it as a nonsensical corporate giveaway.” (Karla Correa of the St. Pete Tenant Union did say “We desperately need public housing, we don’t need more of these public, private partnerships” and “we should not be giving away upwards of a billion dollars of our taxpayer’s dollars,” but she said it at a protest outside the council hearing, so she doesn’t count, I guess.) One of the more critical councilmembers, Richie Floyd, when asked if there were enough votes on the council to kill the deal, said “no,” so it sounds like the council debate will mostly be nibbling around the edges; there’ll be another workshop session next month, which may shed more light on the likely endgame.

Okay, now the news tidbits:

  • Oakland A’s owner John Fisher may have selected the site of the old Tropicana hotel for a new Las Vegas stadium, but it turns out he and landowner Bally’s still don’t know which part of the site the stadium would go on, and NBC Sports has the explanation: “because the project’s master plan has yet to be completed.” That’s, uh, not actually an explanation, it’s just saying the same thing a different way? Anyway, add “Where exactly will it go?” to “How will it fit?” and “Who will pay for it?” and “Will the public money approved so far get overturned by referendum or lawsuit?” on the list of unanswered questions about the soon-to-be officially cityless Athletics franchise’s future stadium plans.
  • Ohio House Speaker Jason Stephens says he’s against giving $600 million in state money toward $1.2 billion in public funding for a $2.4 billion Cleveland Browns stadium in Brook Park, because “we don’t have $600 million to give” and “it’s really easy to not support it when you don’t have it.” Then Stephens said he would prefer to raise the money by selling bonds, which suggests he either isn’t really against it or doesn’t understand that bonds have to be repaid somehow — apply Hanlon’s Razor as you see fit.
  • DaRon McGee, the Jackson County legislator who introduced the sales tax hike plan to funnel $500 million or so to the Kansas City Royals and Chiefs for stadium projects before it was trounced in a public vote, turns out to have asked the Royals’ stadium front man and team owner John Sherman’s personal assistant for box seats to a game in the run-up to negotiations. McGee says it’s all cool, he paid for the tickets now that somebody noticed, get off his case, okay?
  • The Richmond city council voted to issue $170 million in bonds to build a new stadium for the Double-A Flying Squirrels, to be repaid by hotel and restaurant tax surcharges in the stadium district. The plan was immediately met by a lawsuit from local attorney Paul Goldman saying the bonds should have gone to a voter referendum; Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney dismissed Goldman as a “gadfly,” which is at least better than the time Goldman successfully sued to block a casino project and got called “a white Jew with a background of Judas,” so, progress?
  • Albany and New York state officials are talking about building a $75 million minor-league soccer stadium as part of a $300 million downtown redevelopment, to be paid for by “still unknown.” Gov. Kathy Hochul is involved in the talks, though, so we can probably guess what direction this is headed.
  • The Atlantic ran an overview this week of the state of stadium subsidies, and while I could nitpick a couple of things — crediting Camden Yards for the new-stadium boom leaves out the earlier formative effects of Toronto’s Skydome and Chicago’s New Comiskey Park, and shutting off the supply of federally tax-exempt bonds wouldn’t really be the most effective way to eliminate the problem — but I get quoted saying, “Teams need a place to play, and if local governments told them to pay a fair rent or go pound sand, owners would have little choice but to go along,” so I wholeheartedly endorse it.
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Rays execs insist new stadium at Trop site would boost attendance, allow more player signings, no you can’t look at our fingers to see if they’re crossed

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s Day 2 of “The Tampa Bay Rays are building a new stadium in St. Petersburg, maybe, if they can find money somewhere,” which means it’s time for the team to move into high spin gear! Team management’s pet media outlet, the Tampa Bay Times, is sitting right there, somebody send a team official or two to talk to sportswriter Marc Topkin and see what kind of headline results:

How a new stadium deal could improve Rays’ fortunes on and off the field

Oh, this should be good:

Speaking in generalities given stadium financing details have not been worked out, top Rays officials said the project should lead to bigger crowds at games, increased sponsorships, improved facilities and, most relevant, larger player payrolls.

“We wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t think it left the franchise in a better position that we’re in today,” Auld said after a Tropicana Field media conference. “Look, it’s been a wild offseason. We made our biggest free-agent signing ever (Zach Eflin) and I think it was one-tenth the size of a handful of other (teams’) deals.

“The economics of baseball are immensely challenging. This isn’t going to solve all of that. Does it help us to fight with 1-1/2 hands instead of one tied behind our back? We think so.”

Needless to say, Topkin doesn’t ask whether any of the above makes a lick of sense, so let’s think it through for him. The Rays currently don’t spend much money on player payroll: check. So they need a new stadium to increase their revenues so they can spend more on players — but a new stadium that team owner Stu Sternberg had to pay for wouldn’t increase their revenues, so they need tax money to pay for the stadium, so the stadium can turn a profit, so the profit can be used to sign more players, so the Rays can escape the terrible hole they’re in where they’ve only made the playoffs four of the last four years. This comes awfully close to “We don’t play in New York or Boston, so we would like the people of St. Petersburg to buy us some outfielders,” only with more disturbing body-horror metaphors about half-hands being tied behind backs.

And if economic thought experiments aren’t your cup of tea, there’s a perfect real-world example: The Miami Marlins, whose owner similarly demanded a new stadium so he could sign higher-priced players, only to turn around and trade all those players a year later when fans didn’t turn up in droves, at which point the team resumed its perpetual fire sale ways. Or look at the Pittsburgh Pirates or Cincinnati Reds or virtually any other perma-tanking MLB team, all of which play in stadiums that were built on the argument that it would prevent exactly this situation from coming to pass.

But regardless of whether it has any basis in fact, getting a headline in the local paper about how maybe you’ll stop selling off all your high-priced players every year if you get a pile of public money is a good first day on the job for your stadium campaign. The Tampa Bay Times has other writers, though, maybe send team officials to talk to sports columnist John Romano as well and see what they can drum up?

Why in the world would the Rays rebuild on the Trop site? Read on.

Romano is generally a better reporter than Topkin, and he’s here asking a question that lots of Rays fans (and Rays onlookers) would like to know the answer to: Seriously, the Rays are looking to build a stadium site in the same place that they and everyone else has been complaining is killing their attendance because it’s too hard to get to? And he got Rays officials to explain their thinking, sort of:

“I think it’s well understood that Tampa is the business and geographic center of the region. But it’s been proven to be challenging to get a ballpark built over there,” said Rays president Brian Auld. “Meanwhile, St. Petersburg continues to grow, continues to evolve and is continuing to support this team in a meaningful way. And there’s good reason to believe that, with a placemaking development like the one we’re talking about, we can increase attendance even more.”…

“This franchise has never had a new facility, not even a new spring training facility,” said team president Matt Silverman. “There’s a lot of upside for the team to be able to open a brand new, state-of-the-art facility with a roof, embedded into a development in a thriving downtown.

“For a fan it will be about going to bars and restaurants beforehand, enjoying a walk along Booker Creek. It’s not just about parking in a lot and walking to a game and going back to your car afterward. That’s something that we haven’t been able to offer to our fans forever.”

Strip away all the developerspeak, and this comes down to: Well, maybe people won’t mind driving across the bridge to go to Rays games if there’s a sports bar across the street where they can hang out afterwards and gear up for the long drive home. This is not the dumbest thing that a sports exec has said with a straight face, but it could be in the running for dumbest of 2023.

To his credit, Romano assesses Auld and Silverman’s verbiage as making lemonade when handed lemons: “They would rather be nearer downtown Tampa. But building in Hillsborough County is a much more expensive proposition.” But he then goes on to regurgitate their language about a downtown “revival” and “destination sites,” and ultimately lands on:

This feels like the best chance the Rays have had for a new stadium since beginning this odyssey with the suggestion of the Al Lang waterfront site in 2007.

For once, there is a combination of land and revenues. And a potential partnership between the team and a local government. For once, the optimism is based more on reality than hope.

And this, this is the achievement that every sports exec truly hopes to unlock: The point at which local news writers and opinion makers shift from “Why should we build a stadium?” to “How can we get this stadium built?” When the decision about whether to sink hundreds of millions of dollars of subsidies into a sports team owner’s dream stadium (or even second- or third-place dream stadium) to boost his profits is no longer presented as a controversial question that residents and lawmakers need to decide on, but rather as a gleaming opportunity that provokes “optimism” that maybe it can come to pass — that’s some serious shifting of the Overton window. It’s too soon to say if Sternberg and Ault and Silverman will be able to finally shake loose public cash for this project where they’ve failed time and again before, but they’re certainly doing their job making all the moves from the playbook.

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Cue everybody freaking out that the Rays are going to move to Montreal

access_time personNeil deMause

As covered here on Thursday, the collapse of the Tampa Bay Rays‘ stadium plans in Tampa does not make it more likely that the team will move out of Florida entirely; in fact, team owner Stuart Sternberg had to give up his option to look elsewhere in the bay area for a home, which was set to expire at the end of the month, and now is back under the constraints of the lease that binds him to St. Petersburg through 2027. Sure, he could try to break the lease and move out of state entirely, but 1) he would face a certain court battle, and 2) if he really wanted to do that, he could have done it just as easily years ago.

So, the Rays aren’t moving to Montreal anytime soon. However, the message constantly hammered home by sports team owners is if you don’t build it, we will leave, and despite that being completely untrue most of the time, a lot of people believe it. And a lot of those lot of people are sportswriters, so we get:

  • The Tampa Bay Times’ John Romano, who in the past has been amenable to Sternberg’s claims that he needs public money for a new stadium so he can make more money, says that it only makes sense for Sternberg to refuse to put more money into a Tampa stadium, because this is about dollars and cents. Which, sure, but then so would be the decision on moving the Rays elsewhere, and though Romano writes, “There are cities desperate to be called a Major League town, and they will spend an eye-popping amount of money to make it happen. Portland. Montreal,” those cities have actually shown zero interest in spending eye-popping sums on stadiums, which is one reason why the Expos left Montreal, and why they went to Washington instead of to Portland. So really this comes down to “If nobody wants to build him a stadium, what will Sternberg do?” — but as the answer there can only be “Keep waiting and hope some sucker opens their wallet,” and Romano is trying to make Sternberg out to be a sympathetic businessman and not a three-card monte dealer, that won’t do, so instead we get “a stadium in Tampa is still within reach.” Which is … a good thing? Remotely true? Does it matter anymore, in the world of sports columnism?
  • Then there’s Romano’s fellow Times columnist Martin Fennelly, who goes full wailing and gnashing of teeth to declare “Season’s Greetings from Montreal! Wish you were here!” and “I have not arrived slowly at wrapping my head around no more baseball” and “I want to be wrong. My summers have always been baseball summers, and I don’t want that to end.” (No, Fennelly is not really only 20 years old, but he grew up in New York, then moved to Tampa Bay in 1991 when … there was no baseball team, but maybe he’s just blocked out the entire 1990s because all the lack of local baseball was just so depressing.) And: “I’m not about to tell people how to spend their money, especially on stadium construction, though cities do it all the time. But no complaining if the Rays leave, okay?” If you people insist on not spending taxpayer money on stadiums like normal cities do, it’ll only be your fault if the Rays leave, so don’t come crying to me! I am very glad I am not Martin Fennelly’s teenage kid.
  • Finally, we have CBC News, which reports that the chances of baseball returning to Montreal are “pretty good,” according to the guy who is trying to get baseball to return to Montreal, and who therefore certainly has no reason to overplay how successful he’s being or anything. Seagram’s heir and private equity fund manager Stephen Bronfman says he knows there are “naysayers,” but he is a “glass half full kind of guy,” and is “super excited,” and consultants Convention, Sports, and Leisure did a study that shows Montreal is totally ready to be an MLB market again, and those guys are total professionals, right? Number of naysayers, or even independent analysts, interviewed by the CBC reporter: zero.

Look, Tampa Bay is, it has now been well established, a middling MLB market, but that’s still better than most non-MLB markets, since they are non-MLB markets precisely because they can’t even manage to be middling. All things being equal, would Stuart Sternberg make as much money running a team in Montreal as in Tampa Bay? Maybe! Would he make more? Probably not, all things being equal. Could all things not be equal, like if Montreal throws the kind of money at Sternberg that Tampa Bay is so far refusing to? Conceivably, but that didn’t go so well the last time, and the current Montreal mayor sounds at least somewhat skittish about promising piles of cash — saying “We need to evaluate what kind of participation, how we will collaborate, but so far, so good” and “if it comes to asking Montrealers for money, for example to build a stadium, yes, I will ask Montrealers” — so probably won’t to the degree that this is likely to turn into an international bidding war.

It is absolutely important to remember at all times that sports leagues have a monopoly on franchises, and can use that as leverage — but it’s also important to remember that there are only so many cities with the population (and TV eyeballs) to enable a pro sports team to make fistfuls of money, and cities can use that as leverage, too. Romano is right about one thing: This is a business negotiation, and team owners are just trying to maximize their profits (plus maybe their egos), and will use any advantage they can to do so; but there’s nothing stopping elected officials from doing the same. Right now, the Rays and Tampa/St. Pete are still in the staring-each-other-down phase of negotiations, so there are likely at least a few more summers of baseball left before anybody starts storming off and slamming doors.

All of which is to say: Everybody take a deep breath, okay? I know it’s bad for clicks, but it’s good for making sensible policy decisions, and journalism is still about trying to inform people so they can make the world a better place — or at least that’s what the internet tells me.

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MLB commish, guy clinging to sportswriter job agree: Somebody build Rays a stadium already!

access_time personNeil deMause

One of the problems with the sportswriting business is that too many sportswriters tend to approach everything as a game, and the only thing they’re interested in is who’s winning or losing. Okay, two of the problems with the sportswriting business are that, and also that they know their paycheck comes from people reading about the local teams, so they’ll do anything in their power to protect that. Okay, three of the problems are those, plus that whenever sports officials talk, they’re used to listening, because these are the guys who grant them credentials and — you get the picture, and if you don’t, I wrote about it in detail almost 20 years ago, and not a hell of a lot has changed since then.

Today’s problem sportswriter is Tom Jones, sports columnist for the Tampa Bay Times, who heard MLB commissioner Rob Manfred say he wants the Tampa-St. Pete region to “move [a decision on a new Rays stadium to the front burner,” and thought, hey, yeah, what’s taking so long anyway?

Just spitballing, but here’s a thought: How about we stop talking about a new stadium and start building one…

You don’t need a law degree to know the Rays need a new stadium in a new location. We all know that. We’ve all known that pretty much since the Trop opened for business in the 1990s.

What we don’t know is where it should be and who’s going to pay for it. Meantime, as we talk and argue and worry and plan, we keep flipping over pages in the calendar. One month becomes the next. One year bleeds into another. And here we are, still talking, and it feels as if we are nowhere closer to digging in the dirt…

Most baseball fans in Tampa Bay don’t really care where a new stadium ends up, just as long as it’s not Montreal, Charlotte, Las Vegas or anywhere outside the 727 or 813 area codes.

But most of all, don’t you just want this thing to be over already? Don’t you just want someone, anyone, to pick a spot and start building? And let’s face reality, we can all shake our heads and complain and tell [Rays owner Stuart] Sternberg that if he wants a new stadium, he can pull out his wallet and pay for it, but that’s not how this kind of thing works.

At some point, someone’s tax money is going to be used to help build it, whether it’s ours or our visitors’.

This, this is why commissioners like Rob Manfred make these statements, over and over — in hopes that someone friendly in the media will pick them up and make his talking points for him. Jones’s column hits most of the strategies in the new-stadium playbook — the team “needs” a new stadium (without specifying whether that’s fan-comfort need or insufficient-profit need or what), the team could move without one, everybody spends tax money on stadiums so let’s just do it already and get it over with.

Years ago, I engaged in a spirited, mostly friendly online debate with a New York historian about the legacy of Robert Moses, the power broker who pretty much single-handedly reshaped New York City from the 1930s through the 1960s, building parks and highways and public housing, evicting hundreds of thousands of people from their homes, and solidifying the city’s racial and class divides in millions of tons of concrete. (Possibly his most defining moment was his decision to build highway bridges on his Long Island highways too low for buses to fit under them, so as to defend his new public beaches from the people he liked to refer to as “that scum floating up from Puerto Rico.”) My frenemy always insisted, yeah, yeah, but at least he got things done, even if all of it wasn’t that great. My response was: Getting things done isn’t always a plus, if things were better beforehand — or if it forestalls doing things a better way.

Would it be nice if the Rays had a new stadium by now? Sure! (Though I haven’t been to Tropicana Field myself, so can’t actually vouch for how much fans would prefer a new and/or differently located facility.) Is it likely that Sternberg would have built one by now if somebody had thrown a whole lot of public money at him? Indubitably! But every time a city gives in and coughs up public money — whether in the form of straight cash or tax breaks or whatever — that just reinforces the “everybody does it” argument, and precludes the possibility that the public might be able to wait out a team owner until he agrees to stay put and pay for any of his own costs his own self. Which does happen!

You’re reading this website, so I probably don’t need to tell you most of this, but it’s worth restating every one in a while. As is the reminder that even as we can talk about the structural power-dynamics reasons why cities drop billions of dollars a year on subsidies to new sports facilities for the benefit of private team owners, it’s in this kind of everyday battle of public discourse that the power dynamics take shape. Tom Jones is just a guy who’s putting down in electrons his own thoughts and feelings about a new Rays stadium and whether it matters how it’s paid for — as am I, though I do like to think I’ve done a smidge more research on the topic. If Tampa Bay is going to end up with a denouement for the Rays that reflects even in the slightest the needs and desires of actual residents of the region, they’re going to have to shout really loud, because guys like Jones and Manfred are the ones with the bullhorns.

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Rays-to-Montréal rumors heat up after some guy says Sternberg said something about it once

access_time personNeil deMause

Here we go again: After longtime Tampa Bay Rays manager Joe Maddon abruptly quit on Friday, New York Daily News columnist Bill Madden dropped this into the tail end of an item about Maddon’s future and his former team’s:

After last year’s disappointing 77-85 fourth-place finish, they both realized they’d done all they could do in Tampa, and despite consistent 90-win seasons with one of the lowest payrolls in baseball, the Rays played to a half-empty (or worse) stadium night after night. That, more than anything, wore on Maddon and his players, the manager told confidants. Rays owner Stuart Sternberg has been frustrated in his efforts to get out of Tropicana Field in St. Pete and move to a new stadium in Tampa, but there is growing belief that the economically depressed Tampa Bay area won’t support the Rays no matter where they play. And according to sources, Sternberg has had discussions with wealthy Wall Street associates about moving the Rays to Montreal, which has been without a major-league franchise since the Expos were transferred to Washington in 2005. As one major-league official put it to me Friday: “Say what you will about Montreal, but the Expos drew well over two million fans four times there in their heyday, while the Rays did that only once, their first year.

We’ve heard this rumor before, though this is the first time I’ve seen claims that Sternberg has actually had discussions about Montréal as an option. And Montréal is by far the biggest North American market without a team, ever since the Expos left in 2005. Still, it has a big problem in that its only major-league-ready stadium is even less loved than the Rays’ Tropicana Field, and there are no immediate plans for a new one. And you have to consider the source — Bill Madden loves to predict things, many of which turn out not to be true — and that the phrasing could mean just about anything: “discussions with wealthy Wall Street associates” could just mean that while shooting pheasants over sherry at the club, Sternberg sighed forlornly, “Some days I think I’d be better off in Montréal. I hear they have really good bagels there.”

Anyway, everybody and their sister has now been reporting on this unsourced rumor, and Sternberg is sure to try to use it as leverage for a new stadium in the Tampa Bay area, even though it’s pretty weak leverage when your lease says you can’t move for another 13 years. And Bud Selig, in his final week as MLB commissioner, is eager to help, saying he’s never heard from Sternberg about a Montréal move threat, but adding:

“The team has to have a ballpark that makes them competitive,” Selig said before Game 4 of the World Series. “It doesn’t produce the kind of revenue they need.”

Does Selig consider Tampa Bay a viable major league market?

He paused — a long pause — then declined to answer. He said he prefers to leave that judgment to the owner in each market.

We’re going to miss you, Bud. Nobody does passive-aggressive threatmongering like you.

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