Author: Neil deMause

Can Portland make Blazers owner pay a fair share of $600m arena renovation cost? The Oregonian investimagates

access_time personNeil deMause

The Oregonian ran an incredibly long (by 2026 standards) article on Friday on the Portland Trail Blazers arena situation, including lots of useful information but thematically muddled to the point where if you read it and aren’t sure what it was saying overall, you’re not alone. In all likelihood, you didn’t read past the headline (“As the Trail Blazers dig in on Moda Center costs, Portland looks for leverage”) and first three paragraphs, as the Oregonian is hard-paywalled for subscribers only; thanks to a kindly FoS reader who passed along a copy, we can go through it bit by bit and try to see what to make of it all:

The Blazers, through a sibling organization, lease the Moda Center from the city. The team pays no rent. It also pays no property taxes because it no longer owns the arena. In addition, it keeps the revenue from the arena’s naming-rights deal, advertising, concessions, as well as a significant share of the cash generated from ticket sales and parking at Blazers games, as well as some revenue from other events.

Those terms are all negotiable in the team’s next lease, which must run for at least 20 years to unlock the public financing windfall.

That is indeed a very bad lease, one that goes back to 2024 when the city agreed to buy the arena from the estate of the late Paul Allen. And if Blazers owner Tom Dundon doesn’t want to put in a significant share of the $600 million in arena renovations he wants — currently his final offer is “I pay taxes, why should I spend anything on arena renovations?” — then getting him to pay some rent seems like a reasonable demand.

City Councilor Steve Novick has done back-of-the-napkin math that shows tweaking lease terms could make the city whole for its expected $120 million renovation investment, even if Dundon doesn’t chip in a nickel…

In an email, Novick said he wants to craft a lease that kicks back every dollar the city puts into the arena, including the expected $120 million for renovations and $14.5 million in annual operating costs.

That’s not really Dundon not chipping in a nickel, of course: It’s Dundon chipping in $300 million ($120 million for the city’s renovation costs plus the present value of 20 years of $14.5 million operating payments). But if Novick wants to frame it as “Dundon doesn’t have to put in any money for renovations so long as the city can take it out of his increased lease payments,” that’s fine, two can play at the Casino Night Fallacy.

And that wouldn’t all be new money that Dundon would be putting in, because, as it turns out, while his current lease doesn’t require him to pay rent on the arena, it does require him to share some arena revenues:

The city makes $10.5 million a year from the Blazers’ current lease, Novick said. That includes $2.9 million from its 6% fee on Blazers tickets and $4.3 million from non-Blazers tickets. It also makes $3.3 million from parking in municipally-owned garages, a little less than half of the Rose Quarter parking revenue. The rest goes to the Blazers.

So now we’re down to covering $120 million in renovation costs plus an added $4 million a year in operating costs, which comes to about $170 million. That’s clearly $170 million that Dundon doesn’t want to pay — he already pays taxes, that means he gets everything else for free, it’s just how being a billionaire works! — but if it unlocks him getting $600 million in public funds total, he should take the deal and be up $430 million, right? In fact, one could argue the city should really be asking for more than $170 million, on the grounds that there’s county and state spending to be made up as well — Oregon officials have argued that state taxpayers will be made whole by all the income taxes the Blazers pay, which 1) no, probably not and 2) residents who don’t own basketball teams don’t get to devote their employees’ income taxes to their own business expenses — and while Dundon would undoubtedly rather get to keep his whole $600 million windfall, a $200 million or $300 million windfall for doing absolutely nothing aside from continuing to play in Portland is still a pretty nice day at the office.

Ah, but Dundon has leverage too, writes the Oregonian:

The worst-case scenario is grim: If the Blazers leave, the city could get saddled with an aging asset with no marquee tenant, one in need of more than $400 million in maintenance, and no backing from the state or county, which are respectively expected to contribute $365 million and roughly $101 million.

That $400 million in “maintenance” costs doesn’t have a cited source, and elsewhere the Oregonian refers to the projected $14.5 million in operating costs as “maintenance,” so maybe the paper is just adding up the costs of keeping the lights on at the arena for the next 30 years? In which case, first off, that’s not $400 million in present-day costs, whereas the city’s arena renovation costs would all be paid out right now. And second, as just established, that’s money that is mostly being paid off currently by those ticket taxes and parking fees, and if the Blazers left town, there would be 41 added dates a year for the arena to fill with concerts to make up for at least some of the tax revenue shortfall from not having the NBA.

All of which presupposes that Dundon would really move the Blazers if he doesn’t get his $600 million — or if he only gets $430 million, or $300 million, or whatever. And for what it’s worth, Dundon straight-up said in May that he has no intention of moving the team, and even if that was just an attempt to look less like a supervillain to the public, it’s certainly worth using in negotiations.

In the end, the Oregonian article is hamstrung a bit by viewing the Blazers arena squabble mostly through two sets of eyes: The vast majority of the piece is devoted to quotes or information provided by either Novick or Blazers president of business operations Dewayne Hankins, presumably on the premise that the truth must lie somewhere in the middle. But it’s at least an indication that some Portland elected officials are trying to push for a better lease in return for Dundon getting a pile of up-front public cash, which is better negotiating than lots of cities do. Right now the city is overdue sending its initial lease proposal to Dundon, but may as well take the time to get it right — after all, it’s Dundon who risks missing out on $600 million if nothing is approved this year, so who knows, maybe he’ll blink.

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Friday roundup: On being a fan of the World Cup without being a fan of the FIFA World Cup 2026™

access_time personNeil deMause

Before we start with this week’s roundup, a note about the World Cup: I’m enjoying it! The one-game knockout format, even in its dumb expanded iteration, is great for generating drama, and when you mix in international politics and colonial history, you get even more opportunities for hilarity.

But I enjoy most sports, even the dumb ones. The issue about sports mega-events like the World Cup and the Olympics isn’t whether they should exist, but whether they should exist in their current form, as means for extracting tons of money from host cities and delivering it to corrupt oligarchs. The reports just keep coming in confirming that any claimed economic benefits of hosting the games are overwhelmed by the public costs — look, here’s another one from Atlanta about vendors trying to get their money back after being suckered into joining a city-sponsored program for World Cup-related booths that turned into what one called “a financial nightmare” — and while big public watch parties are fun, you don’t actually need to have the World Cup in your city, or in your country, to hold one. The World Cup, like pretty much all sports at this point (I may be willing to make exceptions for curling and Ultimate Frisbee), has been weaponized to transfer money from the many to the few, which is why we keep complaining about it here every week. If we have to live under toxic capitalism, the least we should get to do it the joy of pointing and laughing.

Anyway, here’s a bunch of dumb stuff that’s gone on recently that is likely to cost you money on the grounds that sports are fun, please enjoy ridiculing it:

  • Washington, D.C. is preparing to sell $975 million in personal seat licenses allowing fans to buy Commanders tickets and use the proceeds for stadium construction, which momentarily excited me until I realized it looks like the PSLs will be funding the team’s share of costs, notwithstanding the city’s involvement in doing the sales. Anyway, some quick long division determines that team officials are presumably planning to ask for an average of $15,000 per seat for the mere right to spend hundreds of dollars apiece for tickets, though it’s always possible the team will have to take a loss on the whole transaction if fans aren’t willing to pony up that much.
  • Congratulations, everyone in the United States: You now get to help pay for $25 million in road work around the new Cleveland Browns stadium in Brook Park, after that city won a grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation for “reconfigured freeway ramps and streamlined local roads [that] will lead to the stadium and the surrounding entertainment district.”
  • The city of Oakland may try to sell the Oakland Coliseum and its neighboring arena in separate deals after concerns that wavering plans for redevelopment of the stadium site are holding up the arena sale. The Coliseum is set to finally be entirely empty next year, after the announced departure of the Roots USL Championship club to, uh, somewhere, they’ll get back to you on that.
  • Two contrasting headline styles in reporting on the return of corporate stadium names after FIFA decreed them unallowable during the World Cup because they might compete with their own sponsorship contracts: “Lumen Field returns as Seattle says bye to World Cup and Seattle Stadium” vs “Praise Be: ‘Philadelphia Stadium’ Once Again Bears the Name of Our Corporate Financial Overlords.” Well played, Philadelphia sports site Crossing Broad, even if you do appear to be mostly an excuse to run lots of posts promoting sports gambling.
  • Not sure which is more on the nose for 2026, a proposal to have the Bay Area’s Cow Palace host a data center now that it’s been superseded by the Golden State Warriors‘ new arena or a related proposal to have it host a helicopter landing pad. No word yet on whether these would require public money, but given that a data center is involved, probably.
  • New Dallas Stars vaportecture renderings, though they’re mostly unspecific and from a great distance, aside from the one that appears to show fans watching a Stars playoff game on a giant video screen atop a new team store, which is maybe even more on the nose for 2026.
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Rays stump for $2B stadium subsidy by releasing pictures of fans all raising fists in air at once

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been a while since Tampa Bay Rays officials released any stadium renderings, and with talks on getting almost $2 billion in cash and tax breaks from the city and county seemingly on hold, no time like the present to drum up any excitement possible from some images of what a new building may or may not look like one day, so fire up the vaportecture cannons:

As is by now cliche in the genre, fans here show their appreciation for a Rays two-out rally in a blowout of the Cubs by standing, thrusting their fists in the air, and waving the team flags that baseball fans everywhere bring to games on the regular. Though it’s possible they’re actually cheering the passing lightning storm visible through the part-see-through roof, or just high on the thrill of watching a game with no backstop or netting, so that any of them may be killed by a foul ball at any time. There’s nothing more exhilarating than being reminded of the preciousness of life while watching (squints at the scoreboard, recognizes Jonny DeLuca and Chandler Simpson for starters) the same lineup your team fielded three years earlier.

A view of the same game (see the scoreboard and accompanying video screenshot) hours earlier during the daytime, though still in the bottom of the 5th inning with the same batter up, time will clearly work differently in the 2030s! The fans in the upper deck in their vintage Evan Longoria and Carl Crawford jerseys are just as excited to throw their fists in the air, though, even the ones at the bar who are only following the game by looking over their shoulders at the sky.

Fans stream into the park via center-field escalators, and back out of the park at the same time via escalators on the opposite side of the entry plaza. All the better to see the partly shaded, partly transparent roof, which lets fans view the airplanes pulling “GO RAYS!” banners that fly by whenever there isn’t a lightning storm.

But is there anywhere fans can go to drink any entirely ignore the game, you ask? Is there ever! They can also ignore the overhead plantings supported by nothing at all and the video boards with advanced stats on them, though one guy nearby is still raising his fist in the air, just to let everyone know they’re at a baseball game.

This is all very silly, as these kinds of renderings always are, but the release of the pretty pictures did manage to get Marc Topkin to write a whole article in the Tampa Bay Times about it, so mission accomplished, probably. One hopes that the Tampa city councimembers and Hillsborough County commissioners set to debate that $2 billion subsidy won’t be too swayed by levitating planters, but sports funding bills have passed for dumber reasons.

 

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Building a Marlins stadium during the financial crisis is about to hit Miami with a tsunami of debt payments

access_time personNeil deMause

Something I like to harp on here is that news articles that rage against governments still paying off stadiums after they’ve been torn down are missing the point: How to pay for a stadium, whether with cash now or bonds that can be refinanced into the far future, is just a financing choice, like deciding whether to pay for a car up front or over time. And while continuing to pay for a car that’s long since been totaled (or for Bobby Bonilla) can stick in one’s craw, it doesn’t necessarily cost more than making all the payments while you were still enjoying your stadium/car/alleged third baseman.

There can still be financing decisions that are terrible, though, and the bills for one of those are starting to come due for the Marlins stadium in Miami:

Here’s what we do know: the county issued bonds to build a stadium that it owns but from which the Marlins derive all income. An issue that yielded $80 million was to cost $1.2 billion to repay, one that yielded $319 million was to take $1.3 billion to repay, and one that yielded $50 million was to take $200 million to repay. Most of that debt remains, and payments are soon to balloon.

That’s not good! Also not good: Miami-Dade County commissioners apparently don’t even know exactly how much they’ll be on the hook for, even as they try to figure out where to come up with the money to make the balloon payments that Miami-Dade agreed to when the stadium was first planned in 2009. On the bright side, the county got out of paying its Marlins stadium bills in 2009, when it didn’t have the money; on the less bright side, it now has to pay even higher bills over the next two decades, when it still doesn’t have the money.

Way back in 2013, I guesstimated the county’s ultimate cost as being about $800-900 million in present value to pay off about $400 million in bonds, which was not a great deal no matter how you slice it. (One Miami financier told the Miami Herald at the time, “This is the sort of financing you do when you cannot afford it.”) But it was an emergency after all, with the Marlins threatening to move someplace — today’s Miami Today op-ed says Las Vegas, I remember it as mostly San Antonio, it was probably both of those and more over the decade that Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria spent going back over and over to local governments in search of subsidies — and who can put a price on what Miami got out of its investment:

Today, in a covered ballpark built solely for baseball and with a winning team, sales average 12,735 per game – two-thirds as many as in an open-air football stadium. The problem clearly wasn’t the stadium.

A second promise was that a new stadium on the site of the defunct Orange Bowl – whose bonds were still being paid off – would rejuvenate Little Havana, which surrounds it. It hasn’t happened yet, 15 years later.

The third promise was that in a ballpark for which it pays no rent the team would spend more to get better players. The New York Mets this year top league payrolls at $328 million, followed by Los Angeles Dodgers at $302 million and the New York Yankees at $297 million. The Marlins, in contrast, pay $80 million, more only than Cleveland’s $79 million.

Oh, well, live and learn! Or at least Loria gets to live his life, still running his beloved art dealership after selling the Marlins for more than seven times what he paid for the franchise, while Miami-Dade taxpayers learn the dangers of balloon payment financing. Whether they or their elected officials will remember the lesson the next time it comes up is another story: The Marlins’ lease expires in 2047, so we can expect whoever owns them in a decade or so to start talking up the need for a new stadium then, unless all of Miami has relocated to Texas or Nevada by then.

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World Cup economic impact still hard to find, but at least we’ll always have the “togetherness”

access_time personNeil deMause

The U.S. Men’s National Team is now extremely out of the World Cup, joining co-hosts Canada and Mexico on the sidelines, but North America still has two more weeks of the sweet, sweet international tourism that comes with hosting the tournament. Or, you know, not:

As Toronto’s official FIFA World Cup 2026 hosting duties come to an end, data shows that the city saw little economic gain during the first two weeks of the tournament…

Data from payment processing company Moneris between June 12 and 26 — the first two weeks of the World Cup in Toronto — showed that debit and credit card spending at restaurants and bars in the city rose by just three per cent compared with the same time last year.

A 3% increase isn’t actually terrible in a city the size of Toronto, which can swallow 40,000 or so soccer fans without much noticing. The bigger problem, notes the CBC, is that Toronto taxpayers spent about $380 million on hosting six World Cup matches, which is tough to earn back one debit card charge at a time.

In Texas, meanwhile, the news site Border Report interviewed our old frenemy, sports economist Andy Zimbalist, and learned that “events like the World Cup generate little or no net economic benefit because FIFA keeps most event revenue while host cities absorb major expenses.” Then the site ran this under the whiplash-inducing headline “Impact of World Cup in Texas goes beyond the dollars and cents,” because Zimbalist said the games were maybe “worth it because there was so much togetherness.”

But anyway, who are you going to believe, some pointy-headed bean counter or a respected international sports business entity? Philadelphia’s 6abc digital staff doesn’t need any “experts” or “numbers” when it can just reprint the official press release:

With the final match at the Philadelphia Stadium in the books, FIFA is releasing new details about the World Cup impact locally.

More than 409,000 people attended the six matches — five of which were sold-out. …

Fans consumed 290,000 beers and more than 55,000 hot dogs.

After each match day, any food from the stadium that was not consumed was given to local food banks, totaling 15,000 pounds of food.

Getting 15,000 pounds of leftover food for a mere $380 million — who can put a price on that? Other than $380 million, sure, but that’s the bean-counter way of looking at things, whereas if you count up all the actual unused beans … I’ll see myself out.

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Indiana gov to Porter County: If you want to miss out on fun of giving $250m in tax money to Bears, your loss

access_time personNeil deMause

Indiana Gov. Mike Braun says he isn’t sweating Porter County leaders’ opposition to raising food and beverage taxes for a new Chicago Bears stadium the next county over, because really it’s Porter County that would be missing out on all the fun of taking part in shoveling money at the Bears owners:

Under the law, Porter County would have to approve a one-percent food and beverage tax to have representation on the stadium authority. The governor said if it doesn’t get approved, the biggest impact would be on Porter County itself.

“If they choose not to put any skin in the game, they’re not going to have any say-so for what happens from all the economic benefits we’re going to get from it,” Braun said.

Maybe you’re the one up a stump, Porter County! Does a county get a chance to fund a stadium deal every day?

The whole Porter County kerfuffle points up one of the weirder things about the Indiana Bears stadium deal: Though it was passed by the legislature back in February, it didn’t precisely spell out who would be spending what on a stadium, or even where exactly it would be. A newly created sports authority will be able to offer the Bears owners money from a whole bunch of taxes, only some of which actually exist yet:

  • All new property tax, income tax, and sales tax for the next 35 years from an omni-TIF district encompassing the stadium and an undetermined number of square miles around it. This could certainly amount to billions of dollars, much of it potentially cannibalized from spending that has nothing to do with the Bears, but just as we saw in Kansas, it’s impossible to say exactly how much without knowing the size of the district.
  • A doubling of the Lake County hotel tax from 5% to 10%, which would provide at least $90 million.
  • Those 1% food and beverage tax surcharges in Lake and Porter counties, which would be worth about $250 million each, if approved.
  • A 12% ticket tax, which would be worth about another $200 million, though as established ticket taxes are unlike other taxes in that they tend to come out of team owners’ revenues.

The best guess at the total public cost is “easily past $4 billion,” but that could go up or down depending on what gets approved in terms of that tax diversion district plus the new taxes. And a quarter-billion dollars from Porter County seems like a significant amount of money, though I suppose Braun is right in that if county leaders balk at that, the state could always compensate by running the omni-TIF district all the way to the Ohio border.

All this makes Indiana’s bid for the Bears a bit of a moving target in the state’s bidding war with Illinois, which is no doubt very much to Bears owner George McCaskey’s liking. (“You’re willing to give us $1.5 billion in property tax breaks and infrastructure money, you say? Well, what if I told you Indiana was offering a TIF district the size of the entire Local Group?”) Right now you have a three-way — or more, given the various Illinois factions — game of chicken going on, and nobody’s showing each other their cards, and … okay, maybe it’s too early in the day for me to be writing extended metaphors. If anyone says they know how much money Bears execs could get out of either Indiana or Illinois, they’re lying, that’s the upshot here.

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Friday roundup: Portlanders balk at giving Blazers owner $600m, KC gives initial okay of $235m to expand 2-year-old soccer stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

Too damn hot! Gonna see how few words I can use today, to save electricity, y’know. That headline already caused voltage reductions across Brooklyn!

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Chiefs owners claim report they won’t show you says stadium will create $8.4B in something or other

access_time personNeil deMause

The Kansas City Chiefs (actually the owners of the Kansas City Chiefs, but journalists like to refer to team management metonymically this way, even though, like calling the current leadership of the United States “the United States,” it causes all sorts of problems, sorry, where were we?) released an economic impact report claiming that their new stadium will create a huge benefit for the Kansas state economy, and … ugh, do we really have to do this? You know where this is going, I know where this is going, there’s a whole category full of analysis of these clown documents, can’t we just take it as given that they’re not worth the pixels they’re printed in and move on with our day? Though then the Chiefs execs get away with putting out their take in the media and on the socials with no dissent other than the economists who show up in the later paragraphs of the news coverage at best, so fine.

Who did team officials hire this time? Is it the LOLconsultants at Convention, Sports & Leisure? Some bespoke firm with a name like Fiscalmetrics or Lucresolv and a CEO with a degree in business marketing?

According to a report from Econsult Solutions, Inc.

Checks out! At least they have an actual economist on board, that’s something. So how many billions of dollars did they project the Chiefs stadium will bring in to make up for its $4.1 billion in public costs?

The one-time capital investment of $4.5 billion could generate $1.9 billion in “indirect impact,” or business-to-business spending, and $1.8 billion in “induced impact,” or spending of wages. The report describes this as a “total impact” of $8.4 billion during the construction period.

$8.4 billion is bigger than $4.1 billion! It’s also inevitably going to be if all you’re doing is adding up how much will be spent on the Chiefs stadium ($4.5 billion) and then applying a multiplier for the fact that any local businesses that the Chiefs (and taxpayers) pay for construction will then re-spend a portion of those paychecks on other things. If these were the only criteria, anything at all would be a good spending decision — Kansas could spend $4.1 billion on fake blood testing machines and it would be considered a win, because just think of all the spending on PR firms and lawyers that this would generate!

Anyway, let’s take a look at the report, maybe it has some amusing charts or something.

KMBC 9 asked, but neither the Chiefs nor their consulting firm provided a copy of the full study.

Look. I get that the 24/7 news cycle is tough on journalists, and especially TV stations, which are expected to tell you the latest news the second it happens, even if all the details aren’t known yet. And KMBC did talk to an independent economist who warned that the report “just gives us gross output numbers without proving that taxpayers are getting a return on that investment,” unlike some other local news outlets. But how many times do you need to be told: There’s no law saying that just because somebody with a fancy suit issues a press release means you have to write an article about it. Especially when you ask if you can see the report the press release is about and are told, “No.”

Instead, we get a news report that “Supporters, Critics Split Over Impact,” because when you have a secret document showing that $4 billion is $4 billion on the one hand, and an economist saying that’s silly on the other, the truth must lie somewhere in the middle. So we are cursed to do this every time one of these reports is issued — or vaguely referenced in a press statement — until either we get decent journalism in this country or the sun burns out, I think you know which one I’m betting happens first.

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Royals prepare rezoning plan for new stadium district, even as $1.35B in public money remains up in air

access_time personNeil deMause

Kansas City Royals execs have submitted a rezoning plan for their proposed new stadium development at Crown Center, which Fox4KC, citing the team’s application, describes as “a vibrant mixed-use destination that supports a wide variety of year-round activities – including professional sporting events, concerts, festivals, community gatherings, private events, sponsorship activations and other programmed experiences.” Or as that looks in an overhead schematic:

That is definitely a baseball stadium — with center field pointing just west of north, making for some potentially troublesome summer sunsets in the eyes of left-handed batters — and a lot of Areas where new or renovated buildings can go. The Kansas City Star notes that “the preliminary plan does not specify exactly what new buildings could contain, noting that would be determined in final plans,” but you can be sure that whatever they are, they’ll contain gobs of exciting sponsorship activations and programmed experiences!

A public hearing of the City Plan Commission on the rezoning is set for August 19. K.C. Mayor Quinton Lucas is trying to get all the elements of the Royals deal — including $1.35 billion or so in city funds and state money that he hasn’t formally requested yet — approved before November so he can forestall a possible ballot measure allowing voters to block the stadium plan.

Presumably the Royals’ professional vaportecture artists are still at work on prettier pictures; if you want examples of those, you’ll have to turn to Washington, D.C., where only nine months after the city council passed its $7 billion-ish Commanders stadium subsidy, there are finally some renderings of what the surrounding development could look like: Fall foliage! Canoes! Not a translucent parking garage in sight! Overhead schematics are probably more realistic, but realistic doesn’t get the re-socials, we’re talking about building mindshare here.

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NC house leaders balk at spending $1.7B in tax money on stadium for nonexistent MLB team

access_time personNeil deMause

WRAL in North Carolina this weekend uncovered the financing plans for a new publicly funded stadium for an as-yet-theoretical MLB expansion team in Raleigh, and while it didn’t publish the legislative language itself, the TV station’s coverage did make clear that the project could cost taxpayers a whole lot more than just the $700 million in state development funds that was previously floated:

  • The stadium is projected to cost $1.7 billion, despite not having a site or a design, a number that the funding document reports “came from independent financial models,” per WRAL.
  • The state would provide $500 million in cash — presumably from its Economic Development Project Reserve slush fund, though the news report doesn’t specify.
  • Additional funding would come via “local revenue sources” (city and county taxes? WRAL doesn’t say), “sports gambling taxes” (a la Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s so-far dormant plan for funding a Cleveland Browns stadium), siphoning off of  income taxes from players and performers at the stadium, and “the creation of a sports and entertainment taxing district” — the last of which sounds like a TIF, though again, no specifics are provided.

The combined public money would, apparently, be enough to pay the entire cost of a $1.7 billion stadium, which would make it the most expensive stadium subsidy in baseball history. (The bill would leave the cash on the table for four years, after which it would be withdrawn if no team materialized.) It’s possible North Carolina could charge a prospective expansion team owner rent to recoup part of the cost — but given lame duck state senate leader Phil Berger, who is the lead sponsor of the stadium bill, said last week that “my understanding is most of the professional leagues discourage interest in localities that basically say, ‘We’ll take it, but only if the stadium is paid for by the owners,'” probably best not to hold your breath on that one.

Of course, maybe best not to hold your breath on any of this, since, as noted here on Friday, state house leaders hate Berger’s plan and are keeping it out of the state budget, for now at least. Still, even an abortive attempt to offer $1.7 billion for a free stadium in order to land an MLB expansion team would be quite the opening bid, and would likely make Berger’s prediction that MLB will demand massive stadium subsidies in order to consider any expansion candidates into a self-fulfilling prophecy. There are lots of signs that some MLB owners aren’t actually that interested in expansion — it would come with juicy one-time checks, but in exchange for diluting existing owners’ shares of TV and streaming revenue — but if free stadiums are being dangled, that could get enough owners salivating to tip the balance.

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