Category: minor-league baseball

Was the Carolina Panthers’ $650m renovation deal really the worst of 2024? An investimagation

access_time personNeil deMause

The Center for Economic Accountability, a friend of this site, announced its annual “Worst Economic Development Deal of the Year” award for 2024 this week, and the winner was the city of Charlotte, for giving $650 million to Carolina Panthers owner David Tepper for renovations of his team’s stadium. CEA said in a press release that “Charlotte’s Bank of America Stadium deal stood out from the rest of the competition for a combination of factors that included its high cost, lack of transparency, poor returns, questionable economic justifications and the Panthers ownership’s checkered history with subsidized projects.”

There’s certainly a lot to be said for the Panthers deal as a terrible one: The city of Charlotte put up $650 million out of $800 million for renovations to a 28-year-old stadium it didn’t build and doesn’t own, in exchange for Tepper extending his lease for just 15 years and getting to open “good faith” negotiations for a new stadium as early as 2037. Still, it’s worth looking at some of the other contenders from 2024:

All worthy candidates, even if there can be only one winner. The lesson here isn’t that Charlotte is singularly bone-headed when it comes to handing out public money to local billionaires; it’s that siphoning off public money for private profit is a pandemic with no end in sight, and even the less-bad deals would be scandalous in a saner world.

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Worcester’s stadium fund is in debt to the city, but that’s not the worst of it

access_time personNeil deMause

The Great Worcester Andy Zimbalist Throwdown was so involved that I ended up writing a whole article about it elsewhere, but it ultimately came down to: Zimbalist, the former stadium subsidy skeptic who had started giving testimony-for-hire on both sides of the issue, insisted that Worcester would recoup its expense on a Red Sox Triple-A stadium via taxes generated by new housing that would spring up around it; and pretty much every other economist said it doesn’t usually work that way. “There’s a list a mile long of cities where it hasn’t worked. And there’s a really short list where it has,” said University of San Francisco economist Nola Agha at the time. “Is this development guaranteed? Is it going to happen regardless of if there’s a stock market crash or interest rates go up?”

So how’s that going, you ask, in the three-plus years since the Worcester stadium opened? Welp:

Following news that tax revenues for the independent Polar Park financing account fell short last fiscal year, with the account owing the city general fund $792,000, city councilors had harsh words Tuesday for a developer who appears to be falling short on his obligations to the ballpark district…

“They’ve gotten away with a lot and they’ve put us as a city in a pretty bad position at this point,” District 2 City Councilor Candy Mero-Carlson said.

The city’s stadium fund is supposed to collect property taxes, sales taxes, and building permit fees from development around the stadium, and use it to repay the city’s $146 million in stadium bonds. (It was supposed to be $106 million at the time Zimbalist endorsed the plan, but overruns happen.) But development has lagged as the result of rising inflation — which was largely thanks to Joe Biden’s sanctions on Russia and Bill Clinton’s deregulation of financial derivatives, if you’re keeping score — to the point where developers are now turning down the offer of tax breaks so they can walk away from properties entirely.

The good news, if Worcester city manager Eric Batista is to be believed, is that “we remain confident that the DIF will return significant funds to the municipality’s coffers as new development occurs and certain tax agreements expire.” The bad news is: Even that wouldn’t necessarily help ensure that Worcester taxpayers don’t lose their shirts on this deal. If some of the new housing construction that eventually arrives would have happened with or without the stadium; or if it cannibalizes housing construction that might have gone elsewhere in the city if not for the stadium; or if the cost of building schools for all those new residents adds more to the city expense budget than the new taxes add to receipts, then this could still be a money pit even if all the buildings around the stadium are eventually built, just like other TIF districts elsewhere.

The question now: Will the Worcester Telegram issue a retraction for the anonymous chamber-of-commerce-penned op-ed it ran last year (without fact-checking) claiming that Worcester will be different, because reasons? Your guess is as good as mine, and you can probably guess what my guess is.

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Sacramento to keep grass field for A’s games, leaving only fans to broil in sun

access_time personNeil deMause

Amid much concern about whether baseball players and fans would bake to death once Athletics games are played in sweltering Sacramento starting next season, MLB has announced that the city’s stadium will keep its natural grass for 2025:

“Our shared, primary concern is ensuring the best and safest playing surface for the A’s, River Cats and visiting players. In light of the players’ clear preference for natural grass, and after weighing with the MLBPA the potential risks and benefits of maintaining natural grass versus replacing the playing surface with synthetic turf, all the parties are aligned in moving forward with a natural grass field for Opening Day 2025.”

This makes it sound like the driving force here was the players’ union, which could have filed a grievance over working conditions if it hadn’t been satisfied that Brent Rooker wouldn’t melt into a Brent Rooker–shaped puddle during Sacramento day games on turf. (MLB had previously announced that it would install a “hydration system” to cool the turf, but was never clear about how that would have worked.) To clear that obstacle, MLB seems to have decided it’s cheaper to pay to maintain grass at the stadium, even while the A’s and River Cats both play full schedules that will put a pounding on it.

Who’s going to pay to maintain the grass surface is still an open question, though so was who would have paid for installing turf. River Cats owner Vivek Ranadive has been promised he won’t be stuck with any costs of hosting the A’s, so it looks like this will either be on A’s owner John Fisher’s tab or on the league’s.

A’s fans, meanwhile, will continue to sit in a stadium without even a sun roof, so will likely melt into puddles on their own. They are welcome to file grievances of their own, hahahaha, the Fair Labor Standards Act doesn’t guarantee customers any right to grievances, so be sure to read the fine print on the back of your ticket as to whether you are releasing the A’s from liability in case you die of heatstroke.

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Somebody (hint, hint) says Jerry Reinsdorf could sell White Sox to Nashville-linked ownership group

access_time personNeil deMause

The Athletic reported a weird story yesterday, citing “sources briefed on the matter but not authorized to discuss it publicly,” that Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf is discussing selling the team he’s owned since 1981. According to the article, Reinsdorf in “in active discussions” with a group led by former MLB pitcher Dave Stewart and player agent Lonnie Murray.

Why is it weird? For one thing, the 88-year-old Reinsdorf has previously said he planned to hold on to the team as long as he was alive, leaving it to his heirs to figure out what to do with it afterwards. (Though he’s the White Sox principal owner, Reinsdorf reportedly only owns about 19% of the team.) But also, Stewart and Murray almost certainly don’t have anywhere close to the couple billion dollars or so it would take to buy the White Sox; on top of that, they don’t have any particular ties to Chicago, with Stewart previously having helped lead efforts to get an expansion franchise for Nashville.

It’s certainly possible that Stewart and Murray, who would become the first Black majority owners in MLB if they bought a team (and could raise the funds to be the majority owners), figure that buying a team in Chicago would be a faster and more certain route than waiting for the possibility of one in Nashville. Or it’s possible that they have designs on buying the White Sox and moving them to Nashville, though that would seem like an expensive way of going about it, given that Chicago is the nation’s #3 media market and Nashville is #27.

Or, given that this came out of nowhere based on unnamed sources and that Reinsdorf has previously played footsie with Nashville to try to scare up public stadium funding in Chicago and that is literally his signature move, maybe this is Reinsdorf himself leaking news of the sale talks to kickstart talks about his $2 billion Chicago stadium funding demands? There’s no way to be sure without knowing who the Athletic’s Brittany Ghiroli heard this from — even then it might not be possible to know who if anyone directed them to spread the rumor, but at least if we had a name we could make an educated guess. Unnamed sources really are bad for humans and other living things.

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San Antonio stadium would displace 381 low-income families, replace their homes with ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

access_time personNeil deMause

While plans for a new downtown stadium for the minor-league San Antonio Missions would cost city residents $126 million in tax kickbacks, the more pressing issue as a city council vote approaches this Thursday is the 381 units of affordable housing that would be demolished to make way for the new development, which would also include a hotel and new stores. City officials say there will be replacement apartments as well, but after meeting with project proponents on Sunday, some residents now say they don’t trust the promises and want the council vote delayed:

[James] Boscher and [Brooklyn] Ramos told KSAT on Friday that they didn’t expect to be able to stop the stadium project, but they wanted guaranteed housing in the area at similar rates and money to help move.

Boscher’s opinion shifted after taking part in a Sunday meeting that included [Weston Urban developer] Randy Smith and three city council members. It seemed clear, Boscher told KSAT on Monday, that council members didn’t have enough information and that Weston Urban “didn’t have any actual guarantees.”

Weston Urban owns the Soap Factory apartments, which it says it would tear down in stages, with residents being allowed to move temporarily to other units before those are then demolished, or moved to other housing it owns elsewhere in the city if those are available, or maybe just given “housing navigation” services to find new homes. The stadium wouldn’t actually go on the Soap Factory site — it would be across the street, if I’m reading this map correctly — but the apartments would be torn down to make way for a mixed-use development that could eventually include 1,500 new apartments, or not:

Under terms of the Missions owners’ deal with the city and county, bonds for the ballpark’s construction would be sold only when Weston Urban has its projects for phases 1 and 2 designed and financed.

Those initial phases would add about 575 apartments and between 175 and 200 hotel rooms, Smith said….

More than 1,500 apartments could be built through all four phases.

No guarantees about whether any of that housing would be built, though, or whether it would be available at the same low rents as the current apartments. And really, no explanation of why the Soap Factory buildings need to be torn down rather than built around, other than presumably that Weston Urban doesn’t think low-income neighbors would be as attractive as thousands of new residents meant to “be a massive shot in the arm of existing businesses and small [food and beverage] folks,” as Smith puts it.

Mayor Ron Nirenberg says the new development is necessary in order to generate new tax revenues to pay for the stadium so that taxpayers don’t “end up on the hook” — which only makes sense if you think that tax revenues from new development should go to pay private developers’ costs, something that has not worked out well in the past. Some council members have reportedly expressed concern about tearing down the apartment complex; we’ll have to wait and see whether it’s enough members, or enough concern, to delay Thursday’s vote.

 

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Friday roundup: Sacramento celebrates A’s move with new golf simulators, KC residents say cap public stadium funds at one-third

access_time personNeil deMause

Sports economist Victor Matheson and I were both on a radio show this week to discuss the Cleveland Browns and Kansas City Royals and Chiefs stadium situations — you can listen to it here, but first check out the rest of this week’s stadium and arena news, it’ll be quick, I promise:

  • There’s a “major economic boost” coming to Sacramento now that the Oakland A’s are relocating there temporarily, reports KCRA-TV: A new brunch-and-golf-simulators venue is opening across the street! (It was going to open there anyway, but now that the A’s are coming, the owner is trying to open it earlier.) Also, the mayor is “in discussions” with three new restaurants! Feel the excitement!
  • There is no excitement in St. Louis, where the Cardinals are still technically in the playoff hunt, but fans in the best baseball city in the world don’t want to watch .500 baseball, it turns out, or even buy hot dogs. “I love being the hot dog lady,” says hot dog lady Karen Boschert. “I’ve cut my staff down. My prices are reasonable. You can take my food into the stadium.” Maybe she could pivot her sales pitch to point out that you can buy her food and not bring it into the stadium? Just an idea.
  • Pollsters in Missouri decided to ask an unusual question of local voters: not whether taxpayers should pay toward new stadiums for the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals, but how much. The average was two-thirds team, one-sixth state, one-sixth city and county, which is kind of arbitrary and doesn’t account for whether the public would get back any share of revenues or community benefits or anything, but sure it sounds fair. Ish. Time will tell if the team owners come back with “zero-thirds team, poke in the eye with a sharp stick public.”
  • Most of the San Antonio residents who testified at a Wednesday hearing on a $160 million Missions minor-league baseball stadium “voiced concerns and skepticism,” according to Fox San Antonio. For actual quotes we have to turn to KSAT, which notes that a local arts and social justice activist said, “This project is all about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer,” while a resident of a housing complex that would be demolished to make way for the stadium said, “I would not be able to get somewhere else, and I would end up in the street yet again.”
  • Chicago’s city budget is facing a $982.4 million shortfall, and Mayor Brandon Johnson says, “There are sacrifices that will be made,” but not new Bears and White Sox stadiums, those are important even if they would cost the city upwards of $1.2 billion and $2 billion respectively, sacrifices are for little people.
  • Team-funded studies of a Philadelphia 76ers arena say it would be great, other studies show it would be a disaster; the Philadelphia Inquirer editorial board says it’s up to the mayor and city council to figure out where the truth lies in the middle!
  • Another group of developers unrelated to either the Royals or the city has come up with renderings for a new downtown baseball stadium, and guys, you should at least look up how many players are on the field for a baseball game.
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San Antonio to spend $126m on minor-league ballpark, gullible journalists call this no public money

access_time personNeil deMause

The owners of the minor-league baseball San Antonio Missions, who somehow include both Nolan Ryan and Manu Ginobili, have been angling for a new stadium since they bought the team in 2022, and their proposal has finally reached the city council, with a projected cost of $160 million. And how would that money be raised? Not to worry, says KENS-TV, “if current plans hold, taxpayers wouldn’t be on the hook”:

Funding for the new ballpark would primarily come from a $34 million team equity contribution from the Missions. The rest, about $126 million, would be paid for by bonds issued by the newly created San Pedro Creek Authority, with a pledge from the Houston Street Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone (TIRZ).

Those are taxes collected under a state law which are used for economic development projects.

Now, I am not an economist, though often play one in poorly fact-checked articles. But I am fairly sure that if a project is being funded by $126 million in taxes, then taxpayers are, by definition, on the hook.

The argument here, of course, isn’t that taxpayers aren’t paying for the stadium, it’s that they’re paying for it with money they wouldn’t have without the stadium. This is the Casino Night Fallacy, and while I could talk yet again about how just because tax revenues are “new” to a specific parcel of land doesn’t mean that it isn’t being cannibalized from other tax money that woulc be collected anyway, or would not be available for public uses if someone developed the land but without the ballpark, but I would much rather let Felix and Oscar explain it:

Felix: What have you got there? Where’d you get all that money?

Oscar: From Arnold, he owed it to me.

Felix: What?

Oscar: Yeah. He owed it to me since the year one.

Felix: The “let it ride” guy owed you money?

Oscar: That’s my Arnold.

Felix (reaching for a pile of cash): Well, that’s wonderf—

Oscar: Don’t touch the money, Felix.

Felix: But what a—

Oscar: Don’t touch it, I told you not to touch it.

Felix: But now the opera club gets its money back. Yay!

Oscar: I don’t think I heard you.

Felix: We’re saved! We get our money back!

Oscar (hastily gathering up his money): Now I know I didn’t hear you.

Felix: Surely you’re not thinking of keeping that money?

Oscar: Why not? It’s my money!

Felix: No, it’s not! It belongs to the opera club!

Oscar: How do you figure that?

Felix: Well, Arnold got it from us, you got it from him, you give it back to us! Then everybody’s even!

Oscar: That can’t be right. See, I’d be out all this money.

Felix: No, you wouldn’t! You’d just be back where you started from!

Oscar: Yeah, but only Arnold wouldn’t owe it to me anymore. See, I had this money coming to me.

Felix: But it came from the opera club! From them to him to you to me! It’s like an isosceles triangle!

But fine, that’s only one San Antonio news outlet, anyone can have a gullible day. Let’s see how the San Antonio Express-News covered the—

The Missions owners’ first pitch to city officials for a new ballpark downtown boiled down to this: Please foot almost the entire bill.

That’s how City Manager Erik Walsh on Wednesday recalled that first meeting.

The minor-league ball club struck out.

Seriously?

One article like this is bad enough; two is clearly the sign of a concerned media campaign to spin $126 million in public spending as “no public spending.” There is only one acceptable response by the San Antonio council: Don’t touch the money, Felix.

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Friday roundup: Oakland Coliseum redevelopment moves ahead (maybe), DeSantis writes $8m taxpayer check to Inter Miami stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

In case you’re wondering why sports team owners keep on releasing incredibly amateurish vaportecture stadium renderings that are just going to subject them to ridicule, check out these headlines from just the last two days: “Browns players share thoughts on Brook Park stadium renderings,” “Cleveland Browns stadium saga: Fans react to renderings of Brook Park proposal,” “Cavaliers Star Donovan Mitchell Chimes In On Browns New Stadium Proposal.” Pretty pictures, or even doofy-looking ones, are red meat to click-starved news outlets, and so long as they keep getting coverage that is more “ooh, shiny” than “who’s going to pay for this exactly?” the CAD mills are going to be kept busy.

And speaking of busy, let’s see what else happened this week:

  • Oakland A’s owner John Fisher has agreed to sell his half of the Oakland Coliseum property to developers African American Sports & Entertainment Group for $125 million, which is $20 million more than the city of Oakland got for its half. Now AASEG will convert it into a “$5 billion megaproject that could include a new convention center, restaurant, hotel, youth amphitheater and restaurants,” and maybe a soccer stadium — or could, you know, not, depending on how the economic winds blow. That the group’s private equity partner says the money will come from “investors” isn’t exactly reassuring, but at least a Coliseum development might pencil out as a better investment than the plan that Fisher is trying to sell.
  • One thing to breathe easy about with Inter Miami‘s much-delayed new stadium is that at least it’s not getting any public money, and … wait, why is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis holding a giant $8 million check made out to the stadium? He can just do that? (Answer: Yes, it’s from an infrastructure slush fund he controls.) Technically the money is going toward traffic improvements around the stadium, but still, handing over $8 million to support a stadium that’s going to happen whether or not you spend the taxpayer dollars on it and then declaring “we just don’t believe that we give money to build sports stadiums” is a nice trick if you can pull it off.
  • And speaking of privately funded soccer stadiums getting public funding, how about Kansas City spending upwards of $30 million in cash and tax breaks for a parking garage for the KC Current‘s newly opened stadium? The deal isn’t final yet, so no publicity photos of oversized checks for now.
  • Signal Cleveland speculates that the proposed $2.4 billion Cleveland Browns stadium in Brook Park could use tax increment financing to cover some of its bills, with the $740,000 a year in property taxes the site currently generates continuing to go to local schools while anything above that number would be kicked back to help pay for the stadium. Except if you believe transit blogger and Browns dome enthusiast Ken Prendergast, the newly developed land would “generate millions more in property taxes or payments in lieu of taxes for Brook Park schools than it does now,” and both things can’t be right. We’ll just have to wait and see what’s actually in the financial plan, which the Browns owners seem perfectly content not to reveal anytime soon, not when they can get Donovan Mitchell making headlines by tweeting that a new stadium is “gonna be fire.”
  • The new Worcester Red Sox stadium has “put the Canal District’s emergence on overdrive,” according to a Boston Globe article citing … some bars that opened nearby? Not mentioned: What the numbers show about the city’s bang for its 150 million bucks, despite there being local economists who could have easily told the Globe the answer.
  • In Anaheim, meanwhile, the presence of the Los Angeles Angels has spawned a group of about 40 hot dog vendors who’ve set up outside the stadium, and Angels execs hate it because that’s money that’s not going into team pockets — no, of course not, they’re just concerned about someone “getting severely sick or even dying due to food poisoning,” because we know how devoted the Angels organization is to ensuring people get quality food.
  • Thomas Tresser, not the DC Comics villain but the author of a book on the successful campaign to defeat Chicago’s Olympic bid, has launched a petition to demand that the city of Chicago not provide any public money or land for sports stadiums, feel free to sign if you’re the petition-signing type.
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Friday roundup: “Unbelievable” Utah Olympics projections, Cavs crony capitalism, and stadium vapordistricts

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s Friday, I’ve been testing negative for two days, time to see what we all missed this week while we were busy making other plans:

  • “Second Winter Olympics could spark $6.6B in economic output for Utah, new report finds” reported a headline at KSL-TV, and “could” and “output” are doing an awful lot of work there. (Number of actual economists consulted for the KSL story: zero.) “These numbers are just so unbelievable,” said Salt Lake City Olympic committee COO Brett Hopkins, and yep, can’t argue with that!
  • The guy who negotiated massive tax kickbacks for Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert for the city is getting hired by Gilbert as the team’s CFO, this is fine.
  • The owners of Racing Louisville and Louisville City FC promised to build a new development around their new soccer stadium after it opened in 2019 with the help of city funding, but haven’t actually done so. “There’s good soccer going on, and I was for soccer,” city councilmember Robin Engel said at a hearing last month. “You know, we throw these TIFs around anymore these days like it’s chump change.”
  • Boston Magazine has a good oral history of how the 1999 All-Star Game hosted at Fenway Park helped save the ballpark from a planned demolition and replacement by a fake replica, though it kind of elides the main point, which is “Save Fenway Park activists put up a huge stink and then the new guy who bought the Red Sox decided he liked Fenway anyway. Also Save Fenway isn’t “defunct” as the article says, but the group’s Erika Tarlin does get a decent amount of screen time.
  • Whoever ends up the new mayor of Arlington Heights this fall, it’ll likely be someone who supports building a Chicago Bears stadium there, keep that in mind the next time you ask why people don’t just vote elected officials out of office when they back stadium deals.
  • If you always wanted a restroom sign from Pawtucket’s soon-to-be-demolished McCoy Stadium, now’s your chance.
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A’s will be forced to adhere to Triple-A schedule in Sacramento, endure blazing heat for Sunday day games

access_time personNeil deMause

When Oakland A’s owner John Fisher announced in April that his team would be playing in Sacramento for the next three years while awaiting the construction of a Las Vegas stadium, including how exactly the time-sharing arrangement would work between the A’s and the minor-league Sacramento River Cats. As I noted here at the time:

It just occurred to me that the Pacific Coast League plays week-long series against one team at a time, to cut down on travel. This is going to make drawing up an A’s schedule really interesting, to say the least.

Three months later, and yup, “really interesting” turns out to be not the half of it:

Because the A’s will be co-tenants at Sutter Health Park, they not only will use the same field as the River Cats — the top farm team of the San Francisco Giants — but will need to adhere to Pacific Coast League scheduling to fit in their 81 home games.

It’s an extremely challenging logistical ordeal because MLB and PCL schedules aren’t molded in the same format…

Generally, the River Cats play one team per week in a six-game series with Monday set aside as a travel day. One week at home, the next on the road. The A’s need to mirror that and play in Sacramento when the River Cats are on the road and vice versa…

In other words, the 29 other teams are catering to the A’s because of owner John Fisher’s preference to leave the Coliseum, where scheduling would have been routine, for a temporary home in Sacramento, where the scheduling is complex, the heat is overwhelming and the facilities in need of major upgrades.

Oh yes, the heat, did we forget to mention the heat? Sacramento may actually be to the north of Oakland, but it’s also inland in the Central Valley, which has always been hot and is only getting hotter. The league is trying to schedule as many night games as possible, but the MLB national TV schedule means all A’s Sunday home games will have to start at 1 pm local time, plus the limitations set by the PCL schedule means it’ll be harder than usual to avoid weekday games on “getaway days” when the opposing team needs to catch a flight out of town.

Add in that the River Cats’ home stadium is set to get artificial turf installed, the better to put up with the pounding of two teams using it for home games, and game conditions on the field could be toasty indeed. “Complaints aplenty are expected, including from players, because of the brutal heat” is how the San Francisco Chronicle put it; the players union says it’s currently in talks with the league to try to address this as best as possible.

The Sacramento stadium will hold only 14,000 fans, so at least not too many people will have to subject themselves to the summer heat in order to watch the A’s finish last again. All of this is feeling very much like the Arizona Coyotes‘ attempt to play in a college hockey arena, only with the additional fun of heatstroke; it’s probably too soon to predict that the A’s Sacramento stay will be cut short like the Coyotes’ was at Mullett Arena, but that isn’t stopping people from doing so to beat the rush later.

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Field of Schemes