Camden Riversharks – Field of Schemes

How the Atlantic League suckered New Jersey out of $70m for three now-shuttered stadiums (and still hopes to sucker more)

April 3, 2019 Neil deMause

Apologies if this is a light posting week here at Field of Schemes — I have some other work responsibilities that are keeping me busy, though the news has been cooperating by being fairly light as well, or at least light on major items that can’t wait for a Friday roundup. If you’re really jonesing for some hot stadium-scam action, I would suggest you make your way over to Reason, where Eric Boehm has delivered a tale of the Atlantic League’s doomed stadiums in Atlantic City, Newark, and Camden that is a gold mine of schadenfreude. Let’s begin with then–New Jersey Gov. Christie Whitman, who provided tens of millions of dollars in tax money to build the three stadiums between 1998 and 2001, at the opening of the Camden Riversharks stadium in 2001:

“These partners have heard the message from the movie Field of Dreams: ‘If you build it, they will come,'” Whitman said. “Soon we will see a field of dreams right here in Camden, and my prediction is they will come.”

Yes, she actually said it! And the fans did come, at first, because everybody wants to check out the new team and the new riverfront stadium and get some new gear with a cool logo of a shark with a bat in its teeth. Then the novelty wore off, and they stopped coming so much: According to Deadspin, attendance the Riversharks’ final season in 2015 was less than half of capacity, and even that was goosed with lots of free tickets handed out. Then the team folded and moved to New Britain, Connecticut.

Things didn’t go much better for the Newark Bears or the Atlantic City Surf, neither of which managed to reach voting age, either. (I have previously written about my attendance at the Bears’ last gasp, a tragicomic liquidation sale that largely featured old mascot heads.) But really, that’s to be expected in minor-league baseball, especially independent minor-league baseball, where you can’t even depend on fans of the major-league affiliate turning out to check out players who might some day play for the big club — or the major-league affiliate covering player salaries to help a club through lean attendance years.

The more damning parts of the article are the testimony that even when they did come, it didn’t amount to anything like what it would take to be worth the state’s public stadium expense. Here’s College of the Holy Cross economist Victor Matheson on Atlantic League attendance:

“That’s about 250,000 fans per season—or about the number of people who will visit an eight-screen movie theater over the course of a year,” he tells Reason. “But no one in their right mind would say ‘you know what the solution to all of Camden’s problems is: a new movie theater.'”

Then Matheson goes on to say that a movie theater might be better than a baseball stadium, because at least movie theater jobs are year-round.

The lesson here is, well, that elected officials are either suckers or complicit in siphoning public money to private sports team owners, which we all knew, but it’s impressive to see the level of suckerdom/complicity on display here. Especially when Boehm calls up Atlantic League president Rick White to see if he’s contrite about having sold so many cities a bill of goods, and instead finds that he’s still very much touting it:

“The model we are most comfortable working with now is to suggest to a community that if they were to invest in the infrastructure and potentially in the ballpark, we can suggest to them developers that can help improve the area around it,” White said in a phone interview.

I better run and go get my other work done, because it’s clear my work here will never be finished.

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Friday roundup: Bad MLB attendance, bad CFL loans, bad temporary Raiders relocation ideas

September 28, 2018November 28, 2018 Neil deMause

And in other news:

MLB attendance is down 4.2% this year, something commissioner Rob Manfred blames on bad weather but which can more reasonably be blamed on bad teams — in particular bad teams in cities that were previously drawing well (Toronto, Baltimore, Detroit, Texas). The Oakland A’s have been good this year, but their attendance has barely risen, something team president Dave Kaval says he hopes a new stadium will fix by encouraging “new people to engage our product”; that has worked out extremely poorly for the Miami Marlins, but then, engaging the Marlins’ product right now will probably make you less likely to attend games, not more so.
The Detroit Red Wings‘ and Pistons‘ new arena has turned its area of Detroit into “a dynamic, connected stretch that has grown and attracted new businesses and investment with the promise of much more to come,” according to a press release by the Red Wings’ ownership group that the Detroit Free Press seemingly just up and reprinted, seriously, are they even trying?
German soccer fans protested high ticket prices this week by staging 20 minutes of silence at the start of games, as well as unfurling a giant banner reading (in English) “Football is for you and me — not for fucking pay-TV.”
The government of Manitoba has written off the entire $200 million cost of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers‘ stadium, saying there’s no way the team (which is owned by a nonprofit corporation with no shareholders) will ever repay it. When the stadium was approved in 2010, I noted that “the public is taking on a fair bit of risk” by loaning the team the money; guess that was a bit of an understatement.
The defunct Camden Riversharks‘ stadium is set to be torn down just 17 years after it was built, something we already covered here last year, but this gives the Associated Press the opportunity to run the headline “Baseball stadium built 17 years ago to boost tourism faces wrecking ball,” so more power to ’em.
There’s a petition drive in Austin to block the new stadium for the soon-to-be-erstwhile Columbus Crew, which was already approved but not contractually finalized, so more power to ’em, too, I guess.
Ha ha ha ha, Oakland Raiders execs are really considering playing a season in San Diego as part of their hissy fit over Oakland’s possible antitrust suit, though CBS Sports notes that it’s pretty unlikely given that the Los Angeles Rams and Chargers owners would almost certainly raise objections.
People who want an NBA franchise in Louisville say they’d consider building a new arena for it, despite Louisville already having two perfectly good basketball arenas, which is arguably even more crazy than the idea of Louisville getting an NBA franchise at all.
Jacksonville Jaguars and Fulham F.C. owner Shad Khan has had his purchase of London’s Wembley Stadium from England’s Football Association for $800 million approved, but he says he’s not moving either team into it, he just wants to rake in the money from concerts and such. The stadium turned a £5.5million profit last year, which would be a dismal return on an $800 million investment, so who the hell knows what Khan is thinking, but “This will scare Jacksonville into giving me more stadium upgrade money” has to be at least part of it.

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Camden will be latest city to tear down its nearly new Atlantic League baseball stadium

November 2, 2017November 2, 2017 Neil deMause

In 2001, the state of New Jersey spent $18.5 million ($10.5 million on construction, and $7 million on environmental cleanup) to build a new waterfront minor-league baseball stadium in Camden, across the river from Philadelphia. An independent-minors Atlantic League team moved in, and was named the Riversharks, and everyone sat back and waited for the revitalization to come.

Sixteen short years later, Campbell’s Field, named for the soup company that started in Camden, is set to be demolished. The stadium never made money, and the state ate its construction debt — along with $18.3 million spent on a cross-river tram that was never built — and sold the stadium for $3.5 million in 2015 to the city of Camden, which figured it could pay that off with rent from the team. Then the Riversharks owners, not interested in trying to pay rent on revenues from just 3,000 fans a game, declined to renew their lease and instead moved to New Britain, Connecticut to replaced that city’s departed Double-A team and become the Bees. With nobody using the stadium aside from Rutgers University, it will now be torn down and replaced by athletic fields, or maybe an Amazon headquarters, or maybe something else, nobody knows.

If it feels like you’ve read this before, it’s because you have: The Atlantic League in particular now has a long and sorry history of talking cities and states into building new stadiums for its teams and then slinking out of town not long after. The Newark Bears were first demoted to an even lesser indie league and then went bankrupt in 2014 (I still have a jersey and other goodies from their going-out-of-business sale), and their riverfront stadium is now set for demolition; the Atlantic City Surf only lasted 11 seasons before giving up the ghost and leaving its ballpark as a high-school field where the scoreboard doesn’t work; the Bridgeport Bluefish are being evicted so that city can turn their stadium into a concert amphitheater.

If there’s a lesson here, it’s that minor-league baseball stadiums are incredibly risky gambles, since 1) it’s the rare team that brings in tons of fans after the initial honeymoon period and 2) it’s all too easy for a team to relocate or fold years before the stadium is paid off even if 3) the team is helping to pay off the stadium debt, which it usually isn’t. The Atlantic League particularly targeted itself at small Northeastern cities looking to reinvent themselves as baseball attractions, got a whole lot of stadiums built, and then with few exceptions (teams in Long Island and Bridgewater Township, New Jersey are still going strong, so far at least) pulled up stakes and skedaddled when things weren’t going so well.

I want to have an excuse to link to Deadspin’s Dan McQuade’s lovely remembrance of the Riversharks, so let’s quote from that here:

I liked going to Camden baseball games. Once, I took my father and he won the team’s “Best Beard” contest. He got a hot lather machine for his victory. I’ve lived in Center City Philadelphia for more than a decade now, so games were always a quick PATCO ride away. I could even walk over the bridge if I wanted to! I don’t remember much of the baseball—Von Hayes was the team’s manager one season—but I do remember enjoying my trips there…

Since December 2013, the state has handed out $1.2 billion in tax breaks to businesses to relocate to the city. Subaru is well along on its construction of a new headquarters in Camden; it got $118 million in tax credits from the state to move down the road from Cherry Hill.

The Sixers got $82 million in tax breaks for their new practice facility. When that was announced, a Camden resident asked Sixers CEO Scott O’Neil if there would be jobs for locals. “We need a shooting guard,” he replied. (This is still true.) Holtec International got $260 million in tax incentives to move to the waterfront. (That construction forced out a needle-exchange van; Camden hasn’t been signing Community Benefits Agreements with these companies.)..

The teams of the late-’90s New Jersey minor league stadium boom—the Camden Riversharks, the Atlantic City Surf, the Newark Bears, the Somerset Patriots—are mostly gone. Only Somerset, in Bridgewater, still exists. The promises of economic revitalization by baseball have failed. Now we’ll see how Camden fares under this next plan. Hmm.

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