Hudson Valley Renegades – Field of Schemes

Friday roundup: Bears owner bids to buy Arlington Park, plus do you really need anything else?

June 18, 2021 Neil deMause

Happy Friday, everyone! Unless you’re in the American West and currently melting from the heat, in which case, umm, try to stay indoors and hydrated, and don’t think about how in coming years it’s only likely to get worse. (This is maybe another reason why the Oakland A’s aren’t likely to move to Las Vegas, though building a new stadium right on San Francisco Bay is an equally bad idea in climate-proofing terms.)

Lots of news this week, so let’s get down to business:

Until now talk of the Chicago Bears moving to a new stadium on the site of the closing Arlington Park racetrack in suburban Arlington Heights has been mostly limited to idle suburban-newspaper-columnist speculation, but that speculation got kicked up a notch yesterday when Bears CEO Ted Phillips tweeted that the team had put in a bid to purchase the racetrack as part of its due diligence to “explore every possible option to ensure we’re doing what’s best for our organization and its future.” Now, putting in a bid doesn’t mean Bears execs are necessarily planning on moving — they would still need someone to pay for a stadium, for starters, and also have a lease on Soldier Field that runs through 2033, and even if they won the bid they could always choose to develop the site some other way or re-sell it to another developer who would — but it clearly does mean that they want “Bears could move to Arlington Heights” to remain a part of any discussion about their demands for improvements to their current stadium.
The snagged plan to rebuild San Diego’s arena is now completely dead, after the state of California ruled that the state’s Surplus Land Act requiring that all government-owned land be made available for affordable housing requires that, you know, that. San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria says he’ll now move to restart the bidding process, in hopes of finding a developer who’ll build affordable housing as well as an arena, because to do otherwise would meaning giving up on his dream of a hellscape of people frozen in time.
Remember when former A’s pitcher Dave Stewart said he wanted to buy the city’s half of the Oakland Coliseum site and build “nice restaurants and shops” and “employment opportunities”? The Oakland city council doesn’t seem to, even though Stewart claims to be the high bidder, and that makes Dave Stewart sad.
The Dutchess County legislature voted in favor of spending $12.5 million on upgrades to the Hudson Valley Renegades stadium using federal recovery act money that was supposed to be used to fill in pandemic-related budget gaps. Dissenting county legislator Brennan Kearney decried “the tone-deafness of proposing that our first batch of funding be used at the stadium” while there are residents “who are unable to pay their rent, who are still hungry, who are unvaccinated,” but really, doesn’t everyone in a community benefit from a new clubhouse and batting cages?
Ron Burkle may have cut his losses by deciding that buying an MLS team for Sacramento for $200 million and at the same time building a $250 million stadium was a lousy investment, but it’s also getting him sued by his would-be stadium construction contractor for fraud and breach of contract over $2.3 million unpaid invoices. That’d still be cheaper than actually building the damn stadium, and Burkle can certainly afford to pay it — maybe with all the money he undoubtedly saves by avoiding income tax like his fellow richies.
Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis’s owner’s suite at his new stadium is already getting a $688,000 renovation even though he’s never used it. Davis claims that this is because it was never actually finished, which makes it harder to point and laugh, but also that one new amenity will be a glass wall between the suite and the stadium interior so Davis doesn’t ever have to hear the game or those awful fans, so by all means point and laugh at that.
There were at least three separate articles this week about the color pattern of seats at the new St. Louis S.C. stadium, which can best be described as “red and blue, kind of speckled.” Remember journalism? Those were some good times.

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Friday roundup: County to use federal stimulus money for minor-league ballpark, plus way too much excitement over tax bookkeeping and Elon Musk

June 11, 2021 Neil deMause

It’s going to be tough for anything to top a sports team owner claiming he needs a new stadium because his 25-year-old one is literally going to “fall down,” but the rest of this week’s news was no slouch, either:

The county legislature in Dutchess County, New York, will vote Monday on a 25-year lease extension for the Hudson Valley Renegades that would use $12.5 million in federal American Rescue Plan money to renovate the team’s 27-year-old stadium and buy the land under it from the Beacon City School District. The ARP, better known as the Biden stimulus bill, included not just extended unemployment benefits and new stimulus checks for Americans, but also $350 billion to state and local governments to help bridge pandemic-related budget shortfalls; renovating a minor-league baseball stadium does not appear to be one of the permitted uses of this ARP funding, though Dutchess County legislators will presumably claim it’s helping an “impacted industry” recover from Covid losses or some such thing.
Cobb County, Georgia, may get to stop using general fund money to pay off its Atlanta Braves stadium debt as soon as 2024, according to Braves exec Mike Plant, thanks to the county getting more hotel/motel tax revenue that it’s spending instead. That’s good news in that county revenue is up; whether it’s good news that the county is spending money out of one pot of revenue instead of another will likely depend on whether or not your name is Mike Plant.
In related but opposite news, Clark County, Nevada, is having to dip into a reserve fund for $11.7 million in Las Vegas Raiders stadium payments after hotel tax revenues fell short thanks to the pandemic, just six months after pulling another $11.6 million from the reserve fund for the same reason. Again, this is bad in that the county has less money on hand to spend, but it doesn’t make the stadium a better or worse expense, any more than buying NFTs would be a less stupid idea if you just got an unexpected cash windfall.
And speaking of stupid ideas, Raiders president Marc Badain says he’d welcome a Vegas Loop station near his team’s stadium, which makes this a good time to remind him and everyone reading this that the Vegas Loop is just a one-lane tunnel for self-driving Teslas and so doesn’t really have “stations” per se, though it does have whatever the hell this is.
The Daily Herald, which covers the Chicago suburbs, asks whether the Chicago White Sox could move to the Arlington Park racetrack site in suburban Arlington Heights, immediately answers its own question by noting that “no one actively is suggesting” such a move, then goes on for 34 more paragraphs of speculation about what such a move would look like. Journalism!
Field of Schemes gets a nice shoutout from Jadrian Wooten’s Monday Morning Economist newsletter this week in his look at some favorite baseball stadiums, which also includes a lovely photo of the Pittsburgh Pirates‘ stadium, which is one of my favorites as well. See, I can say nice things about a stadium without mentioning its $218 million in state and city subsidies about which one Pennsylvania legislator said, “It’s not a grant. It’s not a loan. It’s a groan” … oh, whoops, guess I can’t.

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Friday roundup: More crazy stadium subsidy demands than can fit in one headline, you call this a lull?

February 12, 2021February 12, 2021 Neil deMause

Every couple of weeks, it seems, someone in the comments predicts that we are about to see the end of sports’ 30-year surge in stadium and arena subsidies, either because of Covid-depleted budgets or legislators smartening up or just everybody already having a new place. To which I say: If the stadium scam is slowing, why are my Friday mornings still so #$@&%*! busy?

Ahem. And now, the news:

A lawyer for the South Bend Cubs, saying the team owners were “shocked” to discover that a law allowing them to siphon off up to $650,000 a year in sales and income taxes for their own purposes had expired in 2018, has asked the state legislature to renew it. Oh, and also increase the cap to $2 million a year. You know, while they have the document open on their screens. “South Bend and every other city that has retained their relationship with Major League Baseball have to get to a certain level by 2025,” said attorney Richard Nussbaum. “If they don’t, they risk losing the team.” It’s an epidemic, I tells ya.
Speaking of which, Hudson Valley Renegades owner Jeff Goldklang got his $1.4 million in stadium renovation cash from Dutchess County, after emailing residents and fans warning them that the team could move if it was denied the subsidy.
Fort Wayne F.C., which I had to look up to be sure it actually exists and which turns out to be a “pre-professional” (much in the way that kids are “pre-adults”) USL League Two club, is seeking to move up to League One in 2023 and wants a $150 million soccer-stadium-plus-other-stuff project, to be paid for by mumble mumble hey look over there! It also features an instant classic in the field of fans-throwing-their-hands-skyward-while-fireworks-go-off-over-soccer-players-not-playing-anything-recognizable-as-soccer renderings, which is worth $150 million if it’s worth a dime:
The Oakland A’s owners (not the Oakland A’s, I still remember when I was an intern at The Nation Christopher Hitchens lecturing us on how one should always say “the U.S. government” and not “the U.S.” because just because the government approved something didn’t mean the populace did, but anyway) won their lawsuit to allow their Howard Terminal stadium project to have challenges to environmental impact reviews reviewed on a fast track, which is a big thing in California. “This is a critically important decision,” said A’s president Dave Kaval, who indicated he hopes the Oakland city council will be able to vote on a stadium bill this year, presumably after it’s figured out who the hell would pay for what.
Raleigh Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin wants to talk about building a new hockey arena to keep the Carolina Hurricanes in town long-term — their “old” one opened just over 21 years ago — and Sougata Mukherjee, the editor-in-chief of the Triangle Business Journal, points out that maybe now is not the best time what with 7% of the state not having enough to eat, small businesses on the brink, and, oh yeah, a pandemic still going on. Cue Hurricanes execs or their political talking about how a new arena will mean “jobs” in three, two…
While we wait, here’s San Diego Union-Tribune sports columnist Bryce Miller saying that San Diego should build a new arena to lure a nonexistent NBA expansion franchise because it would be “catalytic.” In the sense of the Oxford dictionary’s sample sentence for meaning 1.1, maybe?
Twenty years ago this week, the Pittsburgh Pirates‘ and Steelers‘ Three Rivers Stadium was blowed up real good, only a little over 30 years after it was first opened. I went to a couple of games at Three Rivers over the years, and I agree with former Pirate Richie Hebner’s review that “the graveyard I work in during the offseason has more life than this place,” and the Pirates’ new stadium is one of my favorites. Still, it and the Steelers’ new stadium deserve the blame for popularizing tax kickbacks in the stadium financing world, after Pittsburgh voters passed a referendum barring any new tax money from going to new stadiums, and the state legislature responded by “loaning” the teams stadium money that would be “repaid” by taxes the state would be collecting anyway — prompting Pittsburgh state rep Thomas Petrone’s timeless comment: “It’s not a grant. It’s not a loan. It’s a groan.”
Phoenix restaurants are hoping that having partial attendance at Suns games will provide more happy hour customers, something that seems not only ambitious given the proven not-so-robust spinoff effects of sports stadiums, but also slightly heedless of whether it’s such a great idea to encourage basketball fans to congregate indoors and take their masks off to drink and then go directly to congregating indoors to watch the Suns. In entirely unrelated news, restaurants around the new Los Angeles Rams and Chargers stadium in Inglewood are afraid of being driven out of business by new high-priced options gravitating to serve well-heeled football fans.
Finally a partial explanation of how funding for that new Des Moines Menace soccer stadium would work: In addition to city funds, it would be up for state hotel-tax funds designated for projects that “improve the quality of life for Iowa residents.” Other projects proposed to dip into the hotel-tax pool include a Des Moines Buccaneers junior hockey arena, a private indoor amateur sports facility, and a new mall; is it just me, or does “quality of life” seem to have been interpreted as “ways to put money in the pockets of Iowa business barons”?
Hey, remember the $200 million highway interchange that Las Vegas is building, totally coincidentally, near the Raiders‘ new stadium? It is now a $273 million highway interchange. But the city needed to build it anyway, because traffic was too bad at the old interchange and, shh, don’t tell them.
Okay, here’s one way in which maybe the pandemic has delayed some stadium spending: The Baltimore Orioles owners have signed a two-year lease extension on Camden Yards, while also working with the Maryland Stadium Authority “to establish a new long-term agreement that includes upgrades to the facility,” according to WJZ-TV. So it’s possible some 2021 and 2022 sports subsidies will end up getting pushed back to 2023 or so — yay?
If you wanted a live webcam of construction on the new Knoxville stadium for the Tennessee Smokies that hasn’t even been approved yet, let alone started construction, the team’s new stadium promotion website has got you covered.

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Friday roundup: We have entered the Golden Age of minor-league stadium scams

February 5, 2021 Neil deMause

Welp, that was another week. I know from comments that some of you think that the stadium and arena subsidy racket is about to come grinding to a halt, either because of the Covid economy or everybody already having a new enough stadium or something, but it sure looks like team owners didn’t get the memo — my RSS feeds are as hopping as they’ve ever been with tales of sports venue funding demands, and it’s still a rarity when local governments say no or even hmm, really? Check out this week’s roster, which, as yours truly predicted a couple of months ago, is especially jam-packed with minor-league baseball stadium plans:

Hagerstown, Maryland, could get an Atlantic League baseball team to replace the vanished Suns, but only if the city first agrees to build “a facility that meets or exceeds the league’s standards” to replace its current 91-year-old ballpark. State Sen. Paul Corderman says he’ll propose a funding plan that won’t involve city money, and that he hoped the Maryland Stadium Authority will “take the lead” on managing and funding the facility, so expect Maryland taxpayers as a whole to be asked to write a check for undisclosed millions of dollars so that Hagerstown’s new indy-league team can have more modern cupholders — and maybe don’t look too hard at how that worked out for Atlantic League teams in New Jersey.
The Hudson Valley Renegades, meanwhile, not only survived the Snap but got elevated from the now-vanished single-A New York-Penn League to the double-A Eastern League. But that doesn’t mean they have to stop demanding stadium upgrades, so the now-New York Yankees affiliate is asked Dutchess County for $1.44 million for upgraded lighting and a renovated home team clubhouse, or else. (Renegades owner Jeff Goldklang didn’t convey the “or else” to the county, but did email residents and fans warning them that the team could move if it doesn’t get the cash.) The Renegades’ stadium was opened in 1994 and already got $2.4 million in county money for upgrades in 2018, but if you can keep threatening to leave every so often, that’s a proven way to get what you want.
The Knoxville city council and Knox County commission held a “workshop” with Tennessee Smokies owner Randy Boyd about his demand for $65 million in public cash for a new downtown stadium; I haven’t watched the thing in its entirety because I’ve already had my fill of two-hour Zoom meetings this week, but one highlight pointed out by WATE-TV is that Boyd “has pledged to donate the land” for the development, which sounds generous until you realize that he would still get to use the land but would no longer have to pay property taxes on it because the city sports authority would technically own it. Pretty sneaky, Sis!
Over in minor-league soccer, the proposed USL team in Pawtucket has agreed to accept only $50 million in state and city cash instead of the $70 million it had earlier demanded, now that it has downsized its planned surrounding development. That’s good news, I guess, but it’s still $50 million in subsidies for a $40 million soccer stadium, so maybe not quite excellent news just yet.
The Worcester Business Journal has completed its assessment of why the Worcester Red Sox‘ new stadium saw its price tag soar from $100.8 million to $159.5 million, with the answer being pretty much oh crap, we decided to build on a hill. “That site isn’t ideal for a ballpark,” said Robert Brehm, a construction engineering professor at Drexel University. Oh well, guess nobody could have foreseen that! Maybe someday humankind will have developed tools to determine when one part of the Earth’s surface is higher than another, but until then these sorts of overruns will just be sadly unavoidable.
Buffalo Business First, which is a bracingly honest title for a business journal, predicts that Covid budget cuts will make public funding for a new Buffalo Bills stadium less likely in the short term, but maybe more likely in the medium term as “politicians target regional projects to boost economic development.” That sure sounds about right, especially since Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been talking about building one for years even as the Bills owners have been lukewarm on the idea. Check back in next year’s State of the State address.
The Indy Eleven, which moved out of then-36-year-old Carroll Stadium for the Indianapolis Colts stadium three years ago because they said it was obsolete for modern pro soccer, are moving back in because the Colts require “pandemic-related scheduling flexibility,” whatever that means. “During our first tenure at Carroll Stadium, the environment our fans created gave their Boys in Blue one of the best home-field advantages in all of American soccer,” said team CEO Greg Stremlaw. “We look forward to helping our supporters recreate that magic once again,” and then to get back to demanding a brand-new stadium, because magic gets old and wears out after a while, then you need to buy some new magic!
Oh, right, it’s the Super Bowl again on Sunday, which means it’s time for another round of articles about how much the game does for its host city’s local economy, and then another round of articles showing how pretty much every economist on earth says that’s a load of hooey. I already did my time on this one, so who’s going to pick up the mantle this year — oh good, Noah Pransky has it covered, he’s excellent.
And finally, no MLS lockout just yet, but one could be arriving at any moment. If there’s another thing that people keep predicting will die out but which never does, it’s team owners trying to extract every last dollar from their employees to boost their profits. Fortunately Marc Normandin has that covered, he’s excellent.

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Friday roundup: Jacksonville council holds screaming match about Jaguars subsidy, Braves to charge county for fixing anything that wouldn’t fall out of stadium if you turned it over, plus Texas cricket wars!

November 20, 2020 Neil deMause

I admit, there are some Fridays where I wake up and realize I have to do a news roundup and it just feels like a chore after a long week, and, reader, this was one of those Fridays. But then I looked in my inbox and there was a new Ruthie Baron “This Week In Scams” post for the first time in months, and now I am re-energized for the day ahead! Also despondent about how the fossil fuel industry is trying to catfish us all into thinking global warming isn’t real, but that’s the complex mix of emotions I have come to rely on “This Week In Scams” for.

And speaking of complex mixes of emotions, let’s get to this week’s remaining sports stadium and arena news:

Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Curry on complaints that Jaguars owner Shad Khan’s $200 million development subsidy deal is being rushed through the city council: “What does that mean, it’s rushed? What does that mean? We are following the process we follow as a city. The administration has put forth legislation that includes the development of Lot J. The City Council will take their time and do their work. And then they’ll ultimately have to press a green button or a red button — a yes or a no.” Now I really want to know if the Jacksonville city council actually votes by pushing a green or red button, and if so what they do if a city councilmember has red-green color blindness, and oh hey, what happened at yesterday’s council hearing? “Finger-pointing, name-calling and what some members say was a big embarrassment for government”? Excellent, keep up the good work.
The Atlanta Braves owners have tapped their first $800,000 from their $70 million stadium repair fund, half of which is to be paid for by Cobb County, to pay for … okay, this Marietta Daily Journal article doesn’t say much about what it will pay for, except that one item is a new fence, and there was dispute over whether a fence counted as a repair (which the fund can be used for) or an improvement (which the team is supposed to cover). It also notes: “Mike Plant, president & CEO of Braves Development Company, described capital maintenance costs in 2013 by using the example of taking a building and turning it upside down. The items that would fall out of the building represent general maintenance, which is the responsibility of the Braves, while the items that do not fall out, such as pipes, elevators and concrete, fall under capital maintenance.” This raises all kinds of questions: Would elevators really not fall out of a stadium if you turned it upside down? What if furniture, for example, fell off the floor but landed on an interior ceiling? Would you have to shake the stadium first to see what was loose and just stuck on something? So many questions.
The Grand Prairie city council has approved spending $1.5 million to turn the defunct Texas AirHogs baseball stadium into a pro cricket stadium, which the Dallas Morning News reports “could cement North Texas as a top U.S. market for professional cricket.” (If this sounds familiar, you’re probably thinking of nearby Allen, Texas, which thought about building a cricket stadium a couple of years ago but then thought better of it.) I went to a pro cricket match in the U.S. once, years ago, and there were maybe 100 people in the stands, and later the league apparently folded when none of the players showed up for a game, but surely this will go much better than that.
Angel City F.C. has announced it will be playing games at Banc of California Stadium, which made me look up first what league Angel City F.C. is in (an expansion team in the National Women’s Soccer League) and then what stadium named itself after Banc of California (the Los Angeles F.C. stadium that opened in 2018, I’m pretty sure at no public expense but you never know for sure with these things, and which is not supposed to be called Banc of California Stadium anymore since Banc of California bailed on its naming-rights contract in June) and then why Banc of California insists on spelling “Banc” that way (unclear, but if it was an attempt to put a clean new rebranding on the bank after its creation in a 2013 merger, that maybe didn’t go so well). So now, burdened with this knowledge, I feel obligated to share it — if nothing else, I suppose, it’s a nice little microcosm of life in the early Anthropocene, which may be of interest to future scholars if the cockroaches and microalgae can figure out how to read blogs.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch says that even if the Richmond Flying Squirrels get eliminated in baseball’s current round of minor-league defenestration, “Major League Baseball’s risk is our gain” if the city builds a new stadium that … something about “a multiuse strategy”? The editorial seems to come down to “Okay, the team may get vaporized, but we still want a new stadium, so full speed ahead!”, which is refreshing honesty, at least, maybe?
When I noted yesterday that the USL hands out new soccer franchises like candy, I neglected to mention that a lot of that candy quickly melts on the dashboard and disappears, so thanks to Tim Sullivan of the Louisville Courier Journal for recounting all the USL franchises that have folded over the years.
Six East Coast Hockey League teams are choosing to sit out the current season, and that’s bad news for Reading, home of the Reading Royals, according to Reading Downtown Improvement District chief Chuck Broad, who tells WFMZ-TV, “There is lots of spin-off, economic development, from a hockey game for restaurants and other businesses.” Yeah, probably not, and especially not during a time when hardly anyone would be eating at restaurants anyway because they’re germ-filled death traps, but why not give the local development director a platform to insist otherwise, he seems like a nice guy, right?
In related news, the mayor of Henderson, Nevada, says the new Henderson Silver Knights arena she’s helping build with at least $30 million in tax money is “a gamechanger” for downtown Henderson because “it’s nice to have locations where events can happen in our community.” This after she wrote a column for the Las Vegas Sun saying how great it will be for locals to be able to “attend a variety of events that create the vibrancy for which our city is known” — a vibrancy that apparently Henderson was able to pull off despite not having any locations where events can happen, because that’s just the kind of place Henderson is.
In also related news, the vice president of sales and marketing at New Beginnings Window and Door says that the Hudson Valley Renegades becoming a New York Yankees farm team could be great for his business (which, again, is selling windows and doors) because “the eyeballs are going to be there” for advertising his windows and doors to people driving up from New York City who might want to pick up some windows and doors to take home with them, okay, I have no idea what he’s talking about, seriously, can’t anybody at any remaining extant newspapers ask a followup question?
And in all-too-related news, here’s an entire WTSP article about the new hotel Tampa will have ready for February’s Super Bowl that never even mentions the possibility that nobody will be able to stay in hotels for the Super Bowl because Covid is rampaging across the state. Journalism had a good run.

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Yankees axe Trenton, Staten Island, Charleston teams that received $112m in public stadium money

November 10, 2020 Neil deMause

The long-promised contraction and reorganization of minor-league baseball began in earnest this weekend, as the New York Yankees announced they would be cutting ties with the Trenton Thunder, Staten Island Yankees, and Charleston RiverDogs, while adding affiliations with the Somerset Patriots (formerly in the independent Atlantic League) and Hudson Valley Renegades (formerly a short-season team affiliated with the Tampa Bay Rays). The Thunder and Yankees owners apparently learned the news via Twitter:

https://twitter.com/SIYanks/status/1325840959456874499

Yes, word from Trenton is that they were not notified and learned about it through social media. Yankees AA affiliate will be the Somerset Patriots going forward. Class organization, those Yankees.

— Jim Albright (@njjim1019) November 9, 2020

The Patriots, who play about an hour west of New York City, have long been one of the top-drawing teams in the Atlantic League, though with roughly the same number of fans per game (just over 5,000) as Trenton. Both Trenton and Staten Island have been offered spots in the Atlantic League, reports CBS Sports, but “their futures are unclear at the moment,” which is what happens when you’re suddenly cast into a league that has seen a bunch of teams fold since its 1998 opening, even after getting tens of millions of dollars each in public stadium funding.

Speaking of which, both Trenton and Staten Island got a ton of stadium subsidies as well, money that’s now at risk of going for naught thanks to the elimination of teams. Trenton’s stadium was built in 1994 at a cost of $16.2 million, paid for entirely by Mercer County. Charleston’s stadium was built by the city in 1997 for $19.5 million, with another $6 million in upgrades since to stop it from sinking into the earth. And Staten Island’s was opened in 2001 and cost a staggering $71 million, thanks to cleanup issues at the site, all of which was paid for by the citizens of New York City. It’s possible that both cities will get new indie teams — or even new affiliated teams, though that’s unlikely with the Mets already having the Brooklyn Cyclones and the Philadelphia Phillies four existing affiliates in Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey, and both of them looking to cut back on farm teams as well — but if not, we could see a renewed wave of shuttered new-ish stadiums.

That would be bad news for baseball fans and taxpayers alike, but potentially great news for MLB owners, who would simultaneously cut back on minor-league payrolls, reduce travel costs by consolidating teams near their parent clubs, and potentially get cities and minor-league teams alike into bidding wars to make sure they have chairs when the contraction music stops. We haven’t seen that yet, but you know it’s going to happen: If the Trenton Thunder, say, can’t line up a new big-league affiliation, how long do you think before its owners go back to Mercer County to claim that stadium upgrades are needed to lure away some other town’s team?

The Staten Island Yankees, meanwhile, included in their tweeted press release this line:

The Staten Island Yankees made every effort to accommodate MLB and New York Yankees requirements, including securing a commitment from New York City for ballpark upgrades

Wait, they secured what now? This was news to me, and I followed New York City ballpark spending even more closely than that on the rest of the planet; I’ve reached out for comment to the New York City Economic Development Corporation, the quasi-public agency that owns and operates the Staten Island stadium (though it’s been trying to ditch the “operates” part), and will post here when I learn anything more.

All this is certainly only the first show among many, with 29 other teams still set to announce which affiliates will be cast adrift. Just last night, in fact, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that the Giants are expected to ditch the Augusta GreenJackets and likely the Richmond Flying Squirrels as well. It’s still unclear when minor-league baseball will resume, thanks to the pandemic, but whenever it does, it could look very different than it has for the last several decades.

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