Shouldn’t posting items more regularly during the week leave less news to round up on Fridays? I’m pretty sure that’s how it’s supposed to work, but here I am on Friday with even more browser tabs open than usual, and I’m sure someone is still going to complain that I left out, say, the latest on arena site discussions in Saskatoon. I guess lemme type really fast and see how many I can get through before my fingers fall off:
- The Washington Nationals will host their first-ever World Series games starting tonight, which means it’s time to look at whether the city’s $534 million stadium expense has paid off (the mayor who approved it says yes, a local economist says no!) and at what’s happened to some of the business owners who were forcibly relocated to make way for the stadium (some of them are going to the games, but that doesn’t mean they’re happy about the whole eviction thing!). This is all presumably more interesting than actually watching the games on TV, which fewer and fewer people are doing — I know I’m probably not a representative data point, but I for one haven’t been watching much because I’ve reached my capacity for 1) postseason baseball, 2) John Smoltz, and 3) that Postmates ad where the guy falls out the window.
- The California Air Resources Board still doesn’t want to sign off on the Los Angeles Clippers‘ proposed arena, as far as I can understand it because the board thinks more arenas mean more events and thus more people driving fossil-fuel-burning cars to them? I mean, maybe, but wouldn’t this be an argument for banning every new sports venue, let alone every shopping mall or anything else you have to drive to? Not that I’m opposed to that, mind you, just trying to understand the logic here.
- MLS commissioner Don Garber says that the expansion fee for the league’s next new team will be more than $200 million. despite MLS teams’ average operating income being around –$2.8 million a year. Ahem.
- The Atlanta Dream are moving to a smaller arena nearer to the airport, which should do wonders for attendance by people who like to fly to other cities to watch WNBA games. Or maybe people who want to catch a WNBA game while waiting to change flights?
- The Los Angeles Dodgers owners are spending $100 million on a new centerfield plaza to include “food, entertainment, and a statue of Sandy Koufax,” and some local residents are concerned this will create more traffic and noise. No, I can’t explain anything in that sentence, just chalk it up to 2019 being unutterably stupid.
- “This premium era of sports—taking the largely populist experience of going to a game and turning it into a luxurious one—began out of necessity. As player salaries rose in the 1970s, so did the need for teams to find new ways to generate revenue,” writes a magazine for rich people, which gets completely backwards the causal relationship between player salaries and ticket prices, but I guess rich people prefer to read that high ticket prices are the fault of greedy players rather than themselves having too much money to burn.
- Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban says he will take another “five, six years” to decide whether to keep his team at its current arena, which is all of 18 years old.
- A former Mobile BayBears exec says Mobile’s Hank Aaron Stadium may never get another minor-league baseball team now that the BayBears are leaving town, because the stadium is too antiquated. Hank Aaron Stadium in 22 years old.
- The Milwaukee Bucks are replacing 3,500 cup holders at their one-year-old arena, because the old ones were no longer state of the art.
- The Atlanta Falcons suck, and nobody wants to go see their games even if they do play in a snazzy new stadium with $2 hot dogs.
- NYC F.C. still wants to build a new stadium of its own, and a poll of South Bronx residents and business owners shows they’d be fine with that, so long as the team pays property taxes, unlike the Yankees. Hey, what ever happened to that rumored plan to rush through approval of a stadium before Election Day, anyway?
- A reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal went to the trouble of timing how long it takes to drive from the Raiders‘ new off-site parking lots to their new stadium in “normal traffic,” which would be very useful if only the presence of a 65,000-seat NFL stadium wasn’t likely to change what “normal traffic” will be. Seriously, does the Review-Journal even have editors anymore, or have the bots taken that over too?