Northern Colorado Owlz – Field of Schemes

Friday roundup: If not for John Fisher schadenfreude, we wouldn’t have any freude at all

July 4, 2025 Neil deMause

Hello, Canadians, and Americans who couldn’t find a way to get out of town for the holiday weekend! This Friday roundup is handcrafted especially for you!

I wish the news were better, but we have to go with what we’ve got:

The latest bad news from Sacramento: So few people want to go to A’s games that tickets are selling for a fraction of what they were at the start of the season, leaving season ticket holders with a massive case of buyers’ remorse: “It is really rough,” one told SF Gate. “I’ve given away a bunch of them. I’ve given them to friends. The other day, I set a record: I sold $90 seats for 12 bucks. So, it’s kind of pretty bad.” At least worries that season ticket holders will miss out on playoff games if they’re not playing in Sacramento are probably moot: The A’s can’t see a playoff spot with a telescope right now, and that’s even before they trade their best pitcher because he keeps complaining about how much their stadium sucks.
Speaking of the A’s, I got quoted a lot in this Guardian article on their LOLgroundbreaking in Las Vegas, check it out if you enjoy John Fisher schadenfreude. Economist J.C. Bradbury is also cited as speculating that the A’s could end up in Salt Lake City or elsewhere next season, which he rushed to clarify doesn’t mean he thinks SLC is a long-term solution either (“too small,” yup, checks out).
Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie needs to make a decision on whether to build a new stadium to replace their 22-year-old one, says CBS Sports, because “the clock is ticking due to the lease expiring in seven years” and no no no no that is not how leases work, you can renew them, I just can’t even. Lurie hasn’t actually said anything about wanting a new stadium beyond being asked if he’d like a roof on one and saying he’s “torn,” but rest assured that the sports media is going to keep up the pressure for one regardless.
The Niagara Reporter took a look at Niagara Falls Mayor Robert Restaino’s plans to build a $200 million hockey arena and determined that to meet its revenue projections it would have to attract a junior league hockey team (as yet uncertain), host 60 concerts a year (typical similarly sized venues average 12 to 20), and host 60 youth tournaments a year, which the Reporter deems “impossible” — and even then still would fall short of meeting the city’s $13 million a year in debt service.
“Pioneer League’s Northern Colorado Owlz fold after playing start of season in Colorado Springs following being evicted from their Windsor stadium for ‘health and safety’ reasons and are replaced by new Colorado Springs team with all of the same Owlz players and staff” is quite the story, if only for all the interesting questions it raises about when a sports franchise is no longer the same sports franchise. Also Colorado Springs already had a Pioneer League team, and they’re called the Rocky Mountain Vibes? So very many questions.
In case you needed more reason to block the Daily Mail from your news feeds after it was banned as a source by Wikipedia for being unreliable, this article (Wayback link, they don’t deserve the traffic) headlined “NFL team finally given green light to build new $600 million stadium” when it’s a $2.4 billion stadium and the Cleveland Browns owners still want another $600 million to go with the $600 million in state money they just got should be the icing on the cake.
How are subsidies going in the non-sports world, you ask? Well, California just raised its tax credit for film and TV production from $330 million a year to $750 million, meaning 35% of all filming costs in the state will now be covered by taxpayers. This has worked out extraordinarily poorly for states in the past, and stories of wasteful tax expenditures continue to pile up, but elected officials keep on insisting it’s necessary to keep economic activity from leaving the state, sound familiar?

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ESPN: Minor-league downsizing working out okay for team owners, there’s no one else we should ask, right?

January 31, 2022 Neil deMause

ESPN ran a long article on Friday about people who’d decried Major League Baseball’s forced elimination of 42 affiliated minor-league teams after the 2019 season, and who now say actually, the whole thing worked out okay for them:

“We had a great season, and we had a blast doing it,” [Missoula PaddleHeads] owner Peter Davis says. “You really were hamstrung as an affiliated team … yes, we loved being an independent team.”

“I was wrong,” says Jeff Katofsky, the owner of the now-independent Northern Colorado Owlz and a vocal critic last year. “I thought fans cared more about affiliation than they actually do. … I’m encouraged. I would’ve told you it was going to be a s— show, and it wasn’t.”

“The first initial reaction was ‘change is bad, change is bad, I want status quo,'” says Andy Shea, the CEO of two teams that lost affiliation. “Now that I’ve realized it, the quality of baseball is better, the name recognition is better, and there’s still that autonomy that we have.”

And so on. It’s nice that being kicked out of affiliated ball and into independent leagues has worked out better for some teams than the predictions of imminent doom that were rampant when the downsizing plan was first announced, with minor-league owners saying they would never be able to survive if they had to pay their own players rather than getting them for free — well, really in exchange for affiliation fees — from their parent clubs.

But for an article headlined “‘I was wrong’: Why MLB’s restructuring of the minors turned out mostly better than expected,” there are two big caveats. First off, as becomes clear further down in the article, plenty of now-former affiliated-ball owners are not thrilled with how things turned out, including owners of four of the eight teams (Staten Island Yankees, Norwich Sea Unicorns, Salem-Keizer Volcanoes and Tri-City ValleyCats) that straight-up disappeared, who are pressing forward with their antitrust lawsuit against MLB. (Other owners of defunct teams, ESPN notes, couldn’t join the suit because they also own teams that survived, and had to sign away their rights to sue in order to retain those affiliations.)

The other problem should already be obvious: ESPN didn’t interview anyone other than minor-league baseball owners — and one MLB executive — about how things are working out. But the slashing of the affiliated minors was never about screwing over MLB owners’ somewhat less-filthy-rich minor-league cousins; it was first and foremost a gambit to force a bunch of salaried minor-leaguers to pay for free while creating a sword to hold over the heads of minor-league cities that didn’t pay for stadium upgrades. And on those counts, it’s victimizing exactly who it was expected to: The unpaid Draft Leagues may be working out for some team owners, but the story likely looks different for players who lost their (poorly paid) jobs playing baseball and now effectively have to audition for affiliated ball as summer interns; and minor-league stadium subsidy demands are going gangbusters, as “give us money or we’ll vaporize your team” has proven to be exactly as effective a threat as you’d think, notwithstanding MLB’s supposed “promise that no town would lose baseball because of de-affiliation.”

Now, writing an article about how minor-league downsizing has affected minor-league players or minor-league cities would be a slightly tougher lift than the one that ESPN wrote — not only would you have to track down players who’ve been frozen out of paid jobs and city officials who’ve been extorted out of stadium cash, but they might not be as eager to share their thoughts, given that they’re now at the mercy of MLB’s new system for their very baseball existence. (Actually, you could say the same for the minor-league owners who were interviewed: It’s not always easy to tell the difference between “happy with how things turned out” and “trying to take lemons and make lemonade,” especially when you’re talking to people who are still reliant on MLB to provide the lemons.) But an entire article that evaluates a power move against players and small city taxpayers by talking to a bunch of millionaire owners … is on-brand for ESPN, let’s just leave it at that.

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Friday roundup: Phoenix to get USL stadium with giant disappearing soccer ball, plus more fallout from MLB slashing minor league teams

December 11, 2020 Neil deMause

Too much going on this week to have time for more than a brief intro, but I do want to note that “’Company announces advertising campaign’ is not a story, no matter how easily that campaign can be metabolized by the publications it’s aimed at” is something that should be tattooed on the foreheads of all journalists, even if it is a quote from an article about Pantone colors.

And now, how sports team owners and their friends are trying to rip you off this week:

Phoenix Rising F.C., which has been talking about building a new stadium for a while, apparent broke ground on one weeks ago and nobody noticed until they announced it yesterday. The new stadium, to be built on Gila River Indian Community land, will “increase stadium seating by more than 35%” (their current stadium, a popup model erected in Scottsdale on the cheap, holds 6,200, so that would imply about 8,370 seats in the new place) and feature such amenities as “permanent restrooms,” and is supposed to be ready by May 2021, so we’re probably still talking off-the-rack bleachers that can be installed quickly. “No funding or cost details were given,” reports the Arizona Republic, but “no budget was exceeded from the Gila River Indian Community side,” according to a Gila River exec, whatever that means. Also no word on whether the soccer complex will still include a robot dog showroom, but new renderings show it will at least have a giant soccer ball in the parking lot — hey wait, in this rendering it’s missing! Somebody get on this breaking story, stat!
More fallout from yesterday’s minor-league baseball decimation announcement: San Antonio judge/stadium booster/stadium namesake Nelson Wolff blamed the Missions‘ demotion to Double-A as being “because nothing could ever get done on a new stadium”; bwahahaha, this is going just as baseball’s barons planned it!
Also, the new stadium complex of the Northern Colorado Owlz (formerly the Orem Owlz, spelled that way to honor the Utah Jazz, which were named for the favorite musical style of, uh, New Orleans) will bring in “roughly 1 million to 1.2 million visitors annually,” according to a city official, despite the Owlz having been relegated to an indie league that may or may not survive for long.
Also also, the recently-demoted Fresno Grizzlies got a $400,000-a-year rent break from the city of Fresno this week, in exchange for reducing the city’s capital improvement fund contributions by $250,000 a year and the team sharing $52,500 a year in naming-rights money with the city, which still seems like a pretty bad deal for taxpayers. It’s a percentage deal, 15% of naming rights revenue over $650,000, so Fresno could break even on this if a new naming-rights contract comes to, let’s see … $1.65 million a year. For a now-Single-A team’s stadium. Good luck with that.
And also also also, for those wondering “Why can’t cast-adrift minor-league teams just go independent and dispense with an MLB affiliation?” (you know who you are, you in the comments), a minority owner of one eliminated team that turned down an MLB Draft League spot told me (asking for anonymity because they aren’t authorized to speak for the franchise) that when they crunched the numbers, they figured out that they’d have to sell nearly 3,000 tickets a game plus get lease breaks from their home city to make it work. And the economics would presumably only be worse for a full indie league, where the players would actually have to be paid.
If you were wondering what ever happened with the Jacksonville Jaguars‘ $200 million Lot J development subsidy vote, Jags execs agreed to a delay until January after realizing they didn’t have enough votes on the council to force one sooner. Meanwhile, city councilmember Randy DeFoor asked for Jaguars owner Shad Khan to agree to repay $150 million of the money if the team moves when their lease expires in 2030, calling it “insulting, quite frankly, that you wouldn’t agree to that”; team president Mark Lamping replied that Khan’s “actions speak for themselves” in his commitment to the Jaguars “playing in Jacksonville forever,” so why muddy up these vague promises with enforceable contract language, right?
The new operator of the Nassau Coliseum is telling investors to put their money into his other projects because the arena “generates little to no revenue, and it continues to lose substantial sums of money each month.” The county should definitely keep giving this guy rent breaks, you can’t buy word-of-mouth like this! Or wouldn’t want to, I always get those two mixed up.
In non-sports subsidy news, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos got “tens of millions of dollars” in Opportunity Zone tax breaks for their private spaceship programs, and Tom Brady got almost $1 million in Paycheck Protection Program money and then went and bought a giant boat, and if you haven’t figured out yet that even broadly available government business relief programs get snapped up first by the wealthiest and most-connected people, I don’t know what else I can say to convince you.
New England Revolution owner Bob Kraft still wants a soccer-only stadium in Boston “eventually,” check, same as it ever was.
Inter Miami‘s stadium is going to host a sports management school starting next June, and no, I can’t tell if this will be under the bleachers or out on the pitch to help with social distancing, assuming we still need that then.
Someone in Las Vegas crashed his drone into the Raiders‘ stadium last month, damaged a panel worth $5,000–$8,000, asked the security guard for his drone back, then drove off in a BMW rental car. This really has nothing to do with stadium subsidies, but I cannot overstate how much I enjoyed typing that sentence.

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