“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.”
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!
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 Grizzliesgot 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.
