Category: Uncategorized

Manfred: Threat of A’s moving to Vegas not scary enough? What if I waived relocation fees? Booooo!

access_time personNeil deMause

It turns out that MLB commissioner Rob Manfred didn’t only express optimism about a Tampa Bay Rays stadium deal and pessimism about an Oakland A’s one during his Friday appearance on Chris Russo’s SiriusXM show. Reports the San Francisco Chronicle:

In a weekend radio interview, Manfred said for the first time he would waive a relocation fee to make it easier for Fisher to leave Oakland.

Whoa! That … sounds familiar, actually?

Major League Baseball doesn’t plan to charge the Oakland Athletics a relocation fee if the team moves to Las Vegas — a rare accommodation that shows the league is concerned about the team’s ability to find a viable home, The Post has learned…

It has been speculated that if the A’s left Oakland, the team’s home of 54 years, they might need to pay a relocation fee as high as $1 billion. But MLB held its owners meeting earlier this month and a relocation fee was not discussed in an open session, sources said.

That was from the New York Post back in June, and was based on unnamed sources, so yeah, sure, I guess this is the first time Manfred has said it out loud in public. But the idea that there was some $1 billion relocation fee that was being waived by the league for the A’s to move to Vegas didn’t make sense at the time, as I wrote then:

The notion that A’s owner John Fisher would move from the 6th-largest market in the U.S. to the 40th and pay $1 billion for the privilege of doing so was always extremely silly, so the idea that this is money he’s now being absolved of paying is bizarre — unless you take it as Manfred, or at least some A’s-friendly functionary deep in MLB’s offices who can claim to have “knowledge of the situation,” wanting to do Fisher a solid in his move threats with Oakland as a key vote on the use of port land approaches, which is probably what this is.

And it’s probably still that: University of San Francisco sports economics professor Daniel Rascher told the Chronicle that this “may be cheap talk from the commissioner” to “unclog the slow process of getting shovels in the ground.” Yes, handing Las Vegas to the A’s would mean forgoing any expansion fees if Vegas were to eventually get a brand-new team — but then, those expansion fees are meant as much to cover the loss of income to other owners by dividing the league revenue pie into thinner slices as anything else.

Anyway, the Commissioner Rule still applies: Don’t take anything they say 100% seriously, because they are primarily PR figureheads who work for the owners, not for the sport. One day a commissioner will hold a press conference and nobody will come, but that day is not this week.

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Friday roundup: Jays plan $¯\_(ツ)_/¯ in SkyDome renovations, figure it out yourself, journalism can’t help you

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday! I don’t know about you, but for me this was a great week: I got a new coffee mug, and also it’s now almost over! The week, I mean, not the mug. You’re smart, you probably figured that out already.

And now, how’s about some news:

  • The Toronto Blue Jays owners are planning $230 million in renovations to the stadium formerly known as SkyDome but now named for the team’s corporate owners, or maybe it’s $300 million in renovations, what is money, anyway, especially Canadian money? The CBC’s report says that the redo will include saying “goodbye to the nosebleeds,” as the top 500 level deck will be “completely removed and replaced with non-ticketed spaces,” and oh, here’s a rendering with the 500 level still very much visible, hmm. The stadium is owned by the Jays after Ontario built it and took a huge bath on it, so presumably the renovations will be funded by the team, though Jays president Mark Shapiro called this just a “medium-term solution,” so there’ll still be plenty of time to demand a new stadium later, don’t worry.
  • WPRI in Providence breaks down why Pawtucket’s new USL soccer stadium will cost taxpayers $60 milllion and not $45.5 million like its developers claim, which is helpful and all, except when you add up all the numbers it actually looks more like $80 million? ($46.2 million in state tax breaks, $10 million from the city, plus $27 million in additional money redirected from state infrastructure spending — yup, that’d be more than $80 million.) The fog of stadium wars is soupy indeed.
  • If the Philadelphia 76ers owners succeed in building their own Center City arena and no longer renting from the Flyers, “The companies that would benefit are Live Nation and AEG, because they would have two buildings in Philly to play off each other, so the rent expense would go down,” former Spectrum manager Ed Rubinstein tells Venues Now. “That’s the reason why we never wanted another arena built.” This would be the Sixers owners’ problem, on the one hand, but also Philly taxpayers’ problem if the idea of giving the Sixers arena a giant tax break would be to help the local economy when it would only end up shuffling concert spending around from one part of town to another.
  • There are new Tennessee Smokies stadium renderings, and — oh, come on, you’re not even trying! I get that the plans need to be downscaled some because the stadium is over budget, but at least you can afford some clip art fireworks or people playing random sports. Show some self-respect.
  • Somebody dug up this consulting report that everyone’s favorite economist-for-team-hire Andy Zimbalist did on mixed martial arts — okay, sure — and I must report that previous reporting that Zimbalist earns $225 an hour for his services is out of date: His “customary rate,” he wrote in the 2017 document, is actually $850 an hour. And that’s before any surcharges Zimbalist now imposes for supply-chain issues. Please draw your own conclusions as to whether that rate could be an incentive to report the findings that your client is hoping for, or at least look really hard for them.
  • Your occasional reminder that sports team owners don’t have a monopoly on getting billions of dollars in public money for no damn reason: Here’s a report on Kansas giving Panasonic $800 million in subsidies for a battery factory in exchange for a commitment of zero new jobs, and here’s Bernie Sanders talking about how a new bipartisan bill to compete with China on electronics somehow involves giving $76 billion to microchip companies. The New York Times called the latter “a remarkable and rare consensus in a polarized Congress,” which is both true and all too telling about what our elected representatives (and major newspapers) can agree on.
  • “It’s morally corrupt that new arenas for professional teams worth billions of dollars are majorly publicly funded — especially when the tax dollars could be going to other areas in the city in actual need of the money,” writes Norman Transcript sports reporter intern Clemente Almanza of devoting public dollars to a new Oklahoma City Thunder arena like the team’s owners want, “but” — you knew there was a “but” coming — “that comes with the territory of having a franchise. 18 of the 29 NBA arenas are owned by a government multiplicity” — he’s an intern, he can’t be expected to own a dictionary — and “losing the Thunder would cause catastrophic levels of damage that the state would never recover.” Um, you don’t want to recover the damage … hey, Norman Transcript, don’t you have any copy editors? No? I guess “let the intern sit down and keyboard out a column on why a new arena is necessary” is just how journalism goes these days — that coffee mug gets righter and righter every day.
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Erie County: Bills stadium to be built atop college sports fields, did we forget to mention that?

access_time personNeil deMause

Erie County officials released some details Friday about plans for the new Buffalo Bills stadium that will cost taxpayers $1 billion while the Bills’ owners recoup all their costs from PSL sales before the stadium even opens, and it turns out the county will also turn over 242 acres of public land for the project. And 56 of those acres are part of the Erie Community College south campus, some which is currently occupied by the college’s athletic fields.

Here’s the Bills project plan, and a satellite image of the same site today:

As you can see, the college’s track, football field, and baseball fields would all be turned over to the Bills to use for parking — as would several existing parking lots around the campus. (The old Bills stadium site would also become parking.) Where community college students would park on game days is left unspecified.

Turning over a ton of county land to the Bills — technically, to the state, so that the Bills owners don’t have to pay property tax on it, but they would be the ones getting free use of the land — is an additional public cost, obviously, though the county didn’t specify the value of the property. Large undeveloped parcels in Orchard Park go for anywhere from $6,000 to $17,000 per acre, so we’re probably only talking a few million dollars’ worth of land at the most, though Erie Community College students may feel like pricing their athletic fields as unoccupied is a bit unfair, just as Bronx residents did when New York City built a new New York Yankees stadium atop their public ballfields. (ECC’s south campus is the least-used of its three campuses, but then, one also might ask about the propriety of giving away land for free to a pair of NFL billionaires from a college that is facing layoffs to make ends meet.)

So, what do locals think about all this? Let’s turn to Spectrum News 1, with an article helpfully titled “Western New Yorkers react to Bills stadium proposal“:

“I think it’s good for the area,” said Jill Weigelt, a Bills fan and Buffalo native visiting from Baltimore, Maryland. “Eventually, I think it’s going to bring more people, especially the Mafia. You know, we all like to travel so, especially people like me who came from here maybe and now there will be more incentive to come back up, catch a game and be in the new stadium so it’s pretty exciting.”

Uhh, people born in Buffalo who now live in Baltimore are not actually so much “Western New Yorkers” as “Maryland residents who used to live in Western New York.” The piece later goes on to quote an ex-Orchard Park resident who was visiting from Florida, and what the hell, did this reporter go around interviewing people at the airport? The article itself contradicts its headline, saying it was surveying “fans,” but even then it’s unclear where these fans were found. And there definitely seems to have been no attempt to talk to people who live or go to classes near the new stadium site, making the headline deserving of at least a couple of pants on fire.

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Gov. Hogan may or may not require Orioles nonrelocation clause before giving Angeloses $600m

access_time personNeil deMause

The Baltimore Sun took up the question today of what exactly is the deal with getting the Orioles owners to sign a new lease in exchange for getting $600 million in renovation subsidies to Camden Yards, and learned that, well, this for starters:

“The Orioles have represented to us that he [John Angelos] is CEO of the Orioles and Controlling Person under the MLB Agreement, and MSA will continue to work with him and team leadership until we are told differently,” Thomas Kelso, the stadium authority’s chairman, said in reply to questions from The Baltimore Sun. “We have an excellent working relationship with John and the team’s senior leadership.”

John Angelos, who claims to be in charge of the Orioles despite being sued by his brother over leadership of the team, has represented that he is in charge of the Orioles, and the state will keep negotiating a lease with him until told otherwise! By somebody! This is the opposite of reassuring, but still resulted in the Sun headline “Angelos family split won’t halt lease negotiations to keep Orioles in Baltimore, stadium authority says,” so it seems to have done its job, PR-wise.

What else?

The current lease contains a clause barring “the relocation of the Baltimore Orioles Major League Baseball Team from Baltimore, Maryland.” … While it’s not certain that any new lease would contain a nonrelocation clause, the stadium authority said in a statement to The Sun that “clauses similar to the one in our existing lease are common to such agreements.”

Wait, it’s not certain that in exchange for the subsidy, the state would even require the team owners to promise not to move? Isn’t that the whole point of the $600 million, such that it has a point? What did state officials have to say about this?

Spokespersons for [Gov. Larry] Hogan, a Republican, did not return messages Monday seeking comment on whether they would require a nonrelocation clause in any lease they approved, but a spokeswoman for Democratic State Comptroller Peter Franchot said that would be the case for him.

“The comptroller would absolutely require that those terms be in any new lease,” Franchot spokeswoman Susan O’Brien said in an interview.

That’s even less reassuring, even if Franchot is running for governor and Hogan is term-limited out. A lease extension could easily be agreed upon before a new governor takes office — Kelso told the Sun that lease talks are in a “deliberative” phase while the two sides figure out exactly what to spend the $600 million on. So whether Hogan plans on tying the Orioles to Baltimore or letting the team’s owners, whoever they turn out to be, to demand even more money down the road is kind of a huge deal. It may be time for my to unleash one of my patented fruitless messages to the governor’s office, watch out, interns who are paid to hit “delete” on any incoming emails!

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Anaheim mayor attacks councilmember for violating secrecy by revealing secret Angels stadium meeting was held in secret

access_time personNeil deMause

In the first public discussion about the Angel Stadium land sale in months, Anaheim City Council members on Tuesday night traded a series of insults and allegations about whether there was a conspiracy to privately sell the stadium to team owners.

Ooh, “insults and allegations,” this sounds good!

To recap briefly: Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno and the Anaheim council are currently facing two separate challenges to their 2020 agreement to sell Moreno $500 million worth of stadium land for $150 million to help finance stadium upgrades. First, California’s state housing department has declared the land sale to be illegal under the state’s Surplus Land Act, because Anaheim didn’t seek affordable housing developers for the site first, as the 2019 law requires. And second, a separate lawsuit is charging that the sale violated public meetings laws by being secretly approved by the council in private, with both former city manager Chris Zapata and councilmember Jose Moreno testifying that the council agreed to the deal before holding any public meetings at all.

That royally pissed off Anaheim Mayor Harry Sidhu, who launched into some of those aforementioned insults and allegations at least night’s council meeting:

“What you said in your declaration … is absolutely embarrassing to the city and it was misinformation,” he said. “You have violated our closed session agenda item that was there to discuss and you have never got the authority from the council to discuss with anybody outside of the council.”

Calling out a councilmember for violating the secrecy of a closed-doors meeting that you’re getting sued for holding in secret is pretty ballsy, to say the least. (The Voice of OC’s Spencer Custodio also notes that Sidhu hasn’t filed any formal court declarations contradicting Jose Moreno and Zapata’s statements, preferring to take his argument to the court of public insults and allegations.) The city of Anaheim also published a Facebook post last Friday that claimed to catch Jose Moreno in a contradiction for saying at a December 2019 council meeting that that was “the first time we’ve had a chance to discuss, deliberate, understand fully together in public — actually just with each other — the major deal points here,” so how could anything have been decided before that in secret, huh? Especially not at that secret meeting that the council hasn’t authorized anyone to talk about!

Jose Moreno fired back last night: “It’s disappointing the public information office has been politicized and been used to say a council member has not been truthful. In a disturbing and peculiar action, the city is arguing … it is not allowed in court. How will the public know if the city council violated a public meetings law if the violation occurred in a secret, sacrosanct meeting?”

There was more squabbling at the council meeting, which you can read in Custodio’s full article if you like. Both the court challenge and the state ruling are likely to come to a head soon, with the lawsuit set to go to court on February 14, while the city has to respond to the state’s Surplus Land Act verdict by February 7, either by proposing an alternate solution (there have been no reports of any in the works) or by agreeing to pay a $96 million fine, which would reduce the city’s take on its $500 million in land to a mere $54 million. Here’s a question: If Anaheim pays the fine, then loses its lawsuit and has to undo the sale on secrecy grounds, does it get its $96 million back? Has the council authorized anyone to answer that, or is it a secret?

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Trains to new Islanders arena are empty of fans, full of sadness

access_time personNeil deMause

I almost headed out to the new New York Islanders arena for the team’s first two home games last weekend to see how the Rube Goldbergesque temporary train travel situation was, while everyone waits for the full completion of a new $105 million station for the arena, about 40% of which will be paid for by state taxpayers. But, you know, that would have required leaving the house, so instead I did the 21st-century journalist thing of just looking at Twitter — and at least there, people are not happy.

Much of the reporting comes from the Long Island commuting site The LIRR Today, which started by doing headcounts of how many people were riding trains in the vicinity (QVG is Queens Village, the stop where riders from Long Island need to get off and take a shuttle bus while waiting for the new Elmont station to be open in both directions):

Yep, that’s not much. In a longer web post, The LIRR Today reports that “on both nights, ridership was only about 5% of the 17,255 fans in attendance,” so clearly pretty much everyone was driving to the games, either because they didn’t want to deal with shuttle buses or just because they would rather drive. The state’s environmental impact study “projected potential adverse traffic impacts” if anything less than 12% of fans took the train, and a further study projected that once the Elmont station was open, “24% of attendees would take the LIRR for a Saturday game and 30% for a weekday game.” So clearly there’s a ways to go there.

As for those who took the train, things did not always go well for them:

https://twitter.com/tnminutmen/status/1462628484803706883?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1462628484803706883%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thelirrtoday.com%2F2021%2F11%2Fopening-weekend-at-ubs-arena-weak-on.html

I could get into details about exactly how the train transfers are supposed to work here, but suffice to say: You can’t get anywhere without switching trains, and the trains aren’t timed to allow for quick transfers, which led to a lot of standing around on platforms waiting for the next train. This is a very LIRR thing to have happen, but it also has people wondering why the state is spending all this money on a new train station right next to two other stations (the Queens Village stop and the existing Belmont Park rail spur, which like the temporary Elmont station only works in one direction) instead of just running a ton of free shuttle buses:

But, of course, the rationale for the new train station wasn’t that it made any sense, but rather that the Islanders owners reeeeeally wanted it, because half the point of a new arena was so that it would have better transit access than the old Nassau Coliseum, which required taking a train to a bus. To their credit, they’re splitting the cost with the state; less to their credit, even $41 million in state funding is $41 million that the LIRR could be using on something else, whether figuring out how to get people between the train stations and the arena or something entirely non-hockey-related.

All this could change once the Elmont station is fully open, of course, though there’s also another problem with the idea that commuters will just hop off the train on their way home, check out an Islanders game, then resume their journey afterwards:

UBS Arena is one of an increasing number of venues with an unfriendly “no bag policy”.  Only impractically small clutch bags can be taken inside the arena.

This will make things difficult for those looking to take the train from work to an event on weeknights—if you can’t take your bag into the arena, you either need to leave everything behind at your office, leave your belongings behind at the bag check outside the venue (which I would never do if I was carrying my laptop or had any work papers with me), or stop off someplace else to leave your bag. This almost requires going home or getting back to your car first so you can leave your belongings behind before getting to the arena.

This was all thought through really well! Maybe in a distant future where the Elmont station is operating in both directions and no one carries laptops or work papers because all that resides in their brain chips, that $41 million in state money will end up being well spent. For now, though, it looks more like burning a pile of money so that a handful of people can have terrible train rides to the game, which, again, is very on-brand for the LIRR, but maybe something the state didn’t entirely need to do just so the Islanders could advertise their games as “now accessible by train (sorta)!”

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Friday roundup: NFL owner throwdown over St. Louis Rams lawsuit, and other prospective miniseries pilots

access_time personNeil deMause

Sorry for the lateness of today’s roundup, but I had to get a haircut in advance of an interview about the Buffalo Bills stadium plans. (I mean, I needed a haircut anyway, but this made it important to do so on Roundup Friday. This is probably more than you wanted to know about my haircut.) Lots of news this week, let’s get to it!

  • ESPN did what it does best yesterday, publishing a long fly-in-the-wall report on this week’s NFL meetings based on, you know what, who cares who its sources are when the resulting story includes Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke threatening to sue to get out of his promise to indemnify the NFL against lawsuits from St. Louis over the team’s move out of that city, and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft griping that he wouldn’t have sat on the L.A. relocation committee if he’d known all the shit that would come with it, and Jerry Jones defending his pal (and stadium business partner) Kroenke and blaming the mess on one unnamed owner who gave a “shaky” deposition. This is way better than whatever that HBO show is about rich people that I won’t watch because it looks awful! Somebody greenlight Sunday Night Kroenke already, I’m out of stuff to hate-watch.
  • The Cleveland Guardians owners are being sued by a men’s roller derby team that, whoops, is also called the Cleveland Guardians and has been since before the baseball team changed its name, maybe somebody should have checked that? You would think that the baseball team owners would have simply paid off the derby team, and it appears that’s what the derby team wanted, but the baseball team made an offer that was “four figures” and then “surreptitiously filed” a trademark application for the name in Mauritius. Actually, forget the Kroenke show, I want to watch Cleveland Trademark Law.
  • The owners of the new KC NWSL women’s soccer team (catchy name) say they plan to build a “privately financed” $70 million, 11,000-seat stadium in downtown Kansas City, which sounds very promising, but we’ve certainly heard that before about stadiums that turned out to get tax breaks or free land or other under-the-table subsidies. So what’s the deal here? How much is KC NWSL paying to lease the land from Port KC, the local port authority? There are roughly a billion articles on the announcement, but none bother to go into specifics, so let’s file this one under TBD for the moment; in the meantime, here’s your requisite vaportecture of soccer fans watching, naturally, fireworks.
  • Bronx businesses are less and less thrilled with NYC F.C.‘s proposed soccer stadium, and more and more interested in getting the New York Yankees to actually start paying property taxes. I wouldn’t count on the latter anytime soon since the whole Yankees deal was structured to allow the team owners to pay off their stadium bonds with fake property taxes, and having to pay real property taxes would mess that up, plus the Steinbrenners are not going to want to pay more taxes nohow; but also it doesn’t look real likely that the NYC F.C. stadium is getting built either, so glass half-full, maybe?
  • There’s a new snag for the proposed Arizona Coyotes arena in Tempe, as the Phoenix Aviation Advisory Board has determined that arriving planes at nearby Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport would only pass “maybe 400 feet” above its roof when approaching to land. There are other airports with less headroom, but still the board’s deputy aviation manager noted that other projects have had to address issues around “the various building materials — the glare, the lighting, the way navigator equipment kind of would bound off surfaces. So it’s not as easy to just say, ‘Well, tell us your height and as long as you keep it under that we should be OK.'”
  • Not really stadium news except the team in question just got a ton of public money for one, but MLB commissioner Rob Manfred came out in favor of the Atlanta Braves‘ name and fan practice of chanting vaguely Native American things while waving their hands in imitation of chopping someone with a tomahawk, justifying it by saying: “The Native American community in that region is wholly supportive of the Braves program, including the Chop. For me, that’s kind of the end of the story.” The National Congress of American Indians begs to differ, as do some members of the same local tribe the team owners cite as supporting the name and the chop. Game 3 of the World Series is in Atlanta tonight, you can just feel the excitement!

 

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Friday roundup: Guardians, Rays, Bills updates, plus soccer vaportecture meets Death Race!

access_time personNeil deMause

First off, thanks to all the FoS subscribers for your patience with the bumpy launch of posts-by-email: The good news is that I think I’ve finally landed on a solution that will consistently get the latest news into your inboxes — and better yet, do so as soon as the posts are live, rather than waiting till 10 am Eastern time like the old system did. The glorious future will arrive soon, I’m sure!

But this weekly roundup post is not about the future, but about the recent past, although it’s past events about requests for subsidies in the future, which — you know what, let me just shut up and get to the news:

  • The Cleveland Guardians owners’ request for up to $400 million in public money for stadium renovations had its first hearing this week from the Cleveland city council’s finance committee, and several committee members said they’d have a tough time selling constituents on handing over more money to the local rich guy: “I hope this conversation gets to be about the economic importance in our community and not just about rich sports owners,” said councilmember Blaine Griffin said. “I have families that are struggling every day just to keep a roof over their heads,” said councilmember Mike Polensek. “This one’s going to be a hard sell, and I understand the economic impact. When everyone comes to the table, come prepared,” said councilmember Brian Kazy. The committee didn’t vote on anything, though, so it’s tough to say whether this was an indication that these councilmembers will actually oppose the subsidy, or just that they want a better explanation — or maybe some new mental health centers like last time — to cover their butts with angry constituents.
  • The Tampa Bay Times editorial board thinks Tampa Bay Rays president Brian Auld’s explanation of how the team plans to build stadiums and play games in two different countries is “cogent” and “practical” and could be “a newfound engine for tourism and economic development,” all words that sound good until you actually think about them. The Times has a long history of shilling for local sports team owners, going back to when it was the Tampa Tribune (which was bought and merged into the St. Petersburg Times in 2016), with one former Tribune sportswriter explaining back in 1999 during a Buccaneers stadium dispute that ““I don’t think it was any secret in the Tampa Tribune newsroom that if we lose the Bucs, there’s going to be a good chunk of advertising revenue out the window.” Or maybe the editors actually do think that asking fans in Montreal to buy tickets for games all summer to a team that if it wins the pennant will play its postseason games in Florida is cogent and practical! There’s a fine line between stupid and clever.
  • That study of potential Buffalo Bills stadium sites that is not the cost-benefit study that New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is refusing to release to the public is set to be released in November or so, and everyone is all excited for some reason that it may look at a site in downtown Buffalo in addition to the current stadium location out in the suburbs. Meanwhile, the Erie County legislature was set to debate a resolution yesterday requiring three public hearings to be held before the county can vote to approve any stadium deal, but it doesn’t look like the minutes have been posted yet, and modern newspapers can no longer afford to have reporters watch legislative hearings even when they happen online, so we’ll have to wait a bit to find out what happened there.
  • Lexington is getting a USL team … as soon as it builds a 6,000- to 10,000-seat stadium. According to the Lexington Herald-Leader, prospective owner Bill Shively “insisted Tuesday the franchise will not be supported by city dollars. Still, there has to be city support to make this thing go, support in terms of interest, involvement and ticket sales.” Guess we’ll have to see what that word salad ends up meaning, but “will not be supported by city dollars” traditionally means “will be supported by city dollars that we can pretend aren’t city dollars,” so don’t get too excited just yet.
  • In May, the Nebraska legislature passed a law allowing state sales taxes in districts around a sports complex to be kicked back to pay for the venue — a STIF, in other words. If you predicted that this would lead to an application for pickleball subsidies, you’re our lucky winner!
  • College football games in Florida haven’t been reducing capacity or requiring fans to wear masks, yet there have been no reported Covid outbreaks so far this fall among fans attending games. This is good news, and is further evidence that pretty much no coronavirus infections take place outdoors, even with the Delta variant, so we should mostly worry about masking up and requiring vaccinations for indoor activities. (No, this has nothing to do with sports subsidies, except that it affects teams’ bottom lines, but since I’ve raised the alarm about outdoor sporting events and Covid transmission here previously, I wanted to present the latest data point. Also, you know, proper Covid precautions could save thousands and thousands of lives, so there’s that.)
  • I’m sorry, you there in the back, did you say you wanted to see some Des Moines soccer vaportecture? Sure, enjoy this image of soccer fans about to be run over by a car! (I mean, it’s probably a woonerf, but knowing American sports-fan drivers, they’re totally about to be run over by a car.)
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Friday roundup: Frank White (yes, that one) ready to talk money for Royals stadium, Bills vaccine veto threat, and more

access_time personNeil deMause

So! Much! News! This post cannot stop it, it can only hope to contain it:

  • Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas and Jackson County Executive Frank White Jr. — yes, that Frank White — say they’re open to talking with Royals officials about a new downtown stadium, which why shouldn’t they, talk is cheap. White said a few years back that he was boycotting the team after they fired him as broadcaster for saying that their sucky players sucked, but now says, “As I have said from day one, we have a responsibility to ensure the county is using the tax dollars entrusted to us by our residents as effectively and efficiently as possible. Part of that responsibility is being open to opportunities to improve the impact our investments are making in the community, including a potential downtown stadium,” so guess he’s over it! We’ll still have to see what “efficiently” means, and if White will be willing to loose his tongue again if Royals owner John Sherman’s financing plan turns out also to suck.
  • The Buffalo Bills stadium campaign has barely gotten started and already has a lot of stupid going on, but the Erie County legislator who is threatening to veto any stadium if the Bills don’t let unvaccinated fans attend games really kicks it over the top — not least because one legislator can’t “veto” anything, especially when the funding the Bills owners are seeking is likely to come from the state, not the county. Leg. Frank Todaro’s bio states that the body-shop owner “has spent his life fixing things that are broken” and “hates waste and is determined to put the Erie County Taxpayer first,” and the hill he has chosen to die on over giving perhaps a billion dollars or so in tax money to the local billionaire sports team owner is whether the billionaire insists on enforcing public health rules, okay then.
  • The leading contenders in the extremely contentious Buffalo mayor’s race, meanwhile, aren’t saying much about the Bills stadium plans because — wait for it — the Bills don’t actually play in the city of Buffalo, and neither candidate wants to spend the money for a stadium in the city, because what part of “perhaps a billion dollars” did you miss?
  • New Mexico United‘s preferred stadium site may be in trouble because part of it would require eminent domain to take from its private owner, and the property owner is claiming in court that the city is getting around this by pretending it’s taking the land for a traffic circle. I mean, a soccer stadium has a circle in the middle, and soccer players are a kind of traffic, and — yeah, this is why I never became a lawyer. Isn’t there somebody the team owners can just pay off to make this problem go away?
  • St. Louis Circuit Judge Christopher McGraugh has rejected a motion by the NFL and Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke to throw out the city and county of St. Louis’ lawsuit seeking about $100 million in damages for moving the team to L.A. in violation of the league’s own relocation rules. The suit, which has been simmering for four frickin’ years since the last time McGraugh refused to dismiss it, will now move to trial in January, but more important, the league and the Rams only have until September 28 to start turning over internal NFL financial documents for discovery, and “each defendant would be fined $1,000 per day after the deadline if they don’t comply” — I can’t tell if that’s $1,000 each per day for the league and Rams or $1,000 a day for each of the league’s 32 owners, but either way, this should be some fun coming up as the league tries to figure out how to keep its secret books secret.
  • The Knoxville-Knox County Planning Commission has approved rezoning for a new Tennessee Smokies stadium, which isn’t at all the same as the city and county approving $61 million in public money to build the thing, which hasn’t happened yet. But still, it’s a hurdle, so please mark that off as cleared if you’re scoring at home.
  • There’s even more news, but I can get to it next week, it’s not going anywhere. Happy weekend, everybody!
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Friday roundup: Bills threaten to evict selves in 2023, plus hurricane porn!

access_time personNeil deMause

Why yes, thank you, I was fine in the flooding: Our terrace was briefly a small lake, but it didn’t breach the door to our apartment. Still, I will be demanding a new state-of-the-art retractable-roofed terrace from the governor as soon as my lease expires.

And speaking of demanding things from the governor once your lease expires, the Buffalo Bills, amirite?

  • Pegula Sports and Entertainment senior vice president Ron Raccuia said that the Bills won’t renew their lease in Buffalo in 2023 unless a deal for a new stadium in in place by then. Asked what the team would do if there is no deal by then, Raccuia replied, “We’re not even focused on that, yet,” which will be familiar to parents as the “Don’t make me come in there” move: Threaten first, figure out what to do if your kid calls your bluff later. He also asserted that the current stadium’s upper deck “will fail” in about five years but that it definitely won’t fail before then, which is an oddly specific way for metal to age, confirmed that the planned new stadium would have a $1.4 billion price tag, and said the team owners have “never discussed” moving the team and “our sole focus is to get a deal done here,” which is slightly odd for an interview where you just threatened to leave if you don’t get a deal done. Raccuia did not say how much public money the team would be demanding, but did call a new stadium “the single-largest construction project in Western New York history,” and who can put a value on that? (Aside from economists, but they don’t understand the value of a team to a city’s “psyche and core,” now do they? That’s about enough out of you and your “measuring the value of a team to a city’s psyche with actual math,” Bruce Johnson!)
  • Speaking of evictions, Arizona Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo has officially submitted a bid for land in Tempe for a new arena now that they’re getting kicked out of Glendale. This is only the first step in a possible arena process — later steps will include such niceties as “who’s going to pay to build this thing exactly?” — but first Meruelo has to actually get dibs on the land, so watch this one closely.
  • And speaking of the Coyotes, here’s a nice article in Venues Now about the economic impact study that made Glendale city officials feel okay about evicting them — tl;dr version: hockey fans just buy a hot dog and go home, Elton John fans travel further and make a day of it. This seems slightly dubious to extrapolate to all concerts, but as Venues Now doesn’t actually link to the study, we’ll have to take their word for it for now.
  • Hagerstown, Maryland is getting a new Atlantic League team to replace the Hagerstown Suns, which were disappeared during the Great Minor League Purge of 2019. The cost: Only $59.5 million to build a new stadium, which is surely an excellent investment and won’t result in a deteriorating empty stadium with graffiti on the luxury box furniture once the team folds, you must be thinking of some other league, surely.
  • Alameda County’s sale of its half of the Oakland Coliseum site to A’s owner John Fisher may violate the state Surplus Land Act, because of course it may, all the kids are violating that law!
  • Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis is building a $14 million mansion designed to look like his team’s new taxpayer-funded stadium, as one does.
  • The New York Yankees clearly need a retractable roof, too. (In the headline I teased this as “hurricane porn,” but truly that term should be reserved for whatever the hell this is.)
  • Nice stickers!

 

 

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