Category: cricket

Friday roundup: D-Backs owners sad no one is throwing money at them like in Milwaukee

access_time personNeil deMause

The tchotchkes are in the mail! Repeat: The tchotchkes are in the mail! If you don’t get yours by the end of next week, please drop me a line and I’ll look into it.

And speaking of next week, I’m going to be traveling then, so expect to get your news updates somewhat irregularly and possibly at odd hours. In the meantime, here’s a pile of rounded-up news to slake your thirst for stadium and arena knowledge:

  • The Arizona Republic reports that the Diamondbacks owners still want to renovate Chase Field, but that “the organization thus far has been unable to find the sort of public/private partnership to make that happen,” which is a very creative way of saying “we keep waiting for somebody to leave a suitcase full of unmarked twenties on our doorstep, but it hasn’t happened.” Team CEO Derrick Hall told the paper: “We don’t have our hand out, but if you look at some of the other situations very similar to ours — like Milwaukee, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Baltimore — in each case they are getting strong investments from the public, from a mixture of city/county/state, and we just aren’t.” Hall added: “I’m starting to get concerned with the timing. I don’t think the city officials in particular understand the urgency of our lease, which expires in 2027.” That’s urgent for someone, clearly, but it’s not the city of Phoenix that would face having to go play in the street. Hall did say that the team would put in “more than” 75% of a potential $500 million price tag, though he also said he’d be interested in getting “land we can develop,” so be sure to read the fine print of any eventual proposal.
  • The state of Wisconsin and city of Milwaukee are now looking at spending $600 million in public money over 20 years to upgrade the Brewers stadium that a 2018 study found needed a maximum of $84.5 million in improvements, reports Urban Milwaukee’s Bruce Murphy. Milwaukee residents overwhelmingly oppose the plan, but the Republican leadership in the legislature is currently looking at just taking tax money away from the city and giving it to Brewers owner Mark Attanasio, which is exactly how democracy is supposed to work, A+ work there guys.
  • The House Oversight Committee approved a bill to let Washington, D.C. keep control over the RFK Stadium site, while defeating an amendment that would have prevented D.C. from using public funds to build a new Commanders stadium there. The politics is a little complex here, though, with some Congressmembers arguing against using public money while defending D.C.’s right to use public money, so there’s a lot more haggling to go where this came from.
  • The development team behind the Philadelphia 76ers arena plans released a report it commissioned on the economic impact of the project; please pick a random three-digit number and add six zeroes to it and you’ll be as close to accurate as the report. In related news, the 76ers’ developer partner is apparently kind of a dick.
  • Missed this one last week: The New York city council has approved a new operating permit for Madison Square Garden, but only for another five years. This can will apparently be kicked down the road until Penn Station gets renovated, or the sun burns out, whichever comes first.
  • The temporary cricket stadium in a Bronx public park is dead, with the 2024 men’s T-20 Cricket World Cup matches now to be held in a temporary cricket stadium in a Long Island public park instead.
  • The Associated Press declares the four front-runners for eventual MLB expansion to be Charlotte, Nashville, Portland, and Montreal, though then also mentions Salt Lake City and Austin, so it looks like they’re mostly going by Googling “baseball expansion cities” and taking whatever’s on the first page of hits.
  • “Local tourism agency releases PowerPoint on how cool a new sports arena would be” is exactly the kind of journalism I expect from 2023, deep sigh.
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Friday roundup: Philly paper mysteriously pulls article about 76ers arena being called human-rights violation

access_time personNeil deMause

So this was originally going to be a minor bullet point in the Friday roundup: An international human rights organization called The Shift had declared the Philadelphia 76ers‘ arena plans to be “inconsistent with international human rights law” and called on team owner Josh Harris to work with Chinatown residents to “help realize, rather than interfere with, that community’s human rights.” Okay, sure, international human rights law is a bit of an odd legal footing to appeal to, but if anybody’s authorized to do so it’s an international human rights organization, so that’s worth a small note.

Until this happened:

That’s right: Click on the original link on the Inquirer site and it 404s, though the article still shows up in the Inquirer’s own search results. (I had previously saved the article to Instapaper, and you can find a PDF of that here.) Debbie Wei of Asian Americans United, one of the Philadelphia groups strongly opposed to the arena, says she believes the article was taken down at the request of “the billionaires,” but I haven’t been able to get any more details yet from her.

It’s extraordinarily unusual for a news outlet to outright pull a story without even an editorial note stating why it was removed. It actually goes against most journalism ethics policies, which is that stories should be corrected, but not outright deleted. (The Inquirer does have a committee to de-index older stories that may be unintentionally harmful, but even then the stories remain searchable on the Inquirer site, just not on search engines like Google.)

The whole thing is, frankly, bizarre, doubly so since the original article was fairly tame, with the statements from The Shift countered by statements from team spokesperson Nicole Gainor that The Shift’s letter “isn’t based on a clear understanding of how we are thoughtfully approaching this project.” I’ve reached out to the Inquirer for comment, but haven’t heard back yet; if I get any more information today, I’ll post an update here.

UPDATE: Just got this emailed statement from Gabriel Escobar, Inquirer editor and senior vice president: “The article that briefly appeared Thursday on Inquirer.com, in hindsight, required more context and more reporting. For those reasons, we decided to take it down while continuing to pursue the story.”

Meanwhile, on with the rest of the news:

  • The new Forbes NFL team value estimates came out this week, and there have been lots of headlines about how the Tennessee Titans‘ value jumped 26% after getting their new $1.2 billion stadium subsidy. Which, yes, it’s an indication of how stadiums let the rich get richer on the public dime, but some grains of salt do apply: The Forbes team value estimates are very handwavy and much less reliable than their team revenue estimates (which generally check out), and the average NFL team rose an estimated 14% in value next year, so it’s tough to say exactly how much more the Titans are worth now. If anything, it’s notable that even according to Forbes, the Titans only appreciated in value by $420 million more than they would have without the $1.2 billion handout, which implies that Nashville and team owner Amy Adams Strunk both would have been better off if the city had, say, written a half-billion-dollar check to Strunk and let them keep playing in their old stadium.
  • Add the Bronx Council for Environmental Quality to the list of Bronx groups who really hate Mayor Eric Adams’ idea to build a temporary cricket stadium atop public cricket fields in a public park to host the T20 Cricket World Cup: In a Bronx Times op-ed, the BCEQ wrote that it could take two years for the parkland to be fully restored, and “You can add the NYC/ICC proposal to the growing number of ‘mega-events’ that, according to sports economists, drive wedges between localities and global brand-building strategies and fail to deliver promised economic benefits.” At press time, the Bronx Times had not pulled the op-ed.
  • Just when you thought illegal helicopter registration was going to be the weirdest thing about the now-defunct Los Angeles Angels stadium land sale fiasco, now comes the news that the city of Anaheim can’t find the email where an Angels consultant laid out how Mayor Harry Sidhu and city council members were expected to rubber-stamp the deal, even though the FBI already has a copy. Please consider kicking the nonprofit Voice of OC some cash for keeping on top of these things, if only for the LOLAngels value.
  • The insane Jackie Robinson (not that one) Las Vegas arena for no tenant at all is maybe finally dead, after it blew past a county deadline on Wednesday. That only took, let’s see, ten years? Andy Warhol said you get 15 minutes, man, and you already played seven years in the NBA, quit hogging all the attention already.
  • The Las Vegas Raiders stadium has a leak in its roof, time to build a new one.
  • I forgot to link to the KSHB-TV story last week that interviewed me about the Kansas City Royals stadium situation (sample sound bite: “For this to create the kind of new spending that the Royals are claiming, it would be the first time in sports history that occurred”), but you can still check it out here, along with my living room wall art. (Diego Rivera and Jon Langford, if anyone’s curious.)
  • Finally, thanks to everyone who signed up as a Field of Schemes subscriber to get the brand new set of 25th anniversary fridge magnets! (Or, you know, to support the work this site has been doing for 25 damn years now. But I know it’s mostly the magnets.) If you want to get in on the swag, or just encourage me to spend more time on this apparently never-ending mission, sign up now!
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Friday roundup: O’s owner still wants land atop $600m in state cash, Chuck Schumer lurves the Bills, plus fresh bonkers Titans renderings

access_time personNeil deMause

And here we arrive again at the end of another programming week. It’s a bit demoralizing that this is the slow season for stadium and arena news — no legislatures in session, lots of people on vacation — and yet the news watch is as busy as ever. I’m a little afraid of what’ll happen in September, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Meanwhile, here’s what else has been happening:

  • Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, while visiting Baltimore Ravens training camp and wearing a Ravens jersey, because that’s how elected officials roll, announced that he and Baltimore Orioles owner John Angelos have resumed talks over a lease extension. The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal says the remaining sticking point is that Angelos wants, in addition to $600 million in state renovation money that was already approved, development rights to land around Camden Yards, even though there isn’t really much undeveloped land available. (Which we’ve known since February, really, but it’s nice to get confirmation from The New York Times’ proposed scab sports section.) And Angelos might not get away with it, too, if only because he keeps stepping on rakes.
  • New Tennessee Titans stadium renderings! And it’s a video! Set to a pop cover of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” for some reason! With children playing jumprope and computer animated people doing rock guitar moves in the concession concourses? USA Today’s Titans Wire, which is no doubt an unbiased source, calls it “just well done overall”; it certainly burns, burns, burns, so the soundtrack was well chosen in that way.
  • U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer tells the Daily News of Batavia that he has told Buffalo Bills co-owner Terry Pegula to call him whenever he needs something, and “every so often they do, about one thing or another,” and also that he has confidence the new Bills stadium will be built despite cost overruns and “it’s got to be built soon because, you know, the existing stadium is old,” and also he was “furious and frantic” when he thought the Bills might move and “did everything I could to keep the Bills in Buffalo.” The Daily News of Batavia does not appear to have asked Schumer if he thought $1 billion in public money was a fair price to pay for this, and Schumer ran unopposed in last year’s Democratic primary, so democracy is just working well all around.
  • The developers behind Pawtucket’s stalled Rhode Island F.C. soccer stadium say they have finally found money to finish the project, and will restart construction “in the near future.” The city and state still need to sign off on resuming the plan.
  • Don’t like the Philadelphia 76ers owners’ plans to build an arena on a failing mall next to the city’s Chinatown? What if they added a 20-story apartment building with 20% of the units “affordable” (no specifics provided on to which income group), or at least pictures of one?
  • Bronx cricket leagues officially hate the proposed temporary T20 World Cup stadium that would displace their public cricket fields for next year. “You know, you don’t want to come into a community and just throw things down their throat,” said Curtis Clarke, president of the New York Masters Cricket Association, who clearly doesn’t have a good handle on what sports leagues very much do want.
  • No, it won’t.
  • I have not yet had time to read Brad Humphreys and Jane Ruseski’s paper that found that flu deaths rise when a city gets a new major-league sports team, but the fact that the NHL saw the largest effect — a 24.6% increase — checks out when you consider that the league plays in indoor arenas during flu season in disproportionately cold parts of North America. Good thing we all learned from the Atalanta superspreader event and put in place protocols to reduce viral spread at sporting events by … no? Well, maybe next pandemic.
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Friday roundup: Nashville votes out Titans stadium boosters (but is stuck with stadium), Philly could see battle of billionaires over Sixers arena

access_time personNeil deMause

Pressed for time today, so without further ado or preamble, let’s see what else happened this week:

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Friday roundup: OKC mayor wants new Thunder arena because 22-year-old one is “getting older,” and other things to sigh deeply over

access_time personNeil deMause

Before we even get to the bullet points, we need to start with this: Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt announced yesterday in his State of the City speech that he wants to build a new arena for the Thunder to replace their current one, which just turned 22 years old and is receiving a $100 million upgrade begun in 2011. The present building is “simply not what it used to be,” according to Holt, and  “will keep getting older,” which, yep, that’s how time works. “Seats get old, scoreboards get old, elevators break,” said Holt. Everything breaks, dunnit?

To help pay for a new arena, Holt wants to extend the 1% sales tax surcharge that paid for the old one and which is currently set to expire in 2028. Holt described this as “no tax increase will be necessary,” which is true if you mean that Oklahoma City residents won’t have to pay any more in taxes than they do now, but not true if you mean whether they’d have to pay more than they would if the Thunder were forced to continue to play in their aging more-than-two-decade-old arena instead of an aging new one.

The tax extension would at least require a public vote, as the original one did. Still, J.C. Bradbury has a point:

Nothing wrong with getting a new arena every year, so long as you’re not the one paying for it. And now, on to the week in bullet points:

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NYC mayor considering building stadium in public park to host weird cricket championship

access_time personNeil deMause

I usually try to leave the lesser sports and the lesser sports subsidies for the Friday roundup, so normally that’s where talk of New York City Mayor Eric Adams wanting to build a temporary cricket stadium in a public park would go … but c’mon, guys, New York City Mayor Eric Adams wants to build a temporary cricket stadium in a public park! If this isn’t blog gold, I don’t know what is:

The “temporary” and “modular” structure would host matches next June in the 2024 T20 World Cup held by the International Cricket Council, according to local officials who have been briefed on the plan by the Adams administration and an ICC proposal obtained by THE CITY…

Though they are not opposing it, Bronx elected officials told THE CITY that they have serious concerns about the plan that they heard about from the Adams administration and that would require turning over park land to a ticket-selling venue that would hold nearly as many people as Yankee Stadium or the city’s two professional basketball arenas combined. The stadium would need to be erected in less than five months, starting in January, in close proximity to the graves of enslaved Africans and likely displacing the 12 cricket pitches in the park that New Yorkers use now.

Let’s move right on to the questions:

Cricket? What?

It’s the world’s second-most popular sport, according to THE CITY! (Which, yes, is capitalized that way. It doesn’t make it any more Googleable.) I can’t find a source for that, but it’s a huge sport in South Asia, which has a ton of people in it, so it makes sense. (That it’s the world’s second-most popular sport, I mean — not even the world’s estimated 2.5 billion cricket fans would say that a sport with a position called “silly mid off” makes sense.)

And T20?

The defining characteristic of cricket is that batters get to keep batting until they make an out, and if they want they can just keep hitting pitches and never running anywhere all day while waiting for one they like better. And “all day” is no exaggeration: Plenty of cricket matches last days at a time, which led to the invention of “one day” cricket, which is limited to, you guessed it, a single day.

Alas, some sports fans do not want to spend even one entire day watching cricket, so in 2003 came the debut of T20 cricket, so named because each team is limited to one inning of 20 overs. (The “T” stands for twenty. You don’t want to know what overs are.) This variation is widely laughed at by real cricket fans, but is also seen as the only way to grow the sport in places like the U.S. where there are lots of sports fans with money and no interest in watching cricket for even one over more than 20.

Which park would this be built in?

Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, which is already home to multiple public cricket pitches. Several of these would be displaced by the T20 pitch, as shown in an International Cricket Council rendering that is for some reason in hazy black-and-white:

That would have nearly as many seats as Yankee Stadium?

Actually 34,000 seats, where Yankee Stadium holds 46,537. THE CITY’s stylebook entry for “nearly” was not available at press time.

Graves of enslaved Africans?

The Van Cortlandt family owned people as slaves. They still have a park named after them. It’s complicated.

Okay, so how much would this temporary cricket stadium cost, and who would pay for it?

This is not within the scope of the documents that THE CITY has seen! The ICC proposal document did argue that once the stadium is taken down, the city would be left with “a state-of-the-art outfield,” and who can put a price on that?

Doesn’t New York City have rules about building private venues in public parks?

Good memory! State assemblymember Jeffrey Dinowitz is wondering the same thing, telling THE CITY: “That’s a significant legal issue, which I don’t think that the administration has considered as far as I know. I think there would have to be other measures taken: A ULURP, an EIS.”

ULURP? EIS?

Sorry, that’s all the questions we have time for today!

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Friday roundup: Jacksonville doubles down on $200m+ Jaguars subsidy, MSG replacement vaportectured, Norfolk arena sabers rattled

access_time personNeil deMause

So, yeah, some stuff happened this week, and is continuing to happen now. But let’s not let rampaging Viking cosplayers distract us from the fact that the new year has also brought a resurgence in sports subsidy activity, with a whole lot of news that normally I might write individual posts about if I hadn’t been up too late refreshing Google News, so instead you’ll have to bear with me through some long bullet points:

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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!

access_time personNeil 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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Friday roundup: Vikings get $6m in upgrades for two-year-old stadium, Sacramento finds rich guy to give soccer money to, CSL screws up yet another stadium study

access_time personNeil deMause

No time to dawdle today, I got magnets to mail, so let’s get right down to it:

  • The Minnesota Vikings‘ two-years-and-change-old stadium is getting $6 million in renovations, including new turf, and taxpayers will foot half the bill, because of course they will.
  • Billionaire Ron Burkle is becoming the majority owner of the USL Sacramento Republic, so now Mayor Darrell Steinberg wants to give the team “tens of millions of dollars” in infrastructure and development rights and free ad signage so that he can build an MLS stadium. “The richer you are, the more money we give you” is the strangest sort of socialism, but here we are, apparently.
  • Concord, an East Bay suburb until now best known as “where the BART yellow line terminated until they extended it,” is considering building an 18,000-seat USL stadium. No word yet on how much it’ll cost or how much the city will chip in, but they probably first need to wait to see how rich the team’s owner is.
  • Not everyone in Allen, Texas wants to live across the street from a cricket stadium, go figure.
  • Everybody’s favorite dysfunctional economic consultants Convention, Sports & Leisure have done it again, determining that Montreal would be a mid-level MLB market without bothering to take into account the difference between Canadian and American dollars. (Once the exchange rate is factored in, Montreal’s median income falls to second-worst in MLB, ahead of only Cleveland.) CSL explained in a statement to La Presse that it wanted to show “the relative purchasing power” of Montrealers, and anyway they explained it in a footnote, so quit your yapping.
  • The Milwaukee Brewers are going to change the name of their stadium from one corporate sponsor to another, and boy, are fans mad. Guys, you know you are free to call it whatever you want, right? Even something that isn’t named for a corporation that paid money for the privilege!
  • Local officials in Maryland, Virginia, and D.C. are still working on an interstate compact to agree not to spend public money on a stadium for Dan Snyder’s Washington NFL team, though passage still seems unlikely at best, and the history of these things working out effectively isn’t great. Maybe it’ll get a boost now that team execs have revealed that the stadium design won’t include a surfboard moat after all. Nobody respects the vaportecture anymore.
  • The libertarian Goldwater Institute is suing to force the release of a secret Phoenix Suns arena study paid for by the team and conducted by sports architects HOK, but currently kept under lock and key by the city. (Literally: The study reportedly is kept in locked offices and is only allowed to be accessed by a “very limited number” of people. Also, a citizen group is trying to force a public referendum on the recently approved Suns arena subsidy, though courts have generally not been too keen on allowing those to apply retroactively to deals that already went through. And also also, one of the two councilmembers who voted against the Suns subsidy thinks the city could have cut a better deal. Odds on any of this hindsight amounting to anything: really slim, but maybe it can help inform the next city to face one of these renovation shakedowns, if anyone on other city councils reading out-of-town news or this site and ultimately cares, which, yeah.
  • Oakland Raiders owner Mark Davis and Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke signed agreements to cover the NFL’s legal costs in any lawsuit over those teams’ relocations, and they’re both being sued now (by Oakland and St. Louis respectively), and NFL lawyers are really pricey. Kroenke is reportedly considering suing the league over this, which I am all for as the most chaotically entertaining option here.
  • Wilmington, Delaware is being revitalized by the arrival of a new minor-league basketball team, so make your vacation plans now! Come for the basketball, stay for the trees and old cars! Synergy!
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Friday roundup: More Raiders temporary home rumors, more MLB expansion rumors, and pro cricket (?!?) in Texas

access_time personNeil deMause

Was this week longer than usual, or did it just feel that way? The number of browser tabs I have open indicates the former — personally, I blame the moon.

  • Or maybe the Oakland Raiders will play in Arizona next year? When you have a lame-duck team whose new stadium in its new city isn’t ready yet, no idea is dumber than any other, really.
  • The University of Texas is reportedly building a new $300 million basketball arena at no cost to the state or the university, though if you read the fine print it’s actually getting Oak View Group (the same people behind Seattle’s arena rebuild) to build the arena in exchange for letting OVG keep a large chunk of future arena revenues. So really this is no different from UT building the arena themselves and using future revenues to pay off the construction costs, except I guess that OVG takes on the risk of cost overruns. Anyway, this is a good reminder that it’s not just about the costs, it’s about the revenues, stupid.
  • Las Vegas wants an MLB expansion team. It shouldn’t hold its breath.
  • There are lots of ideas for what to do with D.C.’s RFK Stadium site, and not all of them involve a stadium for Washington’s NFL team.
  • Queens community groups are protesting possible plans to build a soccer stadium for a would-be USL team called Queensboro F.C. on the Willets Point site cleared of businesses for redevelopment (including affordable housing) several years ago. This is a super-weird story that I’m still trying to get to the bottom of, so stay tuned for a more in-depth update soon.
  • Ottawa Senators owner Eugene Melnyk now says he’d consider letting someone else own his team’s proposed downtown arena if they’d pay to build it, contradicting what he said two years ago. Here’s a fun list of other times Melnyk contradicted himself!
  • Lots of public meetings coming up in Phoenix on the much-derided $230 million Suns arena renovation plan. The city has also posted the actual arena proposal, which among other things notes that the Suns’ rent is projected to go up from $1.5 million to $4 million a year in a renovated arena, which would help offset some of the public’s $168 million in costs, though it doesn’t say whether the rent (which is based on revenues) would go up in an unrenovated arena as well, so really this wouldn’t offset it all that much.
  • Speaking of the Suns, NBA commissioner Adam Silver said this week that “it’d be a failure on my part if a team ended up moving out of a market.” Now that’s how you play the army protection racket non-threat threat game! Rob Manfred, take notes. (Actually, please don’t.)
  • And speaking of Manfred, MLB is reportedly considering letting teams take control of their streaming broadcast rights instead of running them all centrally through MLB.tv, which would be a huge deal in that it would allow teams in large markets to monopolize streaming revenue like they currently do TV revenue, forestalling an NFL-like future where TV money is a more level playing field. They could offset this through increased revenue-sharing, sure, but … you know what, let’s table this discussion until there’s more than an unsourced New York Post item to go on.
  • Allen, Texas, is talking about building a pro cricket stadium via a “public-private partnership,” leaving me with two big questions: 1) how much is the public kicking in, and 2) maybe would it be a good idea to wait until a pro cricket league actually exists before building a stadium for it to play in?
  • The Athletic has a strangely formatted article about how finished MLS stadiums seldom look like their renderings that’s a fun read if you’re an Athletic subscriber, which you probably aren’t. (I got the $1-for-90-days trial deal, so I can keep tantalizing you with paywalled stuff for another few weeks yet.)
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