Category: media appearances

Friday roundup: John Fisher Oakland conspiracython, plus OKC Thunder arena logic gets even weirder

access_time personNeil deMause

Okay, so this first one needs more than a bullet point: Scott Ostler of the San Francisco Chronicle ran a long article this week on the possibility of Oakland getting an expansion team if the A’s leave, and how A’s owner John Fisher could salt the earth in his old city while moving to a new one. Ostler’s scenario: Fisher uses his option to buy the 50% of the Oakland Coliseum site currently owned by Alameda County to block a new team in Oakland from building there. Per Ostler, all Fisher needs to do to cement his purchase is to pay the remaining $45 million of the original $85 million purchase price, something that’s due within 180 days of the A’s “announcement of their relocation,” whatever that means.

Or! Given that Fisher needs a place for the A’s to play while waiting for his $1.5 billion Vegas dream house is ready, he could demand a sweetheart lease in exchange for not consummating the purchase, suggests Ostler, under threat of blocking development of the Coliseum site altogether.

And while we’re conspiracy-theorizing, “It’s possible that MLB leaked that Oakland expansion-team teaser in order to pressure Nashville politicians into offering more taxpayer assistance for a new ballpark in that city.” Sure, anything is possible!

“If this all seems convoluted and nutso, that’s because it is,” writes Ostler, and that, at least, is undeniably true. Spending $85 million to buy a piece of land you don’t want and can’t do anything with without partnering with the city you’re in the middle of abandoning seems like an idiotic move, but Fisher could certainly do it either 1) as a game of chicken with the city of Oakland to get what he wants, or 2) because he’s an idiot.

Ostler also notes that as of Tuesday, neither Fisher nor MLB has reached out to Oakland to discuss a lease extension beyond next year, and again, it’s hard to tell if this is them being crazy like a fox or just crazy. From the start nothing about this A’s Vegas move has made sense — well, other than Fisher extracting $600 million in tax money from the state of Nevada, that’s right out of the standard sports team owner playbook — and the endgame, if that’s what this is, only appears to be getting nuttier.

And with that, on to the shorter news items, if only marginally less nutty:

  • If anybody has a study claiming to show that the Oklahoma City Thunder create $600 million of economic impact, the people trying to factcheck Mayor David Holt’s public statements on Twitter would like to see it. Also, Holt’s own administration said in 2018 that the Thunder’s economic impact was only 10% of that, so WTH, David Holt?
  • Holt has also clarified that the 1% sales tax surcharge he wants to impose to provide $780 million toward a new Thunder arena, which he says wouldn’t increase taxes because it will just replace a similar tax surcharge used to pay for the MAPS project that funded the old arena, isn’t an old tax either because it’s not an “extension” of the expiring tax: “It’s the penny currently being utilized by the MAPS initiative. But some people will always call it MAPS because they call everything MAPS. It’s just not.” So it’s a new tax that doesn’t increase taxes because it replaces a different old tax that otherwise would have expired, but that’s not a tax increase because the new tax steps in as soon as the old one leaves — looks like somebody’s been studying their Felix Unger logic.
  • Pinellas County officials say they’re looking at providing $300 million in hotel-tax money toward a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium in St. Petersburg, with county administrator Barry Burton saying, “To be able to create the model, we had to put in something. That’s a reasonable number for plug number. Whether it’s up or down, it’s good for assumptions.” If that sounds like rather than determining what was reasonable in terms of either what the county can afford or how much a stadium would be worth to it, county commissioners picked the $300 million number because it’s half of the $600 million total public cost Rays owner Stu Sternberg wants, which is in turn half of the $1.2 billion stadium he says he wants, and “half” is about the roundest number available, you are very cynical and also probably right.
  • MLB owners are reportedly set to vote on approving the A’s move to Vegas in November, though it remains an open question what approval will mean if Fisher still doesn’t have a stadium plan finalized by then.
  • Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Jeff Gammage’s last article on the Philadelphia 76ers‘ arena plans may have gotten disappeared, but he’s still out there following the story, including reporting that the team is backing off from its end-of-2023 deadline for approval, as well as that this abomination has been driving around Philadelphia City Hall, presumably with an implied threat of “Approve our 76ers arena or else you have to hear this for the rest of your lives.”
  • Also backing off on deadlines: The owners of the Chicago Bears, who have said they won’t pursue state legislation granting them a property tax break on a new stadium site during this year’s legislative session. Oh, you guys, with the deciding what kind of stadium you want to build where before asking for money for it, John Fisher has a lot to teach you.
  • USA Today and The Tennessean are advertising for a Taylor Swift reporter and a Beyoncé reporter, and J.C. Bradbury has a theory.
  • I went on Battleground Wisconsin yesterday to talk about how Wisconsin officials are scrambling all over each other to offer money to Milwaukee Brewers owner Mark Attanasio for stadium upgrades, and how it fits into the overall trends in baseball stadium skulduggery. You can listen to it here.
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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: Commanders buyers’ $500m tax writeoff, SF soccer stadium surprise, commissioners gonna commissioner

access_time personNeil deMause

Can you believe we got through almost an entire week without talking about the Oakland A’s and their planned Las Vegas stadium and its path through the Nevada legislature? I already miss that crazy cast of characters: For-the-Record Jeremy Aguero, the relentless tweeters of the Nevada Independent, the blue recess screen. Yes, they botched the ending, but we’ll always have the memories.

And we’ll always have the future, where we’re going to spend the rest of our lives. Which will be the next stadium drama to become a breakout hit? You make the call:

  • Josh Harris and his friends will get a potential half-billion-dollar tax writeoff for their $6 billion purchase of the Washington Commanders, and while I don’t totally understand Mike Ozanian’s explanation of how it will work — something about amortizing part of the purchase price as being for “intangible assets” — I hope it has something to do with the Bill Veeck depreciation dodge, because that’s a great story worth revisiting.
  • San Francisco Mayor London Breed, in the middle of answering a question of whether her city is in the midst of an urban “doom loop” (spoiler: it’s not) by saying, “we could even tear down the whole [Westfield Mall] and build a whole new soccer stadium,” which is an interesting idea not least because San Francisco doesn’t have a soccer team in need of a stadium (it has the lower-division San Francisco F.C., but its owners haven’t been pushing for a new home), while nearby San Jose already does. Mayor Breed, I have some followup questions, oh crap, she’s gone already.
  • NHL commissioner Gary Bettman “provided an update” on the Arizona Coyotes’ arena situation yesterday, and it is: “They’re in the process of exploring the alternatives that they have in the Greater Phoenix Area.” Does it actually count as an update when you’re just saying the same thing everyone already knew? Discuss.
  • Time magazine asked MLB commissioner Rob Manfred about why a Las Vegas A’s stadium should get public financing, and the faux-pas-missioner replied, “I have read obviously peoples’ arguments about public financing. There’s an equal number of scholars on the opposite side of that issue,” which, I’m sorry, what? Is this one of those dark matter things, where there are thousands of economists who think that public stadium funding is a good idea, they’re just invisible? Mr. Manfred, I have some followup — oh crap.
  • Nashville journalist Justin Hayes unearthed some emails between the Nashville mayor’s office and the Tennessean over the paper’s coverage of the Titans stadium deal, and they’re a gold mine of showing how the media sausages are made: My favorite bit is where the mayor’s communications chief asks for “two half sentences” to be inserted into an article to counter “the vocal echo-chamber of folks who are reflexively negative,” which it’s fair to say he eventually got and then some.
  • Construction has stopped on Pawtucket’s half-finished Rhode Island F.C. soccer stadium after developers ran out of money, and one can only hope that the city will be left with a ruin half as impressive as Valencia’s.
  • More on U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee’s proposed Moneyball Act, which would apparently require any baseball team that moves more than 25 miles to pay its former host city and state “not less than the State, local and or Tribal tax revenue levied in the ten years prior to the date of relocation,” or else baseball would lose its antitrust exemption. That’s a kind of arbitrary and vaguely defined price to hold over MLB’s head, but arbitrary and vaguely defined is probably good enough for government work that is never, ever going to pass anyway.
  • If you’re really jonesing to hear me go on and on about the A’s again, check out my appearance yesterday on KPFA, which should ease your withdrawal symptoms. I did not provide any updates, but we did cover a lot of ground, including the enduring question of what John Fisher is thinking spending $1 billion to move his team to what would be MLB’s smallest stadium in its smallest TV market.
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Friday roundup: More funny numbers on A’s-to-Vegas, Browns stadium renovations, and the economic impact of Peanuts

access_time personNeil deMause

I don’t know what got into this week, but it seems like everything at once suffered rapid unscheduled disassembly: We had Wisconsin elected officials squabbling over which exact $350 million to give to the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, an endless back-and-forth between economic analysts over whether a new Arizona Coyotes arena would be a revenue boon to Tempe or a money pit, a car dealer announcing he was going to build a $2 billion hockey arena on Atlanta’s far northern outskirts for an NHL team that doesn’t exist, Nashville rolling back a rent hike it had just approved for the Tennessee Titans because “competitive potential,” Erie County giving the Buffalo Bills owners total control over their community benefits spending so they could earn a tax break for it, and, last but by no means least, Oakland A’s execs declaring that the team was now fully focused on a new stadium in Las Vegas that would involve more than $500 million in public money, burning (maybe unintentionally?) its bridges in Oakland in the process when Mayor Sheng Thao immediately cut off talks for a new stadium there, declaring, “I am not interested in continuing to play that game.”

With a news week like that, surely nothing else happened of note, right? I wish — then I could have slept in this morning. But events just keep on occurring, so let’s get to the rest of the list before anything else blows up:

  • Speaking of the Las Vegas A’s plans, A’s president/registered Nevada lobbyist Dave Kaval declared that 70% of ticket sales would be expected to be locals, while hired economist (ed. note: not actually an economist) Jeremy Aguero of Applied Analysis said the A’s would draw about 400,000 new visitors to Vegas each year. Let’s see how the math checks out on that: If a new A’s stadium were to hold 35,000 people as planned, that’s a maximum of 2,835,000 attendees a year even if they sell out every game. If 30% of those are out-of-towners, that’s 850,000 people — meaning the A’s would have to produce perpetual sellouts and have half their tourist fans come to Vegas specifically to see baseball for those numbers to make any sense at all. Given that there’s no sign that Florida spring training, to pick one example, brings any measurable number of new visitors, and that Vegas is an even bigger tourist draw already than Florida in March, this might just be a slight overestimate — the first of many in the coming campaign for public stadium funds in Vegas, I’m sure!
  • If the A’s do leave Oakland, the owner of the USL Oakland Roots and USL W Oakland Soul wants to build a temporary soccer stadium in the Oakland Coliseum parking lot. No details on size or cost or funding, but it is projected to last ten years, at which point the Roots and Soul will presumably threaten to move to Las Vegas.
  • Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb says he won’t use “general new fund dollars” for renovations to the Cleveland Browns stadium but rather will “be creative.” Will this mean tax kickbacks that are diverted before they ever hit the general fund, on the Casino Night Principle? Will it mean asking the county and state for money from their general funds instead? Bibb didn’t provide spoilers, but we’ve all seen this movie before.
  • If you were worried that the Memphis Grizzlies owners would really lose state subsidies because Memphis reinstated a state legislator who the state legislature had tried to throw out, nope, the state legislature went and approved the subsidies anyway. How much of the $350 million in state money will go to Grizzlies arena upgrades and how much to the University of Memphis’ stadium will be “released by the city at a later date.”
  • Charlie Brown should’ve demanded a new stadium for his baseball team.
  • And finally, I’m going to be on WPRO radio in Rhode Island tomorrow at noon to discuss none of the above (well, maybe Charlie Brown), but rather the Pawtucket USL stadium plans that are rapidly falling apart. Listen in here, and learn whether I sound energized or half-dead or just Weltschmertzig after a week like this.

 

 

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A brief musical interlude

access_time personNeil deMause

Flew back from Spain last night, and are my arms tired! I know I promised you regularly scheduled new posts today, but it doesn’t look as if anything notable has happened since Friday — the Cleveland city council is voting tonight on the Browns‘ stadium name, but custom here is to cover that after it happens — so the news isn’t quite cooperating.

One thing that did happen over the weekend, though, is that J.R. Woodward’s Our Social Landscape podcast dropped an episode that he recorded with me last month, so you can listen here to me talking about … honestly I’ve forgotten everything that happened before my vacation, but I’m sure it’s extremely cogent and hard-hitting. Also it includes background music taken from a Mekons song that I didn’t even know existed, which I didn’t think was possible given the level of my fandom, so it’s worth checking out just for that!

Enjoy, and see you back here tomorrow to discuss naming rights and wrongs.

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Friday roundup: More A’s move threat fallout, #NoOlympicsTokyo, and me on a podcast

access_time personNeil deMause

Roundup time!

  • Lots more reaction to the Oakland A’s move threat, including skepticism that they’ll really abandon a big market for a smaller one and a San Jose Mercury news editorial suggesting that “the City Council and the public first deserve a thorough independent financial evaluation of the A’s offer, alternative uses of the land and the effect on port operations,” which, yup.
  • Tampa Bay Times columnist John Romano writes that the A’s move threat is “a shot across the bow” to St. Petersburg that the Rays could do the same — and more than just threatening to summer in Montreal, which Rays owner Stu Sternberg apparently thinks is an offer Tampa Bay should welcome — though he also notes that if the A’s do move, that would take a potential relocation target off the table.
  • The reveal of the A’s threat also makes it interesting that MLB commissioner Rob Manfred chose last week to announce that MLB would consider Forbes’ estimate of a $2.2 billion average baseball team value as the price for an expansion team, if MLB were handing out expansion teams, which it’s not. Clever move to stir up baseball interest in all those cities A’s owner John Fisher will need as leverage, or just random fumbling in response to a reporter’s question? You never can tell with Manfred!
  • Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins, noting that less than 2% of Japan’s population is vaccinated and that on top of its billions of dollars in Olympic facility costs Tokyo will have to divert about 10,000 medical workers to service the Summer Games, says Japan should cancel the Olympics now and cut its losses. She likely has a fan in this guy.
  • If you’ve been wondering whether New York Knicks and Rangers owner James Dolan is any closer to seeking a new arena now that Madison Square Garden has only two years to run on its operating permit, the answer appears to be nope. At least that’s according to the New York Post, which writes that even if the permit is allowed to expire, Dolan “doesn’t mean he has to physically leave MSG, which he owns”; that’s not necessarily true, though I guess if New York City can’t even bring itself to stop extending MSG’s permit, it’s not likely to send the Department of Buildings Padlock Unit to put chains across the front door.
  • The president of the Henderson, Nevada chamber of commerce says that the city’s new taxpayer-funded arena for the Silver Knights “was the lead domino to increase activity down here on Water Street.” His evidence? The owner of a barbecue restaurant called Biscuits and Bourbon says business has gone up since the arena opened in November. That’s surely worth $60 million.
  • Finally, I guested on an episode of the Take A 20 sports podcast last week and it went live yesterday — the name is a reference to looking back to events 20 years ago, so you’ll need to take more like 60 to listen to it. I no longer remember all the things we discussed, but I do remember a fun and wide-ranging conversation, so check it out on Spotify or Apple (no subscriptions required).
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This week in boondoggle vivisection: audio edition!

access_time personNeil deMause

Thanks to my recent Deadspin article on how Seattle may be showing the way to negotiating better sports deals (something Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat agrees with me on, for what it’s worth), as well as all the other stadium and arena news that’s suddenly been exploding, I’ve been on the radio — or podcasts, which I’m going to persist in calling “radio” even if actual radio waves aren’t involved, because who listens to the radio on the radio anymore anyway? — a lot the last week or so. Handy links for those who’d rather get their stadium commentary via their earholes:

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Today in peeing-on-NFL-owners’-graves news, St. Louis Rams edition

access_time personNeil deMause

Nothing much new today on the NFL-to-L.A. front except for everyone on the planet continuing to completely freak out about it, but I did want to take note of two links worth following:

  • Will Leitch, last man standing at my old employer Sports on Earth, has penned a great piece comparing St. Louis Rams owner Stan Kroenke’s scorched-earth approach to getting out of that town to former Browns owner Art Modell’s self-reinvention as the most hated man in Cleveland for moving the team to Baltimore, to the point where a Browns fan was recently arrested for peeing on Modell’s grave. That’s a high bar to match, and I’m not sure the Rams have the kind of tradition in St. Louis that anyone will be inspired to quite that much hatred if they leave, but it’s always nice to give people ideas — so long as Leitch doesn’t end up paralyzed by fear of his own awesome power if it works.
  • I don’t always post links here to when I do radio appearances (Twitter is a better place to keep up with that, if you’re interested), but my visit to St. Louis CBS Sports Radio’s We Are Live last night was too long and too hilarious not to share with you all. Podcast link is here; if I can find a web archived version as well, I’ll add an update.
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Long Island pol gripes that Cosmos stadium would create traffic because no one would go there wait what?

access_time personNeil deMause

If you’ve been thinking, “Hey, it’s been a long time since Field of Schemes has written about that crazy $400 million New York Cosmos stadium plan,” here, have a Long Island politician complaining about how the crazy thing about it is that it would create too much traffic:

“It’s a bad idea for the region,” said [Nassau County Legislator Carrié] Solages (D-Elmont), who is worried it could create a traffic nightmare for local residents. “Soccer does not have the draw it needs to survive here.”

The Cosmos also got a brief mention in my just-posted interview on The ‘Cast (on YouTube, but it’s audio-only), so go listen to that as well if you like. Though we didn’t really delve into the problem of how to deal with the traffic jams created by nonexistant minor-league soccer fans.

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Worldwide media domination (Seattle edition)

access_time personNeil deMause

Chris Daniels of KING5 in Seattle has been in Brooklyn all week covering the new Nets arena (see his interview with Norman Oder of Atlantic Yards Report here), and last night the station aired his talk with me about Seattle’s arena plans. I’m not sure I broke any new ground in analysis of the deal, but if you’ve been dying to see fast-cut closeups of me drinking tea, this is a must-watch.

And because I neglected to mention it at the time, a couple of weeks ago I was interviewed by RT America (the web channel formerly known as Russia Today) about my spiked Washington Post op-ed on the Nationals stadium deal. This one was conducted via Skype — watch closely and see if you can tell the difference in production values!

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