Category: Olympics

Friday roundup: Olympics remain world’s greatest money suck, TB Times self-extorts for Bucs stadium, Rays $1B deal nears final approval

access_time personNeil deMause

This has been a long, busy week for a lot of reasons, so let me just thank those of you who re-upped your FoS memberships (your swag will be in the mail shortly!) and get straight to the news, of which there is a ton, because the stadium game doesn’t stop just because it’s summer or there’s other stuff vying for our attention:

  • The Paris Olympics start tonight, and how’s that going? You say France is spending $3-5 billion on the Games in exchange for “uncertain” benefits, tourists are staying away because they don’t want to deal with all the Olympic disruptions and local museums and such are set to lose a ton of money, and Paris is forcibly relocating homeless people to make the city seem more attractive? Good, good, that’s what the Olympics are traditionally all about.
  • The Tampa Bay Buccaneers owners aren’t asking for a new stadium, but that won’t stop the Tampa Bay Times from noting that the stadium is “aging” (aren’t we all, every day) and wondering if the Glazer family will want renovations or a whole new one. “Even after repeated requests from the [Tampa] Sports Authority for information, the Buccaneers have still not provided us with any renovation plans,” Hillsborough County Commissioner Ken Hagan told the paper, while Tampa spokesperson Adam Smith said the Bucs “haven’t approached the city about anything like that” and “we don’t expect them to.” But the Bucs’ lease runs out in 2028, and all the other kids are getting new and renovated stadiums, so Times sports reporter Rick Stroud still spends 2700 words speculating on what a new or renovated stadium could look like and how it would be paid for, it’s always a time saver when your marks take the initiative to extort themselves.
  • Also in Tampa Bay, two Pinellas County commissioners are asking questions about the Rays stadium deal in advance of a Tuesday final vote, questions like “How much will this actually cost taxpayers?” (more than $1 billion, by best estimates) and “Will the public have to put in even more money to make sure affordable housing is built?” Unfortunately, it only takes four of seven commissioners to pass the deal, so there’s no guarantee the dissenters will get answers to their questions before Tuesday, though county officials said they’d ask.
  • Chicago Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf and the owners of the Blackhawks are planning a $7 billion mixed-use project around the United Center, no details provided on whether this would involve public money or tax breaks or anything, they didn’t mention it in their press release so it probably isn’t important.
  • The Pennsylvania Independent Fiscal Office did a study of the economic impact of the Philadelphia Phillies and Pittsburgh Pirates stadiums, both of which were built with public money, but unfortunately even though it spelled out that it was calculating spending by both “fans whose main reason for travel is a Phillies game and casual fans who attend games because they happen to be visiting the region,” the final numbers just added up all spending in and around the stadiums and assumed it wouldn’t happen without them, very disappointing.
  • Not telling the Nevada Independent how to do its job, but if you’re going to roll with the headline “How Bally’s buyout might affect resort plans for A’s Vegas stadium site,” you might maybe want to include something about how it will affect that, you know?
  • Oakland A’s owner John Fisher is laying off half the team’s non-baseball staff so he can make Sacramento River Cats employees do two jobs at once, this has been your weekly John Fisher Sucks post.
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Friday roundup: St. Pete okays $1B+ Rays stadium subsidy, A’s Vegas $ remains a mystery, Bears’ $2B ask still a no-go

access_time personNeil deMause

Was it only two weeks ago that I skipped the Friday roundup entirely on the grounds that nothing was happening? What Berenstain Bears universe was that? The stadium and arena news firehose is back on in full force, so let’s get to it:

  • The St. Petersburg city council indeed voted 5-3 to grant final approval to a $1.3 billion Tampa Bay Rays stadium that will come with between $1 billion and $1.4 billion in public subsidies, bringing almost to an end (the county commission still has to vote on July 30) one of the longest-running stadium battles in sports. “We are St. Pete!” shouted city chief equity officer Carl Lavender following the vote, either overcome with emotion or just reading the wallpaper. Rays owner Stu Sternberg declared, “I think, how it was put today, it was just the right time in the right place, and most importantly, the right people,” which is another way of saying that if a sports owner takes enough swings enough times, even a 15-year stadium losing streak can end up with them holding a ten-figure check from the public.
  • After the development agreement between the Oakland A’s and the Las Vegas Stadium Authority released yesterday revealed nothing specific about the team’s stadium funding plans, team board member Sandy Dean gave the authority more nonspecifics, saying owner John Fisher is in “good shape” raising money but providing no details of where it could come from other than that it would use $300 million in debt and $850 million in private equity and that “it would be a positive to have outside investors,” something A’s execs are “going to talk with folks about” in “the coming months.” (Who’s going to invest $850 million in a team that has an estimated value of $1.2 billion, plays in the smallest market in MLB, and starts out with $300 million in debt? Reply hazy, ask again later.) Dean also said that Fisher would only use $350 million of the $380 million in public funding approved last year, because reasons.
  • MLB commissioner Rob Manfred did reveal this week that the artificial turf at the A’s broiling Sacramento stadium will be cooled by “a hydration element,” and if anyone knows what that means — sprinklers? underground cooling pipes? misters attached to the light poles? — please let me know in comments.
  • Also Bill Shaikin of the Los Angeles Times asked a bunch of MLB players who grew up in Las Vegas what they thought of the A’s moving there, and replies included “it’s a terrible idea” (Paul Sewald), “I don’t see it in Vegas” (Bryce Harper), “as soon as they get a good team, they start trading guys before they get too expensive” (Tyler Anderson), and “the whole thing, I fear, is going to be an abject disaster” (Sewald again). On the other hand, Tommy Pham said, “They said the same thing about the Golden Knights: Would this be a hockey town? … Everybody wears Golden Knights stuff in Vegas now.” Opinions differ!
  • Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker met with Chicago Bears officials this week to discuss their $2 billion state funding request for a new stadium, and Pritzker still hates it, with his press spokesperson saying afterwards “the governor’s position has not changed” from May, when he called the plan “a nonstarter.” Maybe Bears execs need to threaten to move to Indiana, that usually seems to work.
  • Jackson County probably isn’t going to hold another vote on Kansas City Royals and Chiefs stadium funding this year, but it could next year. Gov. Mike Parson will be out of office then, and the people running to replace him won’t be known until the results of an August 6 primary, so this could still go a lot of ways.
  • Paris cultural sites are preparing for next week’s start of the 2024 Summer Olympics by anticipating massive dropoffs in customers. In London during the 2012 games, visits to museums, movie theaters, zoos, and the like “dropped by a staggering 30 percent” as non-sports tourists steered the hell clear of the city, and Paris is expecting the same. “We’re the big losers of the Olympic Games,” said independent theater chain operator Pierre-Édouard Vasseur — though maybe he’ll rethink that once athletes start collapsing and dying from the heat.
  • NBA Commissioner Adam Silver says his league would consider expanding to Las Vegas once its new TV deal is finalized and arena developers have contacted the league for specs on building NBA-ready venues. Las Vegas, at last count, has as least three arenas that could host NBA games, but sure, building a fourth arena just for the NBA to host the fourth big-league sports team in the nation’s 40th-largest TV market makes total sense.
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Friday roundup: “Unbelievable” Utah Olympics projections, Cavs crony capitalism, and stadium vapordistricts

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s Friday, I’ve been testing negative for two days, time to see what we all missed this week while we were busy making other plans:

  • “Second Winter Olympics could spark $6.6B in economic output for Utah, new report finds” reported a headline at KSL-TV, and “could” and “output” are doing an awful lot of work there. (Number of actual economists consulted for the KSL story: zero.) “These numbers are just so unbelievable,” said Salt Lake City Olympic committee COO Brett Hopkins, and yep, can’t argue with that!
  • The guy who negotiated massive tax kickbacks for Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert for the city is getting hired by Gilbert as the team’s CFO, this is fine.
  • The owners of Racing Louisville and Louisville City FC promised to build a new development around their new soccer stadium after it opened in 2019 with the help of city funding, but haven’t actually done so. “There’s good soccer going on, and I was for soccer,” city councilmember Robin Engel said at a hearing last month. “You know, we throw these TIFs around anymore these days like it’s chump change.”
  • Boston Magazine has a good oral history of how the 1999 All-Star Game hosted at Fenway Park helped save the ballpark from a planned demolition and replacement by a fake replica, though it kind of elides the main point, which is “Save Fenway Park activists put up a huge stink and then the new guy who bought the Red Sox decided he liked Fenway anyway. Also Save Fenway isn’t “defunct” as the article says, but the group’s Erika Tarlin does get a decent amount of screen time.
  • Whoever ends up the new mayor of Arlington Heights this fall, it’ll likely be someone who supports building a Chicago Bears stadium there, keep that in mind the next time you ask why people don’t just vote elected officials out of office when they back stadium deals.
  • If you always wanted a restroom sign from Pawtucket’s soon-to-be-demolished McCoy Stadium, now’s your chance.
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Friday roundup: Titans media hijinks, Guardians put off renovation, IOC decides winter is no longer coming

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been a long and hectic week, so let’s let the chatbot take over writing the intro for this week’s roundup:

Write an introduction for a roundup of the week’s sports stadium news

Welcome to our weekly sports stadium news roundup. This week, we’ve gathered the biggest stories from around the world of sports stadiums, from new developments and construction projects to updates on some of your favorite teams’ home fields. Keep reading to stay up to date on all the latest happenings in the world of sports stadiums.

Mm, that’s not very good. Try again?

Write an introduction for a roundup of the week’s sports stadium news

Welcome to this week’s roundup of sports stadium news. From groundbreaking ceremonies to naming rights deals, we’ve got all the latest developments in the world of sports venues. Keep reading to stay up-to-date on the latest news and happenings in the world of sports stadiums.

Worse! Let’s try a slight reword of the prompt:

Write an introduction for everything that’s wrong with this week’s sports stadium news

Welcome to our weekly roundup of sports stadium news, where we take a critical look at the latest developments and trends in the industry. This week, we’ve uncovered a number of troubling issues and challenges facing sports stadiums, from safety concerns to financial struggles and more. Let’s dive into the details and explore what’s wrong with this week’s sports stadium news.

One last attempt:

Write an introduction for how this week’s stadium news shows that we are diving ever deeper into an undemocratic rich-get-richer hellscape from which there is no return.

Welcome to our weekly roundup of sports stadium news, where we explore the latest developments in the industry and how they reflect the state of our society. This week’s news is a disturbing reminder of the ever-widening divide between the rich and the rest of us, as we see more and more examples of undemocratic and unfair practices in the world of sports stadiums. Join us as we delve into the depths of this rich-get-richer hellscape and see how far we have fallen.

Amateurs borrow, bots steal. Let’s get on with the news:

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McCourt’s Dodgers gondola plan still undead, “working on” ways to pay $125m+ cost

access_time personNeil deMause

Despite having extremely sad renderings and being derided as a “combination transit-slash-sightseeing ride” that can’t actually get many people anywhere at all promptly, the Dodger Stadium gondola plan proposed by ex-Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt continues to shamble forward. There’s a new environmental impact report, a new public comment period, and a new price tag:

When the project was first announced, total costs were estimated to be $125 million. However, [McCourt’s company] LA ART said those have risen and it is working on a financing plan that will be submitted to Metro in the coming months.

Well, that’s certainly ominous. The Los Angeles Dodgers and Aerial Rapid Transit Technologies LLC (aka LA ART) had previously said it would pay the entire $125 million cost — this somehow despite rides to games being free with a Dodgers ticket, and nobody really having any reason to take a non-free gondola ride when there isn’t a game on — but if they’re submitting a financing plan to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (aka Metro), one can’t help but worry there will be some kind of public subsidy involved now, especially as McCourt’s initial financing plan was “put in some seed money and hope some other investors will fund the rest for some reason.” (The only news outlet reporting the price hike is the fan blog Dodger Blue, so more details are not at all forthcoming.)

All in all, it still seems unlikely that the Dodger gondola will happen, given the financing unknowns and growing opposition in the Chinatown neighborhood it would pass through. But these things do have a way of taking on a momentum of their own: LA ART said it wants to get the gondola built in time for the 2028 Summer Olympics — despite, as Dodger Blue notes, no Olympic events being planned for Dodger Stadium — and nothing bulldozes opposition and fast-tracks financing plans like “We gotta get this done for the Olympics.”

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Friday roundup: Sports team owners saying stuff, and the journalists who love to reprint it, Episode #736

access_time personNeil deMause

That wasn’t a swing, was it? It sure didn’t look like a swing to me.

Sorry, right, enough about actual sports, back to the business of sports business:

  • The owners of the new St. Louis City SC MLS team want a new parking garage built next to their new stadium, arguing that the stadium “will have a magnetic quality that draws people to the district 365 days a year,” according to the garage’s lead architect. Team officials already demolished several century-old mixed-use buildings to make way for the garage, which would seem to be a lost opportunity for things like stores and restaurants that might more likely be in use year-round, but far be it from me to argue with an expert in economagnetism.
  • Albuquerque city officials say they won’t decide where to build a New Mexico United USL soccer stadium until voters approve the money for it — which makes total sense, because the cost of a project doesn’t depend at all on what land needs to be acquired, and also no landowner would ever jack up the price of property knowing that the city needs it for an already-approved project. Today is Opposite Day, right?
  • Arash Markazi no longer works for the L.A. Times after being exposed for promoting friends’ projects in his columns and reprinting press releases almost verbatim, but Substack and Twitter don’t care if you’re ethical so long as you get eyeballs, so we have Markazi announcing, unsourced, that “The Oakland Athletics are expected to announce a handful of finalists for a potential $1 billion stadium in Las Vegas after the World Series,” and that getting turned into entire news articles elsewhere. Never mind that A’s exec Dave Kaval already said as much last month, or that “narrows down sites for stadium that nobody has proposed to pay for” isn’t really breaking news anyway, a famous reporter guy said a thing about famous business guys maybe saying a thing, everybody quick post updates at once!
  • Tennessee Smokies owner Randy Boyd says he’ll pay stadium construction workers at least $15.50 an hour but won’t sign anything making that promise enforceable, and won’t promise to pay concessions and other stadium workers anything above the cheapest the labor market will let him get away with. The Knoxville News Sentinel reports that Boyd says since he’s “a longtime community member, a community benefits agreement won’t be necessary,” a sentence that it’s amazing the News Sentinel production staff could type without busting out in visible lolsobs.
  • Pawtucket’s McCoy Stadium is in bad shape after the Pawtucket Red Sox left for Worcester and took all the kitchen equipment and office chairs with them. The city is considering whether to rehab the stadium for an indie-league team, but the two that kicked the tires said that at 10,000 seats it’s too big for them; or to redevelop the site for something else, but there are worries it will sink into the swamp.
  • Charlotte officials have noticed that they’re paying city police officers to provide security at Carolina Panthers games instead of having the team hire off-duty officers, because no off-duty officers want to work for the $42-an-hour rate that the team offers. I spent a bunch of time reading local articles to try to figure out if it’s the Panthers or the city or someone else chintzing on security wages, and felt bad that I couldn’t figure it out until I saw a quote from Charlotte’s police chief saying, “Listen Panthers or whoever, enough is enough?” and decided that if he doesn’t know, I shouldn’t be expected to either.
  • Do you really want to read NFL uber-insider Mike Florio speculating about whether the NFL will settle the city of St. Louis’s lawsuit against the league for moving the Rams by offering the city an expansion team? Even though Rams owner Stan Kroenke has promised to cover any losses the league is stuck with, and Florio doesn’t provide any sources at all other than “an acknowledgment in league circles of the possibility”? Probably not, but you’re a grownup, make your own decisions.
  • The Tampa Bay Rays may have been eliminated from the postseason, but that’s not going to stop the Tampa Bay Times editorial board from taking the opportunity to stump for a new stadium on the grounds that, um, let’s see, “far too few people will buy tickets to watch them play at their current stadium” and “the hard work needs to be done now to ensure the team stays in the Tampa Bay area, even if it’s part time.” One could point out that there’s no solid evidence that significantly more people would buy tickets at a new stadium, especially for a team that would disappear to Canada all summer, but the Times also says that “this is not the time to clam up or for grandstanding or unhelpful posturing,” so I guess they wouldn’t want lots of people writing them about this, huh?
  • Did you know that the USL is creating a new women’s soccer league, to be an adjunct to/compete with the NWSL, currently reeling under a sexual harassment scandal that has already brought down its commissioner and forced the relocation of its championship game? I had not, but more women’s pro teams can only be a good thing both in terms of growing the women’s game and providing more teams so that cities don’t have to outbid each other for them, though also more opportunities for teams to demand that cities outbid each other for them, because city officials are pretty much morons when it comes to this stuff.
  • Lots of times sports team owners argue that there’s no way to fund venue construction and repairs without public subsidies, but did they ever consider growing and selling soybeans? On free public land, oh, Canada, you just had to ruin this feel-good story, didn’t you?
  • Tokyo’s Olympic white-elephant stadiums are facing increased maintenance costs because they’re under attack by oysters. That is all.
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Friday roundup: Record-breaking heat brings record-breaking subsidy demands

access_time personNeil deMause

That was a busy week, considering it’s the middle of August and everybody is supposed to be on vacation (but not to Sicily, probably). In fact, be honest: You’re not even reading this, are you? Or if you are, you’re just scrolling back through old posts in September sometime, catching up on what you missed. If so, can you let me know how it all turned out? That would save me a lot of time, thanks.

  • After the Buffalo News reported that the Bills owners were seeking $1.5 billion in state money, $1.1 billion of it for a new football stadium, and a team spokesperson said the $1.1 billion stadium price tag was “pure fiction,” and then the News said the owners were seeking $1.4 billion, all of it for a new football stadium, now the Associated Press says that the stadium price tag is indeed $1.4 billion, but the taxpayer share is “up for discussion.” I think maybe let’s just go with the technical term for this range of prices, which is “a megabuttload.”
  • The Bridgeport city council, faced with a dispute with the Islanders minor-league team where the city said the team owed it $750,000 in back rent and the team said the city owed it $837,596 for back repairs and maintenance, have compromised on the city spending $28 million on arena upgrades in exchange for a ten-year lease extension. That doesn’t sound like a very good compromise at all, but at least $2.8 million a year as a lease extension price is a hell of a lot better than the $19 million a year Cleveland is considering for the Guardians.
  • Fresh arena renderings for the Calgary Flames! If people being waited on at small outdoor tables doesn’t convince you that Calgary needs to spend $300 million on this thing, I don’t know what will.
  • If you’re wondering what’s happening to the stadium in the cornfield that MLB built for last night’s Game in a Cornfield Inspired By an Old Movie That Apparently Still Needs the Publicity, the bleachers and lights and locker rooms are getting disassembled, but the field itself will stay put and be used by Little League or high school games, maybe, which the field next door already was, but seriously, there’s got to be some synergy here, right? Right?
  • This is a couple of months old, but I missed it at the time: Economist J.C. Bradbury followed up his paper finding that the Atlanta Braves stadium had no measurable impact on sales-tax receipts in Cobb County with one finding that it had no measurable impact on property values. Synergy!
  • Nobody wants to host the Olympics anymore, because it’s too damn expensive. Hey, didn’t I say that already?
  • The Tampa Bay Rays stadium may be built on a burial ground, that would explain a lot, really.
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Friday roundup: The Las Vegas A’s, the $550m minor-league bailout, and other mythological beings

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday of another week where the Oakland A’s did not move to Las Vegas! There are going to be a lot of these, either an infinite number of them (my guess) or a very large number (if the game of chicken drags on a while but is not a total bluff), so get accustomed to them.

In other news:

  • On top of $71-84 million in construction costs, a new New Mexico United stadium would require buying out “a lot of property” currently owned by private landholders, which would cost … want to give us a guesstimate, KRQE? No? Okay, then. At last word Mayor Tim Keller was going to present his stadium resolution to the city council by today, so maybe we’ll learn more soon.
  • Denver Mayor Michael Hancock wants to use part of a $450 million infrastructure bond to pay for a new $160 million, 10,000-seat arena at the National Western Center, where it would host, you know, stuff? The National Western Center is described on its website as “a future place where heritage of the Old West meets progress of the New West, a space where school children can cultivate food systems while researchers discover food security solutions that will change the world,” so just use your imagination. It’s infrastructure, anyway, what could be wrong with that?
  • Still not sure if the Minor League Baseball Relief Act is going anywhere or not, but its sponsors sure are firing all the publicity guns: Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) declared this week that minor-league baseball teams “are on the brink of financial catastrophe,” citing … absolutely nothing, though the CBS News article reporting this (and putting “financial catastrophe” in its headline) quoted Chattanooga Lookouts owner Jason Freier as saying that without federal help it’s “going to take us 8 to 10 years to get our balance sheet in the state it was back in 2019,” citing … absolutely nothing again. Freier, for the record, already got $668,000 in PPP money, but if he can get as much as $10 million more from the new bill, he’d be crazy not to ask for it, right?
  • The Charlotte Convention Center Fund only has about $250 million remaining under its debt cap, which could complicate plans for the city to help build a stadium for Carolina Panthers owner David Tepper, who has hinted he’ll be seeking $500 million-ish in public funds. Or, you know, not, given that the city could just give him $500 million in tax breaks or free land or something. Money is fungible, which is great if you’re trying to extract it from the public treasury, for good or ill.
  • Speaking of Oakland, Mayor Libby Schaaf said she’s “excited that we are going to resume our talks with the A’s,” while an A’s spokesperson said team execs are waiting for direction from MLB on how to proceed, ha ha, as if the MLB offices tell team owners what to do and not the other way around, that’s a good one.
  • Modesto, California, which spent $4.2 million on a <strike>new</strike> rehabbed stadium for its minor-league baseball team the Modesto A’s (now the Modesto Nuts) in 1997, is “having conversations” with the Seattle Mariners about a new stadium, according to City Manager Joe Lopez. No details on how much it would cost or who would pay for it.
  • Here’s a whole New York Post article about Staten Island’s new indy-league baseball team that never mentions how much the city will be spending to upgrade Staten Island’s stadium to make it happen. (Spoiler: $8 million, thanks, The City.)
  • Developers are still interested in building on the Ybor City site in Tampa that Tampa Bay Rays owner Stu Sternberg had been considering for a stadium, just without a stadium, which makes sense because those things are damned expensive and don’t bring in much in the way of revenue if you can’t get massive public subsidies for them, amirite? Anyway, the developers are thinking of calling the site the Gas Worx, so there’s still something to be outraged about, at least.
  • When watching the Tokyo Olympics, remember that they have the biggest cost overruns in Olympic history. “At least until the next Olympics,” writes Patrick Hruby, and man, is he ever not wrong about that one.
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Friday roundup: Raleigh to pay Hurricanes $81m to stay put, Calgary arena blows budget, plus sports owners’ 70-year-old tax dodge

access_time personNeil deMause

Hi, all! I’ll be traveling next week to one of the parts of the globe where things happen a bit later in the day (because of time zones, not because everyone sleeps in — but wouldn’t that be a great place?), so anticipate posts to be a bit tardier and possibly more sporadic. I’ll be back in plenty of time for that big Oakland A’s stadium hearing on the 20th, though, so expect a report on that one bright and early. (Unless you live in, say, Europe, in which case you’re already taking an afternoon siesta by the time FoS wakes up, lucky you.)

But enough about living on a spherical planet, let’s get to this week’s news:

  • That five-year lease extension that Carolina Hurricanes owner Tom Dundon supposedly signed more than a year ago actually just got finalized by the state-run Centennial Authority yesterday, and we now have some more details on the terms: In exchange for agreeing to stay put from 2024-29, Dundon, a billionaire subprime auto loan baron who just completed his purchase of 100% of the hockey team, will pay zero rent starting this year, plus will get paid $9 million a year in City of Raleigh and Wake County food and hotel tax money through 2029 to cover both operating costs and arena upgrades. There’s also an out clause in the lease where the ‘Canes owner can pay a termination fee and leave early anyway, starting at $31 million in 2024, and sinking to $3 million in 2028. Authority board member and resume-padding yacht salesman Randy Ramsey worried aloud that “I can see us getting to about 2029 and the Hurricanes, or whomever our partners are at that point, saying the building is dilapidated” and needs to be replaced — and Ramsey was one of the board members voting for the lease extension. This is hardly the first case of a team getting paid to play games in its home arena — it’s practically an annual tradition in, say, Indiana — but it’s still a pretty egregious one, especially since North Carolina taxpayers will end up sending enough money Dundon’s way to pay any relocation fee for him, which isn’t quite what a lease guarantee is supposed to do.
  • The Calgary Flames arena project is now $50-60 million over budget, and the CBC reports that “adjustments are now being made to control the costs, which include interior finishings and parts of the building’s exterior.” That seems like an awful lot of money to try to save just by eliminating some sconces, but more power to them if they can do it without value-engineering the place right out of working for hockey. (In case you’re wondering, it would take a two-thirds vote of the Calgary council to approve more money beyond the $250 million-ish already approved.)
  • ProPublica yesterday ran a long article (the only kind it ever runs) about the special tax dodges that sports team owners use to cut their tax bills, in particular the ability to depreciate the value of your players as if they were machine parts that wear out. (ProPublica, as some of you may know, is currently my day job, but I had no involvement with this story.) This is an old, old dodge in sports circles, having been first invented, as ProPublica notes, by then-Cleveland Indians owner Bill Veeck in the late 1940s; here’s a good Sports Illustrated article about it from 1978. I first read about it in (checks Field of Schemes endnotes, I knew there was a reason we included those) Andrew Zimbalist’s 1992 book Baseball and Billions, and then later talked with sports economist Rod Fort about how he and fellow economist Roger Noll had exposed how then-Milwaukee Brewers owner Bud Selig had assigned 94% of the value of his team to the player contracts he’d bought along with the rest of the Seattle Pilots franchise in 1970, thus allowing him to take almost the entire $10.8 million purchase price as a double-dip deduction — only to be told by a judge, in Fort’s recollection, that “well, that’s a good piece of work, but I can see no reason that Selig’s choice violates the accepted rules of accounting in Major League Baseball.” (ProPublica also didn’t mention that the depreciation tax break only really works when the capital-gains tax rate is lower than the income tax rate, as it is now, or else you end up paying the same taxes anyway when you sell the team, something that helped keep Veeck from ever taking advantage of the tax dodge he concocted — but I think this bullet point has already exceeded its maximum allowable parentheticals, so you’ll have to look that one up yourself.)
  • Tokyo has finally given in to reality and barred spectators from the upcoming Olympics, in the face of a virus surge there. (Japan’s vaccination rate is surprisingly crappy, thanks to slow vaccine approvals and something about not allowing pharmacists to give shots but allowing dentists to.) If there’s good news, it’s that once Japan barred foreign fans from attending, spending billions of dollars to host the Olympics looked like an even worse deal once locals wouldn’t even get tourists’ filthy lucre; though I guess now they’re still spending the money and not getting either filthy lucre or the chance to watch Greco-Roman wrestling in person, so maybe there is no good news at all. (For anybody, anywhere.)
  • Looks like the Reading city council is down with giving $3 million to the Fightin Phils for stadium renovations. Now all they need is $3 million from the county and $7.5 million from the state of Pennsylvania, and they’ll be all set, at least until the next time the Fightin Phils owners — which would be the Philadelphia Phillies owners, who are demanding upgrades as necessary thanks to new MLB rules on minor-league facility minimum standards that they themselves voted to impose — decide their stadium is obsolete because their weight room isn’t roomy enough.
  • The … the Phoenix … Suns are in the NBA Finals, so of course someone’s going to write an article about how great this is for the Arizona economy. Two Arizona economists say so, arguing that people might see images of Phoenix on TV during the finals and decide to move there. Or, you know, decide that Arizona on the fast track to being an uninhabitable hellscape. Definitely one of those two!
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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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