Category: the sports-media complex

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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Freedom of the press belongs to those who own a baseball team

access_time personNeil deMause

We already discussed yesterday the wave of new baseball stadium demands and the possible reasons why they’re all hitting right now. (If you need a refresher, Marc Normandin ran through them all yesterday.) But if MLB owners all seem to be working from the same playbook in much of this — issue renderings, threaten to move to Nashville — they also all seem to have hit on one common strategy: the “exclusive” media interview.

This week’s surge of owner Q&As started with that huge New York Times interview by longtime sportswriter Tyler Kepner with Baltimore Orioles owner John Angelos, which didn’t exactly start out with a hard-hitting headline:

A Great Team, an Ambitious Plan and an ‘Existential’ Issue
John Angelos wants to reimagine the way Baltimore approaches the business of baseball, but his team’s electric young core may not be around to see the result.

Though built around an interview, this was really a profile, and the formula for profiles is that they’re generally kind to their subjects. In this case, that meant some scenes of Angelos chatting with fans, discussion of the team’s recent history of on-field performance (bad, until this year) and controversy (even worse after the team suspended its play-by-play broadcaster for reading negative stats on the air, though Angelos was allowed to brush that off with “Nothing like that is going to happen again,” and then a whole lot of owner-speak about his stadium dreams, like:

“People will speak about Baltimore like, ‘Wow, Baltimore is cutting-edge,’ which is what they said about Camden Yards. If we develop it right, and we include that impactful community program module, we can change the whole brand of Baltimore.”

And:

“If big markets like Boston and Atlanta are doing it, it becomes existential — how are we going to compete and keep pace? Everybody won’t be able to do it. But I think because of what’s here — the brand of this ballpark, this piece of property of 60-odd acres with other land around it that could be accessed, maybe bolted on, with the mass transit you don’t even have in Atlanta, with the great highway systems — we think it’s existential.”

Those are assertions that demand a lot of followup questions: How is redeveloping the harborfront area that was already redeveloped once going to change Baltimore’s “brand,” what about the Atlanta Braves‘ real estate development makes him think the Orioles can’t “compete,” how much is all this going to cost and why should taxpayers pay for it? But Kepner didn’t ask any of those, observing, “There are many details to untangle, of course,” then launching into a discussion of whether Angelos would really try to raise ticket prices to pay for re-signing his young stars, as he’s threatened to do, though the discussion remained one-sided since Angelos was allowed to give his side without any rebuttal from, say, a sports economist who could point out how ticket pricing and player spending actually work.

The same day as the Angelos interview, the Kansas City Star ran a Q&A with Royals owner John Sherman that was somewhat better in that it at least asked some hard questions, like “What are the specific financial asks you’ll make of the city and the state?” and “You said private investment would pay for the bulk of the stadium? Is that properly stating that point?” And the Star reporters did manage to extract some actual news from Sherman, getting him to acknowledge that there could be some infrastructure costs on top of his estimated $2 billion for the stadium and a surrounding ballpark district.

But because this was just a straight Q&A, Sherman, like Angelos, got to control the narrative without fear of being contradicted by other people or other facts. Take, for example, this exchange:

McDowell: There is a concern about siphoning off the (business) traffic from Power & Light.

Sherman: Oh, I think we’d drive traffic to [the] Power & Light [entertainment district]. Particularly in baseball, it’s 81 nights a year, bringing all those people down there. We couldn’t create enough right around the ballpark. So I think that’s a benefit to the city.

That is complete gibberish: Moving Royals home games to downtown and building a bunch of shops and restaurants around it would somehow bring so many people to K.C. that they would be forced to travel to the city’s other entertainment district, the one built adjacent to its indoor arena, to find someplace to eat between getting out of work and the start of the game? And there was no mention of how the Power & Light District and the arena are working out, which last we checked was very poorly, with massive seas of red ink that had to be bailed out with public funds.

Finally, owner soapbox #3 was a two-parter yesterday, with the Las Vegas Review-Journal offering an “exclusive interview” with Oakland A’s owner John Fisher while NBC Bay Area presented a “Bay Area exclusive” with Fisher, which means neither was actually exclusive. The Review-Journal, which has been cheerleading for the A’s move all along, lobbed multiple softball questions (sample: “Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred said that he believes you would field a competitive team in Las Vegas because you won’t be spending upward of $100 million on the stadium development process in Oakland any longer?”) and didn’t question Fisher’s claims that “I think all but four ballparks in baseball are new since the early ’80s” (actually six: Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, Dodger Stadium, Angel Stadium, the Oakland Coliseum, and Kauffman Stadium) and that “the building of a mostly privately financed stadium” will “be the largest amount contributed by a baseball team owner of any stadium built to date” (hard to say, since Fisher still hasn’t divulged exactly what he plans to spend himself after getting $600 million in public cash and tax breaks). The R-J then lifted its paywall for the Fisher story initially (it appears to be back now), giving the A’s owner’s statements even more reach.

As the NBC Bay Area Q&A, it was if anything even more softball, perhaps best summed up by news anchor Raj Mathai’s tweet that “wasn’t expecting him to be so candid/revealing,” which confuses openness with a staged media event where the TV station was forced to agree not to record any audio or video. The interview did manage to induce Fisher to say one quiet part loud — “I’m sorry it hasn’t worked out in Oakland” is getting roundly dragged on social media — but aside from that, Fisher and his handlers have to be happy with how the day worked out.

There are two problems with these kind of “exclusives,” really: One is the way that journalists usually allow sports team owners to control the narrative, giving them tons of space to give their rehearsed talking points without fear of contradiction. (It’s the same problem with much political coverage, actually, though at least there sometimes an opposition candidate will get equal time to spew a different unreliable spin.) But even when the questions are more pointed, as in the Star’s interview with Sherman, simply providing that many column inches to the local rich guy preferences his side of the story: Team owners are presented as newsmakers, which is a different category than mere citizens or even experts, who are relegated to occasional rejoinders when they make it into the story at all.

It’s a tough situation, since exclusive interviews (or even fake “exclusives”) draw readers, and traffic is the name of the game in today’s media economy. But allowing team owners to duck questions for months or years and then rushing to let them say whatever they want in a safe, controlled environment with no rebuttal or fact-checking isn’t journalism — that’s stenography. Billionaires’ control of elected government through lobbyists and campaign funding is a big part of the reason why subsidies to the rich are continuing to soar, but their control of the media by withholding access except on their terms, and most of the media’s acquiescence in that, is a huge factor as well.

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Titans to give one kid a free book for every $50+ waitlist deposit, exciting journalists with poor math skills

access_time personNeil deMause

Exciting news from the Tennessee Titans, who have announced that “Titans New Stadium Waitlist to Support Local Schools“! How on earth does that work, you ask? The Titans press release is happy to explain:

Each time a new member joins the waitlist, a new book will be donated to Metro Nashville Public Schools, with the goal of getting a take-home book in the hands of every MNPS first- and second- grade student and populating books in elementary school libraries across Nashville.

Okay, so the Titans are donating some books to Nashville schools, and tying it to the number of people on their waitlist for personal seat licenses. As Titans watchdog Kelly on Twitter notes, getting on the waitlist requires putting down a deposit of between $50 and $1,000, so the team can afford to pay for the books with just the interest the deposits accrue. But they don’t have to do even that, so I suppose it’s sorta nice that the team owners are using this as an opportunity to ensure that Nashville elementary schools have a well-stocked and diverse collection of—

The donation will feature children’s books from 2nd & 7’s own book series, “The Hog Mollies,” featuring a group of friends who learn valuable life lessons in their adventures. Co-founded by Titans head coach Mike Vrabel, the mission of 2nd & 7 is to promote reading by providing free books and positive role models to kids in need while encouraging young athletes of the community to pay it forward.

Okay, now this requires further investigation. The Titans’ head coach has his own kids’ book series? What kind of valuable life lessons does it teach? Fortunately, the Hog Mollies books are all available to read online, so we can learn such important insights as:

And that’s just from the first book in the series! Later installments feature such important lessons as “If you find money in the street, ring the nearest doorbell and give it to the person who answers, and maybe they’ll turn out to be the owner of a local toy shop and give you a free toy” and “If you see someone ordering ice cream while looking at their phone, go scrub graffiti off the wall of the ice cream store’s building and maybe the ice cream store owner will give you free ice cream,” which maybe seems a little transactional for six-year-olds, but at least it’ll keep the little bastards off their phone for a few minutes, I guess.

Mostly, the book giveaway provides a way for the Titans to generate some positive PR around their $2 billion stadium that everyone hates spending public money on. And the local media have been quick to oblige:

Can’t wait for the next installment of the Hog Mollies series: “The Hog Mollies and Getting the Local TV Station to Promote Your PSL Sales by Giving Away Some Free Books.” Your first-grade viral marketing students will love it!

 

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Newspaper says Brewers could move without stadium subsidy, according to nobody in particular

access_time personNeil deMause

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel dropped a bombshell on Friday:

The Milwaukee Brewers could start looking for a new home this fall if state and local officials fail to reach agreement by then on a taxpayer-funded package to fund improvements to American Family Field required in the team’s lease with the state

Huge if true! Sure, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred had hinted at a move threat for the Brewers previously, but for team execs to actually openly say that the team could relocate without stadium subsidies is — hang on, there was something more to that sentence:

The Milwaukee Brewers could start looking for a new home this fall if state and local officials fail to reach agreement by then on a taxpayer-funded package to fund improvements to American Family Field required in the team’s lease with the state, sources say

Excuse me? This entire article — which also specifically suggests the Brewers could move to “the boomtowns of Charlotte, North Carolina or Nashville, Tennessee,” more on that in a second — turns out to be based entirely on statements by unnamed people, identified only as “sources with knowledge of the dynamic” and “a source familiar with negotiations,” with no one going on the record about a move threat at all. This is, in newspaper lingo, fucked up, and a clear, if sadly not uncommon, violation of ethical standards.

For those of you unfamiliar with the planet Earth and its journalism, the use of unnamed sources is a way for news outlets to report on things even when the people feeding them the information don’t want to go public because they, say, might get fired if they did. The danger is that sources might also hide behind anonymity to use journalists’ desire for a scoop to plant fake news, or at least their spin on real news, in stories without anyone being able to verify it, because everyone involved can publicly deny having said anything.

And so, there are supposed to be guardrails to stop the abuse of unnamed sourcing. For example, the Society of Professional Journalists’ ethics policy states:

If the only way to publish a story that is of importance to the audience is to use anonymous sources, the reporter owes it to the readers to identify the source as clearly as possible…

When someone asks to provide information off the record, be sure the reason is not to boost her own position by undermining someone else’s, to even the score with a rival, to attack an opponent or to push a personal agenda.

The Journal-Sentinel clearly doesn’t do the former here: The paper didn’t even indicate whether the source was on the team side of negotiations or the government side, meaning there’s no way for readers to decide for themselves if this might be, on the one hand, the Brewers’ owners trying to rattle a move-threat saber, or on the other, state officials trying to justify a subsidy deal that now could be as high as $430 million on the grounds that “we had to do it, or they were going to move to Charlotte.” As for the latter, there’s no way to tell from the article whether the Journal-Sentinel’s sources are pushing a personal agenda, and indeed plenty of reason to suspect that the move threat was leaked in order to gin up fear among Brewers fans that the team might leave.

All we know for now, then, is that someone, presumably someone in the state of Wisconsin, says that relocation is on the table for the Brewers, or at least that they’re trying to create leverage by asserting that it is. The one direct quote from the paper’s unnamed source — “The Brewers genuinely want to stay, it is only a question of whether they’ll be able to with the [stadium] district broke” — suggests a subsidy advocate either with the team or in state government who is trying to paint the team as the good guys, who genuinely don’t want any paratroopers to be set on fire, but things break, don’t they?

As for the extremely specific threat that the Brewers could move to Charlotte or Nashville, that’s completely unsupported in the article, not even cited to unnamed sources. Charlotte, at least, is genuinely fast-growing, increasing in population at the fourth-fastest rate in the country between 2010 and 2020, jumping all the way to 15th-largest city in the U.S. Nashville has been growing at a somewhat slower rate, though is still doing better than Milwaukee, which has been shrinking in population in recent decades.

That’s all in terms of the population of the cities proper, though. In terms of metro area, which is far more important to selling both tickets and TV subscriptions, Milwaukee’s is growing at about 0.5% a year, compared to Charlotte’s 5% a year and Nashville’s 2.5%. Charlotte currently sits 21st in TV market size, Nashville 27th, and Milwaukee 38th, so there’s at least some argument that a move by the Brewers to one of those two cities wouldn’t be entirely crazy.

There’s one other important factor, though, that isn’t even mentioned by the Journal-Sentinel article: Neither Charlotte nor Nashville has a major-league baseball stadium, not even one unfathomably ancient like Milwaukee’s, which opened way back in 2001. So moving to one of those cities would require Brewers owner Mark Attanasio to first come up with a billion or so dollars to erect a new stadium — certainly something that Nashville might be willing to help with, given past recent performance, but still not clearly a financial upgrade over staying put even if Wisconsin were to contribute something less than $430 million in renovations.

None of this is unusual in the stadium game, of course — there’s a reason the non-threat threat is one of the key items in the standard stadium playbook as listed in Field of Schemes the book. But it is at least a little alarming, if not entirely surprising, to see a major newspaper playing along with the threat without questioning it in the slightest, let alone without following journalistic ethical principles by saying, “Yeah, if you want to throw that allegation out there, you’re going to have to be willing to say it by name, what do we look like, stooges willing to turn over our news coverage to anyone in a position of power who wants to get something into the headlines? Maybe don’t answer that.”

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Slow news day leaves nation’s journalists stumping ever more desperately for new stadiums and arenas

access_time personNeil deMause

Some days it’s hard to decide what to write about here. There’s always some kind of stadium and arena news burbling beneath the surface, depending on what you consider “news,” and if I tried to write about it all every day, it would leave me no time for anything else, not to mention nothing left over for the Friday roundup, and then where would we be on Fridays? So instead I scroll through the news feed and wonder, is it worth writing about this Guardian article about the Oklahoma City Thunder?

Oklahoma City Thunder are the team of the future. But where will they play?

OKC have a host of young stars who could help them challenge for the NBA title. The only problem may be finding a long-term home

I mean, it’s a dumb premise, to be sure: The Thunder have a bunch of good young players and a pile of draft picks, but they play in an arena that is (checks) 22 years old, and it’s “a bare bones building” or maybe “a bare-bones building” (the Grauniad‘s copy editors can’t seem to decide) according to (checks) the head of the local chamber of commerce, and so CRISIS! Rehash some numbers about how much other cities have spent on NBA arenas, discuss who would pay for one in Oklahoma City (checks: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯), and sum up by restating your premise (“So as fans look to a bright future for the Thunder, there remains a looming uncertainty over where the NBA’s potential next great team will actually play”), cut, that’s a wrap, time to file for your first freelance check in seven months, it’s a rough journalism market out there.

Or maybe the San Antonio Business Journal’s article about how the Spurs have one really good young player but are stuck playing in a non-downtown arena that is (checks) 21 years old thanks to “a lack of political consensus and a willingness to settle” and how there’s “increasing chatter” about a new downtown arena but no consensus or even a hint of a plan in how to pull that off” and architect Janet Marie Smith once said that getting development around a baseball stadium requires planning “to allow for that organic growth to happen” and what does this have to do with, you know what, never mind, just keep on going, there’s almost enough words here to make an article, just reach into your “conclusions” folder and pull out something like “It’s free advice that Alamo City leaders should certainly consider,” now hit publish, time to go see if there’s any breaking human resources news that is also your beat.

But maybe neither of those seems like quite enough for their own post? What, then, about D.C. councilmember Charles Allen’s cleverly contrarian op-ed “Yes, D.C. needs a stadium deal. But not at RFK“? Which turns out not to be, as the Washington Post’s headline writers seem to have thought it was, possibly without having read the whole thing, about how D.C. needs to build a Commanders stadium somewhere other than the RFK Stadium site, but rather about how what D.C. really needs isn’t a football stadium but a basketball/hockey arena to replace the one the Wizards and Capitals play in that is (checks) 25 years old and is “showing its age” in unspecified ways that don’t require spelling out in an op-ed. Anyway, if the teams moved to (checks) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, “it would send the message that we’ve given up on the downtown of the nation’s capital: Who wants to open a new store or restaurant or convert a commercial property to apartments in an empty, destabilized Chinatown?” And nothing says “stabilizing” to D.C.’s Chinatown like a new or renovated arena!

On second thought, maybe none of these are worth writing about, or asking you to read about — is it really necessary to pay attention to every slow-news-day article that the nation’s remaining news outlets throw at the wall? On the other hand, if I write about this today, then if tomorrow’s another slow news day, I can punt on posting then and just skip straight to the Friday roundup and be done for the week. That’s free advice that I should certainly consider.

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What will stadiums of the future look like? Don’t ask bad journalists

access_time personNeil deMause

The trend story is one of the more pernicious forms of bad journalism: It often starts when a reporter’s editor, or the person at the next desk from a reporter, or a reporter’s mom, says, “Hey, didja notice that it seems like all the kids today are doing X? Maybe that would make a good story for you!” At which point the reporter cobbles together whatever anecdotal evidence they can in support of this thesis, hits “publish,” and suddenly it must be true, because it’s in the newspaper.

Which brings us, as mentions of bad journalism so often do, to Front Office Sports, the industry rag that was started by a teenager as an excuse to talk to sports executives in hopes of landing a job. A trend piece from Sunday begins:

Expansive development of the surrounding areas at major sports venues is topping the wish-list of teams looking to bring new retail space, bars, restaurants, and family activities closer to their home venues.

These “mini-cities” have proven to be major success stories in locales like Atlanta at the Battery connected to the Braves’ Truist Park and the ever-growing development around the Dallas Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium as well as its headquarters in Frisco, Texas.

There are a few things wrong with this already. First off, sports team owners sometimes seeking to get additional development as a side dish with their stadiums is nothing new: It goes back at least to the time when the Baltimore Orioles‘ Camden Yards was planned to incorporate the B&O Warehouse building as part of an open-air mall alongside the stadium, and has been a recurrent feature in the 30-plus years since. This has been true for a couple of reasons: It’s a way for an owner to make even more revenue than just selling sports tickets and hot dogs; and it also helps muddy the financial waters, since you can tell the public “It’s not just a stadium!” and hope the economic math is too complex for anyone to figure out who’s spending what and what the return is in terms of jobs or other impact.

Second, “success story” is in the eye of the beholder. The Atlanta Braves‘ surrounding development, for example, has indeed been a cash cow for the team owners, but mostly because taxpayers are underwriting it to the tune of $15 million a year in lost tax money. And who can forget the St. Louis Cardinals‘ “ballpark village” that remained a muddy pit for years until the team owners could extract more tax subsidies to get it built? But the trend story doesn’t let contrary evidence spoil the party, so Front Office Sports reporter David Rumsey just rolls out a couple more examples of stadium projects that fit his premise before wrapping things up at a brisk six paragraphs and hitting publish.

Over at the UK’s Sky Sports, meanwhile, we have the story “Future of Football: What does the future look like for stadium development?“, which at least goes to the trouble of interviewing a few actual people about the alleged trend in progress. Okay, actually just three guys, and two of them are stadium designers, so not exactly unbiased observers; when one exec with the architecture firm Populous says that multi-use stadiums with moving pitches and retractable roofs are all the rage, it’s tough to know whether that’s because that’s what clients actually want or because Populous earns a bigger fee for designing a more expansive stadium project.

The truth is that sports team owners are, as always, looking to build whatever projects they think will make them the most money — and, maybe as a secondary goal, that will make their fellow owners the most jealous the next time they get together for league meetings. Not every team owner puts ancillary development at the top of their wish list, depending on what they think they can extract from local elected officials, and what they think will be a selling point: The Oakland A’s owners appear to be turning down a stadium-plus-surrounding-development plan in Oakland for a stadium-and-nothing-else in Las Vegas; the Buffalo Bills owners are building a new stadium in the same empty suburban parking lot as their old one; and so on. But “The future of stadiums looks much like the past of stadiums: whatever the rich dudes who own teams feel like” isn’t a very grabby headline, so instead we get this kind of thing.

In entirely unrelated news, sports economists J.C. Bradbury, Dennis Coates, and Brad Humphreys have updated their big paper on pro sports stadium subsidies, with an eye toward more policy recommendations. And one of those is no more shitty journalism:

Reporters should acknowledge the strong consensus in economic research that stadiums are poor public investments and treat this consensus the same way they treat expert conclusions on other subjects rife with misinformation, such as climate change, vaccine efficacy, and voter fraud. They also have a responsibility to inform the public that decades of evidence does not support the claim that stadiums promote economic development when covering stadium proposals.

Journalists should provide critical coverage of commissioned economic impact studies including outside evaluations from objective academic economics experts with no conflict of interest regarding the project. Reporting projected positive impacts qualified with modifiers like “could” or “may,” or attributing estimates of future benefits to other sources (e.g, “according to a report from the local convention and visitors bureau”) does not absolve reporters from their responsibility to scrutinize the claims made by subsidy proponents. Reporters should point out when economic impact estimates are forecasts, recognizing that the projections are speculative and often turn out to be incorrect. A norm of not reporting estimates from commissioned economic impact studies that appear to be non-credible should exist.

To that end, the authors say, “Knowledgeable experts have a responsibility to respond to faulty reporting and refute misinformation with evidence.” That’s certainly something that Bradbury, Coates, and Humphreys do every day on what’s left of Twitter; and it’s why half the time this site ends up looking as much like a media criticism blog as one about sports stadium politics. As always, fighting ignorance is taking longer than we thought; thanks for sticking along for the ride.

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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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Hold onto your hats, the Worcester stadium economic impact wars are heating up again

access_time personNeil deMause

The Worcester Telegram ran a super-weird “guest column” (i.e., op-ed) on Thursday on the Worcester Red Sox‘ new stadium, which as you may recall was the recipient of $150 million in tax money and the subject of a bitter battle between economists Victor Matheson and Andy Zimbalist, only one of whom turned out to have been paid $225 an hour by the team for his opinions. First off, the op-ed was unsigned, except by the Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce; second, it asserted that, contrary to what Matheson and other economists had projected, “the ballpark is indeed paying for itself, and [is] a major success for the city”:

It was clearly demonstrated that the revenues from the [District Improvement Financing] – taxes, parking, permits and the team’s rent – are more than covering the expenses related to the park, just as they have done every year, without taking from the municipal general fund.

Sure, if you count kicked-back taxes from a stadium district as “covering expenses,” then it’s easy to get a stadium to pay for itself: Just keep drawing the lines around the district bigger and bigger until you have enough tax revenue to call it profitable — and never mind if you’ve now siphoned off a bunch of tax money that would have come to the city with or without a stadium.

The unnamed authors, though, went a step further, taking a dig at Matheson’s Holy Cross economics department colleague Robert Baumann and Kennesaw State College economist J.C. Bradbury for their paper projecting that the Worcester stadium would cost the city a net loss of $40-60 million:

The recent report that called the park a net loss to the city leaned heavily on the outdated pro forma and the application of an academic notion called a “crowding out effect,” which essentially states that stadiums crowd out existing spending for businesses in the area since people have limited entertainment budgets and tend to choose one activity over the other.

The vast majority of academic literature analyzing the crowding out effect uses case studies of massive projects that host major league events like SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California; Truist Park in Cobb County, Georgia; or when cities construct stadiums to host the Olympics or World Cup. These are not the same conditions that apply to Worcester.

Oh, noooo, you do not want to pick a public fight with a man with the Twitter bandwidth of Bradbury, especially not without doing all your research first. Which, as Bradbury has been tweeting for several days now, neither the Worcester chamber nor the Telegram editorial page appears to have done:

As someone with a fair bit of experience with op-ed pages of my own, I think it’s fair to say that it’s not unusual for them to have two different fact-checking standards, one for opinions that the editorial page editors agree with, and one for those written by naysayers with no ties to the local political-business leadership. Yes, this is a violation of basic newsroom ethics, but so is letting sources express opinions behind the cover of anonymity, and newspapers do that all the time as well for friends in high places, so this should really come as no surprise. An outrage if you think that accurate journalism is an important necessity for a functioning democracy, sure; a surprise, not so much.

Anyway, this probably still isn’t bad enough to displace that horrible Philadelphia Inquirer column on the proposed 76ers arena as worst pro-sports-subsidy op-ed of 2023, but it might win special notice in the minor-league stadiums division. If only we could know who to send the trophy to…

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Somebody wants you to know Rays owner could totally sell the team if he wanted

access_time personNeil deMause

If you’re even a casual baseball fan, you likely know Ken Rosenthal as that guy with the bowtie who does sideline reporting for Fox during playoff games. He’s a consummate access journalism guy, and he and Chandler Rome just turned in a report for The Athletic that boils down to this paragraph:

At least one local businessman is trying to buy the [Tampa Bay Rays] franchise, according to sources briefed on the discussions who were granted anonymity so they could speak candidly. The team also is drawing interest from groups that would relocate the club to one of the cities that is a candidate for major-league expansion.

None of this is particularly surprising or even newsworthy, depending on what “trying to buy” means: There are a lot of billionaires out there, and a lot of them like sports, and with Rays owner Stuart Sternberg unhappy with his current stadium in St. Petersburg, you would expect some of them would at least be kicking the tires on how much it would cost to buy the Rays and either move them or not.

The more interesting question here is why this is being reported now. “Sources briefed on the discussions” can only be so many people: Anyone on the buyer side of talks — say, someone connected to local office printer baron Dan Doyle Jr., the one prospective purchaser named in the article — wouldn’t know about other bidders, so that leaves either 1) Rays officials or 2) MLB officials. So someone from either the team or the league decided to blab to Rosenthal about all the people who would like to buy the team, if it were up for sale. Why?

One immediately obvious possibility: This is coming from Rays execs who, fearing the bidding war to build the team a stadium isn’t heating up fast enough despite those much-hyped Orlando plans, figure that it wouldn’t hurt to plant a story in a major sports publication warning that the team could be sold and moved. Or the same could be coming from MLB execs for the same reason, since the league wants somebody to dump a few hundred million dollars on the Rays for a new stadium almost as badly as Sternberg does.

It also could be that someone in one of the organizations is leaking this without approval of their bosses, in order to … actually, I’m not sure why they would want to do that, other than to gossip with Rosenthal vaguely about how many phone calls they’re fielding from people wanting to buy the team. (Rosenthal isn’t relentless pro-league, by the way — in fact he was reportedly booted from his role on MLB Network for being too critical of MLB commissioner Rob Manfred’s negotiations with players during the height of the pandemic — but gossip, whether with management or players, remains his stock in trade.) The whole thing makes far more sense as a leverage move, but we can’t be sure, because Rosenthal and Rome have granted their sources total anonymity to allege whatever they choose.

This is the biggest problem with relying on unnamed sources (and with access journalism in general): Without knowing who’s making the statements, readers have no way of knowing how reliable it is, or whether sources could be dishing rumors for their own purposes. The Associated Press ethics rules specifically require that articles describe not just why sources requested to speak anonymously but “the source’s motive for disclosing the information” when relevant; NPR’s say reporters should “describe in as much detail as we can (without revealing so much that we effectively identify that person) how they know this information, their motivations (if any) and any other biographical details that will help a listener or reader evaluate the source’s credibility.” Not that AP or NPR or any other publication with similar rules necessarily follow these guidelines when there’s a juicy scoop being dangled in front of them — but there is widespread acknowledgement that granting anonymity too readily is a great way to turn your articles into a mouthpiece for people who want to get things out in the media without having to answer questions about them.

The upshot, then, is that somebody, probably a Rays or MLB exec, wants you to know, or at least to believe, that Stu Sternberg has lots of great offers to buy the team and maybe move it — at a time when Sternberg is in the middle of trying to get some locality to offer the most possible money toward building him a stadium. Sources close to the journalism industry say this strongly suggests the entire Rays sale talk is primarily a media stunt, though they declined to speak on the record because they didn’t want to reveal whether they’re actually just me.

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Friday roundup: A’s now open to “different” Vegas sites, stadium reno could leave Jaguars homeless, Zimbalist says he may have been wrong about Worcester ballpark benefits

access_time personNeil deMause

Time for our weekly speed run through the rest of the week’s news! Let’s get started, because there is a metric crapton of it:

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