move threats – Field of Schemes

Friday roundup: KC Star urges “no” vote on Royals/Chiefs sales tax; property tax breaks could cost KC schools, libraries $600m

March 29, 2024 Neil deMause

Moving a little slow today as I head home from the Sports Economics Conference 2024, which hopefully can become a regular event. As a reward for your patience, here’s audio of yesterday’s journalism panel discussion with me, Ken Belson of the New York Times, and Pat Garofalo of the American Economic Liberties Project, plus lots of questions from the assembled luminaries of the sports economics field. (That’s our host, Dennis Coates of that meta-study fame, introducing us, and the other co-authors of that paper, J.C. Bradbury and Brad Humphreys, make cameos as well.)

And now, if the Amtrak wifi is willing and the creek don’t rise, let’s move on with this week’s news lightning round:

The Kansas City Star has urged a “no” vote on Tuesday’s 0.375% sales tax surcharge extension ballot measure, saying the Royals and Chiefs stadium plans “remain far too hazy and unclear” and “the people who will pay it have every right to ask for facts before making a decision.” It’s pretty unusual for team owners to go into a stadium vote without lining up the support of the city’s major newspaper, and the Star was not that long ago a major booster of a downtown Royals stadium, so this seems very much a sign of cracks in the local growth coalition; whether it’ll be enough to defeat the proposal, we’ll need to wait to see until polls close Tuesday night.
In related news, KCUR reports that because the Royals stadium district would be on land the county would purchase and then lease to the team, team owner John Sherman would be able to duck out of $1.4 billion in property taxes over 40 years, according to “an analysis from Jackson County obtained by KCUR.” Visiting ye olde present value calculator shows that this would be worth about $600 million in current value (maybe somewhat less if it’s significantly backloaded as property values rise), which when added to the $250-350 million from the sales tax and maybe another $650-750 million from as-yet-unallocated city and state money comes to … let’s just say “a huge-ass amount of money” and leave it at that.
Royals president of business operations Brooks “No Relation” Sherman says that the “concrete cancer” issue that was previously blamed for making Kauffman Stadium ineligible to be renovated is “not new news” and is “part of our responsibility to maintain the stadium” and “not the reason we’re leaving,” everyone who cast early ballots only reading the previous claims gets to go back and re-vote now, right?
“Rays’ home opener sells out. Would a new stadium bring crowds year-round?” asks the Tampa Bay Times, and while both Ian Betteridge and the existence of the baseball off-season have something to say about that, the TBT instead asked fans at Tampa Bay Rays opening day, who responded with a decided ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. One did suggest, “I think they’ll sell out for the first couple of years. Then it’ll be right back to this,” which matches very well with Bradbury’s slide from yesterday’s presentation where he showed how stadium honeymoon periods only last 5-10 years.
The Rays are supposedly working on a non-relocation agreement in exchange for a $1.5 billion-ish stadium subsidy, but you can’t see it yet, it’s still getting its face on. Asked if the new lease clause would be as strong as the old one that barred team execs from even talking to anyone about a move, St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch said only, “I am feeling good about the process.” City and county votes on the Rays stadium plan are expected not this evening, but surely tomorrow.
Chicago Bears CEO Kevin Warren has officially said the team’s priority is building a stadium on the Chicago lakefront “right now,” but “we still own the land” in Arlington Heights, but “the focus now has to be on Chicago to give us the best opportunity for success” — yeah, I think we get the picture, thanks.
There were more Oakland A’s fans outside their opening day home game than inside, taking part in a “block party” in protest of the team’s planned-maybe-who-knows move to Las Vegas. For some reason unclear to me this required buying tickets to the game, but as Marc Normandin notes in his long-running-but-only-recently-named Marvin Miller’s Mustache newsletter, “John Fisher getting some extra cash out of the deal bothers me, yes, but him taking a proverbial punch to the chin is also a nifty occurrence, so I’ll let it go.”
“NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell optimistic about a Commanders stadium in Washington” because of course he is, that’s why the owners pay him the big bucks.
Buffalo Bills fans are really steamed about possibly having to pay tens of thousands of dollars for personal seat licenses or else lose their place on the season ticket line, guess you shouldn’t have voted for the new stadium then — oh haha, I was just joshing, New York state doesn’t believe in voting, people might vote the wrong way!
“Could the Chicago White Sox really move to Nashville?” asks the Chicago Tribune, before answering its own question: “It’s complicated.” Heavy sigh. Hello, Chicago Tribune copy desk? I have some news for you about the might/could distinction.

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“A savvy negotiator creates leverage”: That time the White Sox pretended to move to Florida to get stadium money from Illinois

May 12, 2020 Neil deMause

One of the things I’ve been doing to keep myself occupied during our sports-deprived present has been watching old baseball games, especially those from the ’70s and ’80s with ridiculous uniforms. Most recently I landed on a Chicago White Sox vs. Detroit Tigers game from 1988 at Comiskey Park, which featured this:

…plus lots of discussion from Tigers announcers George Kell and Al Kaline about what a shame it would be if the White Sox moved to St. Petersburg, Florida.

Readers of Field of Schemes the book and Field of Schemes the website will be familiar with this as one of the most memorable move threats of the early modern stadium-grubbing era. To recap: Unhappy with their historic but insufficiently state-of-the-art stadium, White Sox owners Jerry Reinsdorf and Eddie Einhorn had asked the Illinois state legislature for a new one, at public expense. And since giving the local sports team owners $150 million to build a new stadium across the street from the old one wasn’t entirely popular — Illinois Gov. Jim Thompson, Reinsdorf later recalled, advised, “It’ll never happen unless people think you are going to leave” — Reinsdorf hopped on a plane to St. Petersburg, Florida, which was in the process of building its Florida Suncoast Dome (now known as Tropicana Field) in hopes of luring an MLB team, a trip that made headlines back in Chicago and helped prompt the banners at that Tigers-White Sox game in late May.

By June 30, the Illinois legislature was ready to vote, with a midnight deadline if proponents didn’t want to have to muster a three-fifths majority, likely an insurmountable obstacle. And thanks to arm-twisting by Thompson — plus a bit of subterfuge by house speaker Michael Madigan, who set his watch back by four minutes so that a 12:03 am vote could be recorded as being at 11:59 pm — the new stadium bill was approved, 30-29 in the state senate and 60-55 in the state house.

Reinsdorf’s Florida jaunt clearly had made an impact: The Chicago Tribune’s coverage of the vote flatly stated that rejection of the stadium subsidy bill would have “[left] the Sox no choice but to leave the South Side for St. Petersburg.” But was Reinsdorf serious, or just following Thompson’s advice to throw a scare into the Illinois populace? Seven years later, Cigar Aficionado magazine asked the Sox co-owner about it, and received a response for the ages:

“A savvy negotiator creates leverage. People had to think we were going to leave Chicago.”

As for St. Petersburg, city officials there kept shopping around for another team to lure to town, eventually helping the Baltimore Orioles, Cleveland Indians, and Texas Rangers create leverage to score new-stadium deals at home as well, as memorialized in a FoS magnet. Finally, it looked like the city had hit paydirt when San Francisco Giants owner Bob Lurie, frustrated at having failed four times to get stadium-subsidy referendums passed in the San Francisco Bay Area, announced he was selling the team to Tampa Bay businessman Vince Naimoli. The rest of the National League owners, however, voted to reject the sale and to tell Lurie to instead sell to local supermarket baron Peter Magowan, which he did, saving the Giants for San Francisco.

This time, though, Naimoli had actual evidence of MLB interference in St. Petersburg landing a team — since Lurie had actually announced a deal, unlike Reinsdorf and other earlier owners who’d merely played footsie with Tampa Bay. He sued MLB, and, with the league unwilling to risk its decades-old antitrust exemption in a court battle, within two years was awarded the Tampa Bay Devil Rays as an expansion franchise, setting the stage for another relocation-threat saga that continues to this day.

Anyway, go watch that Tigers-Sox game if you want an interesting glimpse at the origin story of the sports move-threat campaign. Those White Sox fans with the “Stay In Chicago” banner likely didn’t know that they were unwitting pawns in a political battle over hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds, and knowing baseball fans they might not have cared if they were. But they — and Reinsdorf’s “savvy negotiations” — have echoes in every sports stadium battle of the last 30 years, and likely will for the next 30 unless cities start calling owners’ bluffs. Not to mention setting their watches right.

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A’s, Rays celebrate Wild Card game with dueling move threats by proxy

October 3, 2019October 3, 2019 Neil deMause

The Oakland A’s and Tampa Bay Rays faced off in the American League Wild Card game last night, before a sold-out crowd at Oakland Coliseum who paid an average of $129 for tickets on the resale market. One might think this would make it harder for the teams’ owners to claim that they’re doomed to failure on and off the field without the new stadiums they’re seeking — which means it’s time to pull out everybody’s favorite entry in the stadium-grubbers’ playbook, the oblique move threat:

MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, in town for the game, said he’d told Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf that the city’s lawsuit against Alameda County for agreeing to sell its half of Oakland Coliseum land to the A’s owners without consulting the city that owns the other half left him “very concerned” that Oakland would “litigate against progress,” and that “I said to the mayor at one point, ‘The timing was such that some people could read it that maybe it is time for us to consider other alternatives.’” In case anyone missed the point, Manfred added, “There needs to be a plan to move this franchise forward. I’m hopeful it’s going to be here in Oakland,” and “I think it would be a tragedy for Oakland to lose its last major professional sports team,” which is almost a direct quote from the Army Protection Racket sketch.
Rays owner Stuart Sternberg, meanwhile, bought tickets to the Wild Card game for Stephen Bronfman, the Montreal-based Seagram’s heir and private equity fund baron who is Sternberg’s would-be partner in his plan to have his team split time between two countries as the Tampontreal Ex-Rays. (Not the actual name, probably, but it should be.) “The thing is, it doesn’t interfere with anything going on, on the field. I made a point, and it still continues to be true, that 100 percent of what we’re focused on right now is on the field,” said Sternberg, while making headlines by answering questions about hosting a potential move-threat partner off the field.

Now, you will notice that neither of these threats came explicitly from the teams’ owners: A’s president and de facto stadium campaign spokesperson Dave Kaval limited himself to saying he was “surprised” by the city lawsuit, while leaving the heavy threatmongering to Manfred. And Sternberg insisted that he wasn’t the one who revealed that he bought Wild Card game tickets for Bronfman (they wouldn’t be sitting together, he said), but rather a member of Bronfman’s executive team who tweeted about it.

Still, sports team owners have a long track record of levying move threats by proxy, since it allows them all the leverage benefits while avoiding the nasty bits about being burned in effigy by outraged fans. It’s particularly unlikely that Manfred would be dropping threats in interviews without the explicit permission of A’s ownership, since the 30 MLB owners pay his salary; as for Bronfman, it’s possible that Sternberg said, “Here’s some tickets, now keep it under your hat that I paid for them, it would look really bad if people thought I did this just to rattle sabers about moving to Montreal during my team’s first postseason appearance in six years” and someone in Bronfman’s crew got Twitter-happy and ignored this, but somehow that doesn’t seem the most likely scenario.

Anyway, the Rays drove the A’s out of the playoffs with a pile of home runs, which means now we’ll get to see how attendance at Tampa Bay’s much-maligned stadium looks for games that really matter. Tickets for the A.L. Division Series vs. the Houston Astros go on sale today at 4 pm, and I for one will be as glued to the SeatGeek resale prices as to the start of the N.L. Division Series that’s happening at the same time.

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