Category: vaportecture

Friday roundup: Tampa plans for Rays keep going sideways; new stadium funding demands in Orlando, D.C.

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday to those of you who can see this through all the burning Canada! Everyone stay safe, mask up, and stay indoors to read the latest sports subsidy news, only most of which this week involves Florida men:

  • Hillsborough County Commission chair Ken Hagan said Wednesday that if the Tampa city council won’t go along with contributing tax money to a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium, maybe the county will just go ahead without them. Hagan did not go on to describe where he would find $180 million to replace the city’s planned contribution. Rather than object to being threatened with a good time, Tampa council chair Alan Clendenin warned his recalcitrant colleagues, “Unfortunately, there’ll be a cost of the city not having participated in the process.” He didn’t say what kind of cost he meant, but he gave his word that it was the case, and that’s good enough with old Clenny.
  • The chances of convincing Tampa elected officials to spend public dollars on a Rays stadium, meanwhile, could plummet if Florida voters adopt sweeping property tax cuts in November, which would decimate local budgets. On the bright side — sort of — that would at least make any property tax exemption for the Rays stadium project worth less, since there would be less in property taxes to exempt, though it still would leave Tampa in the same budget hole for the project.
  • And finally, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred also chimed in on the Rays stadium situation, saying at the All-Star Game, “Every delay just makes it more difficult to hit a timetable of when the stadium is going to open,” which, yes, that’s how time works. Maybe Manfred would like to impose a pitch clock on stadium talks?
  • The group of wannabe Orlando MLB expansion team owners say they have more than $2 billion in place combined for acquiring a team and building a stadium, and with MLB’s expansion fee expected to be more than $2 billion, they’re asking the state of Florida to kick in $975 million in tourist tax dollars toward a stadium. The prospective ownership group said this would 100% be worth it, as a new team in Orlando would generate $73 trillion dollars in new economic activity in the first week alone (or something like that, I didn’t write down the actual number, mine is equally likely to be accurate). It also raises the question of whether Orlando is really a move threat for the Rays if it would require state money too, meaning state officials would really be bidding against themselves.
  • Some rich people in Nashville would like an MLB expansion team too, but city officials there say that’ll only work if they can privately fund a stadium, good luck with that.
  • The Chicago city council, as expected, approved spending $425 million in property tax proceeds on roads and public plazas and stuff surrounding a new downtown Chicago Fire stadium. Alderman Anthony Beale called the project “what exactly TIF is supposed to be used for,” adding, “When you look at the jobs that are going to be created by this, when you look at the revenue that’s going to be brought into the city by this project, the restaurants, the parking, the ticket sales and all the things that go along with that, that’s how we make our economy grow.” Beale did not explain how moving the Fire from one part of Chicago to another was going to create all this new revenue — or, for that matter, how encouraging construction of new housing in one part of Chicago rather than another — but surely he knows what he’s talking about, no reason not to trust him just bceause he once attended a fundraiser in his honor held by the taxicab industry the week before before voting to water down taxicab regulations.
  • Washington, D.C. council chair Phil Mendelson has proposed spending $300 million in city money on expanding D.C. United‘s stadium to 28,000 seats and building a roof on it, with the team owners on the hook for the other $320 million. In exchange, the district would receive “stadium-generated revenues and economic activity,” which is to say no actual money, just “maybe it’ll host some more concerts and not everyone buying tickets would have been spending their money elsewhere in D.C. anyway.”
  • The city of Portland broke the stalemate in Portland Trail Blazers arena talks yesterday, sending team owner Tom Dundon a draft term sheet that doesn’t include rent payments but does include payments in lieu of property taxes starting at $3 million a year and escalating over time. This came after NBA commissioner Adam Silver griped that Dundon’s plan to get $600 million in public money for arena renovations while putting in nothing of his own money “seems to have gone off track,” then refused to promise that the Blazers would stay in Portland even if the $600 million was approved — which seems to be a violation of Extortion 101, but maybe you do catch more flies with vinegar than honey, who knew?
  • Cleveland’s Gateway Economic Development Corp. just got a $52 million bill for projected repair needs for the Guardians stadium and Cavaliers arena, and doesn’t have $52 million to pay it with. Surely nobody could have seen that coming when the city agreed to cover the teams’ future capital expenses as long as they played there! Live and learn, or in Cleveland’s case, just live.
  • More World Cup economic impact data points: Some businesses in Atlanta are doing well, others are not; Arlington businesses are only doing well if they sell tourists on Texas-y things like barbecue or access to cattle drives; New York’s bars made out better during the event than its hotels; bars in England are doing great, too, despite England not actually hosting any games; downtown Seattle got an extra 3 million visitors on World Cup hosting days, but the Downtown Seattle Association didn’t release figures on whether the rest of Seattle got fewer visitors than normal on those days; and Miami and Los Angeles and Arlington should all see massive economic impact, report news sites (mostly former news site CBS) that only cite FIFA’s numbers.
  • Economist Geoff Propheter decided to get into the vaportecture game with AI designs for a new Blazers arena, and after some online kibitzing it ended up here, 10/10, no notes.
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Rays stump for $2B stadium subsidy by releasing pictures of fans all raising fists in air at once

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been a while since Tampa Bay Rays officials released any stadium renderings, and with talks on getting almost $2 billion in cash and tax breaks from the city and county seemingly on hold, no time like the present to drum up any excitement possible from some images of what a new building may or may not look like one day, so fire up the vaportecture cannons:

As is by now cliche in the genre, fans here show their appreciation for a Rays two-out rally in a blowout of the Cubs by standing, thrusting their fists in the air, and waving the team flags that baseball fans everywhere bring to games on the regular. Though it’s possible they’re actually cheering the passing lightning storm visible through the part-see-through roof, or just high on the thrill of watching a game with no backstop or netting, so that any of them may be killed by a foul ball at any time. There’s nothing more exhilarating than being reminded of the preciousness of life while watching (squints at the scoreboard, recognizes Jonny DeLuca and Chandler Simpson for starters) the same lineup your team fielded three years earlier.

A view of the same game (see the scoreboard and accompanying video screenshot) hours earlier during the daytime, though still in the bottom of the 5th inning with the same batter up, time will clearly work differently in the 2030s! The fans in the upper deck in their vintage Evan Longoria and Carl Crawford jerseys are just as excited to throw their fists in the air, though, even the ones at the bar who are only following the game by looking over their shoulders at the sky.

Fans stream into the park via center-field escalators, and back out of the park at the same time via escalators on the opposite side of the entry plaza. All the better to see the partly shaded, partly transparent roof, which lets fans view the airplanes pulling “GO RAYS!” banners that fly by whenever there isn’t a lightning storm.

But is there anywhere fans can go to drink any entirely ignore the game, you ask? Is there ever! They can also ignore the overhead plantings supported by nothing at all and the video boards with advanced stats on them, though one guy nearby is still raising his fist in the air, just to let everyone know they’re at a baseball game.

This is all very silly, as these kinds of renderings always are, but the release of the pretty pictures did manage to get Marc Topkin to write a whole article in the Tampa Bay Times about it, so mission accomplished, probably. One hopes that the Tampa city councimembers and Hillsborough County commissioners set to debate that $2 billion subsidy won’t be too swayed by levitating planters, but sports funding bills have passed for dumber reasons.

 

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Royals prepare rezoning plan for new stadium district, even as $1.35B in public money remains up in air

access_time personNeil deMause

Kansas City Royals execs have submitted a rezoning plan for their proposed new stadium development at Crown Center, which Fox4KC, citing the team’s application, describes as “a vibrant mixed-use destination that supports a wide variety of year-round activities – including professional sporting events, concerts, festivals, community gatherings, private events, sponsorship activations and other programmed experiences.” Or as that looks in an overhead schematic:

That is definitely a baseball stadium — with center field pointing just west of north, making for some potentially troublesome summer sunsets in the eyes of left-handed batters — and a lot of Areas where new or renovated buildings can go. The Kansas City Star notes that “the preliminary plan does not specify exactly what new buildings could contain, noting that would be determined in final plans,” but you can be sure that whatever they are, they’ll contain gobs of exciting sponsorship activations and programmed experiences!

A public hearing of the City Plan Commission on the rezoning is set for August 19. K.C. Mayor Quinton Lucas is trying to get all the elements of the Royals deal — including $1.35 billion or so in city funds and state money that he hasn’t formally requested yet — approved before November so he can forestall a possible ballot measure allowing voters to block the stadium plan.

Presumably the Royals’ professional vaportecture artists are still at work on prettier pictures; if you want examples of those, you’ll have to turn to Washington, D.C., where only nine months after the city council passed its $7 billion-ish Commanders stadium subsidy, there are finally some renderings of what the surrounding development could look like: Fall foliage! Canoes! Not a translucent parking garage in sight! Overhead schematics are probably more realistic, but realistic doesn’t get the re-socials, we’re talking about building mindshare here.

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Commanders try to hide ginormous stadium parking garages by drawing them as shorter and translucent

access_time personNeil deMause

What to do when your stadium plan includes two ginormous ugly parking garages, and you don’t want anyone to notice this fact before approving $6.6 billion in subsidies for it? If you’re Washington Commanders owner Josh Harris, you simply direct your rendering artists to make the garages translucent:

What caught fans’ eye was that the parking deck nearest to the Anacostia River — but poking into the stadium view — looked translucent in the concept sketches (see below), masking its real-world impact.

[National Capital Planning Commission] Commissioners requested fuller renderings of that. “I have rarely, if ever, seen a beautiful parking facility,” said NCPC chair Will Scharf.

We spend so much time LOLing at the dumbness of vaportecture renderings here that it’s easy to forget that they serve a purpose: to show the planned project in the best possible light so those with the checkbooks will ooh and aah over it. And often that light is literal, as with the Commanders stadium, which in the above images glows with a spooky inner luminescence while the rest of D.C. is cast into darkness, except for the Capitol dome and Washington Monument, which are a blazing white but also don’t appear to be drawn to scale anyway, given that in reality the Capitol is over half as tall as the monument, as well as significantly closer. The boldest choice, though, is certainly that translucent parking garage, which indeed makes the stadium look better but also raises immediate questions like “Why do the garages look so short if they’re actually going to be two-thirds the height of the stadium?’ and “What translucent construction material will they use?” and “Will the garage be limited to translucent fans driving translucent cars?”

The National Capital Planning Commission still signed off on the Commanders stadium designs, but only because the garages are being developed separately and will be submitted to the commission at a later date. At least one commissioner, Tammy Stidham, a National Park Service lands and planning director, was puzzled by this, asking: “Help me understand why we’re not seeing the development of those [garages] with the stadium package. They don’t have independent utility. They would not be there if you were not building a stadium.”

In fact, the garages wouldn’t be there if Harris weren’t building a huge mixed-use development around a stadium — without that, he could just leave open-air lots like RFK Stadium used on the site, but then he would be missing out on the billions in tax and land breaks that he’s set to receive for the rest of the development. So the garages are pretty key, and “make them shorter and more spread out” doesn’t work if the rest of the land is to be used for other Harris-enriching activities. One local resident suggested instead scaling back on parking and increasing the capacity of the local Metro station or adding a new one, neither of which are bad ideas but both of which would add tremendous public costs to what’s already set to be the biggest public cost ever for a privately used sports stadium. Many, many questions that should be answered before the money is signed off on … well, at least before the stadiums are approved … hrm. Before the sun burns out, is that too much to ask?

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Friday roundup: San Antonio okays $489m arena subsidy to prove “love” for Spurs, plus: invasion of the soccer zombies

access_time personNeil deMause

First things first: As expected, the San Antonio city council voted yesterday to move ahead with plans to give $489 million in tax revenues to Spurs owner Peter Holt to use toward a new arena. The actual council action was two votes: One to reject Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones’s proposal to pause arena talks until an independent economic review could be conducted, and one to allow the city manager to “complete negotiations and execute a nonbinding Term Sheet,” notwithstanding that a term sheet already exists — it’s unclear what the city manager is authorized to negotiate going forward from here, not to mention exactly what the council has actually committed itself to given that the term sheet is nonbinding. Councilmember Edward Mungia said that “we still have the ability to get out of this deal at any point before other project deals are signed,” but didn’t specify if the council would have to vote to withdraw from the deal or still needs to vote on a binding agreement or what.

Jones, who votes as a member of the city council because San Antonio has that kind of city government, voted against the arena subsidy, as did councilmembers Teri Castillo, Ric Galvan, and Leo Castillo-Anguiano. Mungia and the “more business-friendly” councilmembers, as the San Antonio Report put it, voted in favor: Sukh Kaur, Marc Whyte, Marina Aldrete Gavito, Misty Spears, Ivalis Meza Gonzalez, and Phyllis Viagran. As Viagran explained her vote: “You either trust this team … or you don’t. I’ve heard so many people say, ‘We all love the Spurs.’ … But do you really?”

There’s still some possibility of an independent economic analysis down the road, or more hearings to see if public support for the project is still as “tepid” as it was earlier this year. (Jones is also pushing for a public referendum on the city’s spending next spring, but we’ve seen how her proposals go over with the business-friendly councilmembers.) And, of course, Bexar County voters can still throw a wrench into things in November if they vote down the ballot measure that would give Holt around $150 million worth of county tax money on top of the city funds. Regardless, in the first round of the Project Marvel arena battle, the San Antonio council has spoken, and its verdict is “Nothing says ‘I love you’ like half a billion dollars in public money so you can boost your sports team’s profits.”

Who else is loving who this week and how? Never thought you’d ask:

  • Like everyone else, I’m still trying to wrap my brain around MLB’s new set of TV deals that are supposed to be finalized soon, with Apple out and Peacock in and ESPN in on some things but out on others. As far as what it will mean for teams’ media revenues — and, by association, how footloose teams can be about moving into smaller media markets to seek more lucrative stadium deals — it sounds like teams’ cuts of media revenue won’t change much, it’ll just be that ESPN will increasingly be the ones selling the right to watch games, and they’ll be making you pay for an ESPN subscription on top of an MLB.tv subscription to do it. Only 17 years until the last World Series, get your baseball-watching in now!
  • Buffalo Bills owner Terry Pegula bought his $100 million superyacht in 2021, the year before he got $1 billion in state and county tax money for a new stadium, but people aren’t any less unamused at the juxtaposition. One wonders if this might even have become an issue in New York state legislative hearings on the stadium subsidy, if there had been any.
  • Manchester United seeking public money for their planned stadium project isn’t new news, but it did just get the attention of the Guardian, which called the team’s plan to seek hundreds of millions of pounds to clear land for the stadium a “sinister US tactic.” Which is fitting, given that Man U is owned by sinister Tampa Bay Buccaneers owners the Glazer family, though maybe not for much longer.
  • What would happen if a minor pro sports team — say, the Pittsburgh Riverhounds of the USL Championship — wanted to issue renderings of their proposed stadium expansion (to be “paid for with public and private funding, although details have not been provided“) but couldn’t afford the Pro version of Microsoft Stadium Wizard? We have the answer, and it is a hellscape of identical featureless soccer zombies, please enjoy your nightmares:
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Behold, the future of soccer stadiums, Chicago Fire vaportecture edition

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been a long, dismal spring of record-breaking stadium subsidies making their way through state legislatures (not to mention other even more dismal stuff), so let’s have some fresh vaportecture as a respite from all the horror! And it’s for the proposed Chicago Fire stadium, which will allegedly be built entirely with the team owner’s own money. (The overall development itself will get a ton of tax kickbacks, but we won’t think about that right now.) Roll it!

Okay, sure, that’s fine enough. The stadium looks like a stadium, the sun is actually setting in the west at game time, nobody spelled the city’s name wrong. I do have some questions about what appears to be a practice (or youth?) field next to the stadium and whether all those tents and people walking on it before the game won’t destroy the turf and make it unplayable, but as these things go, that’s a minor quibble.

Likewise, let’s look at everything the interior image got right: There are 11 players on each team, and no one is reacting to the exciting play on the pitch by standing up and holding a scarf to face the back rows. And what exciting play it is: A Fire player looks to have just dribbled an opposing defender so ferociously that the defender just straight-up face-planted on the pitch, leaving the Fire player open for a likely goal. Too bad so many of the photographers lining the field seem to be looking in the wrong direction to get any good photos of the play, but you can’t have everything.

Okay, now you’re talking! What on earth kind of act is this that involves one guitar player and one dancer (?) while a sparsely arranged crowd generally pays no attention to the stage, despite it being lit by multiple spotlights? Is this what future stadium shows will look like now that currently popular artists are all canceling stadium gigs because they can’t sell enough tickets?

Anything else? Overblown quotes from team officials, perhaps?

Fire president Dave Baldwin told the Sun-Times the team wanted the design to harken back to “the City of Broad Shoulders” and its “rich industrial manufacturing heritage.”

“It has that Chicago warehouse feel, but also has a little bit of an enduring elegance to it — the brick facade, the steel, the glass, those are all things that were really important to Joe as we designed this,” Baldwin said. “Whether it’s opening day in 2028, or you fast forward 50 years and you come back to the stadium, it should still feel relevant to Chicago.”

Sure, brick, glass, steel, all things that scream “Chicago.” Or, you know, Baltimore. It probably would be too much to expect a stadium incorporating deep-dish pizza or sausages made of dead rats into its façade, but we’ll have to take what we can get.

As Baldwin noted, the projected opening date is 2028. That’s pretty aggressive given that it’s already halfway through 2025 and Chicago isn’t exactly known for its balmy winters and all-year construction schedules, but we can’t entirely rule it out.

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Browns release video of proposed domed stadium, get immediately hated on by fans

access_time personNeil deMause

The Cleveland Browns owners released some fresh vaportecture yesterday, in the form of a CGI flyby of their proposed Brook Park stadium as viewed from a high-speed drone in a hellscape where cars and video boards move but most of the people are frozen in place. But all that aside, by choosing to debut it on X, team execs opened themselves up to comments, and oh, the comments:

Heckuva job, Browns.

“Win some games first!” is maybe not the most rational response to a $1.2 billion stadium funding demand — spending public money on a private sports stadium doesn’t become a better investment just because fans are happier about the standings — but it is a common one, as we’ve seen from all the owners who have waited until their teams were on a playoff run to issue stadium subsidy demands. “That thing is ugly” and “Not with my money” are somewhat more on point. And added together, this comes to a pretty thorough public denunciation of the Browns’ stadium plans, albeit from the self-selected sample of X users who follow the Browns account.

Meanwhile, speaking of self-selected samples, the Ohio House Finance Committee is “likely” to include Browns owner Jimmy Haslam’s requested $600 million in stadium cash, according to committee chair Brian Stewart. The money would, according to Browns lawyer Ted Tywang, come from “revenues that are generated by the project that wouldn’t exist but for this private investment,” though he didn’t explain how moving the Browns from one part of Ohio to another would generate $600 million in new tax revenues. Win some games first, Jimmy!

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Friday roundup: Ravens get even more public cash, D.C. United wants somebody to buy them a roof

access_time personNeil deMause

Greetings from New York, where we now have two terrible mayors instead of one! That’s hardly the worst of today’s political news, so instead let us distract ourselves with some (mostly) terrible stadium and arena news:

  • The Baltimore Ravens‘ $434 million stadium renovation project is now a $489 million renovation project, and 64% of the additional cost is set to be covered by state taxpayers. Or, if you’re whatever AI is writing the headlines over at Sports Illustrated, “Ravens Spending Over $50 Million More on Stadium Upgrades,” sure, that’s probably right, no need to read your own story to check.
  • D.C. United‘s owners want to add 10,000 seats and a roof to their (checks) not yet 7-year-old stadium, and “what remains unknown is the potential price tag or whether the team will ask the city for subsidies.” Also the Axios reporter passing this along (from an original source of “two sources,” not even “familiar with the team’s thinking” or anything) calls D.C. United “American soccer royalty,” what ever happened to no more kings?
  • Missouri House Speaker Jonathan Patterson is turning up the heat on Jackson County, saying “time is running out” for “a plan and course of action” for new Kansas City Royals and Chiefs stadiums, or else … the teams will kick everything back a year and try again, again? Too many showrunners these days really do substitute overbearing string sections for viable suspense plots.
  • D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser says a Washington Commanders stadium “will be the anchor that attracts other investment–housing, amenities, jobs, and opportunities,” guess somebody doesn’t remember what the late Allen Sanderson said about NFL stadiums and cemeteries.
  • In 2023, the city of Anaheim commissioned a $325,000, two-month study of how to keep the Angels‘ stadium viable for decades to come, and now the study may not be done until 2026 and will cost over $1 million, cool, cool.
  • New Sacramento Republic F.C. vaportecture! And it looks like, uh, a soccer stadium? At least there are some smoke bombs, on both ends of the pitch for some reason, but no fireworks or people holding up scarves dramatically and we can’t even see what ridiculous formation the players are in, I give this a B-minus for entertainment value at best.
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Friday roundup: City sues Browns over Brook Park vaporstadium, Broncos go all Bears on suburban move threats

access_time personNeil deMause

Weeks keep happening, and we keep making it to the end of them! (Well, most of us.) If you ever need a break from the general state of everything, you might want to check out this other project I’m involved in, where you can immerse yourself in great live music of the recent past to gird yourself for the present. Or just experience whatever exactly this is.

Back now, all musicked up? Good, because there’s some news waiting for you and it’s not going to stay hot forever:

  • As promised, the city of Cleveland officially sued the Cleveland Browns under Ohio’s Art Modell Law this week to force team owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam to offer the team for sale to local owners before trying to move it to the suburb of Brook Park. The Haslams already preemptively sued to block the Modell Law, so now this will be in the hands of the courts, though it’s also in the hands of the state legislature that is being asked for maybe $1.2 billion to help build a Brook Park dome, hey guys, I think I came up with a way to save a bunch on lawyers’ fees!
  • Denver Broncos co-owner Greg Penner said Wednesday that “We haven’t ruled out anything at this point” in terms of a new or renovated stadium to replace or upgrade their 24-year-old one, adding, “We’re still looking at options on the current site, around Denver.” If that sounds suspiciously like “We’re kicking the tires of local governments to see what our leverage is,” congratulations, you’ve passed Chicago Bears 101!
  • Speaking of the Bears, Illinois house speaker Chris Welch said he might consider having the state pay for some infrastructure costs of a new NFL stadium, so long as the team owners build one at the Michael Reese Hospital site that they first rejected before saying they might reconsider. Fox 32 Chicago further reports that “Governor JB Pritzker is open to talks with the Bears regarding the Michael Reese site” (according to “sources); if the Bears execs’ plan is really “keep throwing things at various walls until we see what sticks,” this might be just the opening they’ve been hoping for — now, how to define an entire stadium as “infrastructure”?
  • The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal … I probably shouldn’t even finish this sentence, but in the interest of the completeness: Mr. Bowtie says that Tampa Bay Rays owner Stu Sternberg needs to find a way to get a stadium built in his current city or else sell the team, and that the situation is “not identical” to the Athletics moving out of Oakland, because Tampa-St. Pete is a large market and the Rays have a stadium offer in hand while the A’s … well, they’re just different, okay? This is probably just Rosenthal going off for his own reasons, but he does spend a bunch of time discussing how MLB commissioner Rob Manfred is taking a “different approach” with the Rays than the A’s, so there’s some chance the consummate baseball insider is sending a message on behalf of MLB leadership, in which case maybe Sternberg will take the hint and stand down from his “Thanks for the billion dollars, what else you got?” gambit.
  • Retiring Miami Mayor Francis Suarez gave a farewell speech in which he stood before the under-construction Inter Miami stadium — as well as an American flag and two John Deere tractors, because Florida — and declared the “the best sports deal in America.” Mmm, maybe not quite that actually, but we have some lovely parting gifts.
  • Remember that time San Diego almost had a floating ballpark? Wait, that was never really going to happen? Shh, it makes a great story.
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Salt Lake okays rezoning for MLB as soon as someone finds an MLB team and $1.8B to pay for a stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

The Salt Lake City council approved rezoning last night for a 95-acre site that could include an MLB stadium, which “historic opportunity” and “create a place for Utah’s families to gather and thrive” and blah blah blah, is anyone actually proposing who would pay for this thing?

The answer appears to be no, or at least no more than the last time this was discussed back in March, at which time the state legislature approved kicking back sales and property taxes from a 200-acre “entertainment district” around the stadium to help pay for construction. At the time, the bill’s sponsors indicated that it would take $900 million to pay for half the cost of a $1.8 billion stadium, and that it would take more than just the tax kickbacks, without specifying how much more or where the more would come from. There had previously been talk of using hotel taxes as well, but that was stripped by the legislature at the last minute and not replaced.

Plus, of course, Salt Lake City doesn’t have an MLB team, though presumably someone there could put in for an expansion franchise as soon as the league decides to open itself up for expansion, which was supposed to happen as soon as the Tampa Bay Rays and Athletics situations are resolved, so, yeah, maybe don’t hold your breath there. At least it does have renderings — the best part is how there are no turnstiles between the ballpark and the adjacent river, so either fans will enjoy free in-game kayaking or kayakers will get free admission to the games, two thumbs up for both ideas.

 

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