Category: All-Star Game

Manfred: All-Star Game hosting is a reward for handing public money to MLB, capisce?

access_time personNeil deMause

Last night was the MLB All-Star Game — or so I hear, like everyone else I know I didn’t watch once I saw the hideous uniforms they’d be wearing — which was held at the Texas Rangers‘ home park in Arlington, the only stadium ever built solely because its predecessor lacked air-conditioning. The Rangers are also unique among MLB teams in not holding a Pride Night, and someone asked league commissioner Rob Manfred what exactly was up with that, to which Mumbles responded:

“There are a whole host of factors that go into deciding who’s going to get an All-Star Game, and I don’t view whether you have a Pride Night or not as a outcome-determinative issue,” baseball commissioner Rob Manfred said before Tuesday night’s game at Globe Life Field. “It’s an issue. We look at all those issues and make the best decision and try to give it to the place that we think is going to kind of be the best in terms of marketing of the game.”…

“I think it’s really important to remember here — here there’s a massive public investment in terms of creating a great new facility and that obviously is an important consideration in terms of awarding All-Star Games.”

We look at all the issues! Especially the number of zeroes on the taxpayer check! And this one had a whole lot of those, what’s a raised middle finger to LGBTQ fans compared to that?

In case you’re wondering, next year’s All-Star Games is set for the Atlanta Braves stadium, which also got a pile of public cash (around $300 million compared to Arlington’s $450 million), and which was all set to host the 2021 game until MLB moved it following protests around Georgia’s new hyper-restrictive voting law, only to have it re-awarded for 2025 when the league quietly changed its mind. In 2026, the game will be played in Philadelphia, which has been waiting patiently since opening its own publicly subsidized stadium way back in 2004, which will make it as old when the All-Stars arrive as the Rangers’ old stadium was when its replacement was approved.

All of which is a choice, certainly, and a longstanding one: Manfred may have also said that “a significant factor should be when did you have a game the last time,” but an even more significant factor is whether it’s needed as a carrot to get cities to approve stadium funding — both the Colorado Rockies and Seattle Mariners have hosted the game twice since any of the Baltimore Orioles, Chicago Cubs, Los Angeles Angels, Oakland A’s, Tampa Bay Rays, or Toronto Blue Jays have hosted, and you 100% know that in most of those cases MLB is waiting to be able to use the game as a prize for upgraded facilities.

Manfred said recently about the Atlanta voting-rights flipflop that “one of the things we’ve learned over time is that the more we stay out of political issues, the better off we are.” Except for the political issue of public funding for stadiums, that’s core to their business model, don’t mess with that or you’ll only get to watch those ugly All-Star uniforms on TV, see?

Share this post:

Friday roundup: OKC mayor wants new Thunder arena because 22-year-old one is “getting older,” and other things to sigh deeply over

access_time personNeil deMause

Before we even get to the bullet points, we need to start with this: Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt announced yesterday in his State of the City speech that he wants to build a new arena for the Thunder to replace their current one, which just turned 22 years old and is receiving a $100 million upgrade begun in 2011. The present building is “simply not what it used to be,” according to Holt, and  “will keep getting older,” which, yep, that’s how time works. “Seats get old, scoreboards get old, elevators break,” said Holt. Everything breaks, dunnit?

To help pay for a new arena, Holt wants to extend the 1% sales tax surcharge that paid for the old one and which is currently set to expire in 2028. Holt described this as “no tax increase will be necessary,” which is true if you mean that Oklahoma City residents won’t have to pay any more in taxes than they do now, but not true if you mean whether they’d have to pay more than they would if the Thunder were forced to continue to play in their aging more-than-two-decade-old arena instead of an aging new one.

The tax extension would at least require a public vote, as the original one did. Still, J.C. Bradbury has a point:

Nothing wrong with getting a new arena every year, so long as you’re not the one paying for it. And now, on to the week in bullet points:

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Fresh subsidy plans for Titans and WFT, Flames arena “paused” amid overruns, Boston Globe can’t stop clowning on Pawtucket for not wanting to spend $150m on stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday! I have a ton of week-ending stadium news to bring you today, or at least there’s a ton of news out there whether I’m bringing it to you or not. What is it about that that is confusing?

Onward:

  • Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks, according to DCist, wants to use “some of” the county’s $1.6 billion in state funding this year to build — wait for it — “infrastructure improvements” for the Washington Football Team‘s stadium that would include “restaurants and places to shop.” It sounds like Alsobrooks is only talking about $17.6 million, maybe, but still this earns a Stupid Infrastructure category tag until proven otherwise.
  • Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee wants to use $2 million a year in state sales tax money (figure roughly $30 million in present value) for upgrades to the Titans‘ stadium, though actually it could end up being more like $10 million a year (figure roughly $150 million in present value) if more development is built around the stadium, plus he wants to give $13.5 million to Knoxville for its Tennessee Smokies stadium. Did Lee call this an “infrastructure” plan? Not that I can find in the Tennessean’s news reporting, but everybody drink anyway.
  • The Calgary Flames‘ $550 million arena plan, which already includes about $250 million in public subsidies, has run into $70 million in unexpected cost overruns and is now “paused” until the team and city can figure out who’ll cover them. Actually, the report is that the Flames owners are demanding $70 million, and previously the city and team agreed to split overruns 50-50, so maybe it’s really $140 million over budget? Either way, there’s already a petition to scrap the whole deal, though “trim a little from the team’s design and both sides kick in a little more money” seems a far more likely outcome, especially with Mayor Naheed Nenshi declaring it “far better to have these issues sorted out at this stage than to have unexpected cost overruns after construction has begun.” (Are known cost overruns actually better than surprise ones? Discuss.)
  • The Boston Globe, not satisfied with its glowing report last month on Worcester’s new stadium for the Red Sox Triple-A team (top farm club of the Boston Red Sox, owner of the Boston Globe), ran two separate opinion pieces this week slagging Pawtucket officials for not offering up $150 million in subsidies like Worcester did and thus losing their team: Dan McGowan, the Globe’s Rhode Island politics reporter, wrote, “Imagine what we could have had if our leaders showed even a tiny sense of vision” and “It too often takes only one politician to spoil a really good idea” while condemning “extremists on both sides of the [stadium] debate” who think a thing can be either good or bad (while also calling the Worcester stadium “great”). The very next day, Mike Stanton, a UConn journalism professor who writes occasionally for the Globe, wrote that former Rhode Island House speaker Nicholas Mattiello “rightly deserves blame for his role in killing the PawSox,” though he also blamed WooSox owner Larry Lucchino for “demanding extravagant taxpayer support for a new ballpark” and harming negotiations for, I guess, less extravagant taxpayer support? Anyway, the Globe wants you to know that Worcester has a shiny new baseball stadium and Pawtucket doesn’t, and let’s not speak of what else Worcester could have done with $150 million.
  • Six Republican Congressfolk — Sens. Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, and Marsha Blackburn, and Rep. Jeff Duncan — have cosponsored legislation seeking to end MLB’s antitrust exemption in response to the league pulling the 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta over Georgia’s new voting-restrictions law. This is part of a long line of proposals to yank the league’s 99-year-old exemption from antitrust laws, which never seem to go anywhere; the last time by my count was when more than 100 Congresspeoples wrote a letter in 2019 threatening to rescind “the long-term support that Congress has always afforded our national pastime” if MLB didn’t back down on its plan to eliminate more than 40 minor-league franchises, a letter that was signed by none of Lee, Cruz, Hawley, Rubio, or Blackburn, all of whom were in office at the time. (SPOILER: MLB didn’t back down, and Congress did.) Waving the antitrust-exemption stick has become the standard way for federal representatives to express their anger at baseball over one thing or another, in other words, but actually using it is apparently beyond the pale, either because of partisanship or lobbyists or both, pick your poison.
  • Another U.S. representative, Georgia’s Buddy Carter, has introduced legislation — or maybe just drafted legislation and sent it to Fox News, he doesn’t seem to have actually submitted it to Congress — to block MLB from relocating non-regular-season events except in cases of natural disaster or other emergencies, under penalty of allowing local businesses to sue for damages for lost revenue as a result of the move. Which, as Craig Calcaterra notes, would be hilarious because it would put MLB in the position of having to argue in court that its events have no economic impact, which is pretty much the truth: “The evidence — like, all the evidence from multiple studies — would actually be on MLB’s side in such a case! And it’d likely win! And all it would cost MLB is the ability to continue to lie about how big an impact All-Star Games and stadiums and things have on local economies when it suits its interest.”
  • The Cincinnati Reds are offering discounted tickets to fans who can show they’re fully vaccinated, and Buffalo officials say the Bills and Sabres will be required to limit attendance to the fully vaccinated in the fall, though New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo says he’ll be the judge of that. Whatever the eventual admittance policies end up being, having going to things like ballgames (or traveling internationally) be less of a hassle if you wave your vaccine card seems likely to be the best way to encourage more people to get their shots, which is the only way to get to herd immunity, which is the only way to prevent lots more deaths and more re-closings of things like ballgames, so this is good news regardless of whether sporting events turn out to be insanely risky or relatively safe.
  • Finally, I can’t let this week pass without noting that the Buffalo Bisons, who have been temporarily relocated to Trenton to make way for the Toronto Blue Jays, who will be spending the summer in Buffalo thanks to Covid travel restrictions, will be playing their home games as the Trenton Thunder while playing road games as the Bisons. No word yet on how this Frankenstein monster of a franchise will be listed in the (checks revamped minor-league nomenclature) Triple-A East standings, though I wholeheartedly hope the Thunder and Bisons get counted as two different teams, ideally with players forced to wear fake mustaches in New Jersey and go by assumed names. “Marc Rzepczynski? No, he plays for Buffalo, I am of course Shmarc Shmepczynski, would you like my autograph?”
Share this post:

Moving All-Star Game to fight Georgia voting law would mean putting people’s rights ahead of MLB’s profits

access_time personNeil deMause

The Georgia state legislature yesterday passed SB 202, the voting law that is probably best known as “You can now be arrested in the state of Georgia for giving food or water to people waiting on line to vote.” The law contains a ton of other provisions as well, though, like requiring an ID (rather than just a signature) when voting absentee, limiting the number of drop boxes for placing ballots in, and banning the use of mobile voting sites, among other things. It’s all a pretty transparent move by the Republican-led legislature to make it harder for people to vote who might vote against them, which mostly means African Americans who are more likely thanks to geography or income to be hampered by the new restrictions: The no-food-or-water rule, for example, was apparently inspired by a single white woman with a gun who was outraged that get-out-the-vote groups had been giving free pizza to people who were waiting on line to cast their ballots.

The new law is so restrictive, in fact, and so reminiscent of blatant Jim Crow–era attempts to disenfranchise Black people, that it’s drawn the attention of some in the sports world, who have suggested a boycott of the state along the lines of the actions taken after North Carolina passed its anti-transgender “bathroom law” in 2016 — actions that resulted in that law’s partial repeal one year later, and its eventual complete expiration at the end of 2020. MLB players association president Tony Clark said last week that baseball players were “very much aware” of the Georgia bill and that if there were a chance to discuss moving this summer’s All-Star Game out of Atlanta, he would “look forward to having that conversation.” And yesterday, an even more prominent president chimed in on behalf of that idea:

President Joe Biden said Wednesday that he would strongly support Major League Baseball moving its All-Star Game from Atlanta after Georgia enacted new voting restrictions that disproportionately target Black residents.

“I think today’s professional athletes are acting incredibly responsibly. I would strongly support them doing that,” Biden said in an interview with EPSN SportsCenter host Sage Steele. “People look to them. They’re leaders.”

Obviously, Biden and other Democrats have a selfish reason to be promoting voting rights in this case: The people being disenfranchised are more likely to vote Democratic, which is the whole point of Republican legislators passing the law in the first place. (I mean, many of them probably also passed it because they just don’t like the idea of Black people deciding who runs their state, but then we’re getting into serious chicken-and-egg territory about the reasons why someone in Georgia would choose to become a Republican legislator.) But something can be in your self-interest and also the right thing to do, and … sorry, what were we talking about? Right, the All-Star Game!

It’s important to remember that MLB did not decide to hold its 2021 All-Star Game in Atlanta because they felt the city deserved it or were under the delusion that Georgia would be a pleasant place to spend time in July. They did it because — here, let’s explain by way of a list of the last 10 All-Star Game hosts:

2011: Phoenix
2012: Kansas City
2013: New York City
2014: Minneapolis
2015: Cincinnati
2016: San Diego
2017: Miami
2018: Washington
2019: Cleveland
2021: Atlanta

The common theme here is that the stadiums involved were new — or, in the cases of Kansas City and Cleveland, newly renovated. MLB has long used the All-Star Game as a reward for cities that have coughed up money for new or renovated ballparks; the last time it held the game at a stadium that wasn’t at least freshly refurbished was Yankee Stadium in 2008, and that was meant as a sendoff in advance of the Yankees’ new extremely-publicly-funded stadium opening the following year; before that, you have to go back to Fenway Park in 1999 to find an All-Star Game that wasn’t handed out as a prize for Most Willing To Subsidize League Profits With Public Money.

Moving this summer’s All-Star Game from Atlanta would no doubt be a logistical pain, though it isn’t all that much shorter notice (four months vs. seven) than the NBA had when it moved its 2017 All-Star Game out of North Carolina after passage of the anti-trans bill. As we were just discussing here last week, boycotts are strategies, not moral imperatives, and voting rights advocates in Georgia are still split on whether a North Carolina–style boycott is the best way to respond to SB 202. But if pressure builds to pull the game from Atlanta — say, maybe around Jackie Robinson Day, which is just two weeks from today — and MLB owners start to push back on it, that’ll likely less be about having to print up new merchandise or even the personal feelings of the almost uniformly white men who run the league, and more about interfering with sports owners’ underlying business plan of using carrots and sticks to maximize their profits.

Share this post:

Miami is paying Jeff Loria’s share of All-Star policing costs, just because

access_time personNeil deMause

And speaking of city officials lying down on the job and the All-Star Game, apparently Miami-Dade County got Miami Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria to promise to pay for security costs for this year’s game, but then the city of Miami went and paid for them anyway:

Under the team’s operating agreement for its heavily subsidized $515 million stadium, the Marlins are supposed to pay for off-duty police and fire services for “jewel events,” such as the All-Star Game…

Back in February, when the team asked the county to support the event by providing its police officers and firefighters free of cost, Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez told the team that it would have to pay the bill due to the terms of its operating agreement…

But the team’s operating contract didn’t stop the city from agreeing early on to pick up the tab. Back in 2014, Miami Mayor Tomás Regalado — who like Gimenez used his opposition to the Marlins’ controversial stadium agreement to help win his election — committed in a letter to then-Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig that the city would pay for public safety “subject to available resources.”

This is actually slightly different from Boston’s arena charity contribution gaffe, in that Miami city officials knew that the Marlins were on the hook for police and fire services, then decided to go ahead and pay for it with public funds anyway, because it would make MLB happy and get them to award the game to Miami. I’ll leave it as an exercise for readers to decide whether that’s better or worse, but one thing is clear: Getting something put in writing isn’t worth much if the people signing it can arm-twist the government to take it back whenever they like it.
Share this post:

WashPost says economists predict $100m in MLB All-Star Game impact (spoiler: they don’t)

access_time personNeil deMause

Hey, look, it’s another headline — this one in the Washington Post — claiming that hosting a sporting event would have huge benefits for a city:

The 2018 MLB All-Star Game could bring $100 million to D.C., economists say

If you actually read the article, only one economist is cited — Anirban Basu of Sage Policy, a consulting firm — who says that the All-Star Game has averaged $60 to 100 million in “economic impact.” (Remember, “impact” isn’t actual public revenues, it’s just money that changes hands in your city.) That seemed high to me, so I checked in with College of the Holy Cross economist Victor Matheson to see if he knew of any other studies. And lo and behold, he actually co-wrote one in 2001. It’s a bit involved in terms of stats and regression analysis, but in short, it says: Once you control for all the other variables that you’d expect to cause economic growth (as seen in other comparable cities), the actual impact of the MLB All-Star Game appears to be negative:

Our detailed regression analysis reveals that during the period 1973 to 1997, All-Star Game cities had employment growth below that which would have been expected. Instead of an expected gain of around 1,000 jobs in the year a city hosts an All-Star Game, employment numbers in host cities have actually fallen more than 8,000 jobs below what would have been expected even without the promised $60 million All-Star boost.

Is this one study, which looked at All-Star Games from 1973 to 1997, absolutely conclusive? No, of course not. But if journalists are going to assert that “economists” think something, they might want to at least google for what economists think, or even put in an email to one who’s actually studied it. (Matheson replied to my query within a couple of hours. On a Saturday.) Instead, the Post’s Alex Schiffer appears to have only contact (or read a press release by) Basu, a guy who says this stuff about the All-Star Game every year, and who appears to come up with his numbers just by assuming every ticket sold is new money to the economy, and then slapping on a multiplier. But then, Schiffer appears to be on the reprinting corporate press releases beat, so maybe we should cut him some slack … nah.

Share this post:

San Diego put down sharp rocks to keep homeless from sleeping near All-Star Game

access_time personNeil deMause

When San Diego city officials installed jagged rocks under a highway overpass near the Padres‘ Petco Park in April to prevent homeless people from sleeping there, many locals assumed it was an attempt to clear out homeless in advance of July’s MLB All-Star Game. City officials countered that the rocks were there at the request of local residents. The news site Voice of San Diego filed a public-records request to find out the truth, and duh, it was all about the All-Star Game:

Sherman Heights is never mentioned in dozens of emails exchanged between city staffers discussing the rock installation. Rather, the rocks were part of a larger effort to clean up the area prior to the July 12 All-Star Game and improve the flow of traffic to and from Petco Park. Early plans, emails show, called for rocks not only along Imperial Avenue, but also along two blocks of a wall lining Petco Park’s Tailgate Park as well as outside the New Central Library, all in an effort to deter camping and loitering near the ballpark during All-Star Game festivities…

John Casey, the city’s liaison with the Padres until March, took the lead on getting price quotes for the rocks. In multiple emails, he urged city staff to move the project along. “Any breakthroughs?” he wrote in a November email. “The Padres and SDPD are asking me when we can see the curbs painted red as well as the rocks at the underpass and Tailgate Park wall.”

In early January, Casey emailed City Traffic Engineer Linda Marabian and laid out a checklist of remaining work to be done before the All-Star Game.

“Back to the vision of Imperial as a Gateway to East Village,” he wrote. “The wrought iron fence has been installed on the wall at Tailgate Park and works well at discouraging loiterers. Remaining work in anticipation of the All Star game is: Rip Rap rocks under the I-5 overpass at Imperial on both sides of the street. Rip Rap rocks at the base of the Tailgate Park wall from 12th to 14th.”

The VoSD didn’t report on where the homeless went who have been displaced from their camp under the overpass. Wherever it is, one hopes that they appreciate it as one of the ancillary benefits of their city getting to host an All-Star Game.

Share this post:

Minneapolis All-Star Game impact overstated by 27-72%, says state revenue department

access_time personNeil deMause

It is very, very rare for a public agency to take a look at the actual impacts of a major sporting event after the fact, as opposed to just throwing around crazy numbers beforehand. So props to the Minnesota Department of Revenue, which followed up on projections that the 2014 All-Star Game would bring $75 million in new economic activity to the state by actually counting up sales tax data, and finding that the actual figure was likely a whole lot less:

The state Department of Revenue, reviewing sales tax data for Minneapolis, added that the true figure could be as high as $55 million, or as low as $21 million…

“At the time, it seemed believable to me,” [Meet Minneapolis director of market research Kevin] Hanstad said of his original projection. Hanstad said he based his forecast in part on the estimated $60 million that the All-Star Game brought to Kansas City and St. Louis, though he added that those estimates were “loosey-goosey.”

He said the actual number for Minneapolis is likely closer to $50 million, and added that even that number remains uncertain. Hanstad said he has the most confidence in just one statistic — that the game itself, played on a Tuesday night, generated $26.9 million in economic benefit.

“It looks like there’s something there, right? But what is it?” said state Revenue Commissioner Myron Frans, who said it is difficult to separate any boost from the All-Star Game from the general upswing that Minneapolis’ economy has seen since 2010. “You don’t want to overstate the case.”

The numbers from the city tourism board Meet Minneapolis, including that $26.9 million figure, are actually more suspect, because they just add up spending at the game and related events, without accounting for what gamegoers didn’t spend on that week. (Data point: When the All-Star Game was in New York in 2013, I dropped several hundred dollars to take my son to the Futures Game, FanFest, Home Run Derby, and the All-Star Game itself. Suffice to say we otherwise didn’t leave the house much that month.) The state revenue figures, on the other hand, at least try to empirically measure the All-Star bump, by comparing tax receipts this July to overall trends.

Their answer — $21 million to $55 million — seems completely reasonable, given that economists have estimated that the Super Bowl’s total impact is around $100 million in new spending, and that’s, you know, the Super Bowl. Remember, though, that this is just economic activity: total money changing hands within the state’s borders. Minnesota’s sales tax rate is 6.875%, which would put the state’s actual take from the All-Star Game at a total of around $2-4 million — maybe a million or two more if you add in any extra state income taxes paid by Minnesotans who made a smidge more money this summer. That’s not nothing, but given that the All-Star Game cost the public about $600,000 in rent breaks, traffic costs, and police expenses — not to mention $387 million for the Twins stadium that earned Minneapolis the right to host the game — it’s pretty unimpressive as windfalls go. I hope the Firestone bunt-at-a-tire game was fun, anyway.

Share this post:

Minneapolis to set up “clean zones” during All-Star Game to ensure wrong kinds of people don’t benefit

access_time personNeil deMause

This year’s All-Star Game will be held at the home of the Minnesota Twins, and the Minneapolis city council is already hard at work ensuring that local residents will be able to profit from the event:

A resolution making its way through the Minneapolis City Council would give the league veto power over any temporary businesses licenses in three designated “clean zones” from July 5-20. The All-Star Game is July 15.

The city has also agreed to assign police and licensing inspectors to ensure that the clean zones are free from any unauthorized commercial activity, including:

(i) transient vending or other sales by any individual or entity;
(ii) sampling of consumable items…

If you’re wondering why Minneapolis is agreeing to do all this after it’s already been assigned the event, apparently it was part of the deal that the previous city manager agreed to back in 2011 to get MLB to grant them the 2014 All-Star Game, and this would just make it “official.” Though it does raise the question of what MLB would do if the council changed its mind now. Move the game to Vancouver?

Share this post: