Category: Baltimore Orioles

Maryland Gov. Moore facing 2027 deadline to okay Orioles development deal or face early lease exit, thanks to Maryland Gov. Moore

access_time personNeil deMause

If you can remember as far back as two winters ago, then-Baltimore Orioles owners the Angelos family agreed to sign a 30-year lease extension for Camden Yards in exchange for $600 million (or more) in state money for stadium renovations. The new lease had an out clause, though: If the Orioles owners can’t agree with the state on a development agreement around the stadium by the end of 2027, they can break the lease after just 15 years. As I wrote at the time:

What’s left now is for the state and Angelos to negotiate the development agreement, but [Maryland Gov. Wes] Moore has effectively tied his own hands in those talks, since if he doesn’t agree to what the O’s owner wants, Angelos can spend his $600 million and then walk. Or, more likely, spend the $600 million and then demand more in about a decade, since he’ll be able to point to his expiring lease.

The end of 2027 is getting ever closer, and for the Orioles owner — now private equity goon David Rubenstein, who bought the team from the Angelos family in 2024 — the above scenario is becoming ever more real:

Catie Griggs, president of business operations for the Orioles, said this week the priority for the club and the Maryland Stadium Authority was to complete the upgrades to the ballpark this winter.

“What I will tell you is MSA has been an incredible partner throughout the process of getting this done,” Griggs said, “so I have full confidence that as we enter the season to sort of pick our heads up to look around again, that they will continue to be great partners.”

That sounds like a … backhanded compliment? Veiled threat? One of those?

Early indications were that the development agreement could amount to a whole lot of extra free money for Rubinstein — as much as $7.1 million a year in new revenues just from taking over the historic warehouse in right field for 99 years, in exchange for less than $1 million a year in rent. And Rubinstein has the hammer in the form of that 15-year out clause, though I suppose Gov. Moore could be equally hard-nosed and say he’ll pull out of the entire development deal if it’s too rich for Maryland taxpayers’ blood, damn the extra 15 years of stadium lease. That could work, just so long as he doesn’t first … oh noooooooooo:

“The thing that we know is that we’re completely aligned on this being the long-term home of [the] Baltimore Orioles,” Moore said of the priorities for the city, state and team owners. “That was a key priority for me. Gone are the days when we were doing one-year deals and two-year deals. I would only accept a long-term deal because we need to have certainty for downtown Baltimore and certainty for the Baltimore Orioles, and I’m grateful that, with this new leadership team, we got that.”

Yup, Wes Moore is very, very bad at this.

If you want to learn more about how the Orioles stadium came to be, meanwhile, student journalists at the University of Maryland have put together a website with a bunch of videos that claim to be the “most complete telling of the Camden Yards story.” I haven’t watched it yet, because I’ve already read (several times) an extremely comprehensive story of the making of Camden Yards. But admittedly that didn’t include hour-long video clips of Edward Bennett Williams testifying, so if you have a ton of time and an enjoyment of YouTube, neither of which describes me, it may be fun to poke around in.

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Friday roundup: Pittsburgh cancels in-person school while hosting NFL Draft, this is just a thing that happens now?

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been quite a week: In case you missed it, I spent much of it keeping up with the comment storm after this Q&A about a paper on housing policy published on Monday. (Turns out people have very many feels about housing policy.) Add in a busy week of stadium news, and I should probably take the day off from typing to avoid a repetitive stress injury — but not before taking a run through the week’s additional stadium and arena news, that’s more important than my wrist tendons.

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Friday roundup: Spurs owner wants arena subsidies so he can be “scrappy,” A’s owner gets closer to unlocking county stadium cash

access_time personNeil deMause

Some weeks, when all the work of this website feels like an endless repetition of the same stories over and over and over again, I try to remind myself that while the general shape of the stadium swindle has remained the same over the last 30 years — boy meets stadium dream, boy uses standard playbook to demand that someone else to pay for stadium dream, elected officials cough up the dough to boy — there have been some discoveries and innovations along the way: The Casino Night Fallacy. The grift that keeps on giving. The kitchen sink gambit. Reusable entourage. Sure, it would be nice for whatever showrunner is in charge of this accursed timeline to quit reusing the same plotlines — helicopter registration fraud was a surprise season-ending twist, but that was three years ago already — but if nothing else we’re getting a deeper understanding of the intricacies of how sports billionaires funnel taxpayer money into their own pockets, and who can put a price on that? Other than the literal price of “billions of dollars of tax money a year,” obviously, but enlightenment doesn’t come cheap.

Also, no one has taken away our god-given right to point and laugh (yet), so may as well enjoy it. And on that note, here’s some fresh meat for your inner Nelson Muntz:

  • San Antonio’s KSAT-TV asked Spurs owner Peter Holt why he can’t just pay for his own arena his damn self, and Holt said “it’s a great question” and San Antonio’s small market size has “pushed us to be scrappy” and “the underdog” and “we want to continue [our] partnership with the county and the city” and the arena project will use “visitor taxes that have no impact on our local citizens” and “there’s no extra fees.” That’s neither really an answer nor exactly true, but Holt is already off and not-answering whether the team would potentially move without a new arena: “You know, we’re not focused on this election not passing. I mean, I think our belief has always been, whether it’s on the court or off the court, we have excellence and we have winning in our DNA. And so we’re confident and optimistic that this will pass, and that’s our plan.” It’s easy to be confident when you’re spending $2 million on ad campaigns to convince voters to go your way, but just in case, may as well employ the “You don’t want to find out what’ll happen if you make Dad mad” strategy as well.
  • The Clark County Commission officially approved the Athletics‘ ballpark development agreement for Las Vegas(ish), which is mostly notable because it allows A’s owner John Fisher to finally tap into $380 million in public funds that was approved way back in June 2023. Or at least Fisher can get the money once he sets a guaranteed maximum price for the stadium and spend $100 million out of his own pocket first, maybe that’s what all the concrete pillars are about? Would Fisher really shell out $100 million of his own money in order to get $380 million in public money in hopes all that will somehow unlock another $1 billion or so of somebody else’s money? He’s done dumber things before, don’t put it past him!
  • Interim Jackson County Executive Kay Barnes says she doesn’t see herself as “taking on any kind of strong initiative” on major issues during her short time back in office, but that’s not stopping her from saying she wants to see stadium projects for the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals move forward, she’s not made of stone, people.
  • The St. Petersburg city council is looking at ending the city’s Community Redevelopment Area (i.e., a TIF that kicks back property taxes to developers) for the Historic Gas Plant District now that the Tampa Bay Rays aren’t using it for a stadium development, probably. “I was very hesitant to do this,” said council chair Copley Gerdes. “More and more, I’m becoming open to it.” What’s next, hugging?
  • A couple of big-market MLB teams might be showing openness to increased revenue sharing to make MLB TV deals more like the NFL’s, which would reduce budget disparities between rich and even-richer teams but also make it easier for teams to threaten to move from big markets to smaller ones like in the NFL. Color me skeptical — big-market team owners have never willingly given up revenue before, and this could all just be openness to new kinds of TV deals while still trying to preserve the biggest slice for themselves, but we’ll see where things go once negotiations for the next collective bargaining agreement begin in earnest after next season.
  • Yes, the latest owner of the Ottawa Senators is still hoping to build a new arena at LeBreton Flats and still hoping for a taxpayer “investment” to help him along, let’s all check back in another decade or so and see if anything has changed.
  • Camden Yards’ public owners won’t get any money from the Los Angeles Rams renting out the stadium for practice before their game in London, just like they didn’t get any money when Paul McCartney played there, who needs money when you have a pro baseball team whose owner wants money more than you do?
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Friday roundup: D.C. poll shows public support for spending fraction of what Commanders stadium would actually cost

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been another long week in what feels like an endless series of long weeks, complete with the most expensive stadium subsidy demand ever and whatever the hell this was and a new pope, so let’s all take a moment to relax by watching a major league baseball player get hit on the head with a pop fly. I watched it four times in a row before writing this post, there’s something remarkably soothing about it, provided you’re not Chase Meidroth or his team physician.

And now there’s no avoiding it: the remaining news of the week!

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Friday roundup: Browns move forward on moving forward on making plans for getting money for Brook Park dome

access_time personNeil deMause

Welcome to 2025! (Looks around.) Hey!

  • The Cleveland Browns owners took a major step forward toward moving to a new stadium in Brook Park by issuing a statement that they have “officially execut[ed] a clause” that will allow them to “tak[e] steps forward” to buy the land for the site. As if that’s not an indication of a promise of an intention enough, Jimmy and Dee Haslam are also planning to work with “our public partners on the project” to cover the remaining funding gap of $1.2 billion, a mere detail!
  • The Baltimore Banner has ideas for how the Orioles should spend the $600 million (plus!) in renovation money the team was gifted by the state of Maryland, and one of them is “Make Eutaw Street a year-round destination,” but it turns out Eutaw Street — the public street that is now effectively owned by the Orioles — is already open year-round, just nobody goes there. Also, maybe the Banner could have suggested its list of proposals when the state actually could have made it a condition of the taxpayer funding? Ah well, next time.
  • Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi points out that spending $91 million in public money on upgrading a public soccer field for BOS Nation F.C., while claiming it’s really to benefit city schoolkids who will get to play there when the team is on the road, is maybe a little disingenuous when nearby Lowell recently renovated its high school soccer field for just $8 million.
  • Been wishing you could read an article portraying city staffers who worked nights and weekends to get the Jacksonville Jaguars $775 million renovation subsidy done as “the real heroes” while calling it “a local government version of a two-minute drill in football” and “a hurry-up offense” and important because if hadn’t gotten done in the summer, the team’s terrible record this fall might have reduced support for the plan? The Jacksonville Daily Record has got you covered!
  • If you would like to serve on Las Vegas’ new Baseball Stadium Community Oversight Committee to oversee the Athletics stadium’s community benefits agreement, assuming the Athletics stadium is ever built and there ends up being a community benefits agreement, applications are open!
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Friday roundup: Voters hate stadium subsidies, business leaders love ’em, the truth must lie somewhere in the middle

access_time personNeil deMause

Thanks for sticking around to the end of the week! As a reward, you get more news items to stick around through! This is the information economy you signed up for, sorry, no refunds!

  • The folks at No Home Run in Tampa Bay have commissioned a poll on the Rays stadium plans, and say it shows that while 51% of voters supported them initially, that figure fell to 38% after respondents heard “key financial details.” This turns out to be: that Rays owner Stu Sternberg would get stadium land at a price that appears to be below market value, that he wouldn’t pay property taxes, that the city would be on the hook for $494 million (including interest) while Sternberg would keep all revenues from the stadium including non-baseball revenue, and that he would not share profits on the sale of the team with the city, all of which are undeniably accurate — all polls are hot garbage, it’s true, but this one seems as legit as any.
  • What do people in Charlotte think of the plan to spend $650 million in public money on Carolina Panthers stadium upgrades? “Leaders say” that it’s necessary for Charlotte to remain a “big-league city,” according to the Charlotte Observer, at least if by “leaders” you mean the Charlotte Regional Business Alliance, that’s how representative democracy works, right, the only important people are the ones who own businesses? When not reporting on what the bosses think, the Observer also asked, “Could the Panthers leave Charlotte if they don’t get $650 million from the city?”, answering its own question by saying that sure, “the Panthers don’t appear to be interested in moving” and team owner David Tepper has made “no outward statements about wanting to relocate,” but they could, and other NFL teams have, are you $650 million worth of scared yet, huh, huh?
  • The Jacksonville city council seems prepared to rubber-stamp the city’s plan to spend $775 million in public money on Jaguars stadium renovations, with no councilmembers at a Wednesday workshop expressing major misgivings about the deal. There will be a single public hearing on June 17 for Jacksonville residents to weigh in — it remains to be seen how many councilmembers will show up for that, and how many will listen as opposed to just playing with their phones.
  • The Indianapolis City-County Council on Monday approved Mayor Joe Hogsett’s plan to create a TIF district to kick back taxes for a new MLS team and dissolve the one previously approved for the USL’s Indy Eleven. Indy Eleven fans are displeased, and some councilmembers questioned whether dedicating tax money to a team and ownership group that don’t even exist yet is the best move, but Hogsett countered that the Eleven plans were too financially risky and also the stadium was going to be built on a damn African-American graveyard, so good points on both sides, really!
  • Illinois House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch has become the latest state official to tell the Chicago Bears and White Sox owners to pound sand on their subsidy requests: “Even after the election, I just think it’s, things we have to focus on: the kitchen table issues. People want to make sure their groceries are affordable, their rent is affordable, you know, that they have a roof over their head. The last thing they want us to be talking about is stadiums for sports teams. … As we’ve said to the Bears over and over again, to the White Sox, and also to the Chicago Red Stars, there’s just no appetite to use taxpayer funding to fund stadiums for billionaires.”
  • The Chicago Reader, meanwhile, has a good article on Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s weird obsession with building the Bears a new stadium with tax money, which is even better since they fixed the part where the coining of the term “vaportecture” was credited to my old Deadspin editor Barry Petchesky. (It’s not the Reader’s fault — the new Deadspin owners broke a bunch of bylines when they did a site redesign, though they’re fixing them now.) I get quoted some in the piece, but the best line, as is often the case, goes to University of Chicago sports economist Allen Sanderson: “There’s a better chance of Brandon Johnson being drafted number one by the Bears than that stadium making a dollar.”
  • Janet Marie Smith, who worked on the design of the Baltimore Orioles‘ Camden Yards but is not involved with its current renovation, was asked by the Baltimore Banner to comment on what the O’s owners could possibly be spending $600 million or more of public money on, and mentioned various things that reflect a “more fluid way of watching a game,” including more standing room and bar areas, which is certainly one way of describing giving fans fewer places to sit.
  • The NFL is ramping up lobbying efforts to protect the use of federally tax-exempt bonds for stadiums, holding a briefing for Congressional aides during the draft in April. None of the recent attempts to rein in this practice went beyond a committee hearing, but since it saves sports team owners about $230 million a year in taxes for absolutely no benefit to the U.S. as a whole, may as well throw a few lobbyists at making sure no one even thinks about touching it, that’s the sports league way.
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Friday roundup: More vague Royals threats, Coyotes trying every trick in book at once, plus: stadium theme song challenge!

access_time personNeil deMause

Not gonna lie, this week has been a lot, what with Kansas City and environs voting down a Royals and Chiefs tax subsidy proposal and the Oakland A’s announcing a temporary move to Sacramento, requiring eight full posts in four days. (If you want to show your appreciation, or just your sympathy, you know where to find the tip jar.) I’m tempted to let you all go a day early, but then what would we do with all the other news that happened this week and got short shrift? Let’s take it one bullet point at a time and see how it goes:

  • Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman’s wife, Marny Sherman, for some reason got to be the one to make move threats in the wake of Tuesday’s “no” vote on a $500 million sales tax surcharge for the Royals and Chiefs, posting on Facebook that “neither team will work with Jackson County again.” Presumably she means to imply that the teams will either look to neighboring Clay County or the neighboring state of Kansas — she concluded her post, “We will be lucky if both teams wind up in Kansas. At least still in the area!” — though neither has a stadium funding plan in place right now, which is a big part of why the team owners were focusing on Jackson County. Meanwhile, Missouri state Sen. Bill Eigel — yes, the flamethrower guy — says, “I know of no path in the Missouri Senate where we’re going to do any public funding of sports stadiums” and “I think that would be resisted vociferously and extensively,” and while Eigel doesn’t have a leadership position, I’m not sure I’d want to risk finding out what he means by “resist extensively.”
  • Arizona Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo is dead set on winning an auction for public land on which to build a new arena, and also is looking for someone who wants to buy the team, and also is threatening to move the team somewhere if he doesn’t get the land. Plus, the Arizona Republic reports that “team leadership is also likely to seek a special taxing arrangement to help finance construction” if it does win the land bid. Alex Meruelo is also a lot — maybe he might want to consider having one less pregnancy?
  • Marc Normandin has taken on the question of why other MLB owners are content to let John Fisher have the A’s spend three years playing in a minor-league stadium and then potentially move them to baseball’s smallest market while continuing to rake in revenue-sharing checks, and concluded that other owners are not content at all, but they’re also not going to do anything about it: “Owners are probably just happy that the Fisher saga is nearly at an end, and that this potentially opens up the path for them to split expansion fees once the A’s are fully settled in somewhere new in a new park, and hey, in the meantime, one fewer suitor on free agency means prices get to come down.”
  • More on the Sacramento River Cats stadium that is supposed to host the A’s the next three years, via SFGate:  [River Cats broadcaster Bill] Laskey mentioned that the press amenities are dreadfully lacking, with only two total broadcast booths — one for each radio team — and, in Laskey’s estimation, space for four to eight people in the press box. When the occasional River Cats game was televised, Laskey told SFGATE the TV crew would take over one of the booths, forcing a radio broadcaster to call the game outside under a canopy, even in the blistering Sacramento sun.”
  • Philadelphia’s Civic Design Review committee called 76ers owner Josh Harris’s plan to build an arena on the downtown Gallery mall site “undercooked” and a continuation of the bad public planning that led to the failed mall in the first place, with one member saying, “We need to think about the real giveback here and whether we should build this thing.” The committee is only advisory, but coupled with the fact that city agencies are now months overdue producing studies of the arena project that would allow a city council vote, all the trash talking only adds to the project’s distinct lack of momentum.
  • Why should St. Petersburg-area taxpayers spend around $1.5 billion on a new Tampa Bay Rays stadium to revitalize the area around the current stadium when it could just build all the other stuff like housing and museums and skip the expensive part? That’s the question being asked by Tampa Bay Times opinion editor Graham Brink, before acknowledging that there are intangible benefits to having a sports team: “When the team wins, the city feels a sense of collective pride. What’s that worth?” That’s actually been studied, and the answer is: Not as much as you might think.
  • I had to head back home after one day of last week’s sports economics conference and so sadly missed taking in a Baltimore Orioles game with the assembled economists, but fortunately the Baltimore Banner has the recap.
  • This interview with Good Jobs First director Greg LeRoy took place before the Alexandria, Virginia arena plan for the Washington Capitals and Wizards got a fork stuck in it, but it’s a great reminder of both how dubious the economic arguments were for the deal (MuniCap, the consultant that came up with $75 parking fees to justify the arena, is “not a company known for saying no, let’s put it that way,” says LeRoy) and how dumb it is that team owners refuse to release details of their own numbers on the grounds it’s “proprietary” information.
  • And this interview with me by Debtwire took place right after the Kansas City stadium tax vote, but we covered a lot of ground regarding other cities’ stadium and arena shenanigans as well. If only we had had a theme song…
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Friday roundup: More shouting about Virginia arena traffic, plus rumors of A’s (temporary) death and Coyotes-to-Utah

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday! (Happiness provided separately.) While I have you here, is it a good time to remind you that Field of Schemes is on Facebook, Bluesky, Mastodon, Post, and whatever Elon Musk is calling his thing these days? And that by following FoS in any or all of those places, you can get notifications of new posts as soon as they happen — and not only that, by reacting to posts on those sites, you can help get more attention for Field of Schemes, because that’s how social media likes work, it’s a popularity contest where your votes make the things you like more popular? No, that isn’t what you want to hear right now, you just to read the weekly news recap? Okay, ignore all that for now, you can always come back to it later.

 

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O’s sale dodge to save Angeloses $300m in taxes on top of $1B stadium subsidy, it’s good to be rich

access_time personNeil deMause

Billionaire private equity dude David Rubenstein is apparently set to buy the Baltimore Orioles for $1.725 billion … eventually, at least. The delay in Rubenstein (and some other rich guys, reportedly including Cal Ripken Jr.) taking full control of the team is because the Angelos family needs to wait on a full sale until current nonagenarian owner Peter Angelos dies, to duck out of paying capital gains taxes, as Marc Normandin explains in detail. The Baltimore Banner reports that the tax dodge will save the Angeloses (and cost U.S. taxpayers) “hundreds of millions of dollars”; since the Angeloses are set to turn a $1.552 billion profit on Angelos’s 1994 purchase of the O’s and the top capital gains rate is 20%, that’s likely about $310 million in tax losses, but whatever the actual number it’s a good reminder that the “step up in basis” rule is a dumb subsidy for rich people that would have been abolished in 2016 if not for Congressional Republicans.

The other aspect of the sale that’s drawing attention is that Rubenstein was reported to be interested in buying the team back in December, at which point state senate president Bill Ferguson slammed the brakes on the O’s stadium renovation plan on the grounds that he didn’t want to give a billion dollars or so to a team that was about to be sold. What happened next, according to the Banner:

CEO John Angelos called Maryland Gov. Wes Moore on Thursday evening to assure the governor the Angelos family does not plan to sell the team, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the call.

In that private phone call between Moore and John Angelos, Angelos refuted Bloomberg’s story, which stated that Rubenstein of Carlyle Group Inc. was engaged in talks.

Angelos, then, either fibbed to the governor or completely coincidentally started talks to sell the team to the guy he said he wasn’t going to sell it to, immediately after promising he wasn’t going to sell. Either way, Angelos got his state money a week after calling Moore, and the legal principle of “no backsies” applies, so that’s that.

While all of this is extremely unseemly, it’s all fair in love and subsidies, at least until Congress either cracks down on the capital gains tax loophole or reconsiders David Minge’s bill to impose taxes on local-level subsidies. I’ll be over here, not holding my breath.

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Orioles owner finally signs new lease after Maryland grants 15-year escape clause

access_time personNeil deMause

Eleven weeks after announcing a new lease deal for the Baltimore Orioles that would keep the team at Camden Yards for 30 years in exchange for maybe a billion dollars in state cash and rent and development rights kickbacks, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore again announced a new lease deal for the Orioles yesterday, this time with actual signed paperwork. Take it away, Wes:

“I want to say something that I have been waiting to say for a long time — Baltimore, the deal is done. … From the very beginning, I was clear that we would only sign an agreement that puts Maryland taxpayers at the top of mind, keeps the Orioles in Baltimore long term and benefits the entire City of Baltimore, and that is exactly what we have done here by extending the Orioles’ stadium lease at Camden Yards for another 30 years.”

Except, about that 30 years: As noted previously, the new lease gives Orioles owner John Angelos, or whoever buys the team from him, an out clause where he can leave early if he can’t come to an agreement with the state on a development deal for the area around Camden Yards by the end of 2027. (The original plan was that the team could then break the lease after ten years; in the final version that’s been pushed back to 15 years.) And he gets to keep and spend the $600 million in state renovation cash, plus more if they can pay off state bonds fast enough and sell new ones, either way — meaning this could end becoming a $40 million-a-year 15-year lease extension, which would tie the new Ravens deal for most expensive per-year cost in sports history.

Regardless, this was apparently enough to placate state senate president Bill Ferguson, who after griping about the deal last week said yesterday, “I am so deeply thankful for the opportunity to have put this 30-year deal into place and to have some small part to work with this team.” Not that he gets to vote on it anyway: Moore already approved the renovation subsidies last year contingent on the teams signing new leases, and it was down to the unelected Maryland Stadium Authority to finalize the lease.

What’s left now is for the state and Angelos to negotiate the development agreement, but Moore has effectively tied his own hands in those talks, since if he doesn’t agree to what the O’s owner wants, Angelos can spend his $600 million and then walk. Or, more likely, spend the $600 million and then demand more in about a decade, since he’ll be able to point to his expiring lease. We’ve known for a while that elected officials are really bad at this, but sometimes they are even more really bad than others.

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