Category: Baltimore Orioles

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 … eventuall, 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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Maryland senate president slams brakes on O’s $1B subsidy amid team sale rumors and last-minute lease changes

access_time personNeil deMause

The maybe-billion-dollar Baltimore Orioles renovation subsidy and development deal came to a screeching halt on Friday, at least for the moment, as Maryland Gov. Wes Moore canceled a planned announcement after state senate president Bill Ferguson raised objections:

“Fundamentally, I believe that the long-term lease for the use of the ballpark should not be conditioned on whether or not a private owner receives a 99-year ground lease to develop land owned by Maryland taxpayers,” Ferguson, a Democrat whose district includes the ballpark, told The Baltimore Banner. “This is more relevant today, as recent news has heightened uncertainties about the future ownership of the team.”

That “recent news” refers to reports that billionaire private equity goon David Rubenstein is in talks to potentially buy the Orioles from the Angelos family. Team ownership goon John Angelos has said he doesn’t intend to sell — among other things, if the family waits until his father, 94-year-old Peter Angelos, dies, they can evade capital gains taxes — but that apparently didn’t placate Ferguson, who either really doesn’t want to approve a giant development deal for a pig in a poke, or doesn’t want to approve a giant development deal at all and is using the team’s potential sale as an excuse to slam the brakes.

The Orioles deal was already getting weird, as Moore tried to get the team’s owners to sign a lease extension while the development fine print is still being finalized. As an inducement to that, a proposed revised deal would have handed the Angeloses $600 million (and more) in state money for stadium renovations approved last year, while giving the team and public officials four years to agree on a development plan; if they couldn’t work one out, the team owners, whoever they were at that time, would be able to break their lease after just ten years.

What happens now is unclear: Ferguson said in his statement that he’s “confident the parties will reach a fair deal before the end of the year,” which certainly implies that he has some modifications in mind that would placate him, but if so he didn’t divulge what they are. Nothing to do now but keep watching the tea leaves in the next week or two, and see whether this ends up being a game changer or merely a speed bump.

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Friday roundup: Royals and Chiefs subsidy compromise rumors, Rays name fight looming, plus more gondolamania!

access_time personNeil deMause

It must be Hanukkah, because there’s miraculously already more than a week’s worth of stadium news! (Don’t think about it too hard, just go with it.)

  • Both Kansas City Chiefs president Mark Donovan and Royals president of business operations Brooks Sherman met with Jackson County executive Frank White this week, presumably to discuss putting a referendum on the ballot in April for a sales-tax surcharge extension to fund new or renovated stadiums for the two teams. Fox4 reports that “a source close to the situation” says the team owners might be willing to give up park levy money and insurance coverage they get from the county currently — the insurance money, you may recall, is what had the county figuring a new Royals stadium alone could cost more than $1 billion in present value costs, so this could potentially trim the subsidy demand to more like $500-700 million, which is better without actually being good. More unconfirmed rumors as events warrant.
  • Tampa Bay Rays president Brian Auld has announced that the Rays have no intention of changing their name to St. Petersburg Rays after moving from St. Petersburg to next door in St. Petersburg. The St. Petersburg city council is set to vote next week on a requirement that the team do so in exchange for getting at least $600 million in city money for a new stadium; Auld had previously warned that “Serious people recognize that putting this entire project at risk over a 25-year-old name of our organization is probably not something worth doing,” which sounds like a threat to me, plus a personal attack by calling councilmembers unserious, it would definitely be disallowed if Auld had tried to post it here in comments.
  • Not only is the Los Angeles Dodgers stadium gondola dream not dead, but it has a new price tag: $385-500 million. Plus another $8-10 million a year to operate it. The environmental impact report that gave the new projections says the money could be covered by private bond financing (which isn’t actually a way of covering anything, just a way of borrowing), sponsorships (uh, sure), naming rights (uh, suuuuuure) and fares (though trips to and from Dodgers games, which are most of the point of the thing, are supposed to be free). The report acknowledged that there’s suspicion that the whole gondola scheme is just an excuse to develop the parking lots around the stadium — which former Dodger owner Frank McCourt, who is behind the gondola idea, still owns — but says there’s no proof of McCourt’s plans to proceed with “a larger, more grandiose project in the future,” so just try not to think about that, and focus on the glory that is gondola.
  • Add the Soldier Field parking lot to the list of potential stadium sites Chicago Bears ownership is considering. No indication of whether or how that would work any better than building on the current stadium site, but at this point the team is just kicking tires on any site it can to hope one comes with a huge pile of public cash, which hasn’t worked so far, but they only need to find one sucker to be successful, so can’t fault them for trying. (Except for 100% faulting them for extracting public money for private profit, that’s the whole point of this site, haven’t you been paying attention?)
  • So it turns out it’s the state of Maryland that wants to separate the Baltimore Orioles‘ new lease from its new development agreement, that makes more sense than the other way around. It sounds like the whole issue is more about lack of time to get the documents finalized before next season starts than the state actually looking for some kind of leverage to negotiate a better deal; the O’s may go to a month-to-month lease in the meantime, the better to keep everyone on tenterhooks until they get all the t’s crossed and i’s dotted on their
  • Plans for a new NYC F.C. stadium in Queens cleared a community board vote after the city agreed to build a new police precinct there, which was apparently the board’s main demand. Still unclear: Who will pay for hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure costs and whether the team will get hundreds of millions of dollars in property tax breaks, maybe if we’re lucky we’ll find out before the city council grants final approval in the spring, but don’t count on it.
  • Jon Styf at The Center Square wrote a report on economic impact consulting reports for sports venues and interviewed both J.C. Bradbury (who called them “fantasy reports”) and me (who called them an attempt to “put across B.S. as fact”). He left out my explanation of the clear plastic binder effect, but you can’t have everything.
  • A high school football team that had to play all its games on the road because first its home field was destroyed to make way for a new New York Yankees stadium and then the replacement field that opened years later fell apart and was left unplayable has won the state championship! I can’t actually tell if this story is supposed to be heartwarming or scandalous, let’s go with both.
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Friday roundup: Fresh A’s vaportecture incoming, OKC readies for $850m arena vote, Revolution stadium hits snag

access_time personNeil deMause

I don’t even know where to start with this week, but suffice to say that this keeps rolling on, with no end in sight. At least, for the second consecutive day, Henry Kissinger remains dead.

And, like death and union-busting, the great stadium swindle shows no signs of going away anytime soon:

  • New Las Vegas stadium renderings for the Oakland A’s are due to be released on Monday, and A’s owner John Fisher is even scheduled to show up. (Alan Snel of LVSportsBiz notes that “Fisher is known for not interacting with fans and making public appearances to discuss his baseball team,” which is a polite way of saying that he don’t like people.) Ha ha, the Las Vegas Sun illustrated its article on this with the June stadium renderings that Fisher’s honchos immediately declared to not actually be what the stadium will look like — LOLSun, go read Snel’s coverage instead, if only for his awesome photo filenames. Meanwhile, Nevada Independent sports business reporter Howard Stutz warned that Fisher still has a lot of hoops to jump through before he can move the team — the referendum, the lawsuit, the finding another billion dollars — and “we’re not going to see much other than public meetings and different announcements over the next year,” so enjoy the dogs and ponies for now.
  • Elsewhere in A’s news, Fisher hasn’t officially notified Oakland that he plans to leave town, in order to postpone a $45 million payment to Alameda County for purchasing half of the Oakland Coliseum property. San Jose Mercury News columnist Daniel Borenstein notes that “county supervisors never bothered to require that the team stay in Oakland as a condition for acquiring the rights to the Coliseum property,” whoops, that would have been an idea, somebody make a note of that for next time.
  • The Oklahoma County Democratic Party held a panel discussion in anticipation of next week’s voter referendum on spending $850 million on a new Thunder stadium while team owners spend $50 million. Party affirmative action officer Nabilah Rawdah said the funding mechanism would be “a regressive sales tax,” which, yup, all sales taxes are regressive, and would cost city residents “around $1,200 per person,” which, yup, math. Central Oklahoma Federation of Labor president Tim O’Connor countered, “JOBS!!1!,” because he got an agreement that the project will use union labor. (Yes, it is possible to hate union-busting and to accept that actually existing unions are maybe not their most perfect selves right now.)
  • Plans for a New England Revolution stadium in Everett, just north of Boston, hit a speed bump in the Massachusetts state legislature when the plan was removed from a state budget bill in conference committee. The Boston Globe notes that the stadium would cost $600 million and “no public money is being sought — for now,” which is maybe not the most reassuring; the memorandum of understanding is only seven pages long and doesn’t provide any details on the project finances, more like a memorandum of misunderstanding, amirite?
  • They’re still talking about that damn Dodger Stadium gondola five years later — LOLgondola, don’t make me send Alissa Walker in there.
  • Baltimore Orioles owner John Angelos may now sign a new lease and work out the details of his insanely lucrative 99-year development rights agreement later, after insisting he wouldn’t sign one without the other, wut? Guess he’s convinced now that the state is happy to give him everything he wants and he doesn’t want figuring out what he wants to get in the way of having a stadium to play in next year, guess the state had leverage after all, somebody make a note of that for next time.
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Inside the secrets of the Baltimore Orioles rent documents (don’t get your hopes up)

access_time personNeil deMause

I don’t know how you spent your weekend, but part of mine was dedicated to going through 299 pages of documents I received from the Maryland Stadium Authority about how the state determined the Baltimore Orioles‘ annual lease payments for 2022. As you may recall, the O’s annual rent is calculated according to a complex formula — 7% of net ticket revenues, 7.5% of most concession revenues, 50% of net parking revenues, 25% of net ballpark ad revenues, 10% of suite revenues, and 7.5% of club seat revenues, among other things — and it’s been unclear how closely the state vets the team’s numbers for these items. So I filed a a public records request, and this is what I got back.

Let’s dive in and see what turned up:

The first 208 pages are just the Orioles’ lease at Camden Yards from 1992, much of which has nothing to do with rent payments. (Though it is fun in a way to learn things like that the Orioles had a separate agreement with Sony to provide “certain television and other video equipment” for the stadium.) Most of the good bits in that regard are in Article IV, which spells out that:

  • Net admissions revenues are after deducting ticket taxes and revenue sharing with the league and visiting team.
  • Concessions revenues are gross revenues paid to the team by its concessionaire.
  • Net ad revenues are after deducting agency fees and commissions, plus “reasonable and necessary expenses” for building and installing ad panels.
  • Net suite revenues are after deducting taxes and other suite payments like for tickets and parking that are covered elsewhere.

That’s all reasonable enough. The Orioles also have a state-of-the-art clause, though at least it’s limited to requiring that the stadium needs to be held to the “maintenance and repair standards” of the top 25% of baseball stadiums, not to have the amenities of the top 25%. Still, it does raise the question: If all stadiums have to be in the top 25%, what happens to the three-quarters of stadiums that are in the bottom three-quarters at any given time, given, you know, math? One would think that some stadium district lawyers might have thought of this, but then, knowing local government lawyers, maybe one doesn’t.

As for the reporting, the Orioles management has to provide the stadium authority with a written schedule showing how it calculated the team’s rent, prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. A sample report is included as Exhibit D, and looks like this:

Unfortunately, there are no examples of filled-out forms. And most of the rest of the documents are also from 1992, so aside from marveling at the one with signature spaces for both Larry Lucchino and Sargent Shriver, there’s not much else here. And the MSA’s cover letter probably explains why:

In connection with MSA’s 2022 rent audit, the Orioles provided numerous records that identify and document certain actual annual revenue streams generated from conducting games and events at Oriole Park in 2022. These records (e.g., admission gate receipts, concession revenues, audited financial statements, etc.) comprise confidential commercial and financial information of the Orioles, and accordingly, MSA is precluded from disclosing them pursuant to GP § 4-335.

So, the Orioles pay rent based on their revenues, but those are confidential. Meaning you’ll just have to trust that the stadium authority is keeping track of them accurately, just like the stadium authority trusts the Orioles to fill out their revenue forms accurately. Trust! It’s the basis of all human interaction, and why we have never had need of things like “contracts” or “laws” or “oversight.”

Sorry if this is disappointing in terms of revelations, but look at it this way: At least you didn’t have to look at 299 pages of documents before getting to it. “Explaining Lack of Transparent Government Since 1998,” that’s our motto, at least since the better one was already taken.

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