Category: Detroit Tigers

Friday roundup: Utah enters MLB expansion sweepstakes, Bettman’s mouth issues more checks Coyotes can’t cover

access_time personNeil deMause

It was 89 degrees in New York yesterday, which made me think about how the cities most threatened by climate change are only going to be threatened sooner and sooner. It may be too soon for team owners to start thinking about threatening to move to Duluth, but, you know, is it ever really too soon to threaten to move anywhere? Food for thought.

News roundup time!

  • Former Utah Jazz owner Gail Miller, who owns the Triple-A Salt Lake Bees, says she wants to bid for an MLB expansion team when and if MLB starts taking bids. “We believe that as a top-30 media market in the fastest-growing state in the country with the youngest population, that’s where our attention should be,” said Miller Company CEO Steve Starks, and while he’s right about those things — Salt Lake sits at 29th, just behind Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Nashville, and Baltimore — it also could soon be the site of arsenic-mercury dust storms, which may not be the best selling point. Salt Lake City also doesn’t have a major-league stadium, and Gov. Spencer Cox has already declared that he’s opposed to public funding of one … except for tax-increment financing kickbacks, which he’d be just fine with.
  • NHL commissioner Gary Bettman has visited Tempe, Arizona to take in an Arizona Coyotes game and promise that “once this [arena] project is built, this team is never going anywhere. It’s going to be here forever.” So Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo is going to sign a 999-year lease? That’s the only thing he can mean. Hey, everybody, Alex Meruelo is signing a forever lease, Gary Bettman promised, this is great news, Gary Bettman would never lie to us!
  • Philadelphia 76ers owner Josh Harris, who is already wrapped up in seeking a Philadelphia arena that all the neighbors hate and for which he’s been accused of illegally funneling money to a mayoral candidate, may be about to buy the Washington Commanders for $6 billion — at which point he will presumably begin lobbying for all the legislators who stopped pursuing stadium bills because they hated Commanders owner Daniel Snyder to resume their subsidy efforts. Here, let’s listen to effusive pro-stadium remarks in the Washington Post from Jack Evans, who was forced off the D.C. council after accepting tons of money from private businesses whose projects he was voting on. Old bribe-takers never die, they just end up becoming pundits.
  • Did I say last month that “the Detroit city council has awarded developers of the area around the Detroit Tigers stadium and Detroit Red Wings and Pistons arena $783 million in public subsidies“? Turns out the actual figure could be as high as $1.8 billion, according to figures compiled by Bridge Detroit, which quotes me as saying, “Once you get your foot in the door and shovels in the ground then you have the city on the hook. That’s how this becomes a gift that keeps on giving for developers, and it’s ‘In for a dime, in for a billion dollars.” (Okay, I got it right at least one of those times.)
  • Kansas City is going to cancel all in-person K-12 classes for two days at the end of the month to avoid traffic created by the NFL draft being held in the city, this is fine and normal.
  • Finally, enjoy some raves from the Globe and Mail about renovations to the Toronto Blue Jays‘ stadium, if pointing out that the Jays are charging $1 just to be admitted to a new liquor automat where you can pay $70 for a drink “reminiscent of Black Forest cake” counts as a rave. The paper also calls the stadium formerly known as Skydome “ancient,” which may be alarming to any readers born before it opened in 1989, apologies for not adding a trigger warning to the top of this post, my bad.
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Friday roundup: March is for veiled threats (by the Rays, Bears, Browns, burger lovers)

access_time personNeil deMause

Baseball season kicked off yesterday, with the introduction of such new innovations as a pitch clock that drove a sharp increase in the all-important (?) metric of hits per hour of baseball and LED stadium lights that can be made to flicker artistically, even in the middle of a play. Truly, this is the future, if the future even exists.

Inarguably, this is Friday, which means we take a spin through news of the past week, if you believe there was one:

  • Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg says it’s his “belief” and “a very reasonable anticipation” that he’ll have a new stadium deal in either St. Petersburg or Tampa by the end of the year, and that if he doesn’t, “there’s not a deal to be done, basically.” If you didn’t get the veiled threat there, he added, “At the end of the day, it’s all about ensuring that the team is here, throwing out its first pitch in 2028. And then here, throwing out its first pitch in 2053 as well.” Then he held up a stuffed Raymond the Seadog and made a slashing gesture across its throat, while dramatically tilting his head to one side with his tongue out and his eyes rolled back in his head. (Okay, not that last one, but only because Stuart Sternberg has no sense of drama.)
  • Chicago Bears owner George McCaskey said that the team still hasn’t made a decision on “whether we’re going to develop the property” it bought in Arlington Heights and “whether the development is going to include a stadium.” He added, “I don’t have a timeline” for making those decisions, and “we’d like to have” discussions with Chicago about revamping Soldier Field. The Vegas betting line on “Are the Bears just trying to get a bidding war going here?” has now fallen to –300.
  • Cleveland Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam said Monday that “we’re committed to redoing the stadium” and “in all likelihood, it’s not going to have a dome.” Zero details on cost or who would pay for it, but Dee Haslam said “it’s a year-long phase” to get a more concrete plan, while her husband Jimmy said “we’re probably three, four, five years” from a stadium renovation “happening,” so clearly they’re not yet in the Rays/Bears stage of more concrete idle threats and promises.
  • The Detroit city council has awarded developers of the area around the Detroit Tigers stadium and Detroit Red Wings and Pistons arena $783 million in public subsidies, because the last batch of subsidies for the sports venues themselves only created a bunch of parking lots. Will the Ilitches and their developer partners be able to score the elusive triple-dip? Herb Simon and the city of Indianapolis know it can be done!
  • The proposed Oakland A’s stadium project at Howard Terminal cleared a legal hurdle as an appeals court tossed a challenge to the building’s environmental impact statement. Yes, that’s the same legal hurdle that a lower court cleared last September. No, still nobody knows who would pay all the costs of the thing. Yes, you may now move on to the next bullet point.
  • Qatar hasn’t actually yet dismantled and reused its World Cup stadiums that it promised to have dismantled and reused by now. If anyone is surprised by this, they really haven’t been paying attention.
  • Tempe’s duplicate Arizona Coyotes arena vote set for August has been officially canceled as unnecessary since voters will already be casting ballots in May, which is sad news for anyone who was hoping that future Arizona Coyotes seasons would be replaced by the more interesting spectacle of 82 televised arena votes a year.
  • Also just in from Tempe: “We are a community that likes to be outdoors enjoying our Arizona sunshine, having coffee on the balcony, walking the dog, grilling burgers with neighbors. We are not a community that remains inside of a sound-insulated apartment with windows closed.” No, I didn’t expect the Coyotes arena battle to turn on the inalienable right to grill burgers either, but stranger things have happened.
  • New York state is likely to use cash instead of selling bonds to finance a large chunk of the new Buffalo Bills stadium. You’ll notice I said “finance” there instead of “fund”; the amount being funded by the public hasn’t changed (still $1 billion), but how the state will raise the money may change. This is like deciding whether to pay for your new car up front or with monthly payments, and so should be completely uninteresting unless you’re an accountant for New York state, but it made headlines so I thought someone might need a reason to skip reading them, please go read about the liquid trees instead.
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Friday roundup: Bengals naming rights deal called “(XXX)” and other titillating stadium commentary

access_time personNeil deMause

Well, that was certainly another week. Thanks to all who engaged in the spirited comment debates about Garth Brooks an Andy Zimbalist and other celebrity stadium experts, and thanks also to all who responded to my latest fundraising appeal — I look forward to a productive weekend of mailing out Cab-Hailing Lady art prints.

But first, we have more news for the roundup to round up:

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Detroit’s “renaissance” has enriched its billionaire sports owners while rest of city suffers

access_time personNeil deMause

If you want a depressing read about the impact of Dan Gilbert, the billionaire Quicken Loans baron, Cleveland Cavaliers owner, and would-be Detroit MLS owner, on his hometown of Detroit, there’s a great one by Shikha Dalmia in The Week. Among the highlights:

  • Gilbert is pushing for the state legislature to approve a super-TIF bill that would kick back property, sales, and income taxes from environmentally contaminated “brownfields” sites to help pay for the project. It would only apply to projects costing over $500 million in cities of more than 600,000, so the only eligible developer is Gilbert, who is proposing a giant project on the former site of the Hudson’s department store in downtown Detroit.
  • Gilbert got $50 million in tax breaks to move his Quicken headquarters from the suburbs to Detroit.
  • He and his partner, Pistons owner Tom Gores, are seeking $300 million in cash and land in exchange for building a new soccer complex on a half-finished jail site (and a new jail elsewhere).
  • Detroit is about to open a new $187.3 million light rail system that will link “Detroit’s downtown, dubbed Gilbertville because it houses the Quicken office and other buildings where Gilbert’s employees live, with the midtown area, where the entertainment district [built by Gilbert’s fellow sports billionaire, the late Tigers and Red Wings owner Mike Ilitch] is. Never mind that Detroit’s jobless and carless residents would have much more use for bus lines transporting them to jobs outside the city.”

Okay, maybe it’s a high price to pay, but at least Detroit is finally undergoing a long-awaited renaissance as a result, right? Well, actually:

The whole argument for pouring taxpayer dollars into this area is that its growth will spill over to the rest of the city, opening up jobs and business opportunities for all Detroiters. But research by Michigan State University’s Laura Reese and Wayne State University’s Gary Sands published earlier this year suggests that on virtually every metric, life outside the targeted zone is worse than it was even in 2010, when the alleged renaissance began.

Detroit’s overall population actually declined by 2.6 percent between 2010 and 2014. The unemployment rate among Detroiters increased by 2.4 percentage points between 2010 and 2013. This may have been because of the bankruptcy-induced layoffs of city employees, but Sands maintains that the trends don’t seem to have changed much in 2015. “About half of the neighborhoods in the periphery saw employment and payroll declines,” he notes. What’s more, although the overall number of Detroit businesses remained unchanged between 2014 and 2015, 13 of the more peripheral city zipcodes saw a decline.

In other words, far from the city core leading a comeback, it is at best siphoning — and at worst destroying — business and employment in the rest of Detroit, perhaps because smaller enterprises are having trouble competing with powerful billionaires who can dip into taxpayer pockets and divert other public resources toward their grand designs.

The whole thing is a terrific read, if you like to be depressed about how our cities are increasingly being run as engines for boosting the profits of their richest citizens. But you almost certainly do, since you read this website, so by all means go check it out.

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New stadiums are falling apart too, nobody’s calling for them to be replaced (yet)

access_time personNeil deMause

So a bolt fell off the retractable roof of the Indianapolis Colts‘ Lucas Oil Stadium last night and hit a woman in the head. This came just two years after a railing collapsed at the same stadium, and just a little over a week after a piece of concrete fell in a concourse at the Detroit Tigers‘ Comerica Park.

Now, it’s important to understand that this stuff happens, though obviously it’s not ideal. When it happens at older stadiums, though, it’s taken as a sign that they’re dangerously outmoded and in need of replacement — recall both the falling expansion joint incident that helped launch Rudy Giuliani’s campaign for a new Yankees stadium and the falling Wrigley Field concrete that began talk about replacing or renovating the Cubs‘ home field. When it’s a newer stadium, though — Lucas Oil Stadium stadium opened in 2008, and Comerica in 2000 — it’s just an unfortunate mishap.

Of course, given recent trends in stadium lifespans, it’s probably not all that early for the Tigers to start talking about needing another new stadium to replace Comerica. Anybody spotted Mike Ilitch returning a blowtorch and hacksaw?

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Ilitch throws hat in ring to buy Pistons

access_time personNeil deMause

Other shoe: dropped.

Sports and pizza boss Michael Ilitch said today he wants to buy the Detroit Pistons and move the team to a new arena in downtown Detroit.

The Ilitch family already owns the Detroit Tigers and the Detroit Red Wings.

The Ilitch bid is for the entire Palace Sports & Entertainment organization, not just for the basketball team itself. If successful, that means that the Ilitches would also own the Palace of Auburn Hills arena, the DTE Energy Music Theatre and other aspects of the Palace network.

You’ll recall that the big question about this plan, which was originally floated about a month ago, was whether giving monopoly control over sports and concerts in the Detroit area would really generate enough money to pay for a new Detroit arena. Still nothing on that in today’s coverage, though enough column-inches were spilled on it that there was room for worries that Bud Selig might thing Ilitch doesn’t love him anymore.

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