Category: Montreal MLB team

It’s been a while since there’s been much talk about specifics of a new baseball stadium in Montreal as a part- or full-time home of the Tampa Bay Rays, and even then it was mostly vague haggling over would-be owner Stephen Bronfman’s preferred Peel Basin site, plus vague talk of the province of Quebec offering loans that the team could count player income taxes as repaying. Yesterday, however, the French-language La Presse newspaper ran a long article saying Quebec premier François Legault is considering vastly expanding the amount of public loans and grants it will offer, to as much as $300 million (all translation via Google):

According to our information, Quebec considers four factors in particular to assess the impact of the project:

1. taxes paid in Quebec by Expos-Rays players;
2. the tax revenues, for Quebec, generated by the construction of the stadium (a study by the Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan Montreal estimated this amount at 55.6 million in 2013; this gives 65 million in 2021 dollars with inflation);
3. Quebec tax revenues (for example, the QST) generated by tourists from outside Quebec who come to Montreal to watch the Expos-Rays games;
4. a percentage of the project’s economic spinoffs, in particular those coming from foreign tourists who come to Montreal to watch baseball games.

That’s a dog’s breakfast of tax kickbacks, and the Gazette isn’t entirely clear how it came up with a value of $300 million. (The paper gives a figure of $155 million over 25 years for a half-season of player income taxes, assuming 3% a year salary inflation, but no details on how it calculated the value of the last two elements, tourist tax revenues and “economic spinoffs.”) And if Quebec is actually thinking of carving out those revenue streams and crediting them to the Ex-Rays owners, it would be a logistical nightmare: There’s no way to set aside only sales taxes paid by people who came to Montreal solely for baseball games (unless every store had to ask customers to fill out a survey, which would be hilarious), let alone to sell stadium bonds based on a revenue stream that comes down to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

But then, this sort of thing is likely meant less as an enforceable economic formula than as a political argument: If you can come up with enough tax revenue that you can claim is “generated” by a sports team, then you can argue that handing over several hundred million dollars in tax money is really no cost to taxpayers — which is exactly what the Gazette says. (Okay, it actually says, “ce sera à coût nul pour les contribuables,” but both Google Translate and my remaining high-school French tell me that’s what it means.) That’s what we saw with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s defense of his Milwaukee Bucks subsidy package, not to mention in the Odd Couple “casino night” episode.

There are two main problems with the “it’s okay, it’s taxes they’re creating to begin with” argument: New tax money isn’t always new, and even giving up new tax money comes with a public cost.

On the first part, sure, Quebec wouldn’t get any MLB player income taxes without an MLB team, nor would it get taxes from tourists who wouldn’t come to Montreal without a baseball team. Except: If part of player salaries are paid for by tickets bought by Montreal residents, and those people then reduce their spending elsewhere (on hockey tickets, movies, whatever), then you’re in part shifting that income tax revenue from one place to another, not getting it all as a windfall. And as for tourists who go to Montreal to see ballgames, at least some of them might have gone to Montreal anyway — as we have seen in Florida, where in years without spring training just as many tourists arrive regardless.

As for the second part, even if 100% of the tax money were new, that still doesn’t mean it’s money that Quebec wouldn’t have other uses for. Baseball players and the tourists who arrive to watch them play come with costs as well — athletes need schools for their kids and government health insurance, fans need to ride trains and drive on roads, just for starters — and that’s what tax money is collected to pay for. And even if the costs don’t eat up all of the new tax revenues being brought in, there’s still an equity issue, in that normal Canadian millionaires have to pay their fair share toward government services, whereas MLB players would have their taxes diverted to build their place of employment. (There’s an equity issue with taxing workers to pay owners, too, but that’s a separate issue.)

Anyway, all this is very hazy at the moment — the La Presse article refers to a deal that would be part grants and part forgivable loans, with no details on how that would break down — but Quebec does seem to be heading in the direction of “pile up everything we can designate as team-related taxes, and hand that back to the team,” which is not a great starting point for negotiations. Quebec opposition parties quickly slammed the plan — “We take people for idiots when we say that,” said Quebec Liberal Party leader Dominique Anglade about claiming that a $300 million tax kickback would cost taxpayers nothing — and there’s still that guy with a billboard, but it appears that Bronfman and Rays owner Stuart Sternberg have at least found a willing ear in Legault, giving Sternberg either a shot at a Montreal stadium or leverage to demand public money in Tampa Bay, which is all he really ever wanted from this whole Tampontreal gambit.

Ha ha ha ha this sign:

‘Dear Rays, Montreal won’t pay for your new stadium’ billboard up near Trop https://t.co/ks0bRigeUg

— Sports by Tampa Bay Times (@TBTimes_Sports) October 25, 2021

That’s Renaud Brossard, director of the Quebec chapter of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, standing next to a mockup of a billboard, and also in front of a real billboard, declaring, “Dear Rays, Montreal won’t pay for your new stadium. Sincerely, Taxpayers.” The sign is on I-275 right outside the Tampa Bay Rays‘ Tropicana Field, and is of course a reference to Rays owner Stuart Sternberg’s stated demand for two stadiums, one in Tampa Bay and one in Montreal, because something about complementary weather and culinary connections.

“If the Rays want to come and play in Montreal, they’re more than welcome to do it,” Brossard told reporters. “We’ll give them a warm Canadian welcome. But we’re not going to let them use our wallets as an open bar.”

That’s a slightly mixed metaphor, but I will cut Brossard some slack, as he’s not speaking his first language. Also he was kind of rushed: The federation only coughed up $1,300 to run the digital ad for one week, so Brossard flew down to St. Petersburg for a couple of days to get in a quick photo op.

The CTF, as you can probably guess from its name, is an anti-tax, anti-spending, pro-free trade group with ties to conservative parties in Canada and international libertarian groups. Brossard cited a March poll finding that 60% of Quebecois (and 59% of Montrealers) don’t want to spend  government money on a new baseball stadium; in the same poll, only 42% of people in Quebec even want the Montreal Expos to return, which is not a terrific showing.

The fact that a guy running an anti-tax group found $1,300 in his budget (plus whatever it cost for plane tickets) to run a billboard ad for a week isn’t really news so much as a media stunt, but there is a point here: Everyone in Florida is acting as if Montreal is a legitimate rival to Tampa Bay for Sternberg’s affections, or at least half his affections, but attempts to get a stadium funded there have an even longer, sadder history than they do in Tampa and St. Pete. Sternberg still appears to be trying to create a bidding war between two metropolitan areas that haven’t shown much interest in bidding, while also declaring that both cities will end up half-winners, which is not how bidding wars work at all. It’s tempting to think that there’s some evil master plan behind the Tampontreal Ex-Rays gambit, but really, billionaires are just as capable of doing stuff without fully thinking it through as the rest of us humans, so it’s equally possible that he’s just flailing around because he doesn’t have any better ideas — in which case, getting trolled by a 20something Canadian with an electronic sign may end up being the whole plan’s most fitting epitaph of all.

Tampontreal Ex-Rays news, everybody!

“We’re going to add a sign in the rightfield foul territory with a very simple Tampa Bay Montreal graphic,” [Tampa Bay Rays president] Matt Silverman said. “Especially with the eyes of baseball on us this October, we want that visible symbol of our plan and our excitement for it. It will mark the effort subtly and keep the focus on winning.”

There is a lot going on in that couple of sentences, so let’s break it down:

• Once the Rays start hosting postseason games on Oct. 7, they will add a sign in right-field foul territory (on the “back wall,” which could mean a couple of places) that will somehow portray Tampa Bay and Montreal. I doubt it will be this, but I so hope it is.
• This sign will portray the excitement of Rays owner Stu Sternberg for the plan, somehow.
• It will also be subtle. While conveying excitement. And getting in the eyes of baseball.
• The focus will be on winning, so don’t pay any attention to the sign that Sternberg put there to get your attention. Unless the Rays are losing, I guess? Or should we still focus on winning even if it’s not the Rays doing it? Is this sign going to come with a FAQ, I hope?

The big, subtle sign is not the only progress the two-city solution is making: Le Journal de Montreal reports that “an important announcement concerning the return of Major League Baseball to Montreal” will be made “after the municipal elections of November 7,” which could mean anything, yes, but it’s got your attention now, doesn’t it? (Subtly.) Also, I would be remiss if I did not report that Silverman’s statement sounds much more awesome when translated into French by Le Journal de Montreal and back again by Google Translate:

“In October, the eyes of the region will be on baseball, so we want to make our plan visible and show that we are feverish,” he added. This subtly shows our efforts, because, at the same time, we want to keep our focus on winning [on the pitch]. “

The people who run the Rays have got a fever for playing home game in two different countries depending on the time of year! Now forget all about that, and focus on the game on the pitch. I mean, the match on the pitch. Go team!

On Monday, the Tampa Bay Times reported that a group of minority owners of the Tampa Bay Rays were suing majority owner Stuart Sternberg, saying he’d engaged in a “relentless scheme” to force them out and seize full control of the team. Among the charges:

• Sternberg deprived minority owners of their share of profits while still sticking them with taxes on those profits — no details provided by the Times on how he pulled this off — forcing some of them, including Lenda Naimoli, the widow of original Rays owner Vince Naimoli, to sell their shares to him at cut-rate prices.
• Sternberg then transferred “the entire baseball club and franchise” to a new company he controlled without telling his minority partners.
• Starting in 2014, Sternberg was “secretly negotiating” to sell shares to Stephen Bronfman, the Canadian private equity goon who has been working to bring baseball back to Montreal.

That’s a bunch of stuff, certainly, and what you make of it depends on your perspective, and your agenda. St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman responded by calling on Sternberg to “consider relinquishing control” of the Rays, while also wondering aloud whether the Montreal talks could represent a default on the team’s use agreement with St. Pete, which prohibits discussions about moving the team before 2028. Most headline writers, meanwhile, focused on the “secret Montreal talks” angle, though the only thing secret seems to have been that they started earlier than Sternberg had previously admitted.

Kriseman’s default charge first: Depending on what evidence the minority owners have, this could well be much ado about nothing, as the Rays use agreement only prohibits Sternberg from talking to other cities about playing games there before 2028, it doesn’t prohibit Sternberg from talking to other cities before 2028 about playing games there. So talking to Bronfman in 2014 about moving the Rays to Montreal 14 years hence was perfectly within the terms of the use agreement — and that’s assuming that the Tampontreal Ex-Rays thing was even a glimmer in anyone’s eye then.

As for Sternberg keeping his Bronfman talks secret, that’s not necessarily nefarious either: You have to start negotiations before you announce them, pretty much by definition. Yes, Sternberg keeping his cards hidden for several years seems skeezy, but pretty much everything Sternberg has done in his campaign to get somebody else to build him a stadium in Tampa Bay has been pretty skeezy, so more gamesmanship isn’t especially out of character.

More interesting is whether this suit will result in any consequences for Sternberg, and here we enter I Am Not A Lawyer territory. The minority owners are asking that the club be placed in receivership to determine who exactly should own how much of it, which clearly would but a dent in Sternberg’s plans to, well, do much of anything, really. But in America, anyone can sue anyone for anything, so it’ll take more analysis of the suit itself — which the Tampa Bay Times still hasn’t deigned to link to — to figure out what’s actually likely to happen going forward. Likewise, Times columnist John Romano’s speculation that the suit could force Sternberg to open his books: Yes, that would be interesting if it happens, but we’re a ways off from that point just yet.

For now, then, we just have a bunch of minority owners upset that they were being muscled out by their majority partner, which could be anywhere from a violation of the law to just cold business practice. And Montreal is ending up in the headline about it mostly because “Rays secretly plotting to move to Montreal” is always an attention-grabbing headline — look, I used it myself up above! — whether or not it’s actually new news. We’ll all find out more once this starts moving through the courts, but unless the plaintiffs start talking to the media, which they haven’t so far, it’ll probably be a while before we get any more revelations, or even find out what the hell that “deny profits while forcing to pay taxes” business is about, which sounds pretty sneaky.

UPDATE: I now have a copy of the complaint — thanks, Noah, and thanks as well for all your fine work following this story over the years — and it appears that the “deny profits while forcing to pay taxes” business is that the plaintiffs are charging that Sternberg paid himself and his cronies large, unaccountable salaries while refusing to distribute profits to the team owners at large, leaving the minority owners on the hook for taxes for owning a share of a profitable franchise without seeing any of the profits, which is a more familiar if still enraging scam. Whether it’s litigable is, again, outside my area of expertise — corporate lawyers, feel free to chime in!

Those two lobbyists that Montreal billionaire family scion and private equity goon Stephen Bronfman hired to push for a stadium for a revived Expos are already paying off, whether they’ve even begun work or not: Quebec premier François Legault responded by offering forgivable loans for the project if it could “generate more in revenue than the aid we give the company” (“revenue” carefully not defined here), and  the buzz is still buzzing: Check out this column by Montreal Gazette sportswriter Jack Todd decrying “anti-taxers” and “naysayers” who want to gripe about giving public tax money to a private sports stadium before they even know how much it would be.

Amidst his stadium boosterism, though, Todd questions whether Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg’s plan to have his team split time between Montreal and Tampa Bay — Todd actually writes that the resulting ballclub would be “likely called the ‘Ex-Rays’,” though he doesn’t go as far as including “Tampontreal” — is something that could really happen, given that building two stadiums in two cities would be even more expensive than building one stadium in one city, and each city would only get half a team. Not only is this not a terrific way to get local legislators on board for handing over stadium cash, it’s gotten the attention of the MLB players union, whose president Tony Clark told the Tampa Bay Times on Thursday that “there are issues, logistical and otherwise, fundamentally related to the Tampa players, as well as how it would affect any and all the teams that would otherwise be playing Tampa.” Players could be forced to maintain two homes, relocate their kids in school twice a year (depending on when exactly the Ex-Rays switched home cities), navigate two very different health care systems, etc., noted Clark; he didn’t mention, but could have, that they would also have to pay taxes in two different countries, which is the basis for Legault’s entire “revenue generation” plan.

There’s another problem with the shared-cities plan, though, and it has to do with Sternberg’s leverage, and as Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf made clear, for a savvy negotiator, stadium negotiations are all about leverage. Sternberg is trying to get a bidding war going here, which is his right as a mediocre rich white man, but the nature of a bidding war is that you need more bidders than winning slots, and right now the Rays owner has two of each. (At least until Tampa shows an interest in bidding against St. Petersburg for the Florida half of the timeshare, which isn’t going great for Sternberg so far.) So instead he’s trying to get Montreal and St. Pete into a race to first approve their half of a deal that can’t happen without both cities, which has resulted in some bizarre rhetorical contortions:

Sternberg said he feels “much more confident about the Montreal side sort of putting this thing together.”

He said he thinks that will jump-start progress on the Tampa Bay side, where there seems to be little momentum as fans and some leaders have not embraced the split-season concept.

“I think as (the Montreal effort) progresses, I feel pretty confident of us being able to get it done here, too,” he said. “I just happen to feel more so because they’re much further down the road.

“In fairness, whether it’s right or wrong, a.) they don’t have a baseball team, and b.) they lost a baseball team. So they’d like one back.

“Here you have one, and it’s sort of like, ‘It’s here, and, well, why only part of a season? Why not the full season? We have the team already.’ (Montreal is) going at this in a different fashion. They know what the hole of baseball has been. They want another crack at it.”

Yes, if Montreal has “momentum,” then soon Tampa Bay will too, because if they don’t … the team will just play its Florida games at its current stadium? The whole twin-city thing will fall apart and the Rays will stay put? Sternberg keeps insisting that he won’t move the team full-time, so as threats go, it’s a fairly empty one, unless he’s hoping St. Pete officials will be shamed by the accusation that they don’t love baseball enough because they haven’t lost it yet.

All in all, the Madman Theory still makes the most sense here: Sternberg doesn’t particularly care if the two-city solution comes to pass, so long as it enables him to pester two reluctant cities into building him a stadium at once. So far, it seems to be working: We’re here talking about his stadium possibilities, after all, instead of just talking about how SOL he is now that his Tampa stadium plans crashed and burned. Savvy negotiators also know never to pass up a threat, no matter how inane it may sound: Reinsdorf, after all, got his stadium cash from the state of Illinois by pretending he was going to move from Chicago to a little town called St. Petersburg. If there’s one thing sports history tells us, it’s that dumber things have always happened.

When last we checked in on the Tampontreal Ex-Rays plans back in March, would-be Tampa Bay Rays co-owner Stephen Bronfman was focused on a new stadium in Peel Basin that would allow the Rays to play half their home games in Montreal. And now the Peel Basin developer has finally unveiled renderings of its proposed project, and it looks like this:

There’s … no baseball stadium. Unless maybe it’s hiding in the unearthly glow from those apartment buildings? Nope, pretty sure no stadium there.

But that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be a stadium there, Devimco president Serge Goulet told the Canadian Press. He’s still “discussing” the possibility with Bronfman & Co., while also waiting to see if he can get hold of more public land:

In an article published in November 2019, La Presse reported that Claridge and Devimco had sights on some 440,000 square feet belonging to Loto-Québec in the area.

For Goulet, the lands are not necessary for the development of the district as he understands it, “but if a stadium project were added, it would be good to have more surface area.”

Loto-Québec is the public company that runs the province’s lottery, so Goulet is at least hinting that if local officials want a baseball team, they’ll need to turn over some more public land, presumably at a price he’s happy with. Devimco is also squabbling with the city over “accountability rules” regarding the development, as well as adding a light rail station near Peel Basin. (Goulet has offered to pay $25 million toward one, but his lengthy press release avoids mentioning what the total cost would be.) There is a whole lot still to be negotiated here, in other words, before anyone can even start thinking about how much a baseball stadium would cost or how it would be paid for or whether a team playing home games in two different countries even makes any sense.