Pittsburgh Pirates – Field of Schemes

Friday roundup: Olympics remain world’s greatest money suck, TB Times self-extorts for Bucs stadium, Rays $1B deal nears final approval

July 26, 2024 Neil deMause

This has been a long, busy week for a lot of reasons, so let me just thank those of you who re-upped your FoS memberships (your swag will be in the mail shortly!) and get straight to the news, of which there is a ton, because the stadium game doesn’t stop just because it’s summer or there’s other stuff vying for our attention:

The Paris Olympics start tonight, and how’s that going? You say France is spending $3-5 billion on the Games in exchange for “uncertain” benefits, tourists are staying away because they don’t want to deal with all the Olympic disruptions and local museums and such are set to lose a ton of money, and Paris is forcibly relocating homeless people to make the city seem more attractive? Good, good, that’s what the Olympics are traditionally all about.
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers owners aren’t asking for a new stadium, but that won’t stop the Tampa Bay Times from noting that the stadium is “aging” (aren’t we all, every day) and wondering if the Glazer family will want renovations or a whole new one. “Even after repeated requests from the [Tampa] Sports Authority for information, the Buccaneers have still not provided us with any renovation plans,” Hillsborough County Commissioner Ken Hagan told the paper, while Tampa spokesperson Adam Smith said the Bucs “haven’t approached the city about anything like that” and “we don’t expect them to.” But the Bucs’ lease runs out in 2028, and all the other kids are getting new and renovated stadiums, so Times sports reporter Rick Stroud still spends 2700 words speculating on what a new or renovated stadium could look like and how it would be paid for, it’s always a time saver when your marks take the initiative to extort themselves.
Also in Tampa Bay, two Pinellas County commissioners are asking questions about the Rays stadium deal in advance of a Tuesday final vote, questions like “How much will this actually cost taxpayers?” (more than $1 billion, by best estimates) and “Will the public have to put in even more money to make sure affordable housing is built?” Unfortunately, it only takes four of seven commissioners to pass the deal, so there’s no guarantee the dissenters will get answers to their questions before Tuesday, though county officials said they’d ask.
Chicago Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf and the owners of the Blackhawks are planning a $7 billion mixed-use project around the United Center, no details provided on whether this would involve public money or tax breaks or anything, they didn’t mention it in their press release so it probably isn’t important.
The Pennsylvania Independent Fiscal Office did a study of the economic impact of the Philadelphia Phillies and Pittsburgh Pirates stadiums, both of which were built with public money, but unfortunately even though it spelled out that it was calculating spending by both “fans whose main reason for travel is a Phillies game and casual fans who attend games because they happen to be visiting the region,” the final numbers just added up all spending in and around the stadiums and assumed it wouldn’t happen without them, very disappointing.
Not telling the Nevada Independent how to do its job, but if you’re going to roll with the headline “How Bally’s buyout might affect resort plans for A’s Vegas stadium site,” you might maybe want to include something about how it will affect that, you know?
Oakland A’s owner John Fisher is laying off half the team’s non-baseball staff so he can make Sacramento River Cats employees do two jobs at once, this has been your weekly John Fisher Sucks post.

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Friday roundup: Every disaster has a silver lining, and vice versa

September 30, 2022September 30, 2022 Neil deMause

When I was seven years old, my family drove down to Sanibel Island for vacation — twice in one year, for some reason — so I’m pretty familiar with the causeway bridge that was just wiped out by Hurricane Ian, which is very not good for anyone who is now entirely cut off from the mainland. I suppose I should make some observation about how the substitution effect means Sanibel’s loss will mean some other Florida beach spot’s economic gain, but too soon, people.

More fallout from that OC Vibe development by the Anaheim Ducks that will use $400 million in city bonds but be paid off by the team owners, maybe mostly hopefully: The city of Anaheim needs to build a fire station to support the new development, but may get sued by Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno for wanting to do so in the Angel Stadium parking lot. There are a lot of moving parts in every development deal, which is why Judith Grant Long spent a decade writing her book just to figure out what stadiums even really cost.
Still more reports that Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman wants to build a downtown stadium, or have someone else build him a downtown stadium, one of those two, though it looks like all he really said was he was talking to the Chiefs owners and Jackson County about the team’s future. Good thing he didn’t reminisce about the time he took his wife on a date to see Lou Piniella, or we might have been subjected to a whole feature article.
The latest revelations in the “Brett Favre used welfare money to build a volleyball arena for his daughter’s college” scandal are that 1) Favre wanted to build a football practice facility too and 2) he at one point suggested saving money by building it with prison labor. Then-Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant texted back to Favre: “But we have to follow the law. I am to old for Federal Prison.😊😎.” That’s for the Department of Justice to decide, Phil.
New York state (not New York City, New York Yimby needs to read its own articles before writing its headlines) has hired an architect for its redesign of Penn Station, and Madison Square Garden is still staying put in the initial plans, look, you can see it right there. New York Mayor Eric Adams says he’s still “open” to discussing with Garden (and Knicks and Rangers) owner James Dolan the possibility of tearing down the arena and building a new one elsewhere, but as the Penn Station redevelopment is not his project — again, he’s mayor of the city, not the state, states don’t have mayors — this is just another example of his mouth opening and things coming out.
A Pittsburgh court has struck down the city’s “jock tax” on income of out-of-state athletes playing in the city, which probably will have some small impact on the finances of the city’s sports facilities, but mostly I’m impressed that the court case took so long that one of the plaintiffs is Jeff Francoeur, who retired from baseball in 2016.
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers stadium has been invaded by bees, time to build a new one, bees are even worse than cats!
I’m not exactly sure why the St. Louis Post-Dispatch devoted a story to its own coverage of the opening of St. Louis Arena (1929-1999) 93 years ago, but there are some nice construction photos, as well as classic observations like “great Visitors will bring added business to local interest and will stimulate St. Louis hospitality and progressiveness anew Welcome to the new Arena civic asset.” I take back everything I said about newspaper copy editing being a dying art.

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Friday roundup: Reds exec says team will only demand renovation money, threatens to move if fans ask for better players

April 15, 2022 Neil deMause

This has officially been the longest week ever. Scientists agree! And so does the news:

Cincinnati Reds president Phil Castellini said it’s his “opinion” that neither the Reds nor Bengals will demand new stadiums when their leases are up soon, just renovations, and shouldn’t he actually be in a position to say more than just an opinion? Anyway, given that the Baltimore Orioles and Ravens just got $1.2 billion for renovations, maybe Castellini is thinking, hmmm, we can still get hundreds of millions of dollars and not have to spend anything of our own on building from scratch, huh?, so yeah, checks out. Castellini also spent the week telling fans that they shouldn’t complain about the Reds getting rid of all their best players to save money because “what would you do with this team to have it more profitable, make more money, compete more in the current economic system that this game exist? It would be to pick it up and move it somewhere else. Be careful what you ask for.”
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul added another defense of her $1 billion public cash giveaway to the Buffalo Bills owners, saying that people upstate complain about her spending money on the New York City subways, and isn’t that the same thing? Looks like somebody wants to give Crystal Peoples-Stokes a run for her money this year!
Speaking of fire sales and dumb reasons to build things, the San Jose Mercury News has looked at the Oakland A’s ownership’s insistence that only a new stadium can stop them from continually selling off their best players and noted that A’s owner John Fisher isn’t spending on payroll for his San Jose Earthquakes despite a new stadium. Which isn’t quite the same thing thanks to MLS’s single-entity ownership structure, but it’s at least more investigation than most news outlets have done into this argument.
And speaking of baseball teams cheaping-out of player spending, it was revealed this week that the Pittsburgh Pirates bring in enough in ticket sales and concessions alone each year to pay for their entire player payroll. Add in at least $100 million a year in national TV revenue, plus local TV revenue, plus league revenue-sharing, and “not having money” isn’t really an excuse for either not signing free agents or demanding new stadiums. (“Wanting more money” is, but that’s not quite the same thing.)
“Developers and analysts” in Las Vegas aren’t concerned about glutting the market for arenas now that Tim Leiweke’s Oak View Group wants to build one to go along with the 23 others (estimated) that the city already has, because 1) Leiweke “knows what he’s doing” (Vegas convention authority CEO Steve Hill), 2) Leiweke “is following the blueprint that he’s done in the past” (Oak View partner Marc Badain), 3) some performers may prefer a newer arena to an older one (Macquarie Securities gaming analyst Chad Beynon), 4) “we need to make sure that demand matches supply” (Vegas-based advisory firm B Global managing partner Brendan Bussmann), 5) “what a lot of people don’t realize is how many events we actually say no to just because of the lack of availability” (MGM arena manager Dan Quinn). That doesn’t quite add up to “there’s plenty of room for another arena” so much as “if an arena fails due to glut, it probably won’t be the new one that Oak View builds,” but at least Leiweke is talking about using all private money so far, so that’s a relief — at least until one of the other arenas demands public money to compete with the new one.
In that same Nevada Independent article, Gov. Steve Sisolak backed away from his unsourced-reported refusal to provide public money for an Oakland A’s stadium, saying “there are other things that can be done that can help on the funding” such as a tax-kickback district or infrastructure money. How much money? Maybe that would be a good followup questions, Nevada Independent? No? Okay, it’s your paper, I guess.
Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins says Washington Commanders owner Daniel Snyder doesn’t deserve public funding for a new stadium because he may have illegally cheated fans out of ticket deposits and other NFL owners out of revenue-sharing money. Which, those aren’t good things, certainly, but 1) doing not-good things is already Snyder’s brand, and 2) the contrapositive of this would seem to be that if he weren’t doing anything illegal, Snyder would deserve public funding, which is a dubious corollary to hitch your newspaper column to.
NBC Sports’ Mike Florio says Nashville’s $10-20 million a year in hotel taxes could pay for $700 million worth of Tennessee Titans stadium, which is definitely not how math works, but then understanding how things work has never been Florio’s strong suit.
The Kansas City Royals could use the Atlanta Braves stadium district as a model for a new downtown ballpark, according to … whoa, Kevin Collison, where’s he been since he stopped being the Kansas City Star’s go-to stadium-boosting columnist? Something called CitySceneKC, apparently, guess times are tough all over. Anyway, arguing that a pretend urban neighborhood in the middle of the suburbs could be a model for moving a team from the suburbs to downtown makes no sense, but you keep doing you, Kevin.
The Lerner family is considering selling the Washington Nationals, which normally might bring up fears of a move threat and new stadium demands, but the Nats’ stadium is only … huh, 14 years old already? That still seems a little soon, but as economist Rod Fort memorably said, there’s nothing wrong with demanding a new stadium every year if you can get away with it.
Pawtucket’s $400 million soccer stadium and development project is facing cost overruns thanks to inflation, and nobody knows yet who’ll pay for them, or if the project will be scaled back, or what. Rhode Island is already kicking back $46.2 million in taxes for the project, or, no, WPRI-TV says it’s actually $70 million? If a cost overrun falls in the forest and there’s no one around keeping track, does it count?
Speaking of cost overruns, Durham will now be paying $10.6 million toward upgrades for the Bulls‘ minor-league baseball stadium, double what it was originally expecting but still little enough compared to the numbers being thrown around in other cities as to sound absolutely insignificant. (Note to readers: $10.6 million is still $10.6 million. I checked.)
Here’s a fun one: The Wichita Wind Surge have started adding an 8% “ballpark development fee” to all sales at their new publicly funded ballpark, a surcharge that doesn’t appear anywhere on the pricing until you actually get your receipt. This sounds like a tax, but it’s not, as Wichita Mayor Brandon Whipple said it’s the first he’s hearing of it, and suggested that the state attorney general should look into it as “a consumer protection issue.” Sports team owners really do do the craziest things!
Add Hawaii to the list of states momentarily flush with COVID relief cash that have decided now’s a great time to spend on stadiums, as a bill to dump $350 million on a replacement for Aloha Stadium is making its way through the state legislature.
The Seattle Mariners are making $55 million in improvements to their stadium, and actually paying for it themselves, which shouldn’t be cause for celebration or anything since that’s what normal businesses do normally, but we’ll take what we can get these days.

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Pittsburgh set for epic throwdown over how to spend hotel-tax money: stadiums or tourism ads, what else is there?

September 14, 2021 Neil deMause

There are two pieces to any public spending proposal: Where will the money come from? and Where will the money go? While they often get lumped together, especially by proponents hoping to argue that tax money isn’t really tax money — I recall, for example, supporters of Washington, D.C.’s gifting of public cash to a Nationals stadium insisting that as it would mostly come from a tax on city businesses, nobody else should complain — they can almost always be separated in subsidy discussions, and should be — there was nothing stopping D.C. from raising business taxes and spending them on something else, except now it can’t because it’s already used that to fund a private baseball stadium.

With that in mind, let’s visit Pittsburgh, which is embarking on a knock-down drag-out fight over hotel taxes, whether to raise them, and how to spend them:

VisitPittsburgh, which is a tourism promotion nonprofit run by local Pittsburgh businesses, is proposing a 2% surcharge on hotel stays anywhere in Allegheny County, with the proceeds put in a pool for “promoting tourism.” The tax would be estimated to provide $6.5 million a year.
The Pennsylvania state senate is proposing a “tourism improvement district” in Allegheny County that would be allowed to impose a hotel-tax surcharge, with the actual amount determined by a board of hotel operators, because that’s how taxation works, like how sales-tax hikes are determined by a board of consumers. (Ed. Note: This may not actually be how taxation works.)
State Sen. Wayne Fontana, the board chair of the city-county Sports and Exhibition Authority, says he won’t approve the tax surcharge unless VisitPittsburgh agrees to give up a cut of the hotel-tax money it already receives for tourism promotion, and instead give it to the sports authority, which runs Pittsburgh’s money-losing convention center (this is a tautology, as pretty much all convention centers lose money) and pays for maintenance on the Pirates and Steelers stadiums and Penguins arena, currently out of ticket taxes.
In fact, Fontana would like to see all the hotel tax money dispersed by the sports authority, which he’s portraying as bringing all tourism-and-sports-related spending under one roof, and never mind that it would just happen to be his roof.
VisitPittsburgh President and CEO Jerad Bachar says if the sports authority gets control of the money, he’s worried that not enough of it will go to tourism promotion, so the proper solution, clearly, is to let him have the money and decide how it’s spent, since he’s an upstanding individual and not susceptible to “politics” like the authority board chair.

In a sensible world, questions would now be asked, in the halls of power and newspaper pages alike, about several things: Will spending more on hiring people to promote tourism (40% of VisitPittsburgh’s expenses are for salaries) really benefit hotels and other businesses dependent on tourism enough to be worth a 2% hotel-tax hike? Do Pittsburgh’s three sports stadiums and its convention center really need more money for maintenance and operations, and what would happen if they didn’t get it? Could a hotel tax surcharge be used for other things that might do even more to help Pittsburgh businesses and residents? This is not that sensible world. Instead, we have the public official who controls the city and county’s stadium/convention slush fund and the nonprofit CEO who controls the tourism spending slush fund fighting over who gets to direct the slush, because surely allocating it as part of the normal government spending process that is (in theory) open to public debate would be entirely crazy.

There’s almost certainly a longer article that could be written about how it came to be that fighting other cities for tourist visits became seen as one of the roles of local government — I may see if Heywood Sanders has anything to say about that, in fact. But for now, appreciate that there’s a fight going on over giving money to Pittsburgh sports venues, and it would very clearly be money that could be spent on a very specific other thing if not used for sports, and that other thing may be as big a waste of money too, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that spending it on sports is a good idea, either. Sorry if that doesn’t provide you with an easy white hat to root for, but moral ambiguity is all the rage these days, embrace it!

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Pirates’ losing seasons cost Pittsburgh tax revenue, except when they don’t

August 9, 2021August 9, 2021 Neil deMause

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran a long article yesterday analyzing the connection between the Pirates‘ on-field performance and the city’s tax receipts, and found that when the team sucks (like now) and people don’t buy tickets (also like now), city ticket and parking tax receipts go down:

When the Pirates lose, attendance plummets, and city amusement and parking tax revenues tumble, according to a review of a decade of data by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

This is, on the face of it, a no-brainer: Of course fewer people buying tickets means fewer people paying ticket taxes. Still, it’s the kind of dig-through-the-documents data journalism that gets a lot of play these days — the article goes on to detail how much city amusement tax receipts on Pirates games have fallen since the team started engaging in perpetual fire sales of its best players, even including a graph, because that’s what data journalism does:

If you’ve been following my harping on the substitution effect on this site, or even just my snarky tone in the last paragraph, you probably know what’s coming next: Okay, but if Pirates fans aren’t spending money at Pirates games, where else are they spending it? Specifically, are they spending it somewhere else that generates city amusement tax — which is charged at “any form of entertainment such as concerts, movies, night clubs, conventions, or sporting events.”

To figure that out, one would have to look up the total amusement tax receipts for each year, not just those generated by Pirates games. And, fortunately, the Pittsburgh controller’s office has those numbers handy on its website:

2012: $11,396,722.52
2013: $12,687,985.70
2014: $13,806,116.47
2015: $15,726,562.24
2016: $15,767,769.39
2017: $16,583,506.83
2018: $16,501,600.74
2019: $14,667,294.33

That doesn’t appear to show quite the same precipitous descent in revenues since the Pirates’ last postseason appearance in 2015 as the P-G article indicated. But here, let’s look at it in chart form:

So entertainment tax revenues went up when the team was good, then kept going up when the team got bad, then finally tailed off in 2019 when the team was really bad. In particular, in 2017 the Pirates’ amusement tax receipts fell by $700,000 when the team collapsed below .500, but overall city amusement tax receipts rose by more than $800,000. So clearly, it’s not that when Pirates fans stay away from the ballpark, they take all their spending money and stuff it under their mattresses; some may have chosen to go see more of the, er, great movies out that year instead.

I don’t want to get too down on the piece or its author, Mark Belko, who’s done good work before, and who I went back and forth with a bit over email yesterday about the substitution issue. Belko does include one more interesting piece of reporting further down in the article, an investigation of the Pirates’ ticket surcharge, a 5% fee that is charged on top of the amusement tax. According to the deal signed when the state helped fund the stadium (the one where a Pennsylvania legislator memorably quipped about tax increment financing kickbacks: “It’s not a grant. It’s not a loan. It’s a groan”), the Pirates owners keep the first $1.5 million a year generated by the surcharge, and only when it tops that amount does the city/county stadium authority get a cut. That threshold wasn’t reached at all from 2009-2011, when the Pirates were also terrible, and has begun falling off in recent years as well, with the result that the stadium authority has had to dip into other sources of public funding to do stadium maintenance.

That’s a terrible system for taxpayers, and could have been a great headline: “When Pirates Tank, Public Is Left On Hook For Stadium Maintenance.” Instead, the story the paper went with was “Moneyball: A losing Pirates season can impact city revenues, vendors, and even PNC Park itself” — which simultaneously overstates the value of a winning ballclub to the local economy while downplaying the way government negotiators created a perverse incentive for team owners to sell off their best players in order to fob off stadium maintenance onto taxpayers. This may seem like nitpicking, and it is nitpicking; but it’s the kind of nitpicking that’s necessary if we want news reporting that not only shines a light on stadium economic numbers, but best helps readers make sense of what it finds there.

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Friday roundup: County to use federal stimulus money for minor-league ballpark, plus way too much excitement over tax bookkeeping and Elon Musk

June 11, 2021 Neil deMause

It’s going to be tough for anything to top a sports team owner claiming he needs a new stadium because his 25-year-old one is literally going to “fall down,” but the rest of this week’s news was no slouch, either:

The county legislature in Dutchess County, New York, will vote Monday on a 25-year lease extension for the Hudson Valley Renegades that would use $12.5 million in federal American Rescue Plan money to renovate the team’s 27-year-old stadium and buy the land under it from the Beacon City School District. The ARP, better known as the Biden stimulus bill, included not just extended unemployment benefits and new stimulus checks for Americans, but also $350 billion to state and local governments to help bridge pandemic-related budget shortfalls; renovating a minor-league baseball stadium does not appear to be one of the permitted uses of this ARP funding, though Dutchess County legislators will presumably claim it’s helping an “impacted industry” recover from Covid losses or some such thing.
Cobb County, Georgia, may get to stop using general fund money to pay off its Atlanta Braves stadium debt as soon as 2024, according to Braves exec Mike Plant, thanks to the county getting more hotel/motel tax revenue that it’s spending instead. That’s good news in that county revenue is up; whether it’s good news that the county is spending money out of one pot of revenue instead of another will likely depend on whether or not your name is Mike Plant.
In related but opposite news, Clark County, Nevada, is having to dip into a reserve fund for $11.7 million in Las Vegas Raiders stadium payments after hotel tax revenues fell short thanks to the pandemic, just six months after pulling another $11.6 million from the reserve fund for the same reason. Again, this is bad in that the county has less money on hand to spend, but it doesn’t make the stadium a better or worse expense, any more than buying NFTs would be a less stupid idea if you just got an unexpected cash windfall.
And speaking of stupid ideas, Raiders president Marc Badain says he’d welcome a Vegas Loop station near his team’s stadium, which makes this a good time to remind him and everyone reading this that the Vegas Loop is just a one-lane tunnel for self-driving Teslas and so doesn’t really have “stations” per se, though it does have whatever the hell this is.
The Daily Herald, which covers the Chicago suburbs, asks whether the Chicago White Sox could move to the Arlington Park racetrack site in suburban Arlington Heights, immediately answers its own question by noting that “no one actively is suggesting” such a move, then goes on for 34 more paragraphs of speculation about what such a move would look like. Journalism!
Field of Schemes gets a nice shoutout from Jadrian Wooten’s Monday Morning Economist newsletter this week in his look at some favorite baseball stadiums, which also includes a lovely photo of the Pittsburgh Pirates‘ stadium, which is one of my favorites as well. See, I can say nice things about a stadium without mentioning its $218 million in state and city subsidies about which one Pennsylvania legislator said, “It’s not a grant. It’s not a loan. It’s a groan” … oh, whoops, guess I can’t.

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Friday roundup: More crazy stadium subsidy demands than can fit in one headline, you call this a lull?

February 12, 2021February 12, 2021 Neil deMause

Every couple of weeks, it seems, someone in the comments predicts that we are about to see the end of sports’ 30-year surge in stadium and arena subsidies, either because of Covid-depleted budgets or legislators smartening up or just everybody already having a new place. To which I say: If the stadium scam is slowing, why are my Friday mornings still so #$@&%*! busy?

Ahem. And now, the news:

A lawyer for the South Bend Cubs, saying the team owners were “shocked” to discover that a law allowing them to siphon off up to $650,000 a year in sales and income taxes for their own purposes had expired in 2018, has asked the state legislature to renew it. Oh, and also increase the cap to $2 million a year. You know, while they have the document open on their screens. “South Bend and every other city that has retained their relationship with Major League Baseball have to get to a certain level by 2025,” said attorney Richard Nussbaum. “If they don’t, they risk losing the team.” It’s an epidemic, I tells ya.
Speaking of which, Hudson Valley Renegades owner Jeff Goldklang got his $1.4 million in stadium renovation cash from Dutchess County, after emailing residents and fans warning them that the team could move if it was denied the subsidy.
Fort Wayne F.C., which I had to look up to be sure it actually exists and which turns out to be a “pre-professional” (much in the way that kids are “pre-adults”) USL League Two club, is seeking to move up to League One in 2023 and wants a $150 million soccer-stadium-plus-other-stuff project, to be paid for by mumble mumble hey look over there! It also features an instant classic in the field of fans-throwing-their-hands-skyward-while-fireworks-go-off-over-soccer-players-not-playing-anything-recognizable-as-soccer renderings, which is worth $150 million if it’s worth a dime:
The Oakland A’s owners (not the Oakland A’s, I still remember when I was an intern at The Nation Christopher Hitchens lecturing us on how one should always say “the U.S. government” and not “the U.S.” because just because the government approved something didn’t mean the populace did, but anyway) won their lawsuit to allow their Howard Terminal stadium project to have challenges to environmental impact reviews reviewed on a fast track, which is a big thing in California. “This is a critically important decision,” said A’s president Dave Kaval, who indicated he hopes the Oakland city council will be able to vote on a stadium bill this year, presumably after it’s figured out who the hell would pay for what.
Raleigh Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin wants to talk about building a new hockey arena to keep the Carolina Hurricanes in town long-term — their “old” one opened just over 21 years ago — and Sougata Mukherjee, the editor-in-chief of the Triangle Business Journal, points out that maybe now is not the best time what with 7% of the state not having enough to eat, small businesses on the brink, and, oh yeah, a pandemic still going on. Cue Hurricanes execs or their political talking about how a new arena will mean “jobs” in three, two…
While we wait, here’s San Diego Union-Tribune sports columnist Bryce Miller saying that San Diego should build a new arena to lure a nonexistent NBA expansion franchise because it would be “catalytic.” In the sense of the Oxford dictionary’s sample sentence for meaning 1.1, maybe?
Twenty years ago this week, the Pittsburgh Pirates‘ and Steelers‘ Three Rivers Stadium was blowed up real good, only a little over 30 years after it was first opened. I went to a couple of games at Three Rivers over the years, and I agree with former Pirate Richie Hebner’s review that “the graveyard I work in during the offseason has more life than this place,” and the Pirates’ new stadium is one of my favorites. Still, it and the Steelers’ new stadium deserve the blame for popularizing tax kickbacks in the stadium financing world, after Pittsburgh voters passed a referendum barring any new tax money from going to new stadiums, and the state legislature responded by “loaning” the teams stadium money that would be “repaid” by taxes the state would be collecting anyway — prompting Pittsburgh state rep Thomas Petrone’s timeless comment: “It’s not a grant. It’s not a loan. It’s a groan.”
Phoenix restaurants are hoping that having partial attendance at Suns games will provide more happy hour customers, something that seems not only ambitious given the proven not-so-robust spinoff effects of sports stadiums, but also slightly heedless of whether it’s such a great idea to encourage basketball fans to congregate indoors and take their masks off to drink and then go directly to congregating indoors to watch the Suns. In entirely unrelated news, restaurants around the new Los Angeles Rams and Chargers stadium in Inglewood are afraid of being driven out of business by new high-priced options gravitating to serve well-heeled football fans.
Finally a partial explanation of how funding for that new Des Moines Menace soccer stadium would work: In addition to city funds, it would be up for state hotel-tax funds designated for projects that “improve the quality of life for Iowa residents.” Other projects proposed to dip into the hotel-tax pool include a Des Moines Buccaneers junior hockey arena, a private indoor amateur sports facility, and a new mall; is it just me, or does “quality of life” seem to have been interpreted as “ways to put money in the pockets of Iowa business barons”?
Hey, remember the $200 million highway interchange that Las Vegas is building, totally coincidentally, near the Raiders‘ new stadium? It is now a $273 million highway interchange. But the city needed to build it anyway, because traffic was too bad at the old interchange and, shh, don’t tell them.
Okay, here’s one way in which maybe the pandemic has delayed some stadium spending: The Baltimore Orioles owners have signed a two-year lease extension on Camden Yards, while also working with the Maryland Stadium Authority “to establish a new long-term agreement that includes upgrades to the facility,” according to WJZ-TV. So it’s possible some 2021 and 2022 sports subsidies will end up getting pushed back to 2023 or so — yay?
If you wanted a live webcam of construction on the new Knoxville stadium for the Tennessee Smokies that hasn’t even been approved yet, let alone started construction, the team’s new stadium promotion website has got you covered.

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Friday roundup: NFL teams debate which fans will be the first to enjoy socially distanced peeing

August 28, 2020August 28, 2020 Neil deMause

Pressed for time today, so while I’d love to comment on everything in the world that happened this crazy week, I’m just going to give you a link to my article on news coverage of the California fires and the state’s reliance on incarcerated people to fight them, then get straight to a quickie news recap:

The Cleveland Browns will reportedly “consider personal seat licenses” in determining who gets to attend reduced-capacity games this season, which isn’t very specific: Would season ticket holders with PSLs (which is almost all of them) get priority? Would those who spent more get let in first? One can only imagine the Browns front office debating which is the fairest solution, and/or which would help maximize team revenues, because you know that the latter is never very far from sports owners’ conception of the former.
If you’ve been jonesing for a picture of what socially distanced urinals will look like, Sports Illustrated has you covered.
Pittsburgh’s Sports & Exhibition Authority is, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “requesting $7.4 million to COVID-19-proof Heinz Field, PNC Park, PPG Paints Arena and the David L. Lawrence Convention Center,” whatever “COVID-19-proof” means. (Lots of urinal covers?)
There are new reports estimating the costs to the local economy of spring training in Arizona ending early and the Oklahoma City Thunder season ending early and do you think either of them looked at what, say, sales-tax receipts actually did starting in March, or did they just project out how much money is normally spent at these events and assume that it all vanished into thin air once they were canceled? (If you guessed door #2, congratulations, you can skip journalism school and go directly to a newspaper job, if newspapers or jobs still existed.)
No huge new revelations in this week’s Epoch Times report on the Los Angeles Angels stadium deal, but it’s a decent roundup and there sure is a ton of me in it, so check it out if you like. (EDIT: Or actually maybe don’t, if you don’t want to support QAnon and anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories. If you want to know what I said, I’ll post it in comments.)
This German study of how people’s breath spreads at an indoor concert is kind of genius, and everyone should be watching to see the results if we ever want to be able to attend indoor events again, whether masked or distanced or ventilated with HEPA filters or what. Results are due in four to six weeks, so stay tuned in early October for further updates.

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Pittsburgh and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad sports team impact study

October 30, 2018November 5, 2018 Neil deMause

Check it out, the owners of the Pittsburgh Penguins, Steelers, and Pirates, seeking $800,000 a year in county money for a slush fund for improvements to their venues, have teamed up to pay for a study showing how much the teams contribute to the city’s economy, and their hired hands have determined: a hell of a lot! $6 billion over five years’ worth of a lot! Do we dare try to analyze their methodology without actually seeing the report itself, because the teams haven’t released that? I’m game if you are! Let’s begin with this from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s article on the report:

They commissioned accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers to produce an economic impact study that measures their value on several fronts, including direct and indirect spending, tax revenue and jobs.

That’s not a good sign: PwC is an accounting firm, not an economic analysis firm, so it’s unlikely they tried to account for the substitution effect whereby if Pittsburgh residents didn’t have pro sports to spend their money on, they wouldn’t just stuff it under their mattresses instead. A serious economic impact study would look at, say, spending during years when there’s a labor stoppage vs. spending during years when all the teams are playing, but we can probably safely assume that didn’t happen here.

[Penguins CEO David] Morehouse said the teams brought nearly 4 million people, counting concerts, to the city in 2017 to eat at restaurants, to stay at hotels, and to partake in other activities.

“Counting concerts”? How are the teams credited with people in Pittsburgh going to concerts? (People even go to concerts in cities with no major-league sports teams! It’s a true fact!) And the total attendance of the three teams in 2017 was only about 3.2 million, so clearly a lot of these people “brought to the city” were already in the city, which makes bringing them there not such an impressive accomplishment.

“You can’t just talk about Pittsburgh’s revitalization and then say these greedy sports bastards over here. I mean, if you’re going to tell the positive story about what’s happening in Pittsburgh, we’re part of it and we shouldn’t be the ones having to say it,” [Morehouse] said.

“But if we’re going to have to say it, we’re going to say it with the largest numbers we can possibly justify! Wait, did I say that last part out loud?”

Frank Coonelly, the Pirates president, doubts Pittsburgh would be one of 20 finalists for Amazon’s second headquarters if it did not have pro sports teams. Only one finalist for the online retailer’s new location — Austin — is without at least one pro sports team in its region.

This is not actually true: Montgomery County, Maryland, isn’t home to any pro sports teams either, nor is northern Virginia, though I suppose one could squint and give them credit for the teams nearby in D.C. But mostly, this is selection bias: Amazon is looking for a major urban area to put its new headquarters in, and there simply aren’t that many major urban areas without major sports teams: There’s Greenville and Grand Rapids, I suppose, but somehow I don’t think they would have made the cut even if they had acquired teams. (Oklahoma City and Buffalo, which are similar sized, didn’t.)

The GumGum analysis found the three teams generate 513.3 million in “combined impressions” a year, whether through TV broadcasts, social media, or print publications.

To get that kind of “postcard” exposure — whether it’s shots of the city skyline, the bridges, or other local landmarks — through paid advertising would cost nearly $41.5 million.

So basically the teams want to be credited for every time they got the name “Pittsburgh” mentioned in the national media, regardless of whether it was in a positive or negative light. I could note that there are other things that got Pittsburgh mentioned nationally lately that you really don’t want to start crediting for ad impressions, but I probably shouldn’t go there.

When the Penguins were fighting for a new arena a dozen years ago, a move to Kansas City made more sense — the deal was better and the city had a larger population, Mr. Morehouse said.

But, but, your own owner said it was a bluff! Get on the same page here, guys!

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Friday roundup: Leaky fountains, cheap stadium beer, and the magic of computers

August 31, 2018 Neil deMause

The world may be on vacation this week, but the stadium news decidedly is not:

The Nashville S.C. stadium squabble continues, months after the city council supposedly approved a $75 million public subsidy (plus free land), and it’s way more than I can recap right now, so please go read the Tennessean’s summary instead while we wait for a final vote next Tuesday.
The Kansas City Royals had a game delayed by leaky fountains, and the Los Angeles Dodgers had a game delayed when the lights went out. Clearly those stadiums are both outmoded, tear ’em down and build new ones!
The city council of Mobile, Alabama, decided not to build a new $72 million stadium for the University of South Alabama, and the mayor is worried this will send a message to the NFL that Mobile doesn’t care about the Senior Bowl college football exhibition game, which is put on by a local nonprofit and not the NFL, so I don’t even know, man.
Tampa Bay Rays designers say they can keep flyballs from hitting the roof at a new stadium, because computers! (Actually because new statistics-keeping, but everybody likes a “because computers” story and statistics are for guys who live in their parents’ basements, so.)
Did you know that the Indianapolis Colts‘ stadium was built atop the remnants of a once-integrated neighborhood largely demolished for a new interstate? If not, here’s a great, sad Indianapolis Star article all about it.
The Miami Marlins are experimenting with lower ticket prices to lure back fans, and some NFL teams are experimenting with $5 beers. We could call this the natural order of price-setting in a free-market economy after owners went too far with price increases, or we could get all excited about how forward-thinking owners are, ha ha, it’s Derek Jeter, no one will ever accuse him of that.
Jason Notte is writing his new Forbes column way too frequently for me to link to them all, but here’s a nice one about how Phoenix should drive a hard bargain with the Arizona Diamondbacks, Arizona Coyotes, and Phoenix Suns to get you started.
Speaking of other sites you should read regularly, here’s some lovely historical stadium vaportecture from Uni-Watch.
The Pittsburgh Pirates and Steelers owners want $1.16 million in public money for stadium upgrades, because it never hurts to ask.
Perpetually injured professional baseball player says Wrigley Field and Fenway Park “suck” because his dressing room isn’t palatial enough, film at 11.
A former Sacramento Kings exec is suspected of embezzling $13.4 million from the team to spend on beach houses, which has nothing to do with stadiums except that the Kings got hundreds of millions of dollars in public arena funding because they said they needed to improve their bottom line, so actually it has a lot to do with it.
King County councilmember Rod Dembrokski is proposing putting the Seattle Mariners owner’s proposed $180 million lease subsidy up to a public vote in February. This really doesn’t seem to be going the Mariners owners’ way, does it?

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