Category: spring training

D-Backs rep says MLB could pull spring training from Arizona if no stadium deal, then says that’s not what he meant

access_time personNeil deMause

Arizona Diamondbacks execs have been putting a full-court press on state legislators to secure their desired $500 million stadium renovation subsidy, as the legislative session enters its final weeks. And shit? It be getting weird:

Notes taken by one participant and obtained by The Arizona Republic … said one of the team’s representatives “insinuated (threatened)” that the MLB would pull spring training from Arizona if a deal were not reached…

Andrew Cohn, who made the statements, said it was “a fiction” to characterize his words as a threat. He said his comments came after a discussion about what would happen if there was no funding agreement. He confirmed he had spoken to the former commissioner [Bud Selig], who he considers a friend, about the Diamondbacks’ situation. He said he did not speak with current Commissioner [Rob] Manfred.

“The comment was that it’s a terrible look to have such a commitment to the Cactus League, and spring training in Arizona, and not have a hometown team here,” he told The Republic.

That is 100% a threat that the Diamondbacks could leave without a new stadium, obviously. Whether it’s really a threat that MLB would pull spring training entirely is slightly fuzzier — if it’s not a warning of the “it’d be a shame for something to happen to those paratroopers” type, then what is it, exactly? A sad reflection on how MLB could never show its face among the other sports leagues again? An acknowledgment that MLB wouldn’t allow the Diamondbacks to move in the first place, because it needs them as the face of Arizona spring training? Arizona spring training, mind you, that started 69 years before the Diamondbacks came into existence? Maybe “insinuation” is a better term after all, since he was certainly saying something bad in an indirect way.

As for Cohn himself, he doesn’t actually work for the Diamondbacks, but is a real estate developer who has previously been an intermediary between the team and the county, even after one interaction ended with him yelling at the chair of the county board of supervisors. (His wife is also on the board of the team’s charitable foundation.) Cohn says Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego invited him to last week’s meeting; a spokesperson for Gallego says she did nothing of the sort.

The actual terms of the proposed stadium deal are still shifting, and it’s not entirely clear as of yet whether the proposal will be rolled into the state budget or get a separate vote. The idea that MLB would shift half of its spring training sites in a fit of pique (and regardless of any ongoing leases for spring training stadiums) is way too vague and implausible to be taken seriously; and yet, here we are talking about it. Sometimes having a guy in the room to say the quiet stuff loud can work out okay, if you want people to focus more on vaporthreats and less on reality.

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Friday roundup: Royals, Chiefs owners turn up heat before sales tax vote, VA gov tries to revive arena by insulting state senate again

access_time personNeil deMause

Time to open up the ol’ Instapaper and see what this week’s leftover news items hold — seriously? Okay, better get started:

  • So much is going on in Kansas City in advance of Jackson County’s April 2 voting deadline for a referendum to extend the county 0.375% sales tax surcharge and give the resulting $500 million or so to the Royals and Chiefs for stadium upgrades that for the first time I’m having to break out a second level of bullets:
    • Chiefs president Mark Donovan went on TV and was asked if the teams would leave town if the tax hike is rejected, and replied, “for us the Chiefs; we would just have to look at all our options” and “I think they would have to include leaving Kansas City. But our goal here is, we want to stay here.” It’d be a shame if someone was to set fire to the football players, wouldn’t it, Luigi?
    • The two teams have doubled their campaign spending to $1 million each, with more presumably expected.
    • A coalition of low-income workers and residents of the Crossroads district where the Royals owner John Sherman wants to build a stadium with around $1 billion in public money says they’re giving Sherman until Tuesday to provide a community benefits agreement for the neighborhood or else they’ll advocate for a “no” vote.
    • And Chiefs mascot KC Wolf and Royals mascot Sluggerrr handed out “Vote Yes” stickers outside the city’s arena yesterday, and I had to dig through the Fox4KC video for photographic evidence but here it is:
  • Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s own internal analysis of the proposed Washington Capitals and Wizards arena deal for Alexandria finds that in order for it to raise enough money to generate the taxes needed to pay its construction costs, fans would have to pay $75 for parking, the arena would have to host 53 more events each year than the teams do now in D.C., and the project’s hotel would have to be able to charge $731 a night. Youngkin says he’s “working on” reviving the arena plan and that the problem is “the Senate didn’t do the work,” he really hasn’t learned his lesson about how to win friends and influence people, has he?
  • Three members of the St. Petersburg City Council remain opposed to Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg’s maybe–$1.5 billion stadium subsidy deal, and it would only take four to vote it down. The nearest anyone else is coming to opposing it is Gina Driscoll’s “undecided but optimistic,” though, so don’t hold your breath, but there’s at least a non-zero chance this thing might not sail through without more haggling.
  • Two weeks after Wisconsin assembly speaker Robin Vos pushed through $471 million in stadium renovation subsidies for the Milwaukee Brewers, five team executives each donated the maximum $1,000 to Vos’s reelection campaign. Probably just a coincidence, though, as they doubtless give money all the time to all sorts of — oh, this was their first donations to any candidate in the state ever? Well then.
  • Why don’t pro women’s teams get as much public subsidies as pro men’s teams? That’s the question being asked by Karen Leetzow, president of the Chicago Red Stars NWSL soccer team, which is owned by Laura Ricketts, who co-owns the Cubs with her brothers Tom, Pete, and Todd, something USA Today utterly fails to mention in its article.
  • The Seidman Research Institute at Arizona State University (which, despite its name, is actually a business consultant) reports that spring training games in Arizona generated more than $710 million for the local economy in 2023, enough to pay Shohei Ohtani’s entire 10-year contract, and this breaks so many rules about not comparing economic activity with actual tax receipts and not comparing present and future value that I almost can’t muster the energy to point out that previous studies show that the actual number is closer to zero.
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Friday roundup: Friends don’t let friends believe what they read about stadiums in newspapers edition

access_time personNeil deMause

Hey, who’s been watching the World Series? Not me! Baseball is my #1 sport and always has been, even as I’ve learned way too much about how the sport’s sausage gets made, but for whatever reason this year I’ve completely lost interest by now: I don’t know if it’s that I’m burned out after more rounds of playoffs than ever before, or by the presence of the 11th-best team in baseball in the finals, or that modern baseball means no starting pitcher goes deep enough into games to have a shot at a no-hitter anymore, or that the Phillies–Astros matchup feels like it should be the 1980 NLCS, or because I now know enough about the randomness of short series to feel like who actually wins the World Series is meaningless, or thanks to John Smoltz seeming like what you’d get if you ran every bit of baseball commentary ever through a Markov generator, or what, but it’s something.

I could come up with some hot take extrapolating this out into What It All Means For Baseball, but I’m probably not a representative sample of anything. It does, however, show how quickly things can change for an individual fan, and that sports fandom is not eternal or imperishable.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this, except to say that sports fandom is weird, man. That it’s also the basis for a multi-billion-dollar industry that has huge sway over our lives and politics is even weirder.

And on that note, here’s some news about sports and politics and lives:

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Friday roundup: Tempe opens arena talks with Coyotes, soccer teams everywhere want taxpayers to cover their cost overruns

access_time personNeil deMause

Last of the semi-abbreviated news roundups! Things return to normal next week.

 

 

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Saturday roundup: Moreno demands Angels land sale approval now now now, and other bribery news

access_time personNeil deMause

Told ya! And now an abbreviated (though extended by one day) look at the week’s other news:

  • Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno has responded to a judge granting a 60-day stay to his discounted purchase of stadium land thanks to the deal being caught up in a corruption and bribery scandal involving the city being run by an unelected cabal by decreeing that the city must approve the sale by June 14, or else … well, Moreno, or really Moreno’s lawyer, didn’t specify what would happen if the deal is delayed beyond that date, but you don’t want to find out what it’ll be, you hear? The Los Angeles Times speculates that the Anaheim city council could move forward with the sale despite the stay on its agreement with the state over selling the land without meeting state affordable housing laws, which would almost certainly lead the state to sue, which isn’t going to get the sale resolved by June 14, but maybe Moreno wants that for some reason? Anyway, here, thanks to reader Moose, are some photos of Mayor Harry Sidhu throwing Easter eggs from the private helicopter he’s accused of illegally registering in Arizona to save money, I know that’s what you really want.
  • Speaking of bribery scandals, the Cleveland city council is considering a resolution to demand that the electric utility FirstEnergy have its name removed from the Browns stadium after it was accused of bribing a state official. Browns officials replied that FirstEnergy is “committed to upholding a culture of integrity and accountability” going forward and also the council resolution is non-binding, which is another way of saying “Sorry, we own the naming rights to this publicly owned and paid-for stadium because that’s just how these things are done, we get to decide whose name goes on it, what part of that didn’t you understand?”
  • Tennessee Titans CEO Burke Nihill says it would cost $1.8 billion to renovate the team’s current stadium because it’s in such “disrepair,” citing … well, he didn’t actually cite any study or report or anything, but just trust him, okay? Better to just build a new stadium that would cost — oh, look, Nihill says the price tag is now $2.2 billion, while the team’s share remains at $700 million, meaning the city and state would have to come up with $1.5 billion? That totally makes sense, after all, the old place is 23 years old, it’s pretty much a given that all buildings that old get torn down, right, isn’t that just how engineering works?
  • And speaking of inflation, the Kansas City Current women’s soccer team’s stadium price tag has gone up from $70 million to $117 million, and the team’s owners are asking state taxpayers to cover $6 million of it through tax breaks. Councilmember Eric Bunch says this is fine because it would be “using state tax dollars indirectly to support a project that’s going to benefit Kansas Citians,” which seems to be a novel use of “indirectly” and also “benefit,” though I guess the team owners are technically Kansas Citians in addition to being hedge fund goons, so it would benefit two Kansas Citians, anyway.
  • And speaking of stadiums having the shelf life of mayflies, Palm Beach County is spending $111 million to renovate the spring training home of the Miami Marlins and St. Louis Cardinals; Cards VP Mike Whittle, asked if the 25-year-old Jupiter stadium’s facilities are outdated, replied, “They are. They are,” which should be good enough for you.
  • And speaking of naming rights (which we were doing a few bullet points ago, do try to keep up), the Chicago Fire owners are in hot water for allegedly trying to sell the naming rights to the Soldier Field field when they don’t actually own them, which should make for a fun lawsuit.
  • A Kentucky sports business professor says if the Cincinnati Bengals keep winning, they’ll be able to demand more publicly funded stadium upgrades, which doesn’t really make more sense, but maybe he really means “if the Bengals start losing again, no one will write their elected representatives to demand that the team owners be offered whatever they want in order to keep the team in town, which does check out.
  • Some guy wants to build a USL soccer stadium in downtown Milwaukee, which would cost an unknown amount of money and require an unknown amount of public subsidies. But look, here’s a rendering of it! True, there are no fireworks or people pointing at the sky, but you can imagine those things, no?
  • This is already more bullet points than I meant to write, let me leave you with pictures of the possum that has made its home in the Oakland Coliseum press box. Honestly, given what the A’s owners left of a team for local sportswriters to watch on the field this year with their player fire sale, this maybe should be considered a feature and not a bug.
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Why doesn’t spring training help Florida and Arizona economies? An investimagation

access_time personNeil deMause

With baseball spring training games already getting canceled by the owners’ lockout of players and the few two series of the regular season now officially canceled following yet another breakdown in talks, we’re getting more articles talking about how this is allegedly costing spring-training cities millions of dollars in lost revenue. We’ve been over how this isn’t true before — here’s a good article on how economic studies show that spring training doesn’t actually bring in measurably more revenue to Arizona and Florida, or, if you’d rather hear a comedy club owner in Toronto make a similar point much more evocatively during the 1994 baseball strike, here’s that as well.

But a new, largely crappy article in the San Francisco Chronicle hints at one reason this counterintuitive reality might be the case. Scroll down past all the small-city mayors claiming that canceled spring training weeks cost them $2 million a game, and you land on some fans talking about how their plans have changed now that spring training likely won’t be happening in March:

A’s fan Rich Stein, of Lake Forest, near Irvine, said he had arranged to celebrate his 50th birthday, March 5, with a spring training trip. He rented an Airbnb and friends booked flights from Wisconsin, Oregon and California. It’s too late to cancel, Stein said, so they’re going anyway and will improvise if no baseball is being played.

“One of my buddies was like, ‘Let’s have a Wiffle ball tournament!” Stein said. “I guess now we’re going to play Wiffle ball that Saturday instead of going to a game.”

A’s fan John Tice said he bought plane fares to Arizona months ago, for mid-March, but held off making other plans amid the lockout. … Lori Muhlenbeck and her husband, Mike, embraced the A’s after moving to the Bay Area in 2017. They returned to Wisconsin in 2020 but have made a trip to Arizona each of the past three springs with their two teenagers to watch their team. Muhlenbeck said they had planned to arrive this year on Saturday but have switched to a late March trip “on a hope and a prayer” that the lockout will be resolved.

“We’re going to go anyway,” Muhlenbeck said, “but it won’t be as fun if baseball is not alive and well.”

Previously the leading theory for why spring training doesn’t add much to local coffers has been displacement: Fans coming to town to watch spring training games soak up all the available hotel rooms, meaning visitors who would otherwise go to Florida or Arizona in March because it’s nice in Florida and Arizona in March go somewhere else instead. (Cities also like to count the same fans as multiple visitors even if they’re sticking around to watch multiple games, which, no.)

But is it also possible that some spring-training visits are just converted into non-spring-training visits when fans are forced to adjust plans on the fly? Maybe it’s not so much that spring training doesn’t matter, but just that it only matters if spring training is on the calendar, at which point it’s too late for fans not to spend money in spring training sites?

The best way to check this would be to see what happens when spring training isn’t scheduled at all, and fortunately we have an example of this: 1995, when baseball was in the midst of a strike that had been ongoing since the previous July, and MLB teams held games with scab “replacement players” that had only a fraction of usual attendance. University of Akron professor John Zipp did a study for the Brookings Institution on what happened to taxable sales in Florida spring-training sites that year, and while I can’t find a link to the actual study at the moment, Governing magazine wrote up his findings in 2011:

If spring training had a major financial impact on those communities, they should have suffered tremendously. That didn’t happen, and in fact, their taxable sales increased. Those findings “may indicate that spring training is not the major tourist draw that many claim,” Zipp wrote.

So, we’re back to our original theory: People go to Florida and Arizona for all sorts of reasons in the spring, and spring training games are either soaking up available hotel rooms to the point where it drives away an equal number of non-baseball tourists, or at most it’s such a small drop in the bucket compared to the flood of warm weather seekers that any impact is too small to be measurable. That should be some small comfort to spring training sites as the lockout drags on — and anyway, assuming there’s a season eventually, there will almost be some spring (or summer?) training before it, so baseball tourists will arrive at some point, if that even matters much.

And speaking of the baseball lockout, Marc Normandin and I have a new article over at FAIR on the ways in which the media have portrayed the dispute as one in which both the players and owners are “spoiled” and refusing to come to an agreement, whereas actually this one can be pinned squarely on the owners, who have figured out how to create a two-tier economic system that lowballs salaries for all but the best players and are refusing to even talk about giving that up. It has nothing to do with stadiums, except that it has to do with why baseball isn’t being played in them right now and also who reaps the benefit of baseball spending and the whole minor-league takeover that is also leading to a flood of minor-league stadium subsidy demands, so I rule that it is relevant, you may proceed to read it!

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Friday roundup: Titans mull demanding whole new stadium, Howard Terminal A’s project lurches one more step forward

access_time personNeil deMause

A special note to FoS Patreon subscribers: If you’re signed up at any subscription level and have not been receiving posts via email, please drop me a line. I’m trying to determine if there’s a bug in the automated system that I need to address, thanks!

For everyone else reading this via any and all communications media, here’s what all has been happening in stadium and arena news this week:

  • Plans by Tennessee Titans owners the Adams family to demand $300 million in state sales-tax kickbacks to help fund a $600 million renovation of their 23-year-old stadium have hit a snag, which is that the projected cost is now expected to be nearly double that — thanks to things like “antiquated” windows and a concrete structural frame that “needs” to be replaced with steel, people sure didn’t know how to build things to last in 1999! Since the Titans have a dread state-of-the-art clause in their lease requiring the city of Nashville to keep the stadium in the same condition as other NFL facilities, which presumably includes the latest in window technology, Mayor John Cooper says he plans to “closely review whether a new stadium would be a better long-term financial decision.” Since the Titans’ lease expires in 2028, Cooper might also want to closely review whether a better financial decision would be to just inform the Adamses that if they want to stay in town they will not be offered a promise of continual publicly funded upgrades, but Axios Nashville, which reported this “scoop” (you can tell because it says “Scoop” right in the headline), doesn’t seem to have bothered to ask about that, guess “local coverage worthy of readers’ time” doesn’t include followup questions!
  • The Oakland city council voted 6-2 to approve the final environmental impact report for a new Oakland A’s stadium at Howard Terminal, after a meeting that included construction workers demanding approval so that they can be hired to help build the thing. This isn’t actually the final vote that everyone is waiting on — that would be the final financing plan, which could cost taxpayers a billion dollars and still has about a half-billion-dollar hole in where the money would be raised, and which will be voted on someday, eventually.
  • The Arizona Coyotes are officially moving for at least the next three years to Arizona State University’s new 5,000-seat arena (which looks like this currently, if you were wondering), but team CEO Xavier Gutierrez says he doesn’t expect a “material financial impact” because of “how difficult our current situation has been financially.” Yes, the Coyotes have been losing money, largely thanks to nobody showing up to games, but it’s hard to see how spending $20 million on new NHL-only locker rooms won’t have at least a $20 million financial impact, you know?
  • The new owners of the USL’s Austin Bold F.C. are considering a move to Fort Worth now that Austin has its own MLS team, and are eyeing the construction of a 10,000-seat stadium to make it happen. The city would “support” construction of the stadium, and no total or public price tag has been provided, so in the meantime let’s just gaze upon this rendering and wonder what’s going on with that poorly synchronized flag display on the field, let alone why one entire end of the grandstand wouldn’t have a view of the game:

  • We already covered at the time the sad story of how the city of Anaheim responded to the 2018 expiration of Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno’s lease opt-out clause by just handing him a lease extension with a new opt-out clause that allowed him to continue his stadium subsidy demands, but if you want a longer recap in full gruesome detail, the Orange County Register has that for you.
  • Glendale, Arizona city manager Kevin Phelps is “very upset” that baseball spring training is being delayed by MLB owners’ lockout of players in a labor contract dispute, since he was counting on a stream of tourists to boost the local economy. Don’t worry, Kevin, spring training visitors don’t seem to provide any measurable economic boost anyway, so … yay?
  • Buffalo News columnist Rod Watson says New York state and local elected officials are being held “hostage” by Bills team owners and succumbing to “Stockholm syndrome” because they … aren’t insisting on building a new publicly funded stadium in Buffalo instead of in the suburbs. Keep on speaking truth to power, Buffalo News.
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Friday roundup: Buffalo wants to change Earth’s orbit for Bills, plus when is a USL stadium vote not a vote?

access_time personNeil deMause

Hey, look, it’s Friday again! I realize that I sometimes tell me about my week, but I seldom ask about yours. How’ve you been? Anything interesting going on? What’s that, you’ve already abandoned this paragraph and have skipped ahead to the bullet points where all the real news is? A reasonable response, I completely understand, let me now do the same—

  • Lots going on in the Buffalo Bills stadium campaign, for certain values of “going on”: On Tuesday, six members of the nine-member Buffalo Common Council passed a resolution calling for “strong consideration” to be given to locating a stadium in Buffalo instead of at the current site in suburban Orchard Park, complete with renderings showing the sun setting in the northwest; residents of the Old First Ward, one site being maybe considered for a Buffalo stadium, told WGRZ that they wouldn’t welcome an NFL stadium as a neighbor; and the Erie County Legislature voted to require at least three public hearings before any stadium deal is approved. Since the real question remains “Who the hell is going to pay for this thing, and how much?”, the rest is all pretty much just distraction right now, but at least we’re starting to see who’s lining up to fight about what once there’s something to fight about.
  • A supporter of New Mexico United‘s $68 million USL stadium plan has filed an ethics complaint against the opponent group Stop the Stadium, saying the group needs to register as a political action committee because it’s spent more than $250 on flyers opposing the plan. The real news, meanwhile, comes way down in the last paragraph of the Albuquerque Journal article, which reveals that a pro-stadium PAC funded entirely by New Mexico United owner Peter Trevisani has already banked $840,000 toward mail and TV ads — if the 100-to-1 rule holds, that probably bodes well for the stadium vote’s success, which would be a great return on investment for Trevisani, spending $840,000 to get $46 million in taxpayer cash.
  • Also about that New Mexico United stadium vote: The Journal reports that because the stadium bonds would be paid off with sales and use tax revenues and not property tax revenues, it’s actually just an advisory vote; the paper also notes that the wording of the ballot measure is confusing, since at one point it refers to “gross receipts tax revenue bonds” (sales tax money) and at another to “general obligation bonds” (property tax money), but since the vote isn’t binding anyway, what’s a little contradictory wording among friends?
  • Richmond wants to build a new stadium for the Flying Squirrels and is seeking developers to create a stadium-anchored “entertainment destination” district, which will hopefully “minimize public investment and risk and maximize private investment,” yeah, I’ll believe it when I see it. The Flying Squirrels are threatening to leave town in 2025 without a new stadium, not because they want to, mind you, but because MLB is forcing teams to upgrade their stadiums as part of its takeover of the minor leagues, I warned you this would happen, didn’t I?
  • Along the same lines, the Eugene Emeralds say they need a new stadium by 2024 or else MLB will vaporize them. No price tag or location yet, take hostages first, figure out your demands later.
  • The owners of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago White Sox are seeking to develop 53 acres of city-owned land near the teams’ spring-training site in Glendale, and if you’re wondering why the teams get to develop city-owned land, it’s all part of the deal where Glendale spent $150 million on a new stadium complex to lure the teams back in 2007. It’s kind of starting to make sense that Glendale city officials’ new policy toward sports teams is not to let the door hit them on the way out.
  • Not Tempe, though, which is planning a $50 million renovation ($40.9 million of it paid for by the city) to the Los Angeles Angels‘ spring-training stadium, to “improve the fan experience by adding shade” and “modernize the food court and the restrooms,” which haven’t been modernized since way back in 2005. Good ol’ Tempe, bet the Coyotes will be very happy there.
  • That Tampa Bay Times editorial stumping for a new Rays stadium surely has nothing to do with one of the developers leading the push for a stadium has loaned the paper $15 million, right? Surely a coincidence, not anything that would require a printed disclosure!
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MLB encouraged Arizona mayors to ask for spring-training delay, to pressure players to take pay cut

access_time personNeil deMause

The story of how a bunch of Arizona elected officials asked for MLB to delay the start of spring training because Covid and then took it back after the players’ union rejected the idea isn’t over yet, as it turns out that MLB apparently asked the cities to make the demand, as part of a scheme to put pressure on the players to take salary cuts in exchange for safety. The Athletic uncovered the story (according to “people with direct knowledge”), but they’re paywalled, so let’s turn to excerpts in Marc Normandin’s summary instead:

“Basically, the position that the league stated on the call was that they were open to delaying and that the players were not,” one source said. “And that a document like the letter may help push negotiations along and allow what you guys would like, which is a 30-day delay.”

“The representative was very direct,” another source added. “They believe it is time to push off spring training for a month, but they’re having problems with the players because a change would be necessary to the CBA for that to happen. He supported a letter to put pressure on players to push back spring training, a full month.”

Well then! There’s nothing illegal in all this — all’s fair in love and hardball labor negotiations — but it’s certainly skeezy to pressure a bunch of mayors into helping you extract concessions from your employees under threat of a deadly disease. And this is very much about the money, not about safety, as I discussed here yesterday and as Normandin makes clear:

MLB wants to delay the start of the 2021 season, because they want to make sure the games have fans in attendance. They’ve been in full-on collective bargaining mode for some time now, so they have to roll with the narrative that they’re losing money without fans, even if it means pressuring the Cactus League into requesting that MLB delays the start of spring training, a shift in schedule which would then bleed into the regular season…

MLB knows they do not have any grounds to suspend contracts or reschedule the start of the season without a local or federal ordinance prohibiting them from starting spring training or the regular season, so they’ll suddenly become very concerned with coronavirus and its potential spread when they can leverage that concern to get what they want. Which is itself laughable considering they already pushed through fans in the postseason and World Series last year with a “well, let’s see what happens” attitude, and then didn’t bother to follow up on whether they actually managed to not be a superspreader.

In other words, in the absence of more government stay-at-home orders that prohibit even fan-less games, it’s likely to be full speed ahead with the baseball season so long as shortening it might cost anyone any money. Which is to be expected, since that’s pretty much how all sports has gone so far, though that’s not without potential costs either: If starting the baseball season on time means more virus spread, which means it takes longer to get the pandemic under control as vaccines are rolled out, which means longer lockdowns and more economic damage and, oh yeah, more people getting sick and dying, that’s a cost to everyone, not just baseball owners or players. Externalities are a bitch.

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Why Arizona mayors asked for spring training delay then unasked for it (tl;dr: money)

access_time personNeil deMause

A kerfuffle has broken out in Arizona over the start of baseball spring training next month, with officials from host cities requesting that the opening date be delayed, and also not actually requesting it, and — you know what, let’s begin at the beginning.

Spring training is set to start in less than three weeks, with pitchers and catchers reporting on February 15 and exhibition games starting on February 27. When those dates were first set last fall, it wasn’t thought to be an issue — teams were already playing games in their home cities across the nation, with frequent testing (more or less) making it possible to do this without massive virus outbreaks. But coronavirus rates are roughly a squillion times higher now than they were then, with Arizona at the top of the list for cases per capita. Plus, as noted on Friday, Arizona city officials started realizing that nobody was going to come to those games and stay at their hotels and stuff, and while that’s not actually a huge economic benefit, it’s all they get.

Soooo, a whole bunch of Cactus League mayors and city managers sent out this letter to MLB on Friday:

 

If that’s too small to squint at on your phone, the gist is:

In view of the current state of the pandemic in Maricopa County — with one of the nation’s highest infection rates — we believe it is wise to delay the start of spring training to allow for the COVID-19 situation to improve here. This position is based on public data from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which projects a sharp decline in infections in Arizona by mid-March (an estimated 9,712 daily infections on February 15 and 3,072 daily infections on March 15).

And if you look at Arizona’s infection-rate curve, that pretty much checks out:

Yesterday, however, Cactus League executive director Bridget Binsbacher quickly walked that back:

“If it is determined that spring training is going to start on Feb. 27, we’re prepared for that,” Binsbacher told ESPN in an interview. “Our focus is having a safe, secure experience for all involved. We believe we can do that on the 27th. We believe we can do that a month from the 27th.”

The subtext here has to do with MLB’s need to consult with the players’ union on delaying the start of the season — or, more to the point, consult with the union on paying players less if the season is delayed. Players, needless to say, despite any concerns about reporting for duty in the nation’s Covid capital, are also not crazy about MLB keeping them safe by furloughing them without pay, and have turned down any delay in the start of the season without pay. MLB owners, for their part, have no interest in not playing games if they have to pay players anyway. So everyone is just sort of moving ahead by pretending that all this will be safe enough, probably:

In a statement, the MLBPA said: “While we, of course, share the goals of a safe spring training and regular season, MLB has repeatedly assured us that it has instructed its teams to be prepared for an on-time start to spring training and the regular season.”

The league, in a statement, said: “As we have previously said publicly, we will continue to consult with public health authorities, medical experts and the players association whether any schedule modifications to the announced start of spring training and the championship season should be made in light of the current COVID-19 environment to ensure the safety of the players, coaches, umpires, MLB employees and other gameday personnel in a sport that plays every day.”

And, you know, it might work out okay! There are very likely to be outbreaks at spring training camps, and some players might get seriously sick (hopefully Eduardo Rodriguez is doing better now), especially given all the airports that players will be shlepping through to get to Florida and Arizona. But there are plenty of players at spring training if you need substitutes, and for that matter it’s easy enough to cancel spring training games if needed since they don’t count for anything. So maybe if by late March coronavirus rates are down to more reasonable levels, and there isn’t a second (fourth? I’ve lost count) wave thanks to new mutated variants, then by April everyone will be ready to start the season on time with at least some practice in. Maybe. It’s no dumber than what the NBA is doing, certainly!

Still, it’s important to note that whether MLB gets this right or not will be almost entirely down to dumb luck, since everyone concerned — owners, players, mayors — is looking at this from a money standpoint first, and a public health standpoint at most second. Is it too late for all sports to take a gap year?

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