spring training – Page 2 – Field of Schemes

Friday roundup: Tokyo Olympics back on, NFL doesn’t understand vaccines, and other hygiene theater stories

January 22, 2021January 22, 2021 Neil deMause

It was yet another one of those weeks, where you finally look up from the news that’s obsessing everybody only to find that while you weren’t looking, monarch butterflies had moved to the verge of extinction. There doesn’t seem to be an end to this anytime soon — which is pretty much the motto of this website, so let’s get on with it:

Japan was reported to have decided to cancel the 2021 Summer Olympics in Tokyo because the pandemic won’t be over by July, then doubled down and declared that the games are definitely still on. All this is still subject to change, especially since the coronavirus itself is still subject to change, so expect the rumors and counterrumors to continue right up until the torch is lit, if a torch relay is something that can even be pulled off with social distancing.
The NFL is planning to sell 14,500 tickets to next month’s Super Bowl in Tampa, plus allow in 7,500 vaccinated health care workers for free, because as we all know, once you’re vaccinated you no longer pose a contagion risk and so are the equivalent of an empty seat in terms of viral spread. Wait, what’s that? We don’t know that at all? Oh well, I’m sure it’s safe, surely the NFL would never do anything to put anyone at risk.
Speaking of hygiene theater, the Arizona Coyotes are allowing up to 3,450 fans to attend their games, but say it’s fine because fans must be masked and socially distanced and are required to “download an app to answer a series of health survey questions” first, which pretty much comes down to “promise you don’t have the ‘rona first, okay?” The Coyotes have still only drawn an average of 2,329 fans for their first two home games, which is either a sign that Phoenix-area hockey fans still aren’t comfortable going to games at an indoor venue in the middle of a communicable disease spike, or that there are no Phoenix-area hockey fans, make your own joke.
And speaking of Arizona and deadly diseases, officials of the spring-training Cactus League would like to see exhibition games put off past March so they have a better chance of actually being able to sell tickets, with Glendale city manager Kevin Phelps adding, “Without those fans staying in your hotel rooms and eating in your restaurants and shopping in your stores, spring training quickly becomes one of the worst business decisions you can make.” Actually, even with them, Kevin! Not that it matters, since spring training is going on full speed ahead on schedule after owners failed to get players to agree to be paid less for a shortened season.
The Double-A Jackson Generals, who were booted out of the affiliated minor leagues last month despite somehow not showing up on USA Today’s master list, have now been evicted by the city of Jackson, Tennessee, though mayor Scott Conger says the team will be allowed to bid on using the stadium site along with anybody else who wants it. Team owner David Freeman has retorted that since the team is still technically a member of the Southern League, even without any players to play in it, it’s meeting the terms of its lease. This lawsuit is going to be by far the most interesting thing ever to involve the Jackson Generals, very much including the time when the team was for inexplicable reasons renamed the Diamond Jaxx.
Here’s a Jacksonville Business Journal article asking “What do the Jaguars need to be financially viable in Jacksonville?” while noting that the city is now only the 43rd largest TV market in the U.S. Not mentioned in the article: that local TV revenue doesn’t matter at all in the NFL since all TV contracts are national and revenue is shared among all the teams, and Jaguars owner Shad Khan is still raking in almost $100 million a year in profits regardless. Surely it is mere coincidence that this article, which mostly quotes only Jags officials and longtime NFL consultant Marc Ganis, is appearing just as Khan is preparing to again ask Jacksonville for $200 million in development subsidies; to think otherwise would imply that news outlets are willing to serve as mouthpieces for billionaires’ subsidy demands, and what kind of world would that be to live in?
NBA commissioner Adam Silver has clarified that the league isn’t necessarily going to expand right away despite a Covid-spawned cash crunch, because “in essence at the end of the day we’re selling equity in our league by virtue of expansion” and “ultimately, the main driver for expansion should be the ability to grow the pie, not necessarily to bring in, you know, to sell equity, to bring in cash now, you know, as opposed to generating the money later.” That’s all very reasonable, and simultaneously a way to say, Hey, Seattle, we’re not going to let you in our little club just to raise quick cash, you gotta make this worth our while, capisce?
Hey, did you know that the current Busch Stadium, and also the Busch Stadium before that but not the one before that, was built on or at least near the site of a pen where African American slaves were imprisoned? (Also that the original Busch Stadium was named that because league rules prohibited naming a stadium after a beer like Budweiser, so instead St. Louis Cardinals owner Gussie Busch named it after himself then created Busch beer to get around the rule? But I digress, damn you, Wikipedia rabbit holes.) Two state representatives would like to see the Cardinals erect a plaque at the stadium noting this fact, which seems reasonable enough, especially since the pen apparently wasn’t torn down until 1963 — though according to St. Louis Public Radio, it was “well hidden even before it was demolished. It was located in a subbasement, so that the screaming, wailing, and corporal punishment would happen out of sight and hearing range of the people who lived nearby.”
And finally, let’s all bask in Las Vegas tourism authority chair Steve Hill saying that the new Las Vegas Raiders stadium has been a hit for the city despite not being able to host fans because: “It’s been a great representation of Las Vegas. We’ve all seen games on television where you get that just great backdrop of Las Vegas, both during the day and at night. It’s a spectacular shot from the stadium and of the stadium.” Spending $750 million in public money on a football stadium was totally worth it because now TV viewers will finally know what Las Vegas looks like, stop looking at me like that and definitely don’t ask me why I said it was a good idea for the Raiders not to pay rent, okay?

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Friday roundup: OKC Thunder want their subsidies sooner, Indy Eleven want theirs later, let me repeat back your orders to make sure I have it right

January 15, 2021 Neil deMause

I’ve already thanked everyone individually, but I’d like to give a collective shoutout to all the readers who signed up as FoS Supporters this membership cycle. The money you send translates directly into time I can spend covering stadium and arena news for you, and I remain extremely heartened by your support. If you sent me your mailing address, your magnets should be en route; if you didn’t, send me your mailing address already, these magnets aren’t going to ship themselves!

And speaking of covering stadium and arena news, let’s cover some stadium and arena news, why don’t we:

The owners of the Oklahoma City Thunder, who won $115 million in arena upgrades as part of a sales-tax-hike project to fund mostly parks and social services because that’s the way Rick Horrow sells you your monorail, are now asking to get the first $115 million off the top to build a new scoreboard and install new seats and let the parks and stuff wait till later. City councilmember JoBeth Hamon says she would rather prioritize “things people would see out their front door,” get a load of her! How many megapixels do your trees have, hmm?
Indy Eleven owner Ersal Ozdemir, who last year successfully got $115 million in state money for a new MLS stadium while wriggling out of a requirement that his USL team actually make the jump to MLS, may now be about to wriggle out of the requirement that he actually pick a start and start building the stadium anytime soon. A bill introduced by state senator Jack Sandlin, the main backer of the original stadium bill, would extend that deadline to July 2024, in exchange for absolutely nothing that I can tell, because the business of Indiana is Indiana’s business or something.
The would-be Atlantic Schooners‘ would-be CFL football stadium project was already mostly dead, and now it’s completely dead, with the Halifax Regional Municipality declaring it was putting the plan on hold indefinitely since nothing was going on with it anyway. The Schooners ownership group says it still hopes to bring the plan back from the dead someday once the pandemic is over, though, because you never want to leave $20 million in subsidies sitting on the table if you can help it.
Did I say the Worcester Red Sox‘ new stadium would cost a record $157 million? Make that a record $172 million, once you add in the $15 million in “infrastructure improvements” the city will also be on the hook for as part of the team’s new lease. Some of the money will come from state and federal dollars, but that’s still money that could have been used elsewhere otherwise, though I guess “let’s build the local sports team some new roads or else the state will just blow the money on Lowell or Pittsfield” has some logic to it if you’re extraordinarily provincial.
Speaking of the Worcester Red Sox, the city of Pawtucket is suing the team’s owners of for failing to adequately maintain Pawtucket’s McCoy Stadium before the team relocated after the 2020 season. (Really after the 2019 season, since there was no 2020 minor-league baseball season, which ruined a perfectly good road trip to Pawtucket I had planned.) Pawtucket is seeking unspecified damages.
In case you’ve missed it, the NBA season is already a mess thanks to Covid outbreaks, and the league is trying to fix things by allowing players to keep playing maskless indoors in close proximity to each other for 48 minutes a night, but not allowing them to hug. Before that there was talk of holding off on playing games until the pandemic has stopped raging quite so much, but surely this will do the trick, no need to do anything crazy now.
Speaking of Covid, it’s running rampant in Arizona, where baseball spring training is about to start in a month, but MLB wouldn’t agree to any delay unless the players agreed to take pay cuts, which they wouldn’t, so fingers crossed that the vaccine rollout speeds up, I guess.
Part of Miller Park Way in West Milwaukee will remain Miller Park Way even though the Milwaukee Brewers‘ Miller Park is no longer called Miller Park, because locals have grown attached to the old corporate name, so there it will stand forever, apparently. Kind of like the Citgo sign.

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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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Friday roundup: Pandemic could delay Rams and Chargers stadium, drain hotel tax base for Raiders stadium (and kill millions of people, oh yeah)

March 20, 2020March 20, 2020 Neil deMause

And so we come to the close of Week 2 of Coronavirusworld, with still little way of knowing what Week 3 will bring, let alone Week 8 and beyond. (I just now started to write about this far less grim response to Tuesday’s London study, until I noticed none of the authors are infectious disease specialists and the claim that contact tracing can keep infections under control was cited to a single Chinese news story that said nothing of the sort, so maybe stay grim for the moment?) With pretty much all of the sports world now shut down, though — except for Australian Rules Football for some reason — sports journalists have begun looking down the road at longer-term effects of the pandemic, resulting in some useful and some not-so-useful reporting:

All of California is now under “shelter-in-place” orders, which looks like it will shut down for the time being construction on the new Los Angeles Rams and Chargers stadium, as construction work is not considered an “essential” work task like medical services or food provision. So it’s up in the air whether the stadium will be ready by its planned opening this fall, though of course it’s also up in the air whether the NFL will be ready this fall. (Side note: I hope Gov. Andrew Cuomo lets New York City go on shelter-in-place soon, not just because it’s the best way to avoid a healthcare disaster, but because it’s been really hard to avoid all social contact and get work done at home when there’s a crew digging up the street outside my apartment every morning starting at 7:30 am.)
The Baltimore Orioles and Washington Nationals are still locked in a legal battle over control of TV rights in their shared territory, which could only become more important if the pandemic results in TV becoming even more dominant as the way people watch sports (and the way sports teams make money).
Speaking of TV, the NBA is reportedly still getting paid TV rights money even though play is suspended. I bet a whole lot of contract lawyers are either kicking themselves or patting themselves on the back right now for what clauses they wrote into deals regarding acts of God. (Note: Studies of God’s responsibility for the spread of coronavirus have yet to be peer-reviewed.)
Here’s a New York Times article on how the loss of income from shutting down sports will affect various leagues, at least to the best of our knowledge without seeing all of their contract clauses.
Of course there are articles about how shutting down sports will devastate local economies, whether it’s the cancellation of spring training or of the NCAA tournament or what. Pay no mind, I guess, to the fact that when spring training attendance dropped 60% during the replacement-players spring of 1995, there was no measurable economic impact on Florida — and pay even less mind to the fact that whether people are spending money on sports is way less important than whether coronavirus lockdowns will destroy the entire economy. Bad economics may be bad, but it’s easy to squeeze an article out of on deadline!
The collapse of tourism will, however, take a particular hit on hotel tax revenues, which just happen to be what Nevada is planning to use to pay for its new Las Vegas Raiders stadium. The state has a year and a half of reserve funds, but if tourism never takes off again to the degree it was at before travel for pleasure became a distant memory, we could see some scrabbling under sofa cushions for where to find another few hundred million dollars.
A “coalition of shipping, trucking and steel companies” is suing to stop the proposed Oakland A’s stadium at Howard Terminal from being fast-tracked through environmental review, at least if they can find any courts open during shelter-in-place.
MLB teams have finally agreed to kick in $1 million each to pay stadium workers during the delay to the start of the season, though I haven’t been able to find details on how many weeks of lost income that will cover. They’re also paying minor leaguers $400 a week each through at least April 8, with an extension beyond that likely. (Yes, that’s next to nothing, but it’s the same next to nothing minor leaguers normally have to live on, so that’s … better? Worse? Definitely one of those.)
And finally, here’s an article that won’t age well: A’s president Dave Kaval asking “a fan who has said he has tested positive for coronavirus” to throw out the first pitch at the team’s opening day, wherever that is. That’s gonna make for one crowded mound.

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Friday roundup: News outlets everywhere get pretty much everything wrong

August 23, 2019August 24, 2019 Neil deMause

On a tight deadline this week, so let’s get straight to the news:

MLS indeed awarded St. Louis an MLS franchise this week as had been hinted, to begin play in 2022. “St. Louis has always been and will continue to be one of the great historic soccer cities throughout the United States,” said MLS commissioner Don Garber, failing to note that this soccer tradition didn’t help when St. Louis voters rejected giving sales-tax money to the team for a new stadium in 2017, but once the city and state went ahead and approved about the same $60 million in public funding in 2018, it was all good.
Here’s an article about how Mesa, Arizona is “saving $22 million” by paying off $45 million in spring-training stadium debt early instead of continuing to make payments through 2032. Which, no, that’s not how borrowing money works: Yes, Mesa now gets to avoid interest payments, but it also no longer has $45 million sitting around, meaning it either needs to cut back on spending or take out new debt to pay for stuff that that $45 million would have paid for, which will result in, yep, more interest payments. Choosing when to pay off bonds isn’t a funding issue, it’s a bookkeeping one; I’m not sure why so many journalists can’t understand this, but it’s probably millennials’ fault somehow.
And here’s an article about how Nassau County’s executive wrote an op-ed for another site calling the New York Islanders arena deal “a hat trick for Nassau County.” Remember, kids: If you study hard and eat your spinach and grow up to be an elected official, not only to you get to write in the newspaper about how great your decisions are, but other people will write articles about how your decisions are great because you wrote an op-ed saying they are!
On the other hand, if you try to bill a company $50,000 for negotiating a stadium naming-rights fee with the public authority you’re in charge of, you might get in trouble and have to resign! Politics is only fun and games until somebody gets an eye put out!
The Kansas City T-Bones indy league baseball team is getting evicted for nonpayment of rent on its stadium, and I, for one, hope it will involve a tractor parked on home plate.
“Should the White Sox leave Chicago?” asks Chicago Magazine, apparently because the White Sox aren’t drawing as well as the Cubs, though they are drawing better than eight other MLB teams despite heading for their seventh consecutive losing record. Maybe they could move to Charlotte or Las Vegas, suggests the article, noting in a coup de grace, “The Chicago Public Library holds twice as many books about the Cubs (274) as the Sox (131).” I’m sold — Charlotte may have barely one-third the TV households as Chicago, but I bet the CharlSox would dominate the public library, and that’s priceless.

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Friday roundup: Beckham proposes stadium lease, FC Cincinnati pays off evicted tenants, Florida city admits its spring training economic projections were bunk

June 7, 2019June 7, 2019 Neil deMause

Is anyone else hugely enjoying John Cameron Mitchell’s new semiautobiographical musical podcast “Anthem: Homunculus” but having a hard time listening because the Luminary podcast platform keeps freezing up mid-episode? Is there enough overlap in the Field of Schemes and John Cameron Mitchell fan bases that anyone here even understands this question? (If not, here’s a good primer by my old Village Voice colleague Alan Scherstuhl.) Is Luminary still offering podcasts on its pay tier without the creators’ permissions? How should one handle it when great art is only available on platforms that have some major ethical issues? Are we ever going to get to this week’s stadium news?

Let’s get to this week’s stadium news:

David Beckham’s Inter Miami has offered to pay $3.5 million a year in rent on Melreese Park land for 39 years, plus $25 million for other Miami park projects, as part of a stadium lease agreement. That still doesn’t sound like too bad a deal for the public to me, but as nobody seems to be linking to the lease proposal in its entirety, there could still always be some time bombs hidden in there that weren’t reported on. More news when the Miami city commission actually gets ready to vote on this proposed lease, hopefully!
The owners of F.C. Cincinnati have agreed to pay off the tenants they’re evicting to make way for an entrance to their new stadium, but one of the conditions of the payout is that no one can discuss how much it’s for. We do know, however, that “at one point pizza was ordered in during the eight hours of negotiations” — thank god for intrepid journalism!
Clearwater, Florida just cut its estimate of the economic impact of the Philadelphia Phillies‘ presence during spring training from $70 million a year to $44 million a year after realizing that it didn’t make sense to include spending by locals who would be spending their money in town anyway. Now let’s see them adjust their estimates to account for tourists who are visiting Florida already because it’s March and Florida is warm and happen to take in a ballgame while they’re there and maybe we’ll be getting somewhere.
Good news for Columbus: After a good year for concerts, the public-private owned Nationwide Arena turned a $1.87 million operating profit last year. The less good news: None of that was used to repay the $4.76 million in tax subsidies the arena received, because the profits were instead poured into improvements like “roof and concrete repairs, natural-gas line replacement, new spotlights, metal detectors, and renovations to corporate suites.” The maybe-good news: If this means that the arena managers won’t ask for new subsidies for renovations for a while because they’re getting enough from operations, yeah, no, I don’t really expect this will forestall that either, but here’s hoping.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred again said a bunch of things about the Oakland A’s and Tampa Bay Rays stadium situations, but as usual nobody read them to the end because it’s impossible to do so without falling asleep. I am not complaining when I note that Manfred is an incompetent grifter compared to some of his colleagues in other sports, really I’m not. (Well, a little.)
Speaking of the Rays, Minnesota Twins broadcaster Bert Blyleven would like to blow up Tropicana Field because a fly ball hit a speaker, but the game broadcast cut to commercial before he could spell out his financing plan to build a replacement stadium.
A street in Inglewood near the Los Angeles Rams‘ new stadium is seeing stores close as a result of luxury blight, but Mayor James Butts says it’s just because of gentrification unrelated to the stadium. Which either way makes it hard to see how the stadium (or the arena that Clippers owner Steve Ballmer and Butts want) is needed to help the Inglewood economy, but mayors aren’t paid to think very hard about this stuff.
Washington, D.C., is spending $30 million to install three public turf ballfields near RFK Stadium, which sounds like a lot of money for just three turf fields, but still a better investment than some other things D.C. has spent money on, so go … kickball players? Kickball needs to be played on turf? The things you learn in this business!

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Friday roundup: Calgary residents demand say on Flames arena, Indy Eleven asked to only accept public funding of 80% of stadium, Raiders could re-up in Oakland this week

February 22, 2019 Neil deMause

Happy Friday! Here is your weekly fact dump of news that I didn’t get to earlier in the week, because I only got two hands, man:

Calgary residents who went to speak their minds at yesterday’s town hall on a new Flames arena say they want to be able to speak their minds on a new Flames arena. The city council is set to vote on an arena term sheet on Monday without public input — or even revealing to the public first what’s in the term sheet — though I suppose some councillors might read the press coverage of the town hall and learn how angry the public is. It’s worked before in Phoenix, for a few weeks at least!
The Indy Eleven stadium subsidy proposal has made it into a state senate bill, but “with some hefty strings attached,” reports the Indianapolis Star: the team’s owner would need to put up $30 million of his own money before getting to access $200 million in public tax money (more like $112 million in present value) for stadium costs. This does not actually sound like a big ask, but hey, Star sports columnist Gregg Doyel says it’s worth any price to keep the city’s sports teams (even if they’re not threatening to move) because, and I quote, “my job could depend on it,” so why quibble over a mere $112 million, right?
The city of Anaheim has hired a real estate consultant to conduct an appraisal of the value of the Los Angeles Angels‘ stadium site, as it first authorized last month, which is slightly weird in that they just did an appraisal in 2014 that found that the stadium parking lots sought by team owner Arte Moreno for $1 were worth $245 million, but whatever. It’s at least good that the city is apparently committing to ask something based on actual market value for the land, especially coupled with talk of basing any land deal on the Anaheim Ducks deal, which was a decently fair price for development rights to city land. Maybe this will not be awful, despite the new mayor talking about how eager he is to cut a deal even though Angels owner Arte Moreno has no real leverage? I’m almost afraid to hope — we’ll just have to see what happens when the assessment comes in, presumably a couple of months from now.
Oakland officials could vote soon to approve a new lease for the Raiders for 2019, with an additional option for 2020, which would put an end to talk of the team playing everywhere else on the planet this fall. Apparently Raiders owner Mark Davis is willing to let bygones be bygones and overlook that antitrust lawsuit the city filed that led him to insist he wouldn’t play in Oakland this season. Good successful bluff-calling, Oakland officials!
The New York Mets will not be moving their spring training home out of Port St. Lucie, after threatening to in order to secure a revised deal for $57 million in renovations to their stadium, $55 million of which will come from taxpayers. Bad bluff-calling, Port St. Lucie officials!
A rival developer is seeking the same land in Montreal that would-be Expos revivers want for a baseball stadium, to use for a “new smart development of office towers, housing, hotels and public space.” Looks like a fight is in the offing, and these guys have “smart” right there in the name, so watch out!
Brooklyn’s Barclays Center is hoping to save some money when the New York Islanders move out for their own arena eventually — the arena is losing about $12 million on guaranteed revenue payments to the team, and without hockey will be able to book more concerts — but more interesting to me from this article is that the building lost $21 million on operations in the 2017-18 season, plus another $33 million in debt and other expenses. Maybe the Nets owners are soaking up any profits, or the arena’s builders are earning their money on all the high-priced housing that went up next door, but still the whole project seems a bit like a waste of everyone’s time and money and eminent domain takings.
Also, work on the Islanders’ new planned arena by Belmont Park won’t begin this spring as planned, because the environmental impact statement required for the project won’t be ready until June at the earliest, but “state officials insist the project remains on schedule.” Hmmm.
And finally, your regularly scheduled Tottenham Hotspur stadium updates: It won’t be open until April at the earliest, it won’t have a VIP cheese room, and team officials are catching wild foxes and shooting them in the head with pistols. Exactly one of those things was something I expected to type this week.

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Are sports leagues trolling Arizona media by refusing to release full economic impact studies?

August 15, 2018August 15, 2018 Neil deMause

Emerging briefly from my travel-imposed radio silence to note that Arizona tourism officials are once again talking up how sports is a mammoth contributor to the state’s economy, to the tune of $1.3 billion over the last three years. That’s according to figures come up with by the Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business, and since they go against pretty much every other study conducted of sports economics ever — which conclude that most sports spending just displaces other spending, whether it’s by locals or tourists — I heartily pooh-poohed the latest of those studies when it came out last month, noting that a previous enthusiastic study of spring-training impact in Florida turned out not even to have been conducted by an economist.

After I wrote that, I got a very friendly under the circumstances email from one of the Arizona State economists, who assured me that the people behind the report had degrees and everything. He also indicated that the study had tried to avoid crediting sports with economic activity from visitors who would have come to Arizona anyway by asking survey respondents, “How strong a factor was the 2018 Cactus League in your decision to visit Arizona?”

This was very interesting, I told my correspondent. Where could I find the complete study, so I can see the full methodology?

Sorry, I was told. These reports were commissioned by the sports leagues (MLB, the NFL, and NCAA), and they were only releasing summaries, not the full reports.

This, needless to say, is a problem: Without seeing the methodology, there’s no way to tell if these studies truly show something unprecedented is going on in Arizona, or if every other study is correct that one-time and seasonal sports events don’t have any measurable economic benefit. So instead we just have the sports leagues picking and choosing which numbers to put in their press releases, with no way to tell how those figures were generated.

And if the notion of sports leagues deliberately trolling the media with cherry-picked stats is bad enough, one has to ask: Why the hell are Arizona media letting themselves get trolled? Pretty much every news outlet in the state has been running these stories at face value, without ever noting that there’s no way to evaluate the claims. That’s a dereliction of duty way worse than anything the leagues (who only have obligation to profit, not to truth) or the economists (who are just doing what their clients ask of them, though I suppose they could always refuse to take on projects with secrecy clauses on the grounds of academic openness) are doing.

Anyway, sports leagues are devious and secretive and news outlets are lazy and eager to suck up to the sports industry that provides them with many of their dwindling number of readers. Glad to see nothing has changed in my absence, in other words.

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Friday roundup: Bad spring training math, Beckham’s curse, and the opening of Megatron’s Butthole

July 27, 2018July 27, 2018 Neil deMause

No time for quips today, just the news:

A study by Arizona State University found that spring-training baseball was worth $373 million to the Arizona economy in 2018. I can’t find the actual report itself, but it looks like they came up with this number by interviewing a sample of out-of-town visitors at spring training games about how much they were spending on their trips — which would be a perfectly good methodology if not for the fact that lots of people travel to Arizona and then think “I’ll go see a baseball game while I’m there,” instead of traveling there just for baseball and thinking, “Sure, I’ll check out that big canyon, too.” Which is why when spring-training games have been canceled for labor conflicts, the observed impact on local economies has been pretty much zero. I wonder if the people who wrote this Arizona State report are actual economists, at least.
Nashville is getting an MLS franchise because it promised to build a soccer stadium, but it still might change its mind and not build a soccer stadium, and this is going to be great fun to watch if it does. (Not if you’re a Nashville MLS fan, I guess. But [insert requisite jibe about anything being more fun to watch than MLS soccer].)
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said last week that he hopes MLB expands by two more teams during his lifetime (or during his tenure as commissioner — he wasn’t exactly clear), specifically mentioning “Portland, Las Vegas, Charlotte, Nashville in the United States, certainly Montreal, maybe Vancouver, in Canada. We think there’s places in Mexico we could go over the long haul.” That got people in those cities all excited, which is presumably the point in saying such things — of course, none of those cities have MLB-ready stadiums (unless you count Olympic Stadium in Montreal), so prepare for a stadium arms race sometime before Manfred dies.
Megatron’s Butthole is now fully operational.
The estimated cost of renovating Key Arena has risen from $600 million to $700 million, but the city won’t have to pay any of that because their deal with the developers says those guys have to pay any cost overruns. Kids, when signing your next arena deal, do that.
A Florida man was arrested for setting fire to golf carts at the golf course where David Beckham wants to build his soccer stadium, but police say it was just arson and has nothing to do with the stadium proposal. Except insomuch as David Beckham is cursed, okay? If construction on this place ever begins, I fully expect it to be interrupted by all its milk cows going dry.

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Blue Jays get $60m in spring-training subsidies, mayor sobs “I could not be more proud”

April 25, 2018 Neil deMause

The Toronto Blue Jays owners have been trying to get public subsidies for renovations to their spring-training facility in Dunedin for a couple of years now, and it looks like they’ve finally hit the jackpot, with Pinellas County agreeing to kick in $41.7 million in hotel taxes to go along with $5.6 million from the city and $13.6 million from the state:

The unanimous vote by the County Commission was enough to bring Mayor Julie Ward Bujalski to tears.

“I could not be more proud,” Bujalski said Tuesday. “We have a huge quality of life here and no one thing makes our quality of life. It’s a combination of things. Spring training is part of that.”

I mean, sure! I would never have heard of Dunedin if the Jays didn’t play there in the spring, so there’s clearly some benefit to having the team in town one month out of the year. It is almost certainly not $60.9 million worth — previous studies trying to show that it would be ended up double- and sextuple-counting spring training visitors in terms of their economic impact — but it’s definitely part of a combination of things. And the county also gives hotel-tax money to things like the Clearwater aquarium and public sports complexes and the Blue Jays are going to let high school teams use their stadium some and hey, get off their case, okay? If “the government throws tax money at all kinds of things, might as well throw it at one more that benefits one of the most profitable sports leagues on the planet” isn’t a reason to be brought to tears, I don’t know what is.

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