In case you haven’t noticed by the flood of posts on this site of late, we’re in the midst of a sports subsidy demand boom, with a record number of team owners seeking public money for either new or renovated stadiums and arenas. And that’s been especially the case with baseball, where in the last three years alone we’ve seen: the Cleveland Guardians owner get $285 million for stadium upgrades; the Milwaukee Brewers owner get $471 million in renovation money; the Arizona Diamondbacks owner demand either a new or renovated stadium, they still can’t decide; the Baltimore Orioles owner get $600 million in stadium renovation money plus $150 million in tax breaks and development rights plus a potentially bottomless pool of money for future upgrades; the Oakland A’s owner get $600 million toward a new stadium in Las Vegas; the Kansas City Royals owner push for $1 billion in public money for a new stadium; the Tampa Bay Rays owner demand $1.5 billion in cash and tax breaks and discounted land; and the Chicago White Sox owner demand $2 billion toward a new downtown stadium project.
And now, the Riverfront Times has discovered, we can add another baseball baron to the list: Bill DeWitt Jr., owner of the St. Louis Cardinals, whose son and team president Bill DeWitt III tells the alt-weekly that the family’s 18-year-old stadium, built with the help of about $130 million in state funds, county forgivable loans, and city tax breaks, will need a “significant capital infusion” in two to five years, and guess who’ll get to pay for it?
It’s “too early” to detail what the improvements would look like, he says. “Our goal would be to handle whatever back of the house things need to happen and to fix [them], as well as probably create some cool and interesting new features for fans.”
The owners would likely seek public money for that, he adds.
When asked how much such a project would cost, DeWitt III says it would likely be in a similar range to recent Milwaukee Brewers and Baltimore Orioles projects. Those are $500 million and $600 million taxpayer investments, respectively.
DeWitt III didn’t go into detail about how the money would be raised, likely because he and his dad haven’t figured that part out yet; and likewise didn’t go into detail about how they expect to pin the tab on taxpayers when their lease runs through 2041 and prohibits them from moving during that time. But this is clearly a trial balloon to anchor expectations of how big a public tithe the DeWitts are expecting, so that if the ultimate ask gets whittled down to, say, $450 million, it looks like a relative bargain for taxpayers.
The Riverfront Times article on this (backed by the River City Journalism Fund, because that’s the only way serious journalism happens these days) runs 4,600 words, and includes in-depth look at the history of Cardinals stadium shenanigans, including tidbits about:
- The DeWitts succeeded in getting public money for their current stadium by threatening to move across the Mississippi River to Illinois.
- Though the DeWitts claim to have paid 90% of the construction costs of that stadium, stadium cost expert Judith Grant Long of the University of Michigan says it’s more like 79% — and that’s before counting city tax breaks, infrastructure costs, or spending on municipal services, or public subsidies for the stadium’s accompanying Ballpark Village.
- That Ballpark Village, which was supposed to “revitalize downtown,” has instead helped lead to the closure of several local restaurants by creating new dining establishments that competed with them for fan spending, including the two-story Cardinals Nation bar/restaurant owned by the DeWitts.
And more! It’s well worth a read, for a reminder of how journalism can still work, at least when you have a crowdfunded nonprofit giving reporters the time to do actual research.
As for why the surge in recent baseball stadium subsidy demands, which will reach one-third of the league when the next owner shows up with their hand out — I’ll take a stab and guess the Pittsburgh Pirates, though there are lots of contenders — there are a bunch of factors: lots of teams with stadiums built in the ’90s and ’00s with soon-to-be-expiring leases, a feeding frenzy to get subsidy deals done before MLB expands and takes two move-threat target cities off the table, and just the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses effect you get when some rich guys get suitcases full of public cash and their frenemies see it and decide they should get the same. And so long as owners’ demands are successful — and most of them have been, though the jury’s still out for the Royals, White Sox, and D-Backs — there’s no reason this trend is going to stop, ever. Get comfortable, you and I still have a lot of quality time to spend together over the coming years/decades/centuries.
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