Category: St. Louis Cardinals

Friday roundup: Sacramento celebrates A’s move with new golf simulators, KC residents say cap public stadium funds at one-third

access_time personNeil deMause

Sports economist Victor Matheson and I were both on a radio show this week to discuss the Cleveland Browns and Kansas City Royals and Chiefs stadium situations — you can listen to it here, but first check out the rest of this week’s stadium and arena news, it’ll be quick, I promise:

  • There’s a “major economic boost” coming to Sacramento now that the Oakland A’s are relocating there temporarily, reports KCRA-TV: A new brunch-and-golf-simulators venue is opening across the street! (It was going to open there anyway, but now that the A’s are coming, the owner is trying to open it earlier.) Also, the mayor is “in discussions” with three new restaurants! Feel the excitement!
  • There is no excitement in St. Louis, where the Cardinals are still technically in the playoff hunt, but fans in the best baseball city in the world don’t want to watch .500 baseball, it turns out, or even buy hot dogs. “I love being the hot dog lady,” says hot dog lady Karen Boschert. “I’ve cut my staff down. My prices are reasonable. You can take my food into the stadium.” Maybe she could pivot her sales pitch to point out that you can buy her food and not bring it into the stadium? Just an idea.
  • Pollsters in Missouri decided to ask an unusual question of local voters: not whether taxpayers should pay toward new stadiums for the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals, but how much. The average was two-thirds team, one-sixth state, one-sixth city and county, which is kind of arbitrary and doesn’t account for whether the public would get back any share of revenues or community benefits or anything, but sure it sounds fair. Ish. Time will tell if the team owners come back with “zero-thirds team, poke in the eye with a sharp stick public.”
  • Most of the San Antonio residents who testified at a Wednesday hearing on a $160 million Missions minor-league baseball stadium “voiced concerns and skepticism,” according to Fox San Antonio. For actual quotes we have to turn to KSAT, which notes that a local arts and social justice activist said, “This project is all about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer,” while a resident of a housing complex that would be demolished to make way for the stadium said, “I would not be able to get somewhere else, and I would end up in the street yet again.”
  • Chicago’s city budget is facing a $982.4 million shortfall, and Mayor Brandon Johnson says, “There are sacrifices that will be made,” but not new Bears and White Sox stadiums, those are important even if they would cost the city upwards of $1.2 billion and $2 billion respectively, sacrifices are for little people.
  • Team-funded studies of a Philadelphia 76ers arena say it would be great, other studies show it would be a disaster; the Philadelphia Inquirer editorial board says it’s up to the mayor and city council to figure out where the truth lies in the middle!
  • Another group of developers unrelated to either the Royals or the city has come up with renderings for a new downtown baseball stadium, and guys, you should at least look up how many players are on the field for a baseball game.
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St. Louis Cardinals exec: We’re not asking yet for $500m+ in renovations to 18-year-old stadium, but wait for it

access_time personNeil deMause

Not sure how this slipped under my radar last week, but: St. Louis Cardinals president and nepo baby Bill DeWitt III said Thursday that he’ll be asking the city, county, and state for a “big infusion of capital” to upgrade Busch Stadium, which is (checks calendar) 18 years old:

DeWitt said the Cardinals don’t have a specific request of the public support the franchise might seek for a revamp of Busch Stadium, but that officials would approach the city, county and state as plans are developed for the project.

“We’ll sit down with the appropriate folks at the right times, but it’s premature to say ‘oh, the Cardinals are asking for something,’” Dewitt said. “We want to have those conversations with the mayor, county executive, whomever else – the state – as we sort of formulate a game plan for committing to downtown for really forever.”

DeWitt further said that the money would be needed in the next three to five years, so while it may be premature to say “oh, the Cardinals are asking for something,” it is not at all premature to say “oh, the Cardinals are about to ask for something.”

If all this sounds familiar, it’s because DeWitt the Younger said all of the exact same stuff in April, down to the “significant capital infusion” line, though back then he said it was needed in the next two to five years, so either he’s scaling back his expectations a bit or he just needs a better continuity supervisor. Back then he name-checked the Milwaukee Brewers and Baltimore Orioles renovations that are expected to be in the $500-600 million range, so presumably that’s still the dollar figure on the table, though by the time we hit the 3-5 year mark the benchmarks could be higher, who knows?

Back in 2002, right after St. Louis approved about $130 million in public money for construction of this stadium, voters approved a referendum requiring any city funding for sports facilities to go to a public vote, so presumably that would be on the table for Cardinals renovations as well. Unless the DeWitt clan figures out a way to call the city share of the money “infrastructure funding” or something that doesn’t trigger the stadium language, of course — it would be premature to assume otherwise.

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Friday roundup: Rays promise “intimate” stadium with ginormous upper deck, Cleveland running out of tax money to pay for Cavs and Guardians upgrades

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy end of the week! Surely some other news of note happened in recent days, but you chose to come to this website, so you’re looking for different news, maybe some bleak Utah minor-league baseball renderings? And that is but the beginning of the smorgasbord of stadium and arena items on tap! (Yes, you can have a smorgasbord on tap, I’m a professional wordsmith, you’ll just have to trust me on this one.)

  • Reporting live from Tampa Bay Rays owner Stu Sternberg’s colon, the Tampa Bay Times’ Marc Topkin has a love letter to the Rays’ new stadium design, gushing about how much more “intimate” it will be thanks to only having 30,000 seats and “70% of the seats in the lower two of three seating levels.” Getting rid of the worst seats doesn’t actually make the view from the remaining seats any better — getting rid of intervening luxury seating might accomplish that, but there’s no indication Sternberg plans to do that — and having 30% of the seats in a third deck actually sounds like a lot for a 30,000-seat stadium (the Pittsburgh Pirates‘ stadium holds 38,000 and doesn’t have a third deck at all), but team officials blurted all this stuff out and Topkin wrote it down and printed it verbatim, that’s the job of a journalist, right? (UPDATE: FoS reader Andrew Ross points out that the Times actually squeezed this story onto its front page alongside the other notable news of the day.)
  • Cleveland’s stadium agency is on the hook for nearly all upkeep of the Guardians stadium and Cavaliers arena, and the alcohol and cigarette taxes that are supposed to pay for them are running dry, so someone is going to need to find more money to spend on the teams. (Right now Cavs owner Dan Gilbert is fronting his team’s arena costs, and the city and county will have to pay him back.) Some of the work includes upgraded elevators and escalators for the Cavs, kitchen equipment upgrades and new in-stadium TV screens for the Guardians, and a special film on the new glass wall at the Cavs arena to keep birds from flying into it which will have to be replaced every five years, not all of which really seem like “capital repairs” to me, but from the sound of things whoever negotiated these leases on behalf of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County did an absolutely horrible job that is allowing the team owners to bill the public for any and all upgrades, can lawyers be found guilty of malpractice? Make a note to check into that.
  • Speaking of malpractice, the Baltimore Banner managed to write about the Ravens‘ new stadium upgrades with only the briefest of mentions that state taxpayers are picking up the entire $430 million tab, and not mentioning at all that Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti can avail himself of another $170 million or much more after that. The headline the Banner chose to roll with: “M&T Bank Stadium’s premium areas will soon reach new level of luxury.” Turns out corporate-run nonprofit journalism isn’t necessarily any better than corporate-run for-profit journalism, maybe we need a better model?
  • I’ve been sadly neglecting the throwdown in Indianapolis between Indy Eleven owner Ersal Ozdemir, who was planning to build a new stadium for his USL-but-wants-to-be-MLS team with $112 million in state money, and Mayor Joe Hogsett, who now wants to use the money for a different soccer stadium on a different site for a different wannabe MLS ownership group. The City-County Council is set to vote on authorizing legislation for a new “professional sports development area” (read: super-TIF district) on June 3; if it’s approved, it would then go to the state legislature for a final vote.
  • New York Mets owner Steve Cohen’s plan to build a casino in his stadium parking lot, despite it being public parkland, is likely dead after state senator Jessica Ramos said she won’t support any casino project in her district when 75% of residents say they don’t want one. The state legislature could still pass casino authorizing legislation over the local representative’s objections, but that rarely happens, and anyway the state casino location board is unlikely to hand out a casino license to a project on such shaky ground, so probably New Yorkers will get to gamble somewhere other than the Mets parking lots, which Cohen is vowing will remain parking lots until the sun burns out, because it’s the prerogative of a sports team owner to throw a hissy fit.
  • A stairway flooded during heavy rains at the St. Louis Cardinals stadium, time to build them a new one, that’s how it works, I don’t make the rules!
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Friday roundup: Throw another $75m on the Rays subsidy fire, Phoenix mayor opposes neo-Coyotes arena tax

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s Friday again! I tried asking Google AI some stadium questions to see if it would return entertainingly daft answers, but I didn’t get much, so just eat your rocks and let’s get on with the week’s news remainders:

  • If an estimated $1.5 billion in cash, tax kickbacks, and land breaks for the Tampa Bay Rays didn’t sound like a lot already, turns out the $155 million that Rays owner Stu Sternberg wants to pay for 65 acres of land isn’t really $155 million, because he’d be making the payments in installments over 30 years. (St. Pete Assistant City Administrator Tom Greene estimates that this would knock about one-third off the value of the payments, making them worth $103 million; I get more like $80 million, but it depends on the exact payment schedule.) “I think that if you are not accounting for inflation in the agreement, we’re not getting the value that it says there,” said city councilmember Lisset Hanewicz, and, nope, inflation is not quite the same as devaluation for present value, but good enough for government work.
  • Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego says she “does not support using taxpayer funds, including property tax abatement, for sports arenas,” which is a blow to once-and-wannabe-future Arizona Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo’s plan to build a new arena in Phoenix using a “theme park” sales tax surcharge. “Tax abatement is essentially what establishing a theme park district does — so per the statement, she is opposed,” a Gallego spokesperson clarified — I’m still not 100% convinced that’s what it does, but either way, it’s going to make it tough for Meruelo to pursue his arena plans, at least unless the state legislature passes its bill to block city officials from having any say in such matters.
  • The city of Santa Clara and the San Francisco 49ers owners have resolved their lease dispute after, as the San Francisco Chronicle put it, “the five-member City Council majority, which was elected with the help of millions in campaign contributions from 49ers CEO Jed York, approved the deal 5-2 in a closed session Monday night.” The details are too detailed to figure out exactly who came out how far ahead in the agreement, but given the above you can probably make an educated guess.
  • Voters in Eugene, Oregon have overwhelmingly rejected spending $15 million toward a new stadium for the minor-league baseball Emeralds, who have to move from their current stadium, which is only 14 years old, because MLB is making them as part of its “force all minor-league cities to build new stadiums” plan. Team officials had previously said they would move the team if the stadium measure didn’t pass; General Manager Allan Benavides said following the vote results that he didn’t know what the team owners’ next steps would be: “We’ll have to get really creative if we want to stay here, or find a new home.” Or maybe MLB could give them a waiver to keep playing in their current stadium, though that would only help the Emeralds and their fans, not MLB, so don’t hold your breath there.
  • John Mozena of the Center for Economic Accountability (the makers of these stickers) wrote an op-ed for the Tampa Bay Times yesterday on why stadium subsidies in St. Petersburg or anywhere are a bad idea, which provides a good overview of the economic arguments and more than a few bon mots — I’m partial to “stadiums don’t create more economic activity in a city any more than cutting a pizza into more slices creates more dinner for everyone,” but feel free to choose your own favorite.
  • The St. Louis Cardinals suck, which means it’s time for a news report about how hot dog trucks outside the stadium aren’t seeing as much business. Are hot dog trucks on the other side of town doing better business as a result? That’s too hard to report, you’ll have to do your own research, apparently.
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Cardinals owner to demand upgrades to 18-year-old stadium that could cost Missouri taxpayers $600m

access_time personNeil deMause

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

access_time personNeil 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:

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With college football season on the brink, what can we learn from sports leagues that have restarted play?

access_time personNeil deMause

College football’s Mountain West conference canceled its fall season yesterday, with the possibility of holding it next spring instead, and the “Power Five” conferences (Atlantic Coast Conference, Big 12, the Big Ten, Pac-12, and Southeastern) are reportedly set to meet today to discuss doing the same. This has led to a flurry of reactions from across the sports and political world as to whether it’s a good idea to play contact sports during a raging pandemic (players: yes, if there are safety protocols; doctors: maybe no if you don’t want players to risk lasting heart problems; Donald Trump: blarrrrrrgh!), with lots more tweets surely to follow.

This makes it a good time to take a step back and see what we’ve learned so far from sports leagues that have restarted since Covid took hold this spring, and what it can tell us about how to proceed from here. Unfurl the data points:

That is, honestly, not a terrible track record overall — back in the spring, it wasn’t clear that any sports leagues would be able to finish out their seasons, so a range from successful restarts to “limping along but might make it to the finish line” is better than expected. And there are definitely some lessons that we can learn from the spread of results:

  • If you want to play sports without an outbreak of virus, start with less virus. I mean, duh: The best way not to get infected is not to be around people who are infected, and in places like Taiwan, players could pretty much be sharing forks without much worry about contracting Covid. Likewise, even if NHL players busted out of their Canadian bubbles and hit the casinos (which are open), the level of community spread there is low enough that they’d stand a good chance of rolling the (metaphorical, virus-related) dice and coming away lucky.
  • Bubbles work. There was tons of skepticism that the NBA could pull off its bubble in the middle of the world’s biggest Covid hot spot without tons of infections, but so far it’s working well. Of course, we’re not even two weeks into the resumption of the season, and the entire two-month playoffs are still to go, so it remains to be seen if the league can keep its protective wrapping intact through October, especially as players start going stir-crazy. (Though player families will be allowed to enter the bubble at the end of the first round on August 30, after they’ve quarantined for two weeks.)
  • Testing works, sort of. The Marlins and Cardinals outbreaks have gotten lots of attention as a sign that MLB didn’t really have a plan for its bubble-less season — and, indeed, there are lots of signs that it didn’t, especially when the decision on whether the Marlins would play after positive tests at one point came down to texting their shortstop to see what he thought. And the uncertainty on when it was safe for teams to resume play has exposed all kinds of issues with how to interpret test results, thanks to everything from false positives and false negatives to the problem that it can take a few days for someone to test positive even after contracting the virus. But on another level, it’s a success: MLB has been aggressively testing its players — to the point where there are concerns that athletes are soaking up testing capacity and causing delays in test results for civilians — and managed to keep any outbreaks from spreading beyond those two teams. That may be the best you can hope for in a non-bubble league.
  • Actually playing sports doesn’t seem to be a huge risk. Unless I’ve missed something, there remain zero cases of athletes catching the coronavirus from opponents during games, even in higher-contact sports like soccer. (Early speculation that the Marlins got infected from the Atlanta Braves‘ catchers appears to have been incorrect — the Braves players never tested positive, though they did have Covid-like symptoms — and it’s more likely someone picked it up by going out for coffee or drinking at the hotel bar.) That actually jibes well with research that shows that “Successful Infection = Exposure to Virus x Time“; it’s simply hard to get infected if you’re only in close proximity to another player for a couple of minutes at a time. What’s super-dangerous is being in a clubhouse (or hotel bar) with teammates for extended periods, as witness how both the Marlins and Cardinals outbreaks spread like wildfire through those teams, even taking out the Philadelphia Phillies‘ visiting clubhouse attendant who shared indoor breathing space with the infected Marlins.
  • Indoor sports, and those with more contact, are less charted territory: The only good examples we have so far for indoor sports transmission are the NBA and NHL, which have barely begun play, and which are taking place in virus-free bubbles, so we haven’t seen how an outbreak would play out there. Likewise, nobody’s played any American football since the pandemic began; Australian Rules Football teams have been forced to bubble in hotels and move games to less virus-y parts of Australia, but don’t seem to have suffered major outbreaks among players, at least.
  • Getting Covid can be really, really serious, even for young, healthy athletes. As noted above, one of the concerns pushing college football to consider postponements is that doctors are noting an increase in myocarditis — basically, inflamed heart muscle — among college athletes, something that could be a passing thing, or could be a chronic problem. Boston Red Sox pitcher Eduardo Rodriguez has already been ruled out for the entire 2020 season thanks to Covid-related heart problems, and while team execs say they’re “very optimistic” he’ll make a full recovery, with a disease that’s only existed in humans for less than a year, they’re really only just guessing.

That’s still very much a work in progress, and lots more questions remain unanswered, including what on earth MLB should do if one of its teams suffers a Marlins- or Cardinals-style outbreak in the middle of the playoffs. Baseball officials are reportedly considering setting up bubbles for its postseason, though they’d still have to figure out how to have teams and their traveling parties quarantine first for two weeks; also, right now the only advantage teams finishing with better regular-season records would get in the expanded playoffs would be home-field advantage, which wouldn’t mean much if no teams were playing at home. As for college football, it’s hard to say what the risks are until someone starts playing and we see how many people turn up sick, though the indicators for a sport with tons of teams and huge rosters and no bubbles sure don’t seem too promising.

Still, there are some lessons here, and they’re reasonably hopeful ones: If you can manage to play in a nation with low virus levels, or keep your players and staff from ever interacting with the outside world, you can play sports, and maybe even allow fans in, relatively safely — though “relatively” is obviously less reassuring if you wind up being one of the few players getting sick. Really, the most important message here is the same one as for the rest of our pandemic world: If you want to reopen things that are important to you, keep wearing masks and stay away from house parties. The best way not to contract Covid remains having fewer infectious people to catch it from, so if it means shutting down restaurants and bars to keep schools open — or shutting down college football to allow other activities to proceed, or even shutting down everything until viral levels are down to near-zero — that’s the kind of calculus we need to be making right now. It worked for New Zealand!

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St. Louis Cardinals get $1m from big-business pandemic relief program you’ve never heard of

access_time personNeil deMause

There are an awful lot of government programs to provide financial help to both individuals and businesses during the pandemic crash, and the nooks and crannies of the multiple relief bills passed by Congress contain even more. A bunch of these are “small business” programs, and as we’ve seen before, the feds define a whole lot of things as small businesses, including sports teams like the Los Angeles Lakers, whose owners applied for $4.6 million in refundable loans via the Payroll Protection Program before giving it back when they realized it looked bad. And now, hey look, the owners of the St. Louis Cardinals have found another program that they can get cash from!

It turns out that our beloved baseball team has also discovered a way to help itself to a share of the very same federal CARES COVID-19 relief dollars, but under a separate tax credit provision established for companies that don’t qualify for the PPP.

The tax credits portion of the CARES act has flown under the radar. Under it, a qualified company can receive taxpayer dollars indirectly through a reduction of its employer-match share of social security (FICA) payments. A company gets forgiven up to $5,000 per employee in taxes it would normally have owed, in exchange for maintaining a certain level of its workforce.

The Riverfront Times’ Ray Hartmann goes on to note that while the Cardinals wouldn’t divulge the total tax credit it was applying for, with 280 non-player employees listed on their website, they’d likely be looking at “substantially more than $1 million in CARES tax savings.” Further investigation reveals that while the Employee Retention Credit, as it’s known, is technically formulated as a “tax credit” on FICA payments (likely in order to make it non-taxable income), as a refundable tax credit it can be more than a company is actually paying in FICA — so in practice it’s just a $5,000 check for every employee earning at least $10,000 between March 12, 2020 and January 1, 2021, making “more than $1 million” a decent ballpark figure.

So, how evil is this, on scale of 1 to Sauron? From what I can tell, the ERC isn’t a set pool of money like the PPP; any employer is eligible, and it’s not first-come-first-served. So at least the Cardinals owners getting cash isn’t denying funds to some other more needy recipient. (Unless you count future Americans as a whole as needy, since we’ll be the ones ultimately paying off the trillions of dollars being borrowed to pay for all this.) And while Hartmann writes:

This is not just a case of a company taking all the normal tax breaks to which it is entitled. Everyone has a right to do that. No one needs to tip the government. This is about a professional sports franchise actively pursuing tax breaks expressly meant for folks who are suffering.

…that’s not exactly true, because this is actually a tax break expressly meant for businesses, the bigger the better. While you can make a case that this is encouraging companies to retain employees — hence the name of the provision — you could also argue that since employers are unlikely to keep on unneeded workers just to get a $5,000 tax break, it seems likely to result in a lot of businesses just getting subsidies to retain people they’d be keeping on anyway.

In fact, the bigger concern here is the construction of the Employee Retention Credit in the first place, which seems geared to benefit large corporations the most, given that it’s available to businesses of any size but not to self-employed individuals, even though the self-employed do pay the employer portion of business taxes. If a billionaire sports team owner takes advantage of a government program designed to take advantage of a global crisis to funnel money to billionaires, who is really to blame here? Crony capitalism? The Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling? Society as a whole? This fighting evil business really would be a whole lot easier if you could just drop a magic ring into a lava vent to solve all your problems.

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Friday roundup: Team owners rework tax bills and leases, Twins CEO claims team is winning (?) thanks to new stadium, and other privileges of the very rich

access_time personNeil deMause

Tons more stadium and arena news to get to this week, so let’s dive right in without preamble:

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