Category: Texas Rangers

Manfred: All-Star Game hosting is a reward for handing public money to MLB, capisce?

access_time personNeil deMause

Last night was the MLB All-Star Game — or so I hear, like everyone else I know I didn’t watch once I saw the hideous uniforms they’d be wearing — which was held at the Texas Rangers‘ home park in Arlington, the only stadium ever built solely because its predecessor lacked air-conditioning. The Rangers are also unique among MLB teams in not holding a Pride Night, and someone asked league commissioner Rob Manfred what exactly was up with that, to which Mumbles responded:

“There are a whole host of factors that go into deciding who’s going to get an All-Star Game, and I don’t view whether you have a Pride Night or not as a outcome-determinative issue,” baseball commissioner Rob Manfred said before Tuesday night’s game at Globe Life Field. “It’s an issue. We look at all those issues and make the best decision and try to give it to the place that we think is going to kind of be the best in terms of marketing of the game.”…

“I think it’s really important to remember here — here there’s a massive public investment in terms of creating a great new facility and that obviously is an important consideration in terms of awarding All-Star Games.”

We look at all the issues! Especially the number of zeroes on the taxpayer check! And this one had a whole lot of those, what’s a raised middle finger to LGBTQ fans compared to that?

In case you’re wondering, next year’s All-Star Games is set for the Atlanta Braves stadium, which also got a pile of public cash (around $300 million compared to Arlington’s $450 million), and which was all set to host the 2021 game until MLB moved it following protests around Georgia’s new hyper-restrictive voting law, only to have it re-awarded for 2025 when the league quietly changed its mind. In 2026, the game will be played in Philadelphia, which has been waiting patiently since opening its own publicly subsidized stadium way back in 2004, which will make it as old when the All-Stars arrive as the Rangers’ old stadium was when its replacement was approved.

All of which is a choice, certainly, and a longstanding one: Manfred may have also said that “a significant factor should be when did you have a game the last time,” but an even more significant factor is whether it’s needed as a carrot to get cities to approve stadium funding — both the Colorado Rockies and Seattle Mariners have hosted the game twice since any of the Baltimore Orioles, Chicago Cubs, Los Angeles Angels, Oakland A’s, Tampa Bay Rays, or Toronto Blue Jays have hosted, and you 100% know that in most of those cases MLB is waiting to be able to use the game as a prize for upgraded facilities.

Manfred said recently about the Atlanta voting-rights flipflop that “one of the things we’ve learned over time is that the more we stay out of political issues, the better off we are.” Except for the political issue of public funding for stadiums, that’s core to their business model, don’t mess with that or you’ll only get to watch those ugly All-Star uniforms on TV, see?

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Friday roundup: More Bears $2.6B stadium subsidy fallout, plus Indianapolis switches soccer horses

access_time personNeil deMause

Before we get to the news: I hope that those of you who enjoy using dark mode are enjoying the new dark mode plugin I installed this week (DarkMySite, if anyone cares), which seems, unlike the old one, to actually mostly work. If you haven’t tried it out and want to, click the little moon symbol at bottom right and take a load off your eyes!

Also, a special shoutout to a couple of FoS readers (unnamed, but you know who you are) who either sent in a large lump sum of cash or upped their monthly Patreon pledge for no reason at all in the last week. As I forget if I explicitly mentioned, I quit my previous day job last month, which should give me more time to devote to this site; and while I do have a new regular gig that seems promising, every step towards making this site self-sustaining is hugely helpful, so a huge thanks to all you supporters, at any level. (And for those who haven’t yet taken the plunge: There are still about a dozen more Vaportecture art prints, get ’em before they’re gone!)

Okay, enough of that, time’s a-wasting and there’s a whole week of news remainders to dig through:

  • The fallout continues from the Chicago Bears owners’ $2.6 billion stadium subsidy demand (see the updates for the math behind the updated figure), with so much more today that we’re going to have to break out the second level of bullet points:
    • Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson says it’s no contradiction that he said during his mayoral race that the city shouldn’t spend billions of dollars on a Bears stadium when there were “dozens of other urgent needs” and now thinks this is a great idea, on the grounds that he, a “middle child” from a “working-class family,” got to talk to billionaires and make sure they put some “skin in the game” and also the stadium will be “transformational” and “the Bears are staying in Chicago” and “the type of economic development this project brings” and “14 more acres of space for our children in the city of Chicago to benefit from.” Is all that the best use of $2.6 billion? I’m sorry, we’re out of time for questions, thank you for coming.
    • The Chicago Sun-Times editorial board did get a chance to ask Bears CEO Kevin Warren what would happen if the team got its $1.225 billion in taxpayer money for the stadium and nobody came up with another $1.175 billion to build new underground garages and park space, and Warren replied: “I’m not going to think negatively about that now. … If that’s the conclusion that … you want to reach now, then you can say that. I’m being positive about it … and being very transparent as far as what we need from the different three phases with this stadium project.” So, optional when projecting the city’s costs, not optional in the sense that you don’t want to go there in terms of what happens if the city doesn’t come up with another billion-plus dollars, got it.
    • Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker reiterated yesterday that he’s agin’ the whole kit and kaboodle, saying: “I’m skeptical of the proposal that was put forward and I’m even more skeptical of the ability to get enough votes for it in the General Assembly.”
    • Chicago Sun-Times columnist David Roeder suggests that if the Bears (and White Sox) want public money, they should give the public a cut of ownership of the team, though some stick-in-the-mud (okay, it’s me) points out that sports leagues love nothing more than to head off the possibility of public ownership, even blocking one-time San Diego Padres owner Joan Kroc from gifting her team to the city of San Diego on the grounds that that just isn’t done.
  • Way back in 2019, the Indiana state legislature approved giving $112 million toward a new soccer stadium for the Indy Eleven soccer team, provided owner Ersal Ozdemir got his team promoted from the USL to MLS. At the time, this seemed like an easy enough lift, since all the other kids were doing it, but it hasn’t happened yet, and now apparently Indianapolis mayor Joe Hogsett has gotten tired of waiting, announcing that he’s putting in a bid with another ownership group to get an MLS expansion team, using the same tax kickbacks that Ozdemir was looking to get. Ozdemir, who already broke ground on his stadium site last year, though it’s unclear if he’s actually started construction, is naturally enough extremely unhappy with this latest news, accusing Hogsett of “preparing to walk away” from “years of good-faith negotiations” and instead give the public money to some other soccer guy instead of him. Will there be lawsuits? Stay tuned!
  • A “hotel entrepreneur and former longtime Kansas City resident” got space on the Kansas City Star op-ed page to argue that Kansas Citians who voted against a tax subsidy for Royals and Chiefs stadiums missed an opportunity to become like Denver, where “the Coors Field development inspired a stunning downtown renaissance” where “dozens of restaurants, bars and clubs opened to serve crowds before and after the 81 hometown games each year.” I once again wish that I still had a copy of the chart someone once showed me that indicated that most of the development starts in Denver’s LoDo district actually preceded the construction of the Rockies stadium; if I can dig it up, I’ll post it here as an update.
  • The Arizona state senate is considering a bill to allow the state to approve “theme park districts” like the one Alex Meruelo wants for a Coyotes 2.0 arena, without city governments weighing in. (It did so by virtue of hollowing out an already-state-house-approved bill to give first responders access to treatment for PTSD and inserting theme park district language instead, which Arizona calls a “strike everything amendment” but “zombie bill” is a much better name.) This could make it easier for Meruelo to have the state levy a sales tax surcharge in his arena district that would be kicked back to him for construction costs; we’ll have to wait and see what the state senate thinks of it.
  • Buffalo Bills owners Terry and Kim Pegula may sell up to a quarter of their team to help raise money for their share of a new stadium, after construction costs have soared by a reported $600 million. In case you needed more evidence that many if not most stadiums are money losers that are only built so that team owners can cash subsidy checks, here’s your Exhibit A.
  • Arlington, Texas is spending $4.2 million to upgrade the Texas Rangers‘ old stadium, which the team moved out of after 2019 into a new publicly funded one, because, according to Arlington Mayor Jim Ross, “it’s a regional injection of all economic development.” The stadium is currently home to the XFL Arlington Renegades and occasional concerts.
  • What more could happen to Montreal’s Olympic Stadium after costing $1 billion to build and hundreds of millions more to fix the roof on and now $870 million to fix the roof on again? How about catching fire and needing $40 million to fix the damage? You gotta wonder if the Big Owe is just trying to put itself out of its misery at this point, but Montreal officials aren’t getting the message.
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Friday roundup: Bears rumors! Titans vaportecture! Coyotes still about to announce something, sometime!

access_time personNeil deMause

Another week in the books! Will “in the books” soon become an anachronism, once there are no more physical books to keep? Or will “books” just become a term for long documents, and future English speakers will wonder why the phrase isn’t “in the spreadsheets”? Has this already happened and I didn’t notice? Gen Z readers, say your piece!

Moving on to the news:

  • Chicago Bears president Kevin Warren said, “What intrigues me about downtown is I strongly believe Chicago is the finest city in all of the world,” and now everybody thinks this means the Bears would prefer to build a stadium in downtown Chicago rather than it just being a savvy negotiator trying to create leverage for a stadium wherever he can get one paid for by somebody else.
  • Virginia’s billion-dollar-plus subsidy for a Washington Capitals and Wizards arena in Alexandria may now turn on Metro public transit funding, as Senate majority leader Scott Surovell says “making sure Metro is fully funded is a precondition before we have any kind of dialogue about the arena” while Gov. Glenn Youngkin retorted that he wants to see a Metro business plan first because “they’ve got overhead levels that far exceed any of their benchmarks.” Hey, you know what would help fill Metro’s $750 million budget deficit? Here’s a hint, it rhymes with “bot giving a billion dollars to the local sports team owner,” hth.
  • New Tennessee Titans vaportecture! This time the (imaginary) camera moves but the (pretend) people don’t, so we get a horrorscape of fans frozen in place with their arms flung skywards for all eternity! All except for the rock band that is playing forever to a perpetually frozen audience, and the video boards that show moving replays of a forever-static game, this is the most terrifying Black Mirror episode ever.
  • Former Utah Jazz majority owner (and current minority owner) Gail Miller is buying up land around the site of her proposed baseball stadium for her proposed MLB expansion team, hey at least Salt Lake City has more TV households than Las Vegas.
  • The public cost of the new Chattanooga Lookouts stadium has soared from $80 million to $139 million in the last 17 months, which will be fine so long as an extra $500 million worth of development appears from out of nowhere and pays new taxes that won’t cannibalize existing ones, this is fine.
  • “The Orlando Magic are making millions by selling naming rights to a building the team doesn’t even own,” yup, that’ll happen.
  • “[Arizona] Coyotes on ‘precipice’ of announcing location organization will focus on for new arena,” reports an Arizona Sports headline, then the story itself doesn’t have anyone at all saying the word “precipice” with regard to anything, wut.
  • Baseball stadiums built since the early 1990s have crazy-far upper deck seats, reports Travis Sawchik for The Score, will that change with the latest wave of new buildings? Populous architect Zach Allee says there’s a tradeoff that’s “kind of like a balloon” where “if I say I want to be closer to the field horizontally, it ends up pushing the seats up higher,” which isn’t really how geometry or balloons work, and then Sawchik touts the Texas Rangers‘ new stadium for moving the last row of its upper deck 33 feet closer than the last row in its old stadium, but actually they did this by just removing the last 8,000 seats, this is actually a terrible article, I’m sorry I linked to it.

I’m traveling next week, posts may appear at sporadic and/or unexpected times. Have a good long holiday weekend, or as our Toronto readers know it, Monday.

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Here is your Texas Rangers opening day superspreader porn

access_time personNeil deMause

The Texas Rangers held their home opener yesterday, as promised at full capacity at their new (if you don’t count the games last season with no fans or the NLCS and World Series with some fans) stadium. Did every news outlet on earth give it in-depth coverage, so that readers could google in awe and/or horror at Texans packed cheek to jowl watching sports during a pandemic? With sweet, sweet clicks at stake, what do you think?

Let’s start with the New York Times, which used an Associated Press drone (I think) to capture people waiting to get in to the park in socially distanced lines, sort of:

You can’t tell all that much from that image. For one thing, are those fans wearing masks, as the Rangers and MLB said would be required? Or ignoring the mask requirement, as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott encouraged them to do? Let’s take a closer look inside the stadium:

That’s not a lot of masks! Of course, there is a loophole to the mask requirement at ballgames this year, which is that you can remove them while actively eating and drinking. This photo, though, as should immediately be apparent, was taken during the national anthem, when presumably most people are not eating or drinking. “Sorry, I can’t put my mask on, I’m busy chewing on patriotism!”

Let’s next try the opposite end of the news spectrum from the New York Times, KULR-TV in Billings, Montana, which was likewise all over the story with an item headlined “Maskless fans pack sold out stadium in stunning display,” though it turned out just to link to a CNN video:

That’s epidemiologist Michael Osterholm in the corner, about to say that “already we’re seeing the surge” in places like Michigan and Minnesota despite those states ramping up vaccinations, saying in the next six to ten weeks, we’re going to have more viral spread thanks to reopenings and not yet enough shots to counter it.

Want your packed-stadium photos in pointless-video form? We got that too:

As we’ve discussed here before, pandemics are not clean-cut moral dilemmas, so there’s no sure way of knowing what the result of the Rangers’ experiment with non-distancing will be. The roof was open, so there was tons of air circulation, but also people were right next to each other largely without masks on, which is pretty much the only good way to get infected while outside:

“The risk is lower outdoors, but it’s not zero,” said Shan Soe-Lin, a lecturer at the Yale Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. “And I think the risk is higher if you have two people who are stationary next to each other for a long time, like on a beach blanket, rather than people who are walking and passing each other.”

One recent study found that just talking can launch thousands of droplets that can remain suspended in the air for eight to 14 minutes. But the risk of inhaling those droplets is lower outdoors.

We’ll just have to wait and see what happens over the 4 to 14 days before passing judgment on whether the Rangers owners were unthinkably reckless or acceptably reckless here. And even then, it may come down as much to luck as to good or bad planning, as a handful of people shedding virus in the wrong place can easily make the difference between explosive spread and not much. At least Rangers execs limited full attendance to opening day — they’re switching to distanced seating after yesterday’s game — which should make for an excellent controlled experiment in how much difference distance makes in preventing viral spread at outdoor, unmasked events. Those sports team owners, always thinking about the future journal articles!

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Friday roundup: Baseball ticket chaos, and the continuing endless rain of minor-league soccer stadium demands

access_time personNeil deMause

New York state announced yesterday that baseball stadiums will be open at 20% capacity to start the season, which, as things go, is not one of the stupidest reopenings announced by Gov. Gropey this week. As a Mets fan who will be fully vaccinated-plus-two-weeks by shortly after Opening Day, it has me weighing whether sitting three hours masked and distanced outdoors at a ballgame is low-risk enough to be worth considering or still terrible for society as a whole, which in turn had me checking out the Mets’ ticket sale policies:

All ticket management actions for tickets for impacted games [in April], including Ticket Forwarding, will be canceled. These tickets will be removed from your account and are no longer valid for admission.

Glad I didn’t buy tickets when I first noticed they were on sale a couple of weeks ago, because those are apparently now worthless. (Worthless for entry, anyway; you can still get a credit on your account for the purchase price.) Season ticket holders will get first dibs at buying the new blocks of tickets, at least for April; it’s unclear when the mad scramble for seats begins.

Then I checked the Yankees‘ site, and found this:

To be eligible, fans must have purchased their tickets through Ticketmaster and not have transferred, posted or resold them. If the tickets were transferred, the transferee or recipient of the ticket will need to transfer the tickets back to the original purchaser in order for the original purchaser to request a credit or refund. The credit request option is not available for tickets purchased via resale or the secondary market.

If you bought through Stubhub or the like, in other words, you are SOL, unless you can find the person you bought from and have them ask for a refund, then refund you.

I get why the teams are doing this — rather than figure out how to reassign already-purchased seats in distanced pods, it’s way simpler to just refund everybody and start fresh with new ticket sales. But it’s hard not to foresee a whole lot of lawsuits, or at least angry tweets, from people who bought or sold what are now worthless barcodes, and questions about whether pro sports are becoming the latest realm where buying a thing doesn’t mean you’re actually buying it.

Anyway, enough about that. On to the stadium and arena news, which I know you’ve been waiting for and which includes lots of good juicy schadenfreude, plus more minor-league soccer than you can shake a stick at:

  • I’ve been mostly steering clear of the debate over where to build a new high-school sports stadium in Spokane, because, frankly, high-school sports stadium in Spokane, and also the money ($31 million) has already been allocated, so it’s now just a question of where to build it. But if you want an explainer, here’s a good one, which I will now summarize even more briefly: Spokane residents want the stadium to be built where the current stadium is, but the USL says it’ll put a soccer team in Spokane if they move it to a site downtown, so now city officials are trying to decide who it’s more important to listen to, their constituents or the guys dangling a minor-league soccer franchise. Also local business advocates say that if the city doesn’t build a stadium downtown, the USL may look to build there anyway, and they already have $2 million in cash plus a promise of $1 million from an unidentified investor, and that’s only $28 million short! More news as events warrant, which I seriously hope is never.
  • Elsewhere in everybody-gets-a-pro-soccer-team, Grand Rapids may get a USL team if it can be determined how to fund a $40 million stadium. Nobody’s talking public money just yet, but a guy from Convention, Sports & Leisure — yes, those guys — has been hired to talk up how a stadium “has the ability to anchor development, serve as a destination but also kind of speed up and accelerate reinvestment into areas of the city, whether that’s in downtown or on the purview of downtown,” so it’s gotta be only a matter of time.
  • And the Indy Eleven, currently of the USL but maybe one day to be in MLS if you dream real hard, are still seeking their own $150 million stadium, saying it would be “more than a stadium, it is the opportunity to create a vibrant community that will attract individuals and families from near and far to live, work and play — creating jobs and improving quality of place far beyond game day.” Team owner Ersal Ozdemir already got $112 million in state money approved for the stadium last year, but then decided maybe he’d build a smaller stadium and give up on the plans to join MLS that were the whole reason for him getting the $112 million. The state legislature is currently deciding whether to give Ozdemir more time to figure out exactly which scam he wants to pull or to take back the money; “give him more rope” just unanimously passed the state house ways and means committee, so that’s not a great sign.
  • A Nevada state senator is proposing to create a state esports commission to lure major video-game tournaments to Nevada, because “economic development.” I’m still not entirely clear how many people actually travel to attend esports rather than just watching online — attendance figures are brutally hard to come by online, though apparently 45,000 turned out for one event in Beijing in 2017 — but this is one to keep an eye on, especially if esports organizers start choosing site based less on who has the most regulatory oversight (?) and more on who offers cold, hard cash.
  • And finally, circling back to questionable sports reopenings, the Texas Rangers decided to advertise their 100% capacity opening day by showing a fan flagrantly violating their own mask rules. This is all going to go just great!

 

 

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Rangers launch return to normalcy and/or risk Texans’ lives by allowing 100% capacity for Opening Day

access_time personNeil deMause

One year ago today, the sports world screeched to a halt: In a span of just 24 hours, all the major leagues had suspended their seasons, the NCAA basketball tournament had been canceled, and we entered the long, strange time that we will likely remember just as “2020,” even if it didn’t start until a couple of months into the calendar year and won’t fully end until who knows when.

The return to something approaching normal is likely to be strange and herky-jerky — here’s a good Q&A with epidemiologist Ashish Jha about how it’s likely to go — so it’s probably appropriate that today’s big news is that the Texas Rangers will be playing three home games (two exhibition, one Opening Day) next month not only with fans in the stands, but at full capacity:

On Wednesday, the Rangers announced their in-person attendance policies for the start of the 2021 season, which include offering all 40,518 seats to potential ticket buyers for two exhibition games on March 29 and 30, as well as for the team’s home opener on April 5. (After that, the team plans to limit capacity and introduce social-distancing in some sections of seats for further games.)

It’s unclear whether the organization somehow believes the virus will behave differently after opening day than it will for the three games at which there will be no attendance cap. In an email to Texas Monthly, John Blake, the team’s executive vice president for communications, said, “The total number [of tickets available after opening day] will depend on demand and can be expanded if needed.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott famously “opened Texas 100%” last week, so it’s not entirely surprising that some sports team owner was going to take advantage by seeing how many fans they could jam into their new open-air (unless the butt-ugly roof is closed) stadium. But like so many “reopening” things over the next few weeks and months, it’s likely going to raise a whole lot of conflicting emotions along the lines of this is so exciting but uh are we doing this too soon and all going to die?

Let’s lay out the arguments for and against this being a historic disaster:

It’ll be fine: Things are very different in the world now than they were last fall, when the Rangers’ stadium admitted a small number of fans who were supposed to stay masked and distanced (but didn’t really) for the NLCS and World Series: Unlike then, virus rates are falling, and the people the most vulnerable to getting sick are getting vaccinated at an unprecedented pace, even if going a lot faster in some places than in others. There were no identifiable mass outbreaks after the World Series or other outdoor sporting events with limited fans — here’s an article that claims there has yet to be a single “confirmed super-spreading event that occurred solely outdoors,” though that ignores a lot of things like that infamous Champions League match in Milan and Sturgis and Trump rallies, or at least is strict about “solely outdoors” in a way that probably excludes baseball games, too. In that interview above with Jha, he even says that outdoor mask mandates can probably be safely dropped sooner than other measures, or could be if it didn’t get people thinking oh cool, pandemic’s over and then have them start packing into bars and family gatherings without masks and really kick off some major superspreading. So a bunch of people, many of whom will be vaccinated or have antibodies as a result of having gotten sick during Texas’s deadly January surge, packing together for a couple of hours to watch baseball, with lots of airflow and presumably masks on, is maybe not the biggest concern — or at least, not nearly as big a concern as all the sports bars they’ll be packing into after the game.

What are you, nuts? While the U.S. may be on the brink of escaping from this nightmare thanks to vaccinations, it’s simultaneously on the brink of another surge, with new, more transmissible variants ready to take advantage of eased restrictions to send viral rates soaring again. Rates have fallen since their January peak thanks to people getting vaccinated and staying out of public, but have plateaued since then, thanks to new variants and a bunch of reopenings that really could have waited just a few more weeks. As could having a full house for a baseball game: Even if you wishcast that a couple of full-capacity games might be fine, is it really worth going back to more lockdowns and more deaths when it could be just a matter of weeks before waiting for the all-clear?

In the end, as with so much about reopenings, the answer is let’s roll the dice and find out. Given that past sports reopenings went better than expected — even while restaurant reopenings and family holiday reopenings seem to have gone much worse than expected — I’m tentatively optimistic that we will remember the Rangers’ cheek-to-jowl Opening Day as the start of a return to normalcy, not as that time a sports owner decided to play Russian roulette with people’s lives in an effort to wring a quick buck out of the return of baseball before everyone noticed how dreadful his team was going to be. But then, it can be both: The very nature of Russian roulette is that most of the times you pull the trigger, everything turns out fine. Get real familiar with outcome bias, because we’re likely to be talking about it a lot in the weeks and months ahead.

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Friday roundup: MLB billionaire owners cry poor, Rangers stadium reviews get worse and worse

access_time personNeil deMause

What a week! I know I say that every week, but: What. A. Week. In addition to the World Series insanity, I spent some time this week writing an article about other ways that giant monopolistic cartels screw over regular folks, but it’s not up yet* so you’ll just have to find out about it next week (or keep refreshing my personal website, or follow me on Twitter or something).

In the meantime, there’s lots of sports stadium and arena news to keep you occupied:

  • NYC F.C. may have announced progress on its new soccer stadium this week while providing no indication of actual progress, but the Washington Football Team one-upped them when team president Jason Wright earned an entire NBC Sports article about their stadium plans by saying he didn’t even have a timeline for the process. Meanwhile, the Sacramento Republic likewise issued a statement on their new stadium construction plans that amounted to nothing (“I do have a hard hat in my trunk!” said team president Ben Gumpert, by way of news). At this rate, team owners will be able to get reporting on their stadium campaigns after denying they even want one — oh wait, we’ve gone there already.
  • MLB commissioner Rob Manfred says the league now has $8.3 billion in debt, $3 billion of it accrued during 2020’s pandemic season, which doesn’t actually tell you how well baseball is doing — presumably some of it was borrowed against future revenues from TV contracts and naming-rights deals and the like — but sounds impressive when you’re about to go into union contract talks. Also, notes Marc Normandin, that’s really only a $100 million loss per team, which isn’t an unfathomably huge sum for the billionaires who own most teams; plus we have to take Manfred’s word on that debt figure, and it already doesn’t include things like teams’ ownership of regional sports networks. MLB owners, he writes, are “hoping, as they so often do, that you have no idea how anything works, and will just take them at their word. So that they can do things like, oh, I don’t know, decline the 2021 option on basically everyone with one in order to flood the free agent market with additional players they can then underbid on and underpay, claiming that this is all financially necessary because of all the debt, you see.” Or as we may start calling it soon, getting Brad Handed.
  • Philadelphia public schools lost $112 million in property tax revenues in 2019 that were siphoned off to tax breaks for developers, according to a new Good Jobs First study, nearly double their losses from just two years earlier. Good thing the 76ers‘ plan for an arena funded by siphoned-off property taxes was rejected, though there are more plans where that came from, so Philly schools should probably still hold onto their wallets.
  • One more review of the Texas Rangers‘ new stadium that team owners Ray Davis and Bob Simpson got $500 million to help build because the old one lacked air-conditioning, this one from a fan who’s visited every stadium and arena in North America: “This would probably end up probably down near the bottom.” He added that the upper decks are too far from the field, the place is too dark, the scale is “ridiculous,” and on top of that fans were taking off their masks as soon as security is out of sight, which, yup.
  • Las Vegas has extended its negotiating window again for a new soccer stadium to lure an MLS team, which makes you wonder why they even bothered to set a window in the first place instead of just hanging out a shingle saying, “Have Stadium $$$, Inquire Within.”
  • Sports team owners make tons of “dark money” to political campaigns to try to get elected officials to support their interests, according to ESPN, though disappointingly their only real source is an unnamed NBA owner. But that source did say, “There’s no question,” in italics and everything, so you know they’re serious.
  • Maybe the NHL should just play games outdoors so they can allow in fans? There are dumber ideas, but they might want to figure out how to get fans to keep their damn masks on first.
  • There are some new renderings of the New York Islanders‘ luxury suites at their new arena, and I can’t stop puzzling over what that weird counter-like thing is in this one, or why the women are all wearing stiletto heels to an NHL game. I’ll never understand hockey!

*UPDATE: Now it’s up.

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World Series ends with Covid-positive Justin Turner celebrating on field without mask, sportswriters sum up Rangers’ $1B stadium as “unnecessary,” all is as it should be

access_time personNeil deMause

The baseball postseason that would never end has finally ended, fittingly enough with a late-inning Covid controversy as Los Angeles Dodgers third baseman Justin Turner had to be removed from the final game of the World Series in the 7th inning after receiving a positive test result, went back on the field without a mask to celebrate with his teammates, then complained that he “couldn’t be out there to celebrate with my guys.” Truly, the only way this could be more cringey would be if MLB chose this moment to bring back the ad slogan “Baseball Fever: Catch It!”

But even as we wonder how Turner contracted the coronavirus while supposedly in a bubble and why he then sat next to a cancer survivor with no mask on, let’s not allow this bizarro World Series to pass into history without enjoying the glimpse that it gave us of the Texas Rangers‘ new $1 billion stadium, about half a billion dollars of which came from Arlington residents so that the team would no longer have to suffer the indignity of playing in a stadium without air conditioning. We’ve already heard the few fans in attendance extremely inappropriately calling the place “breathtaking”; now ESPN has polled its reporters on the scene of what they think of the place, and the reviews (edited for length and maximum hilarity) are decidedly meh:

Alden Gonzalez: It’s a modern, bigger, more comfortable, yet less charming — and in my opinion, unnecessary — version of the old place.

Jeff Passan: It’s fine. … Aesthetically, there’s nothing particularly inspiring about it.

Jesse Rogers: It feels cozy, especially if you’re in the lower bowl, but the tradeoff was going straight up. If you have a fear of heights, this is not the park for you.

Gonzalez: My least favorite part is that it doesn’t feel intimate.

Passan: From above, the place looks like what would happen if a Costco and a barn had a baby.

Gonzalez: What’s better is that it has a roof.

Rogers: OK, it’s cool when it opens and closes, but this is Texas. Besides the occasional storm, what’s the need for a dome?

Okay, I left out a few nice things the ESPN trio had to say about Globe Life Field — apparently the fence height is “perfect,” according to Gonzalez, which is totally a reason to spend $1 billion to build an entirely new stadium — but the upshot is that they think this is a “middle-tier” stadium, not the best or the worst, with a “corporate” feel but some nice brick columns. That’s something that could be said of lots of modern stadiums, including the one it replaced, but I guess they had to come up with something to say beyond “it would have been more impressive if they’d kept the old stadium and set a billion dollars on fire in center field.”

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Friday roundup: World still on fire, let’s remember 1989 when the greatest sports horror imaginable was Alan Thicke in a tuxedo

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Very busy week here at FoS HQ, so let’s dispense with any introductory chitchat and get right to the news we didn’t already get to this week:

That’s all for now, see you all Monday!

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Baseball fans call new Rangers stadium “breathtaking” while breathing all over each other

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We’re now two games into the fans-getting-to-see-live-baseball-under-Covid era, and if Fox won’t show us what it’s like at the stands, that’s what we have Twitter for. And there’s double reason for rubbernecking interest here, as the National League Championship Series not only gives us our first glimpse of baseball spectating during the pandemic, but also our initial look at the new Texas Rangers stadium that was built with taxpayer money so the team could have air-conditioning. And the Twitterverse says, at least according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram: Awesome!

“It’s breathtaking,” said William Necessary, a Rangers season-ticket holder since 2012 from Arlington. “It does look like a barn or a hangar from the outside, but inside it’s amazing.”…

“It reminds me of the old Reunion Arena where you were right on top of everybody,” [Necessary’s friend Bobby] Brown said. “It’s not the most aesthetically pleasing stadium there is on the outside, but on the inside it’s beautiful.”

Maybe “breathtaking” isn’t the word I would have used under current circumstances, but okay! Two Rangers season-ticket holders say the new place may be ugly on the outside, but it’s nice on the inside, check. Star-Telegram reporter Stefan Stevenson didn’t tell us where Necessary and Brown were sitting, which might have been helpful — early renderings made it look like the view from the cheap seats would be just horrible — but at least the stadium is nice to look at, regardless of whether you can see the game.

Let’s see what we can find for ourselves on Twitter:

Those people indeed have great seats, though they’ve chosen to ignore the game in order to take a selfie of themselves flouting the requirement to wear masks at all times while not eating or drinking. (You get two warnings before being kicked out, so maybe these folks were okay with using up one of their three strikes?) Let’s try to find another image:

If I’m counting right, that’s at most six out of 22 fans pictured in that shot who are wearing masks properly. And hardly any appear to be maintaining a six-foot distance, though it’s a bit hard to tell given the camera angle. What else have we got?

Okay, they’re just trolling us now. Everyone hold your breath for tonight’s heart-stopping Game 3!

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