Category: Toronto Blue Jays

Friday roundup: Jays plan $¯\_(ツ)_/¯ in SkyDome renovations, figure it out yourself, journalism can’t help you

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday! I don’t know about you, but for me this was a great week: I got a new coffee mug, and also it’s now almost over! The week, I mean, not the mug. You’re smart, you probably figured that out already.

And now, how’s about some news:

  • The Toronto Blue Jays owners are planning $230 million in renovations to the stadium formerly known as SkyDome but now named for the team’s corporate owners, or maybe it’s $300 million in renovations, what is money, anyway, especially Canadian money? The CBC’s report says that the redo will include saying “goodbye to the nosebleeds,” as the top 500 level deck will be “completely removed and replaced with non-ticketed spaces,” and oh, here’s a rendering with the 500 level still very much visible, hmm. The stadium is owned by the Jays after Ontario built it and took a huge bath on it, so presumably the renovations will be funded by the team, though Jays president Mark Shapiro called this just a “medium-term solution,” so there’ll still be plenty of time to demand a new stadium later, don’t worry.
  • WPRI in Providence breaks down why Pawtucket’s new USL soccer stadium will cost taxpayers $60 milllion and not $45.5 million like its developers claim, which is helpful and all, except when you add up all the numbers it actually looks more like $80 million? ($46.2 million in state tax breaks, $10 million from the city, plus $27 million in additional money redirected from state infrastructure spending — yup, that’d be more than $80 million.) The fog of stadium wars is soupy indeed.
  • If the Philadelphia 76ers owners succeed in building their own Center City arena and no longer renting from the Flyers, “The companies that would benefit are Live Nation and AEG, because they would have two buildings in Philly to play off each other, so the rent expense would go down,” former Spectrum manager Ed Rubinstein tells Venues Now. “That’s the reason why we never wanted another arena built.” This would be the Sixers owners’ problem, on the one hand, but also Philly taxpayers’ problem if the idea of giving the Sixers arena a giant tax break would be to help the local economy when it would only end up shuffling concert spending around from one part of town to another.
  • There are new Tennessee Smokies stadium renderings, and — oh, come on, you’re not even trying! I get that the plans need to be downscaled some because the stadium is over budget, but at least you can afford some clip art fireworks or people playing random sports. Show some self-respect.
  • Somebody dug up this consulting report that everyone’s favorite economist-for-team-hire Andy Zimbalist did on mixed martial arts — okay, sure — and I must report that previous reporting that Zimbalist earns $225 an hour for his services is out of date: His “customary rate,” he wrote in the 2017 document, is actually $850 an hour. And that’s before any surcharges Zimbalist now imposes for supply-chain issues. Please draw your own conclusions as to whether that rate could be an incentive to report the findings that your client is hoping for, or at least look really hard for them.
  • Your occasional reminder that sports team owners don’t have a monopoly on getting billions of dollars in public money for no damn reason: Here’s a report on Kansas giving Panasonic $800 million in subsidies for a battery factory in exchange for a commitment of zero new jobs, and here’s Bernie Sanders talking about how a new bipartisan bill to compete with China on electronics somehow involves giving $76 billion to microchip companies. The New York Times called the latter “a remarkable and rare consensus in a polarized Congress,” which is both true and all too telling about what our elected representatives (and major newspapers) can agree on.
  • “It’s morally corrupt that new arenas for professional teams worth billions of dollars are majorly publicly funded — especially when the tax dollars could be going to other areas in the city in actual need of the money,” writes Norman Transcript sports reporter intern Clemente Almanza of devoting public dollars to a new Oklahoma City Thunder arena like the team’s owners want, “but” — you knew there was a “but” coming — “that comes with the territory of having a franchise. 18 of the 29 NBA arenas are owned by a government multiplicity” — he’s an intern, he can’t be expected to own a dictionary — and “losing the Thunder would cause catastrophic levels of damage that the state would never recover.” Um, you don’t want to recover the damage … hey, Norman Transcript, don’t you have any copy editors? No? I guess “let the intern sit down and keyboard out a column on why a new arena is necessary” is just how journalism goes these days — that coffee mug gets righter and righter every day.
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Friday roundup: Bills $1B subsidy not finalized yet, amid ridicule from pretty much every economist everywhere

access_time personNeil deMause

This was quite a week, bringing with it New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s proposal of $1 billion (at least) in public money for a Buffalo Bills stadium and Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee’s proposal of $500 million (at least) in public money for a Tennessee Titans stadium and Kansas City Chiefs president Mark Donovan’s floating of a possible bidding war between Missouri and Kansas to give umpteen gazlllion dollars (at least) to his team for a new stadium. For readers who are visiting this site for the first time as a result, first of all, welcome, and second, this is our weekly rundown of all the other news that happened while we were goggling at the even bigger news. Please breathe deeply, and we shall begin:

  • Speaking of that Bills stadium, it probably isn’t getting passed by today’s budget deadline, as legislators are still debating both that proposed expenditure and scaling back bail reform. State Assembly Republican Leader Will Barclay decried the “Democrats’ dysfunction [that] has resulted in little more than needless gridlock,” which, good work, criticizing members of the opposing party for actually wanting to discuss things before voting on them is definitely a way to reduce dysfunction.
  • Also speaking of that Bills stadium, USA Today checked in with a couple more sports economists who weren’t part of Tuesday’s press conference, and got some choice quotes: Kennesaw State’s J.C. Bradbury said, “I think it just goes to show that policy decisions don’t seem to be tied to actual knowledge,” while University of San Francisco’s Nola Agha said, “It’s like saying the bakery down the street receives $100,000 a year from the city government, just so they can bake croissants every morning.” Add in Smith College’s Andy Zimbalist’s New York Daily News op-ed saying, “If the people of Erie County and New York State … believe that retaining the Bills will provide hefty economic benefits, then buyer beware,” and West Virginia University’s Brad Humphreys’ retweets, and it’s pretty much a clean sweep of every single economist who’s studied these things.
  • And also also speaking of the Bills stadium, Hochul’s proposed memorandum of understanding is out, and it includes an item that the announced “ironclad” deal to keep the team in Buffalo for 30 years would actually allow the team owners to skip town for lower and lower penalties starting in year 15. They really don’t make iron cladding like they used to.
  • Okay, moving on from the Bills: Arena developer Oak View Group says it wants to build a new $1 billion arena in Las Vegas that could host an NBA expansion team, because none of Vegas’ six other arenas could possibly be used for that. No public funding has been mentioned so far, so it’s possible this is just part of a land rush to grab prominence in the Vegas arena market; though given that another Vegas arena project announced its groundbreaking in 2014 and still hasn’t actually been built, it’s also possible this is just hot air.
  • Despite the New Orleans Pelicans‘ lease on their 23-year-old arena expiring in 2024, definitely aren’t looking for a new arena until “the future,” says owner Gayle Benson, adding, “I don’t want anyone to think we’re using that as any type of leverage over the state of Louisiana.” She definitely doesn’t want state legislators thinking that, who would do a thing like that?
  • Cincinnati USA Convention and Visitors Bureau chair Jeff Berding says, “It’s time we have a modern arena in Cincinnati.” Berding is also co-CEO of F.C. Cincinnati, who already got a giant pile of public money for their own new stadium, maybe it’s not such a big mystery why these things keep happening.
  • Wait, Ottawa Senators owner Eugene Melnyk died? Ottawa Senators owner Eugene Melnyk died! Now it will be up to his college-age daughters, Anna and Olivia Melnyk, our sympathies to them, to decide whether to carry forward with his never-ending arena subsidy demands, our sympathies to them on that as well.
  • A Virginia state senator told WUSA-TV anonymously that legislation to spend as much as a billion dollars on a Washington Commanders stadium is moving slowly because “public reaction to this project has been underwhelming” and “the team lacks gravity,” and mostly it makes me wonder what about the Virginia legislature requires members to demand anonymity so they can “speak freely.” Anyway, team owner/accused toxic workplace enabler Dan Snyder has turned over direct control of the team to his wife, Tanya Snyder, that should take care of everything.
  • The Toronto Blue Jays are moving ahead with a “significant renovation” of the SkyDome or whatever it’s called these days, promising to “modernize the fan experience.” No public money request was attached to the announcement, or price tag on the renovations at all, but team president Mark Shapiro did say that the renovations are “probably for the next 10 or 15 years but we’ll probably still have a stadium issue,” so this ain’t over by any means.
  • A Nebraska bill would increase the amount on sales tax kickbacks to the state’s arenas and convention centers because, and I swear this is not an April Fools joke, they have hosted such important economic and cultural events as “a recent concert by the legendary Elton John, the U.S. Olympic Swim Trials and the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meetings.” No economists were consulted by the Omaha World-Herald for this story, though it’s always possible they were laughing too hard to comment coherently.
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Friday roundup: Bills reveal new stadium could cost $1.5b more than renovations, Jays mull SkyDome upgrade

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy next-to-last Friday of 2021! Whether you’re traveling for the holidays or hunkering down to avoid spreading Omicron, Field of Schemes never sleeps, or at least not when we forgot to do an early weekly news roundup on Thursday so as to avoid having to work on Friday, whoops. But good thing we waited, because newsmakers are following their year-end tradition of making news when nobody is paying attention, so if anyone is reading this, you’re not just killing time until your Zoom holiday call, you’re sticking it to the man.

On with the show:

  • New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration has finally released that 2019 Buffalo Bills study of new stadium options that she had been refusing to release, doing so on the last night before Christmas Eve, as one does when one wants news to sink without a trace. The study, by consultants CAA Icon, includes price tags for a stadium in Buffalo ($1.99 billion) and in suburban Orchard Park ($1.55 billion), as well as two renovation options for the current stadium ($1.91 billion and $459 million, depending on whether they rebuild the whole thing or just the allegedly-falling-down upper deck), and says of the project’s economic impact … wait, there’s nothing on economic impact. What happened to the promises of $793 million in increased economic activity? Did they leave those pages out? Is this yet another study, not the one Hochul has been withholding? That one was supposed to be co-written by CAA Icon and Populous, and this one just says CAA Icon, though Populous’s name is on the renderings, but anyway everybody’s on vacation now, don’t try to call for answers!
  • SportsNet reports that the Toronto Blue Jays owners have decided not to replace whatever SkyDome is called these days (I know, I know, it’s Rogers Centre, but I like to avoid corporate names wherever possible), but rather do a $200-250 million renovation that would include a “redesign of the lower bowl,” no more details available. Nor are there any reports on whether the Jays owners plan to foot that whole bill themselves or seek public money; SportsNet says “details should be wrapped up next month,” so tune back in next month, I guess!
  • Washington Football Team owner Daniel Snyder is reportedly looking at stadium sites in Prince William and Loudoun counties, according to state senator Jeremy McPike, who said Snyder could be looking at a stadium with less capacity but with a dome (retractable? he didn’t say) surrounded by development. Sen. McPike also didn’t provide any details about cost or public cost beyond asserting that “the days of taxpayer fully-funded stadiums have fully gone by the wayside” — though not taxpayer mostly-funded stadiums — but nonetheless said the idea was “something to keep our mind open to” because, uh, something about economic development impact, no followup questions, please, it’s Christmas!
  • The Advocate’s editorial board says spending $300 million in public money toward a $450 million re-renovation of the New Orleans Saints‘ Superdome is “a bargain in comparison” to losing the team and/or being ruled out for future Super Bowls, which would definitely happen because so sorry, out of room for this editorial, happy holidays!
  • Big article in the New York Times last Friday about the Arizona Coyotes situation that didn’t really break any new ground, but it does include Glendale city manager Kevin Phelps saying that he’s come to the conclusion that Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo didn’t just forget to pay his tax bill but rather has a company policy of dealing with disputes by refusing to make payments and daring creditors to sue: “It may be built into the culture and value of the organization that they can wear a creditor down and negotiate a better deal.” Try this at home with your landlords and credit card companies, kids, and see how far it gets you! As always, membership in the 800-pound-gorilla club is the gift that keeps on giving.
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Friday roundup: Trying to make democracy without a responsible media really isn’t going all that well, plus: cardboard stadiums!

access_time personNeil deMause

Things I learned this week: Dogs don’t have eyebrows, but they did evolve special facial muscles so they could look cuter to humans. Synanthropic evolution is weird, and that’s even before getting into how rats in Central Park evolved the ability to metabolize rancid peanuts.

And with that palate cleanser out of the way, on to the stadium and arena news:

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Toronto councillor says he’s sure Jays stadium plan is good, whatever it is

access_time personNeil deMause

The Toronto Blue Jays stadium plan is still, as one columnist called it, “a trial balloon wrapped in a beta test,” with few real details beyond that it would require the demolition of SkyDome, cost “multibillion” dollars, and be “privately funded.” But that hasn’t stopped Toronto city councillor Joe Cressy from endorsing the plan sight unseen:

“The clear understanding from the earliest conversations was that [public funding] was not a consideration here,” Mr. Cressy said. “I don’t see it as an inherently politically contentious subject.”

The problem, of course, is that “no public stadium funding” is a claim that’s gone along with everything from a $350 million gift of public land to the most expensive baseball stadium subsidy of all time. And also that there can be reasons for a development deal to be contentious even if it doesn’t require public money. (Is what the Jays owners want really the best use of the stadium site?) It’s possible Cressy knows more than he’s letting on — the Jays stadium talks have apparently been going on in secret for years — but it’s also possible he’s just trying to spin the story as pay no attention to the financial details behind the curtain, in which case we definitely should be paying more attention to the financial details.

Meanwhile, even the hint of a new Blue Jays stadium has some people fantasizing about how great it would be if Toronto’s future ballpark could be modeled after another stadium that hasn’t actually been built yet:

That there is a Photoshop, all right! It also requires putting the new stadium on the site of the old stadium, which would defeat the purpose of moving it to the south to make way for new residential and office towers, but would be necessary to leave room for the retractable roof to retract, as can be seen in this Hokkaido rendering:

That’s an important question, though: Would a new Jays stadium have a roof? If so, it would be hard to have natural grass there, unless the roof fully retracts as in the above image, in which case there’s not much room on the site for a stadium plus additional buildings. (There’s a major highway not far south of the current stadium, which is the only direction it could expand in.) If not, it’s gonna be cold in April, which is the whole reason SkyDome was built as a dome. This could get contentious!

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Report: Toronto’s SkyDome marked for death, redevelopment using public land

access_time personNeil deMause

Right, so three days ago in a comment thread about whether major stadium and arena construction is likely to slow down in coming years (because of Covid and shifting political winds), FoS reader Aqib wrote,

By my count there are 2 MLB teams (Oakland and Tampa) that are in the market for new stadiums

and I replied,

the Diamondbacks have already said they’re considering a new stadium, the Blue Jays and White Sox have at least been kicking tires, and teams like the Indians and Orioles have talked about significant renovations

and they replied,

Blue Jays? All I heard was that they were looking at refurbishing the stadium to make it a pure baseball park, but that was 5 years ago. Is there anything new?

and I replied,

Nothing lately — that was the tire-kicking I referred to. But you don’t put Chekhov’s gun on the mantel unless you’re going to use it eventually.

By “eventually” I didn’t actually mean “by the end of this week,” but here we are:

The owner of the Toronto Blue Jays wants to demolish the Rogers Centre and construct a new stadium as part of a downtown Toronto redevelopment, according to sources involved in the project…

Rogers Communications Inc. and the real estate arm of Brookfield Asset Management Inc. are working with city, provincial and federal government officials on a plan that would effectively cut the Rogers Centre in half.

The partners would build a new, baseball-focused stadium on the foundations of the southern end of the current facility and adjacent parking lots. The northern portion of the 12.7-acre site would be turned into residential towers, office buildings, stores and public space.

Rogers is also considering building a new stadium on a lakefront site if plans for the Rogers Centre fall through.

The Globe & Mail reports that the project would cost “multibillion” dollars, and would be “privately funded” (by Blue Jays owners Rogers Communications) and developers Brookfield, but “needs numerous government approvals to move forward.” It also would use federally owned land, which raises all sorts of questions about how much the team and developers would pay for this valuable property, and whether the development would pay property taxes (more common for private developments on public land in Canada than in the U.S., but still not a given), and generally sets up the potential for a Canadian version of Anaheim’s “We’re getting market value for our stadium land but also not really” scenario.

The report also says that lobbying records show the Jays and Toronto officials have been discussing this plan for two years, that rebuilding the stadium “is expected to play out over five to eight years,” and that “it is not clear where the team would play if its Toronto stadium is being torn down and rebuilt.”

SkyDome — now the Rogers Centre officially, but still once and always SkyDome — was opened 31 years ago (by Alan Thicke, for some reason), and as noted the Jays have made faint noises about leaving for a new stadium before, so this is slightly less shocking than when the Atlanta Braves owners announced they were leaving their then-17-year-old stadium to move to suburban Cobb County or the Texas Rangers owners announced they would be moving across the street from their only marginally older stadium to one that was the same only with air conditioning. But still pretty shocking! There are, as noted, still a whole lot of unknowns about this one, so I think we can say we’re going to spend much of 2021 discussing all its ramifications. And if we end up spending 2022 on the Chicago White Sox, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

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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

access_time personNeil deMause

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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Friday roundup: The baseball gods are very, very angry

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy baseball season, everybody! Last night the New York Yankees were leading the Washington Nationals 4-1 when MLB commissioner Rob Manfred came out to explain the new playoff system in which 16 teams will make the postseason and the only advantage you’ll get from winning your division is home-field advantage in empty stadiums, at which point the baseball gods tried to kill Manfred by hurling lightning bolts at him and the game had to be called. This really could not be a more auspicious beginning.

Anyway, stadium and arena news, that’s what you’re here for:

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Friday roundup: Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it for 150 years edition

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Juneteenth, the most quintessentially American of holidays, in that it celebrates both the nation’s ability to right seemingly intractable horrific historic wrongs through grassroots action faster than anyone ever could have dreamed, and also its ability to then revert to virtually the exact same horrific wrongs in all but name for the next century or so. We got issues.

And speaking of issues — if that’s not too inappropriate to compare the enslavement of an entire people with the siphoning off of tax dollars for sports, which it probably is, but segues gotta segue — here are a bunch regarding stadiums and arenas that reared or re-reared their heads in the last week:

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New state coronavirus plans: Reopen sports venues and concerts, see if people start dropping dead

access_time personNeil deMause

It is becoming increasingly clear that the answer to “How will sports and concerts and other things in the U.S. reopen?” is “However the hell individual governors feel like it, and damn the science.” Missouri Gov. Mike Parson declared last week that concert venues can now reopen if concertgoers socially distance (though Missouri concert venues have been decidedly uninterested in booking shows just yet); Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson followed that up on Saturday with the announcement that arenas and stadiums can reopen at one-third capacity, which it doesn’t take complex math to see isn’t going to work too well if you want to ensure six feet between each set of fans. (Taiwan, the only nation so far to resume sports in front of live fans, has been limiting baseball stadiums to between 5% and 10% of capacity.)

In the absence of any federal plan, however, nothing is stopping governors from making up their own rules, which means we’re likely going to see a patchwork of reopenings under different social-distancing guidelines in the weeks and months ahead. That could potentially be very, very bad for sports- and concertgoers in those states (and anyone who potentially comes in contact with them, which is to say pretty much everyone who lives in those states) if it turns out sitting three seats away from your nearest neighbor while masked isn’t enough to stop the spread of Covid-19. [UPDATE: Just spotted some new evidence that social distancing is essentially useless indoors, though masks may help some here.] Arkansas and Missouri both have had relatively low death tolls from the virus so far, but also their new case rates haven’t even started to come down from the peaks they reached a month ago, though at least Missouri can claim that this is a positive sign since it’s massively scaled up testing in that time period.

On the bright side, if you can call it a bright side, all these differing state-by-state rules should make a nice controlled experiment in the effects of lifting various restrictions: If you’re an elected official wondering whether to reopen bars, say, you can just look a couple of states over and count the dead bodies to see how that’s likely to go. It’s also going to make a shambles of any plans for sports leagues to restart with all teams in their home venues — check out this hilarious CBS Sports article about how MLB plans to start its season in July, with its 12th-paragraph aside that “all travelers to Canada are subject to a 14-day quarantine, which could create headaches for the [Toronto] Blue Jays and their opponents” — but as we’re seeing with the Bundesliga’s attempts to restart its season despite the entire Dynamo Dresden team being AWOL for two weeks while quarantining after two players tested positive, any resumption of sports is necessarily going to have to be tentative and subject to rapid change if people start getting sick and/or dropping dead.

And, really, any resumption of anything, now that it’s becoming ever more clear that a single weeks-long shutdown isn’t going to do anything more than buy some more time for hospitals to catch their breaths, and doctors to work on better treatments, and cities and states to ramp up testing and contact tracing capacity (after first engaging in the requisite petty political bickering over it) while we await a vaccine — something that’s not a 100% sure thing to arrive even in 2021, or ever. It would be very nice to wait for science to provide answers to key questions like “Are schools key transmission vectors?” and “Are surfaces relatively safe compared to contact with actual people or do we need armies of disinfectant-spraying drones?” before we start going back out in public, but it looks like most political leaders (in the U.S. especially, but elsewhere too) aren’t willing to wait for the slow grind of scientific research. So instead we’ll get a series of mass experiments, with human beings as guinea pigs. Get your tickets now!

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