LOLAthletics make Sacramento debut with tool-shed press conference, mid-game bathroom breaks

access_time personNeil deMause

Stadium Day at the second annual sports economics conference at University of Maryland-Baltimore County isn’t until tomorrow, so while I’m attending today, I’m not liveblogging, meaning you’ll have to wait 24 hours for this kind of nonstop excitement. But it also means I have time to check in on the question everyone spent the winter wondering: How is A’s owner John Fisher’s mad scheme to leave Oakland and play three seasons in a temporary home in a minor-league stadium in Sacramento before (hopefully, maybe) moving to Las Vegas working out?

Welp:

The A’s opened their three-year (or perhaps longer) stay in Sacramento on Monday night, and it was an unmitigated disaster — to the point that getting absolutely decimated 18-3 by the Cubs barely registered on the Disaster Scale.

Do tell!

The most embarrassing thing out of Monday night was the A’s English and Spanish radio feeds completely crashing out by the later innings of the blowout loss, forcing the team to switch their television audio into their radio feed to listeners.

But not the only embarrassing thing:

And then there’s:

The A’s temporary home in Sacramento — Pacific League Ballpark Sutter Health Park — doesn’t have bathrooms attached to the dugouts. Yes, that’s right, much to the dismay of the A’s and visiting teams like Monday night’s Chicago Cubs, whereas every other MLB Stadium has a tunnel that leads from the dugout to the clubhouse and locker room, Sutter Health’s player’s area is located near left field.

So when Cubs outfielder Seiya Suzuki had to head to the clubhouse to presumably take a leak, he had to do what is now being called “The Walk of Shame,” as they paused the game so Suzuki could run all the way across the outfield and do his business.

And also:

A’s owner John Fisher, who did not attend a game in Oakland last season, was at the ballpark to hear occasional chants of “Let’s go Oakland” and see a handful of fans wearing SELL T-shirts. Several others wore T shirts or sweatshirts that read, “I’d rather be at the Oakland Coliseum.” A spirited but brief “Sell the team” chant arose after the bottom of the sixth, with the Cubs leading 16-3.

And this, which had to be far more entertaining than the game at that point:

There was a DRONE DELAY during the A’s opener vs the Cubs in Sacramento.

But, hey, every stadium has growing pains, right? Sure, the tool shed and the no-dugout-bathrooms problem aren’t going away anytime in the next three years, probably, but maybe they’ll at least figure out how to keep the radio broadcasts on the air, and maybe one day the A’s will even learn how to pitch! And at least the A’s no longer had to worry about empty seats, since their new stadium only holds 14,000 people, only 10,000 of them in actual seats—

*sigh*

Well then. Anyone else want to pile on?

“I think it’s so stupid that we have to play at a Triple-A stadium,” Cubs veteran reliever Ryan Brasier told USA TODAY Sports, “when they have maybe not a perfectly good ballpark in Oakland, but a big-league ballpark. I would have much rather play in Oakland than Sacramento, but I guess it doesn’t really matter what we want.”

No, no, it does not. All that matters here is that Fisher decided that he wasn’t happy with the $775 million in public money being offered for a new stadium development at Howard Terminal in Oakland, and would rather move to a stadium in Las Vegas that he didn’t have the money lined up for yet, and rejected an offer from Oakland to extend his lease there by paying actual rent. So here we are, for at least the next three years. Though good news, everybody! Fisher got permits approved to break ground for a new Vegas stadium, that should be happening real soon now, right?

The owner said the team’s stadium project in Las Vegas is “in a good place.” He has been targeting a June groundbreaking in Las Vegas. Asked Monday if a summer start to the construction is still possible, he said only, “I hope so.”

This is fine. It occurs to me that before setting betting lines about where the A’s would end up, I probably should have specified what “ends up” means.

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Ohio legislature kills governor’s stadium slush fund, will he veto its Browns subsidy bill in return?

access_time personNeil deMause

As expected, the Ohio state legislature has killed Gov. Mike DeWine’s proposal to use increased sports gambling, cigarette, and cannabis taxes to fund a $2 billion stadium slush fund, and will instead move ahead with its own plan to collect all sales and income and other state taxes from in and around a new Cleveland Browns stadium and use them to give Browns owner Jimmy Haslam $600 million toward the stadium’s construction cost. (Cuyahoga County and the city of Brook Park would be on the hook for another $600 million.)

DeWine still would have to sign off on the legislature’s omni-TIF plan, though, and if the pro-stadium NEOtrans blog is to be believed, he may veto it instead:

[DeWine’s] opposition — including a possible veto — to HSG’s funding proposal could also cause removal of the funding before the legislature votes in a couple of months on the a proposed biennial budget that starts July 1, 2025 and ends June 30, 2027.

But if it remains in the final bill, there’s a strong possibility that DeWine could veto it. If he does, it requires a 3/5 majority vote in both the Ohio Senate and Ohio House of Representatives to override a governor’s veto — and that supermajority may not exist.

That’s an overwhelming number of coulds, but, sure, a three-fifths majority is harder to muster than 51%, so the threat of a DeWine veto would throw at least a medium-sized wrench into Haslam’s stadium plans. So is the governor really threatening a veto, or what?

At a forum at the Columbus Metropolitan Club led by the Statehouse News Bureau’s Jo Ingles, DeWine was asked if he would veto the amendment. It would add the $600 million bond package to the budget and would eliminate his proposed sports facilities fund, paid for by doubling the tax on sports gambling operators, who are mostly located out of state.

“If you look at the next 10 to 20 years, there’s going to be a lot of demand on the state budget for this. I don’t think we can afford to continue to go into the general fund of our budget and take this money,” DeWine said.

That is, as Statehouse News Bureau put it, “stopping short of threatening a veto” — though the site didn’t speculate about whether DeWine actually doesn’t intend to veto the legislature’s plan or just isn’t threatening a veto yet. Add in that DeWine was still trying to push for his own now-dead subsidy plan at the time he said all that, and it’s really impossible to say for sure what the governor’s game plan is until he responds to the legislature stripping his plan from the budget, which he hasn’t yet done.

But so long as we’re reading tea leaves, I’ll play: The Republican-led state legislature didn’t axe DeWine’s tax plan because they’re antsy about handing money over to sports billionaires, but because they’re antsy about anything that can be said to be “raising taxes”: “Anywhere where there was a program that was proposed to be added or expanded, we either said no or dialed back the increase,” finance chair Rep. Brian Stewart bragged. Taking the money from existing taxes and giving it to Haslam, though, doesn’t count as “spending” in their eyes — same as giving income tax deductions to Ohioans who donate to anti-abortion fake medical clinics isn’t considered spending, even if it’s exactly the same from a budget perspective.

What we have here, then, is a squabble not over whether to give gobs of money to the Browns and other Ohio sports teams to build stadiums for their own profit, but rather which money to use. This seems like the sort of thing that a bunch of fellow Republicans could hash out a compromise over — or that could lead legislative leaders to wait out a lame-duck governor and see if the next one is more on their wavelength. Sure would be nice if the main debate here were over whether the subsidies are worth it at all and not just where the money will come from, but we live in the worst of all possible timelines.

 

 

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Browns owner: If Ohio won’t give me $1.2B in tax money, I’ll keep playing in Cleveland

access_time personNeil deMause

Apparently all the stadium news decided to happen in the last 24 hours, that’s okay, I didn’t have any better plans for things to do with my Tuesday. Anyway, in Cleveland yesterday, Browns owner Jimmy Haslam revealed his “Plan B” if the state, county, and city don’t approve $1.2 billion in public money for a new stadium in Brook Park:

Haslam said it will come down to whether Ohio lawmakers approve $600 million in funding for the stadium proposal in the budget at the end of June. If so, the plan is to have shovels in the ground to begin construction in Brook Park in the first quarter of next year.

If not, Haslam told reporters that the Browns would move to “Plan B,” which would be renovating the existing Huntington Bank Field in downtown Cleveland.

So, wait, hang on. That $600 million in state tax money, the revenues that supposedly would cease to exist without the Browns playing in Ohio, is needed because without it … the Browns would keep on playing at another location in Ohio? Even if you think that Cleveland would be better off reclaiming its lakefront property that is currently occupied by the Browns stadium, there is no math by which it’s worth spending $1.2 billion in government money just to move the Browns and their fans a few miles southwest.

There is certainly a theme emerging to this firehose of a news day, and it is this: From Oregon to Arizona to Ohio, sports team owners and their pals in state and local government are tallying up every scrap of tax revenue they possibly can as “attributable” to the local sports team, and then demanding a check in that amount — and never mind if it’s tax revenue that the government would be getting anyway because if the team left people would just spend their money elsewhere, or because the team owner has no intention of leaving regardless. There haven’t been many big changes in the stadium subsidy playbook over the 27 years I’ve been writing this blog, but I’m tempted to say that the increasing reliance on the Casino Night Fallacy is a growing trend. Next up: To find out whether state legislators can see through it as well as Oscar Madison, or if they’re happy enough to use it as an excuse to hand over public cash to the local sports billionaires, whether it makes any damn sense or not.

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AZ senate pulls $500m D-Backs stadium subsidy from committee agenda at last second

access_time personNeil deMause

And speaking of people who will be speaking at this week’s sports economics conference and the Casino Night Fallacy, J.C. Bradbury had an op-ed in the Arizona Mirror yesterday on the proposed Arizona Diamondbacks tax-redirection bill, and didn’t mince words, as he never does:

The funding mechanism being proposed to benefit the Diamondbacks relies upon what public finance economists call “fiscal illusion.” The tax mechanism was selected to understate the public cost. By drawing funds from the district around the stadium, it gives the appearance of a use tax, being paid for only by customers.

This is not correct. What it is doing is taking tax dollars that are scheduled to be allocated to other public purposes and instead redirecting them to underwrite this special-interest project. Even though the hundreds-of-millions of dollars figures being discussed would be collected from the geographic area, the revenue has the opportunity cost of funding other public projects or simply cutting taxes to put the money back in taxpayers’ pockets.

If the government is devoting public dollars to a stadium project, then the public must be out that same amount of money. You cannot pull this money out of thin air; otherwise, we would fund all public projects like this. It’s important to remember: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FREE STADIUM.

Siphoning off $500 million worth of future tax revenues and delivering them to the Diamondbacks’ billionaire owner, concludes Bradbury, “is a wealth transfer from general taxpayers, many of whom can’t afford to go to a game, to the most well-to-do members of the community. Democrats and Republicans should be joining hands in opposition to this indefensible subsidy rather than making bipartisan toasts over cocktails in the owner’s suite.”

The D-Backs stadium subsidy bill was set to hit the Arizona senate appropriations committee today, but was removed from the agenda at the last minute. We’ll have to see whether this was because it didn’t have the votes to pass, and if so what the bill’s proponents do next; we should find out soon enough what state legislators plan on doing with their hands.

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Can a Portland MLB stadium pay for itself with “no impact” to Oregon? Ha, ha, it is to laugh

access_time personNeil deMause

With the Oregon senate moving forward with plans to approve up to $800 million in stadium bonds for a potential MLB expansion team, to be funded with player income taxes — it just passed its last committee vote and is headed for the full senate — the Portland Business Journal asked a “Portland economist” to explain it. And while ECONorthwest’s Michael Wilkerson is indeed an actual economist, Ph.D. and everything, I only got as far as this sentence before I had to stop reading:

“The state is not looking at how they could spend this known, certain new income that would be generated. They’re saying this revenue will only happen if the state and PDP is successful in getting a team, and if PDP is successful in getting a team, you will then have the player income to fund the stadium. But if the team doesn’t come, that revenue goes away, and there’s no impact to the state.”

That is indeed the argument being made by wannabe MLB owner Craig Cheek: Without a baseball team, those income taxes — not a special “tax on players,” as some news outlets are reporting, but their regular Oregon state income tax that tops out at 9.9% — would not exist, so it’s free money. But is it true?

I’ve spent years beating my head against that wall — here I am doing it ten years ago regarding the Milwaukee Bucks owners plan to use a similar financing scheme — and frankly I’m tired of saying the same thing over and over again. So I asked some other actual economists who will be attending this week’s second annual sports economics conference at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County (yes, you’ll be seeing at least one more liveblog, likely on Friday’s session), and Geoffrey Propheter, who will be presenting his paper on “Determinants of Lawmaker Support for Sports Facility Subsidies: Inching Towards a Predictive Model?”, replied like so:

Player (and non-player staff too presumably) salaries come from, in part, residents spending money on tickets, concessions, parking, etc. In order for people to buy tickets, concessions, parking etc, they stop spending money on other goods and services. The businesses that would have received that consumer spending now don’t, and it instead accrues to the team owner as revenue and to players/staff as wages. This includes media revenue from things like TV rights — you used to go to the movies once a month but now you buy a monthly local TV subscription for the team, that sort of thing.
The part of the income tax stream that is new is the chunk paid by non-residents via MLB revenue sharing agreements.

href=”https://www.oregonlive.com/sports/2017/09/possible_names_for_a_portland.html”>Orcas game instead of a Trail Blazers game, that doesn’t create new income taxes for the state. Yes, when a resident of South Carolina watches an Orcas game on Fox and part of the proceeds go to Portland ballplayers, that results in new income tax revenue for Oregon. But that’s not what the Senate bill does: Rather, it just adds up all the income tax revenue that was ever touched by baseball team employees, declare it an isosceles triangle, and sells $800 million in bonds on the proceeds.

And how did the state senate and Cheek come up with that $800 million number, anyway? J.C. Bradbury, whose conference paper is on “Franchise Relocation and Stadium Subsidies: Credible Threats or Cheap Talk,” chimed in that it’s worth looking at the projected Portland income tax revenues needed to pay off the bonds, which are, he said, “bananas.” but let’s go with “optimistic, to say the least.” The projections used a variety of scenarios, but mostly assumed average MLB payrolls would keep rising by 3% a year, as they have on average since 1989:

(Yes, that chart was put together by ECONorthwest, the company that employs Michael Wilkerson, the economist consulted by Portland Business Journal for his unbiased analysis back at the beginning of his post, who have actually been paid by Cheek’s prospective ownership group to work on its analysis, something the Journal didn’t divulge in its article.)

If you look closely at that chart, average player payroll relative to inflation has actually fallen since about 2017. That could be a temporary dip, or it could be an indicator of things like the popping of the cable bubble that could cause MLB revenues to flatten or decline.

And how you project future baseball revenues, it turns out, matters a lot to the $800 million stadium bond plan. The average MLB payroll right now is about $180 million a year, and the bill assumes that non-player payroll is about the same.* The Oregon bill assumes that players would pay 8.62% of their salaries in state income taxes and non-players 6.36%, which comes to $27 million a year — only enough to cover around $400 million in bonds. If baseball salaries rise by 3% a year, meaning the average player would be earning $14 million a year by the 2050s, then you could pay off around $600 million in bonds, by my back-of-the-envelope math — but if salaries are flat or fall, the state of Oregon could end up hundreds of millions of dollars in the hole. And when you take into account that much of those “new” income tax revenues wouldn’t actually be new, this looks like a guaranteed money loser for taxpayers in at least the half-a-billion-dollar range.

All of which any economist not in the employ of the Portland Diamond Project could have explained to Oregon readers, if they’d had the chance. This should make for some lively dinner conversation in Maryland this week, I expect.

*UPDATE: This bothered me when I read it, and bothered Bradbury even more, so I’ve spent a bit of time trying to track down where it came from, and … I still have no idea. My best guess is that it’s based on a bunch of figures showing that when you subtract out profits from income to get expenses, about half of that is player payroll, so then the other half has to be non-player payroll … which isn’t how “expenses” work at all, I know, but could ECONorthwest be that dumb? Don’t answer that.

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Friday roundup: Angels owner could be skimping on stadium repairs, St. Pete may send Rays owner a bill for their wasted stadium time

access_time personNeil deMause

Hey, did you hear the one about the time that then-New York governor and now-New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo gave two of Elon Musk’s cousins $750 million in public money to open a solar-panel factory that ended up not making any solar panels but just re-sold another company’s solar panels for twice as much per watt as the national average? Me neither until recently — consider it bonus topical content.

Meanwhile, back in the now:

  • Anaheim city officials have no idea how much maintenance work is needed at city-owned Angel Stadium because the Los Angeles Angels‘ lease doesn’t require them to tell the city about repair needs, but it could be “hundreds of millions of dollars” worth, according to state auditors. They suggested either asking Angels owner Arte Moreno if the city can do occasional inspections or maybe seeking a court order. It’s important because Moreno is on the hook for certain maintenance costs, while others would fall on the city; the Angels owner recently said, “I’m not going to put $200 or $300 million into a stadium that a city owns without any of their participation. Maybe we’ll get a new mayor and council that wants us to stay,” which is not exactly a commitment to live up to his lease obligations.
  • Pinellas County is considering sending Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg a bill for county time and money spent on the St. Petersburg stadium deal Sternberg ultimately backed out of, and St. Pete Mayor Ken Welch said the idea “has merit” and he may do the same. “Yeah, why not?” remarked county commission chair Brian Scott, who was previously for the stadium deal. “When we find out what that is, we’ll send them an invoice.”
  • Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine still wants to raise sports gambling taxes to raise $600 million toward a Cleveland Browns stadium (and more toward other future stadiums), but the state legislature still prefers its omni-TIF idea to do the same, and DeWine hasn’t said he’ll veto the legislature’s plan. As for the idea of just not giving Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam $600 million to move from one part of the state to another, no one (besides state house Democrats, but who cares about them) seems to be interested in that, way to go, Ohio.
  • Bexar County, the city of San Antonio, and the Spurs owners have signed a nonbinding agreement not to use county property taxes to fund a new $1.5 billion basketball arena, instead relying on hotel and car rental taxes, which, uh, was the plan all along? Could this nonbinding agreement just be a way to get headlines like “Bexar County agrees not to use property taxes to fund new Spurs arena”? Surely elected officials would not be that cynical!
  • Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman says he has “multiple [stadium] opportunities on both sides of the state line,” because of course he does, he wants to be a savvy negotiator, after all.
  • The USL is expanding to compete directly with MLS and adopting promotion and relegation even, and you know what that means: lots of new stadiums! Modesto, California gets one, and Rogers, Arkansas gets one, and Albany, New York gets one, and by “gets one” I mean of course “gets to help pay for one,” that’s just the price of doing business in a world where there are now two leagues that could be forced to compete for the right to play in markets, hmm.
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KC mayor has piece of paper right here detailing how he can offer Royals $1B for stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

Kansas City, Missouri Mayor Quinton Lucas said a thing:

Kansas City, Missouri, Mayor Quinton Lucas said Tuesday the city has offered more than $1 billion to the Royals to help the team build a new downtown stadium or renovate Kauffman Stadium.

“We do have, I think, a very robust offer that combines state and local incentives,” Lucas said. “It’s my view that gets you to a $1.2 to $1.4 billion range with no tax increase. It doesn’t calculate or include the current Jackson County sales tax.”

What’s that, now? The last Royals stadium funding plan that Lucas mentioned was a state bill that would raise an amount of money Lucas didn’t disclose by means he also didn’t disclose, though apparently it’s a super-duper-STIF, funneling 50% of state sales and income taxes plus up to $100 million in state “matching grants” for “qualified entertainment facility projects.” The total state subsidy is limited to 33% of a project’s total cost, meaning Lucas must have city and county subsidies in mind as well, though — stop me if you’ve heard this one — he hasn’t disclosed what those would be.

Meanwhile, the owners of land in Overland Park, Kansas who had been reported to be negotiating the sale of their property for a possible new Royals stadium say they’re “NOT in discussions with the Royals about being a potential new site for their stadium.” Facts are passé, man, future stadium projects will be entirely based on vibes.

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D-Backs stadium redo bill shuffles tax streams, still set to cost Arizonans $400m+

access_time personNeil deMause

The bill to funnel about $400 million worth of future taxes to Arizona Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick for stadium renovations took another step forward yesterday, passing the state senate finance committee by a 4-3 vote. (It’s already been approved by the state house.) The senate version, however, is what KJZZ-FM called, in a language almost but not exactly like English, “a paired down version” of the bill; what’s changed?

  • Removed: A provision to redirect Diamondbacks player state income taxes to pay for renovation costs. That was set to provide about 12.7% of the tax money, meaning the projected public cost would now be around $350 million.
  • Added: A provision that Maricopa County put in as much as the city of Phoenix does — something it wasn’t previously going to, because the county has no general sales tax. If the city cost remains $6.4 million a year, that would mean the county contribution would have to quadruple to keep pace, meaning we’d be back up to around $420 million in taxpayer costs.
  • Unchanged: Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego’s request for a $15 million a year cap on public expenditures — which would keep the total subsidy value at around $220 million — was rejected, though the new bill does include an overall cap of $500 million “plus inflation,” which is to say not actually a cap of $500 million.

The bill still needs to get through the appropriations committee, then on to a full vote of the senate, then back to the house for a re-vote on the amended version. Then it would be up to Gov. Katie Hobbs, who has said she’ll sign the bill if it is “acceptable to all the parties,” which right now it is not if Mayor Gallego and Maricopa County leaders count. This one could go down to the wire — not that stadium deals don’t usually get hashed out at the wire, if necessary by a few concessions to key opponents, but “usually” isn’t “always,” so we’ll have to wait and see.

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Ohio legislature proposes omni-TIF to funnel tax money to Browns and other stadiums

access_time personNeil deMause

Ohio’s Statehouse News Bureau has obtained the draft legislation that would provide $600 million worth of state tax dollars to Cleveland Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam for construction of a new stadium, as well as potentially more money to other teams such as the Cincinnati Bengals, and an initial read reveals some interesting details:

  • The proposed state budget amendment would allow the state legislature to redirect all state taxes “attributable to the professional sports franchise,” after first subtracting out how much in state taxes were paid by the sports facility district in the year prior to the first year of a team’s lease. This would include taxes levied under chapters 5739, 5741, 5747, and 5751 of the state code, which are sales tax, use tax, storage tax, income tax, and commercial activity tax.
  • The district is defined as “the geographic area encompassing the land upon which the 19 transformational major sports facility mixed-use project is located,” with no apparent limit on the size of the area within which taxes will be kicked back.
  • The money would be available to any “transformational major sports facility mixed-use project,” which would be defined as any project that 1) includes a “major sports facility,” 2) includes any size of mixed-use development, and 3) “is expected to generate increased state tax revenues.”

This is, in technical budget terms, some damn sweeping legislation. By allowing the state to create stadium and arena districts of any size where all new sales, income, and other tax revenues are kicked back to the team to pay construction costs, the bill would effectively prioritize projects on otherwise vacant land — or at least land that can be made vacant by the year before the stadium lease starts. And there’s no provision for determining whether the “new” tax revenue in a stadium district would be new to the state as a whole — meaning Ohioans could end up paying a team to move its economic activities from one part of the state to another, then 20 years later paying them again to move it back.

There have been plenty of sports projects in the past funded by tax increment financing, or TIF, projects, which usually just mean kicking back increased property taxes; occasionally, other taxes are rolled in too, creating the less common mega-TIF. This legislation ups the ante even further, and really deserves a new name: “Omni-TIF” has a nice ring to it. The state legislature will be debating what’s in the final budget until next Tuesday, April 1, with a full floor vote slated for the following Wednesday, April 9 — we should get a sense by then how much this language would be expected to cost Ohio taxpayers, but with the ability to draw a circle of unlimited size around a stadium and kick back and any all taxes from it, looks like the sky’s the limit.

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Friday roundup: Oregon considers upping MLB expansion stadium ante to $800m, baseball owners twirl mustaches in glee

access_time personNeil deMause

This week’s vibes.

  • An Oregon state senator has introduced a bill to increase the state’s spending on a possible Portland MLB stadium from $150 million to $800 million, provided Portland gets an expansion team whenever MLB next expands. The source would still be funneling player income taxes to pay off stadium bonds, yet another Casino Night–style funding scheme that is both risky and not really free money, for reasons we’ve covered here before. (The increased figure would rely on rising player payrolls since the initial $150 million plan was approved more than 20 years ago.) The $800 million figure is apparently meant to compete with Utah’s proposed $900 million in property tax kickbacks for an MLB stadium in Salt Lake City; expansion city bidding war, activated!
  • Denver’s NWSL franchise is planning to build a 14,500-seat stadium, and “the ownership group is paying for the stadium in its entirety,” according to the Denver Post. Also according to the Denver Post, four paragraphs later, a tax increment financing district is already in place on the team’s proposed stadium site, meaning the team would recoup property taxes worth some number that the Denver Post didn’t deign to mention. The city would also be on the hook for buying $24 million worth of land for the stadium project, but Denver Mayor Mike Johnston says “the city would always own that public space and that could come back to us for repurposing in 50 years from now if the stadium were to move,” so really it’s an investment, see?
  • Will the Tampa Bay Rays draw more fans this season, despite playing in an 11,000-seat minor-league stadium, thanks to now being on the side of the bay where more people with more money live? Doesn’t look like it, based on the fact that opening day is one week away and hasn’t sold out yet. It doesn’t help that Rays management raised average ticket prices by 30% in response to the smaller capacity, which could complicate efforts to use the 2025 season to answer the age-old question, “Is it St. Petersburg, or is it just Florida?“
  • Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne says the financing plan for a new Cleveland Browns stadium would require average ticket prices to rise to $800 over 30 years in order for the math to work, while a Browns spokesperson says this isn’t true, and nobody’s showing their math, that’s no fun! (Yes, this website is predicated on the notion that math is fun. I’m sorry if you’re learning about this late.)
  • A Massachusetts judge heard arguments this week in a lawsuit charging that a new stadium for BOS Nation F.C. (soon to be renamed, finally) violates a state law requiring a two-thirds supermajority of the state legislature to approve any new uses of land taken for conservation purposes. The Boston mayor’s office insists that tearing down a public school stadium and rebuilding it as a pro women’s soccer stadium that public school students would still get to play in is really the same use — cue the Ship of Theseus debates!
  • The Eugene Emeralds are absolutely, positively moving out of Eugene after 70 years, uh, just as soon as they find somewhere else offering to build them a new stadium. Until then, they’ll still be playing in Eugene. But they’re gonna leave, just you watch! Don’t call their bluff, voters who rejected giving them $15 million last May!
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