Search Results for: Royals promise $425 million of fun

Friday roundup: Cleveland, Nashville keep throwing good stadium money after bad

access_time personNeil deMause

Running late today, let’s do a speed round:

  • Upkeep costs for the Cleveland Guardians stadium and Cavaliers arena continue to climb, with one estimate placing them at $261 million, and the county-run Gateway Economic Development Corp. still doesn’t have money identified to pay for them. “We need to figure this out,” said Gateway board chair Virginia “GiGi” Benjamin; given that the Guardians’ and Cavs’ leases only run though 2036 and 2034 respectively, Gateway could always just not spend the money and dare the teams to break their leases a few years early, or at least ask the team owners to kick in a bit more if they don’t want Gateway to default, but still nobody seems to be considering that option, or at least pricing out whether it would be cheaper than spending $261 million.
  • The Tennessee Titans owners are seeking another $75 million for a pedestrian bridge to their new stadium on top of $1.26 billion to build the stadium itself, part of $700 million in public spending set aside for the stadium area, move over, Indiana, there may be a new grift-that-keeps-on-giving champion.
  • Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke’s lawsuit to get the city of Inglewood to repay him for about $400 million in roads, sidewalks, utilities, and other “public services” for his otherwise privately funded stadium has ended in a judge confirming that the agreement for Inglewood to cover those costs was nullified in a previous court ruling, so sucks to be you, Stan Kroenke. Expect an appeal, and for the two sides to try to settle out of court for a smaller amount.
  • NBA commissioner Adam Silver said it is his “hope and belief that the Trail Blazers can be successful in Portland, Oregon” but that they “need a state-of-the-art arena” but that he’s talked to Blazers owner Tom Dundon and wants to “lower the temperature bit in these negotiations,” all of which are very Adam Silver things to say. It seems like Silver would like for Dundon to find a way to accept a very large taxpayer check while also ensuring that the check is as large as possible, which is why the owners pay him the big bucks.
  • The Kansas City Star says the key difference between K.C. giving Royals owner $600 million toward a new stadium and giving Current owners Angie and Chris Long $185 million toward an expanded stadium is that the Longs are the ones selling the bonds instead of the city, which will “protect the city in the case of shortfalls.” Except that the Longs will get to repay their bonds with city sales tax revenues, so if there’s no shortfall in those, city residents are still on the hook for $185 million. Maybe all of Kansas City journalists need remedial economics lessons?
  • The Washington Commanders parking garages are no longer set to be translucent, now they will just be set in a featureless void or way far in the distance instead.
  • Longshot recidivist Chicago mayoral candidate Willie Wilson (not that one) says he would resolve the Bears stadium battle by paying to build a dome atop Soldier Field and sell the Bears owners land for a new practice facility and give the team (and nearby homeowners) property tax breaks, at a cost of nobody has asked him, the media are just reprinting his campaign glurge, this is fine.
Share this post:

KCUR gets Royals stadium math all wrong (again)

access_time personNeil deMause

Kansas City NPR station KCUR, which has a pretty bad record of trying to explain stadium financing, set out to do an explainer today on the city’s plan to spend $600 million toward a new Royals stadium, and how’d that go?

The plan to pay the $600 million Kansas City plans to borrow for or spend on the downtown Royals stadium relies on tax revenue that wouldn’t exist without the new ballpark.

Ooh, not great! Most of the $600 million would be paid off with tax revenue that wouldn’t exist at the ballpark — the money would come from increased sales and income tax revenues in the stadium district — but it could very well just be substituting for money that would no longer be spent at the Royals’ current stadium, or at restaurants elsewhere in the city, say. As J.C. Bradbury writes in his new book This One Will Be Different, in a quote that deserves to become as well-known as Allen Sanderson’s about the helicopter, crediting spending at a new stadium as all increased revenue for your city is “like moving a $100 bill from your right hand to your left, and then declaring that the money in your once-empty hand represents a financial windfall of $100.”

If revenue projections come up short, the city still has to cover the bonds through alternative means since the Royals have “no obligation to repay” those bonds.

That’s true as far as it goes: Kansas City is on the hook to cover the whole $600 million, regardless of whether it receives enough tax revenue from the assortment of proposed tax sources (there’s also a 1% sales tax surcharge in the stadium district and some other city money) to cover the principal and interest. But the implication that so long as tax revenues meet projections, K.C. taxpayers are fine, is not true — if some of this is tax revenue that would have been received at Kauffman Stadium if the Royals stayed put and would have gone into the general city treasury, then that’s money the city could have used for other public services, but now won’t have access to because it’ll be earmarked for the Royals.

In total, the stadium project costs $2.05 billion, with the team covering $911 million.

That’s only true if you don’t take into account the roughly $350 million in property tax breaks Royals owner John Sherman is in line for, or the benefits of getting to use the stadium for just $1 a year in rent. In reality, the public will be covering closer to three-quarters of a Royals stadium cost than one-half.

Friends don’t let friends read KCUR for their stadium news, I guess. It would be nice if more journalists would care about reporting the actual facts rather than what’s in the press release, but that’s been a problem for a long while now.

Share this post:

Hochul says $1B Bills stadium spend was to meet fan demands, make “better deal for taxpayers,” other things that aren’t true

access_time personNeil deMause

For some inexplicable reason, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle got an interview with New York state governor Kathy Hochul that ran this morning, and decided to spend it asking her all about how much she loves the Buffalo Bills. After a whole lot of reminiscing about how no one in her house growing up was allowed to talk when the Bills game was on TV — the Hochul family sounds like a blast — the governor gets around to discussing her role in giving Bills owners Terry and Kim Pegula $1 billion in public money for a new stadium, and, well:

The stadium was important to me to have the fans have an experience they wanted. And when I first found out I was going to become governor, I knew that the owners, Terry and Kim Pegula, were frustrated that they weren’t getting an answer out of the administration on whether or not there’d be support for a new stadium. And the lease was up, and there were repairs that were definitely needed; they were expensive. And the Bills had options to go elsewhere. They absolutely were being recruited by other cities. So, it was a perilous time for the Bills.

And I became the first governor from Buffalo since Grover Cleveland and knew what I had to do. And first conveyed to them my strong feelings of getting a new stadium built.

But as a new governor, I had to expend tremendous political capital to get it through the Legislature. I’m not sure they wanted to commit that much money to a sports venue in a place that most of them had never been to. But I was able to be successful. And I showed the economics that, in fact, the Buffalo Bills in the region is about $300 million a year.

I figured out the economics of it. I had to pitch it. I had to negotiate hard. I had two main criteria. One was that the Bills commit to staying 30 years … as well as we would not be responsible for cost overrides, which is fortunate because a lot has happened with inflation and tariffs and costs could go up. But I kept the size of the state’s share the same. So, in comparison to other stadiums, ours comes out as a much better deal for the taxpayers.

As the next followup question from the D&C reporter was “What are you most excited for ahead of the new season?”, we’ll have to pick apart Hochul’s answers ourselves. One at a time:

The stadium was important to me to have the fans have an experience they wanted.

When New York residents were asked if they wanted the state to fund a new Bills stadium, 63% said no, vs. only 24% who said yes. And while many of those were likely downstate fans of the New York Giants and Jets, even those in the Buffalo region opposed the deal by a wide 65-31% margin. And now that the stadium is open, many fans are complaining that it’s not at all the experience they wanted.

I knew that the owners, Terry and Kim Pegula, were frustrated that they weren’t getting an answer out of the administration on whether or not there’d be support for a new stadium.

Hochul’s predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, gave lots of answers about a new Bills stadium, but none was “Here’s a check,” so it’s possible the Pegulas were frustrated by that.

There were repairs that were definitely needed; they were expensive.

This is a common claim by Bills officials, but any evidence in support of it was blacked out of public documents as “a threat to public safety,” so no way to know what repairs were actually needed or the cost. (Time to re-file that FOIL request now that the old stadium is being torn down and can’t be a threat to anyone!)

And the Bills had options to go elsewhere. They absolutely were being recruited by other cities.

“We did not have conversations with other cities,” said Bills stadium czar Ron Raccuia in 2022 shortly after the stadium was approved.

I had to expend tremendous political capital to get it through the Legislature.

Mostly, Hochul won support for her stadium plan by doing an end run around the usual budget process and instead dropping the bill on legislators’ desks too late for any public debate. It’s possible she also had to arm-twist individual reluctant legislators into voting for the bill, but she may want to consider that’s not really the flex she thinks it is.

I showed the economics that, in fact, the Buffalo Bills in the region is about $300 million a year.

That’s not even English, let alone economics, but presumably she means that the economic impact of the Bills in the region is $300 million a year. Economic impact is famously a meaningless number, as “an airplane landing at an airport and everyone gets out and gives each other a million bucks, then gets back on the plane” counts as $200 million in economic impact; what matters is fiscal impact, the amount of money that actually ends up flowing to local governments. The only impact report done for the state actually said that the amount of city, county, and state tax revenue associated with the Bills is $27 million a year, and as that report was done by an engineering firm whose “national director of sports economics” had a degree in accountancy, not economics, it’s doubtful this accounted for things like money that would be spent elsewhere in the state if the Bills had left.

We would not be responsible for cost overrides, which is fortunate because a lot has happened with inflation and tariffs and costs could go up.

They’re generally called cost “overruns,” but fair enough, the Pegulas did agree to cover those, and they were substantial. So one thumb up for Hochul’s negotiating.

In comparison to other stadiums, ours comes out as a much better deal for the taxpayers.

Sports economist Victor Matheson called the Bills deal “one of the worst stadium deals in recent memory – a remarkable feat considering the high bar set by other misguided state and local governments across the country” and “a return to the bad old days” where taxpayers put up the bulk of money for NFL stadium costs.

In conclusion, Hochul is clearly a huge Bills fan, and also kind of a dissembler. We knew both of those things before today, but I suppose it’s nice to have a reminder — though it would have been even nicer if the reporter doing the interview had pressed Hochul on some of her more questionable statements, since I doubt she’s going to reply to this post.

Share this post:

DC officials battle over giving United owners $300m to upgrade 8-year-old stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

Washington, D.C. council chair Phil Mendelson’s proposal to give D.C. United‘s owners $300 million for upgrades to their eight-year-old stadium is facing opposition from Mayor Muriel Bowser, who has argued that she already gave a pile of public money to one 20,000-seat venue in the district — the Wizards and Capitals arena, which is in the midst of getting a $515 million facelift courtesy of D.C. taxpayers — and doing so for the United stadium would be “cannibalizing one for the other.” And this weekend the Washington Post editorial board chimed in with an opinion piece under the 10/10, no notes headline “Yet another subsidy for a D.C. stadium? Really?”

History shows that promises of new revenue from sports venues almost never pan out. The same is true of arguments that such public investments can help boost the local economy. And it’s especially true of more subsidies for Audi Field — since it already exists.

(Somebody’s already making use of J.C. Bradbury’s new stadium economics FAQ, excellent!)

There are ironies up the wazoo here, starting with Bowser finally finding a sports subsidy deal she doesn’t like after writing enormous checks to not just the Caps and Wizards but to Washington Commanders owner Josh Harris; and Mendelson, who was against the $7 billion Commanders deal before he was for it, now taking the lead on fighting for money for United owner Jason Levien. (Both Mendelson and Bowser were on the council when the initial United stadium funding was approved, and worked together to craft the final deal.) Then there’s the fact that the renovations to an eight-year-old stadium will somehow cost $620 million — Levien would cover the rest — when the initial construction cost in 2018 was only $400 million, just under half of it funded by the district. Levien says the stadium needs 8,000 more seats and a roof to be “more impactful,” and the rebuild is not just because MLS is about to shift to a winter schedule that will mean more cold-weather games in D.C.

If Mendelson has a case here, it may be that the funding scheme for the United renovations looks less bad than the previous D.C. stadium deals: The city’s share would be partly funded by a 4.25% ticket tax surcharge, which as previously discussed here mostly ends up coming out of sports team owners’ pockets. (The rest would be funded by a 4.25% sales tax surcharge at the stadium, which would less fall on the United owners; it’s a marginal cost thing.) There would also be a new city maintenance and repair fund for the stadium, which would be directly funded by team rent and naming rights and sponsorship money. It’s hard to say that putting public money into upgrading a stadium just eight years after it opened, in exchange for no additional years of a lease commitment, is ever a good thing, but this seems to be one of the less bad ways to pay for it, at least.

Or that’s how it looks from Mendelson’s proposed legislation, which runs only seven pages and just authorizes the mayor to negotiate the details. Bowser doesn’t seem interested in negotiating squat, but Mendelson is going ahead with an October 23 hearing regardless; maybe at that point we’ll find out more about the details of this plan, but don’t get your hopes up.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Nobody in media or politics can math or word right edition

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s been a while since I’ve thanked everyone who makes this site possible through their generous donations, so: Thanks, everyone, who makes this site possible through your generous donations! I hope you are all still enjoying this journey through the world of sports venue shenanigans, if “enjoy” is the right word for it. Sometimes it feels more like a group therapy sessions for survivors of sports fandom (our own or other people’s or both), but there’s value in that too, right?

I’m going to take the fact that you’ve read this far as a “yes.” Let’s get on with the rest of the week’s news roundup:

  • The Kansas City council approved spending $185 million on expansion of the Current‘s (checks calendar) two-year-old stadium yesterday, something that KMBC described as “$185 million in public financing,” which is absolutely wrong: This would be private debt, but repaid by the city, so private financing but public funding — these things matter. Fox4KC, meanwhile, reported that “the project will be funded by revenue generated by the stadium and surrounding development,” which is also wrong: It will be funded by sales taxes on spending in and around the stadium, most of which probably won’t be new to K.C. at all. This is no way to educate the electorate about stadium economics in advance of a public vote on a Royals stadium next spring, when it will very possibly be too late to matter anyway.
  • Los Angeles County has issued an economic impact report on hosting the 2028 Olympics, far too late to be used to determine how much to spend on the event, but oh well. My eye was immediately caught by the prediction that “the 2028 Games could boost tourist spending by $1 billion above and beyond a typical summer,” a curious conclusion given that actual studies of past Olympics, including Atlanta 1996, Salt Lake City 2002, and London 2012, have found that spending overall doesn’t rise during an Olympics, in large part because locals flee town during the Games. From what I can tell from the county report — turning my laptop sideways to read it because the county doesn’t know how to rotate PDFs properly — consultants HR&A didn’t actually conduct an in-depth spending study, just plugging Olympic visitor numbers into the off-the-shelf IMPLAN software package, because “garbage in, garbage out” is how HR&A rolls.
  • NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly says the league is talking to three different potential Atlanta expansion team ownership groups — because what did that fictitious Einstein guy know, anyway — plus also Austin and maybe Phoenix “with the right location” or maybe expansion “might not happen” at all, Bill Daly clearly got an A in playing hard to get at deputy commissioner school.
  • The Brook Park city council has declared the area around the new Cleveland Browns stadium blighted, which Mayor Edward Orcutt says “gives us the opportunity to be able to maintain this site in the future,” another way of saying “lets us keep spending money on the stadium ad infinitum,” somebody clearly got an A in doubletalk at mayor school.
  • Throw another $60 million on the fire for San Antonio taxpayer spending on a new Spurs arena, this time to acquire land for the project. This brings the public cost total to, you know what, I don’t feel up to mathing today, let’s just call it an even squillion dollars.
  • Residents of Chicago’s Bridgeport’s neighborhood this week protested a proposed Amtrak maintenance facility that could be built there as part of a land swap for a new White Sox stadium, with local alderman Nicole Lee saying, “f the Sox move and we’re left with a 24/7 rail maintenance yard and an empty stadium, we’re done for here.” Team execs, meanwhile, are distancing themselves from minority owner Justin Ishbia’s stadium plan, issuing a statement saying only, “If the site proves viable, it would be added to the locations up for consideration for a new ballpark, along with The 78 and other options.”
  • Judging from my inbox, a lot of you are really excited to see the latest renderings of a new Philadelphia 76ers and Flyers arena, so here, go to town. I’m mostly interested in whether they include fireworks (nope) and how they handle the question of which players’ jerseys fans will be wearing when the place finally opens in 2030 (one part guys currently on the team, one part guys like Charles Barkley, hey remember when he was a Sixer?).
Share this post:

MLB expansion talk focuses on Salt Lake, other cities with major question marks

access_time personNeil deMause

With the Athletics seemingly settled on setting the Fisher family fortune on fire in Las Vegas, and Tampa Bay Rays owner Patrick Zalupski about to receive the spendiest gift stadium in history, the thoughts of bored baseball writers are turning toward expansion. Sure, there’s the little matter of a new union contract first, which could have monumental impacts in terms of incentives for MLB expanding or not. But league commissioner Rob Manfred said he wants expansion cities picked out by the time he retires at the start of 2029, at least before then saying maybe there won’t be expansion after all, so sure, let’s survey the field of candidates.

This week, we’ve had ESPN’s Jeff Passan, Yahoo! Sports’ Matt Larter, and Sportsnaut’s Lincoln Zdunich all chiming in with their lists of prospective expansion cities. Let’s go through the possibilities — since the three can’t agree on a ranking, let’s do it in order of TV market size:

Montreal: Being in Canada, Montreal doesn’t actually appear on the Nielsen market size list, but it’s pretty damn huge: There aren’t directly comparable numbers, but it looks like if Montreal were in the U.S. it would fall around 14th, between Seattle and Detroit. It also doesn’t have either a workable MLB stadium (unless you count the re-refurbished Olympic Stadium, which MLB probably wouldn’t) or a prospective owner in place; Passan notes that “at the forefront of the latest push is Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, the owner of WatchMojo, and he sees himself more as a facilitator than the money man for a bid.” (I’ve now read a fair bit about WatchMojo, and still can’t figure out exactly what it does, which makes it a very 2026 candidate for sports ownership, or at least sports ownership facilitation.) Montreal also still has all the same other issues as when the Expos left, like a sometimes-weak Canadian dollar. Larter calls Montreal a “longshot”; Passan includes it in his top six; Zdunich doesn’t mention it at all.

Orlando: The largest U.S. market without an MLB team, something local team advocates mention at every possible opportunity. It’s also only 84 miles from Tampa, which looks like it will have the Rays to kick around for the foreseeable future, and sure, that’s only a little less distance than Philadelphia is from New York, but Tampa-Orlando isn’t anywhere near as big a combined market as NYC-Philly. (Tampa already swiped Orlando’s prospective lead investor, Rick Workman, as a Rays co-owner, Passan notes.) It’s also in Florida, where MLB expansion franchises go to suffer league-bottom attendance. Orlando does have a name picked out (the “Dreamers”) and a plan for funding a stadium, albeit one that has been rejected by local officials so far. Passan insists that MLB owners “will consider it”; Zdunich says MLB would be concerned about an Orlando team siphoning off fans from Rays and Miami Marlins fanbases that can’t afford to lose any, but that “the Dreamers have time to improve their proposal until an expansion committee is convened” — maybe by moving Orlando to a different state?

Raleigh: North Carolina’s second-largest media market (behind Charlotte) seems to have taken a leap past its neighbor to the south recently, if only because Carolina Hurricanes and Portland Trail Blazers owner Tom Dundon has expressed interest in owning a baseball team there, which gets MLB owners salivating. North Carolina doesn’t have a stadium plan (though it’s funded other teams’ projects before), and it has the disadvantage of splitting its population among three markets (Charlotte, Raleigh-Durham, and Greensboro) that would each be among the smaller metro areas in MLB. Passan says it’s “punching well above its weight” without really explaining why or what that means, while Zdunich calls it the “surprise frontrunner” while noting “the only remaining roadblock would be [stadium] funding,” which is kind of a significant hurdle.

Portland: Has an actual stadium plan with $800 million in promised public funding (allegedly from player income taxes, though that’s unlikely to work out without dipping into existing public money) and a group eager to land a team, though one without a billionaire on hand to pay the expansion fee. It’s also on the West Coast, and Manfred has said he’d prefer to add one team on either side of the continent, which gives it a leg up on the larger East Coast cities, but not on one smaller West Coast city, supposedly.

Nashville: Like Orlando, it has a team name picked out (the “Stars”). It’s less than two-thirds the size of Orlando, though, and has even less of a plan for a stadium, with public funding unlikely to be coming soon after Nashville emptied its stadium budget for the Tennessee Titans. The consensus opinion appears to be that Nashville’s time as a frontrunner has passed, if the consensus opinion really matters here.

Salt Lake City: On the face of it, Salt Lake seems like a bad place to put an MLB team: It’s the smallest market on this list, and while it’s been growing fast, it’s also running out of water and facing a future of toxic dust clouds. But it does have two things MLB really likes: a prospective owner (the Miller family, former owners of the Jazz) and a plan to spend $900 million in public money on a stadium, though not specifically where the $900 million would come from. This is enough to make Passan call it “by far the most advanced potential bid”; Zdunich writes that “Salt Lake has been known as a sports town for a while,” though that’s another way of saying it already has a lot of teams (NBA, NHL, MLS) for a smallish city.

In short, MLB has a bunch of imperfect expansion candidate cities (San Antonio, Sacramento, and Vancouver didn’t even get mentions this week, but they’re still out there). And while the league can — and certainly will — play them off against each other to see who comes up with the most lucrative bid, beyond a quick infusion of expansion fee cash and possibly some stadium money, none seem like they would significantly increase the league’s revenue going forward, certainly not enough to make up for giving up a 1/32nd share of national TV and streaming and other revenues. This financial calculus is the main reason MLB hasn’t expanded yet this century, and it hasn’t changed much, though the soaring sale prices of sports teams as North America fills up with multibillionaires presumably has at least some baseball owners salivating for a quick cash infusion, even if it would only come to a couple hundred million dollars per existing owner.

Going back to that Marc Normandin article from February that I linked to above, he wrote at the time:

As I put it back in 2023, “As much as the current 30 owners would love to split some 10-digit expansion fees, they’d also love to be able to threaten to take off for Nashville or Charlotte whenever they aren’t getting as much taxpayer money as they’d like for a new stadium or renovations of an old one. And if new teams fill those slots, well. Threatening to move to Manchester, NH just doesn’t carry the same weight, you know?” And while a market as small as (and as bumping-up-against-Boston as) Manchester might never actually be on the table, somewhere like Las Vegas is a whole lot easier to put up with, media-market size-wise, if the Dodgers, Yankees, et al are subsidizing it a bit. “We can’t put teams in another market the size of Milwaukee” doesn’t hold up when you have a revenue-sharing model that makes Milwaukee work better than it already does.

That’s true, but it also means that going into collective bargaining agreement talks that will include discussions of how teams share revenue, big- and even medium-market owners may not want to saddle themselves with even more people in the owners’ club who don’t bring much to the table other than a one-time check and an expectation to get a big chunk of MLB.tv revenue into the distant future despite not providing many new eyeballs of their own. We don’t know without a fly on the wall inside the owners’ suites; it would be nice if access journalists like Passan would use their contacts to suss out what the jockeying for power within MLB really looks like instead of just passing along what certain insiders want repeated in print, but I guess that’s the kind of reporting that is less likely to get you continued access.

Share this post:

White Sox owner-in-waiting reveals pictures of what proposed “Railyards” stadium probably won’t look like

access_time personNeil deMause

What’s worse than a Friday news dump? A Saturday news dump on a three-day weekend:

Canal Edge LLC – a Chicago-based development and investment firm owned by White Sox minority owner Justin Ishbia – revealed renderings of a potential stadium and mixed-use development along the Chicago River that would also include residential, commercial, retail and healthcare space.

The mixed-use development, dubbed “The Railyards,” would be designed to “convert long-under-utilized rail and industrial land into one of the city’s most significant economic development opportunities in a generation.” …

If feasible, the plan could be presented to White Sox leadership for consideration as one of the team’s options for a new ballpark when the team’s current lease in state-owned Rate Field ends.

So there’s a lot left out of that WGN report, starting with the fact that Ishbia isn’t just a White Sox “minority owner,” he’s the majority-owner-in-waiting, with an option to buy the team by 2034 from current owner Jerry Reinsdorf, who will be celebrating his 98th birthday that year. There’s also the question of who would pay for this stadium district project: Amtrak last month approved $659 million to relocate a railyard currently located on the site — which is across the Chicago River from the The 78 site previously floated as a White Sox stadium location but now slated for a Chicago Fire stadium — but that doesn’t indicate what Ishbia would pay Amtrak for the land, or who would pay for the stadium district, or if any of this would require billions of dollars in tax money as Reinsdorf was seeking across the river. (Reporting in the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times and Block Club Chicago is similarly silent on the funding issue.)

To make room for the new project, Amtrak would relocate its existing maintenance facility to a new one built on Union Pacific property near the White Sox’ current stadium in the South Side neighborhood of Bridgeport. Ishbia will pay $125 million toward that project, then is supposed to get control of the proposed stadium site; without knowing how much Ishbia will pay Amtrak for the 47 acres of downtown railyard land, though, it’s impossible to begin to guess how the funding will shake out. (UPDATE: Ishbia is also looking at acquiring more than 30 acres of adjacent land from freight operator BNSF, according to a Crain’s Chicago Business report.) 

Residents and elected officials in Bridgeport, meanwhile, are vowing to block the new maintenance yard, with alderman Nicole Lee and Cook County commissioner John P. Daley issuing a statement that the land swap would be “a betrayal” to the neighborhood and to Sox fans and “would drive a knife into the heart of this community, abandoning Bridgeport and sticking us with an empty stadium and 24/7 Amtrak maintenance facility in a residential neighborhood, with no protections against the environmental impacts, not to mention the economic ones.” Amtrak is currently seeking a federal exemption from doing an environmental review for the project.

One thing we do have is lots of pictures of the proposed stadium, since all the coverage made sure to reprint those:

That looks like a baseball stadium, all right, one that cleverly leaves “Chicago” out of its name to avoid misspelling it. From this design, we can tell that — I’m sorry, what’s that, Tribune baseball writer Paul Sullivan?

Ishbia’s spokesperson said the architect has not been chosen and the renderings are a representation of a modern-day ballpark. It could look completely different if it gets built.

So, what are we left with? The private equity goon who is heir apparent to take over the White Sox wants to build a stadium district on federally owned land that he doesn’t own yet, with money to come from somewhere, sometime in the future. (The White Sox’ current lease expires after 2029, though it can always be extended.) That’s all pretty much the same as we knew before the weekend, but now there’s also a pile of news stories featuring pictures of what a stadium almost certainly won’t look like. “Print first, ask questions later” isn’t a great journalism axiom, but it’s where we seem to have landed.

Share this post:

Friday roundup: Vegas stadium board approves Raiders cash after “fastest meeting in the history of $75m giveaways”

access_time personNeil deMause

Welcome to the end of another programming week, one that was way busier than you’d expect for the dregs of summer. Let’s get through the rest of the week’s news and get you out of here for the long weekend:

  • Also eager to get out of town for the long weekend, apparently: The Las Vegas Stadium Authority, which voted unanimously Wednesday to give $75 million from a “waterfall” reserve fund of hotel tax money to the Raiders, to be used mostly toward a $158 million upgrade of an entry plaza. The authority took this action after just two public comments and none from the authority board members themselves, in what local podcaster Dayvid Figler called “the fastest meeting in the history of $75 million giveaways.” Board chair Steve Hill presented the plan as in response to the “need to keep driving all those great results that Jeremy presented,” referring to Jeremy Aguero, the paid sports team consultant and hotel management degree holder who for some reason gets to do all the economic analyses of sports projects in Nevada. (Hill, of course, is an unregistered sports team lobbyist too, Las Vegas is truly a growth coalition at its finest.)
  • The Kansas City council put off a rezoning vote for a new Royals stadium district again, because they want to wait first to get all the city’s mega-TIF districts finalized first. The council could have waited to figure out how it’s going to pay for its $1.1 billion share of the project before approving the money, but there was democracy afoot, had to nip that in the bud.
  • The Royals deal is still facing not only a potential April public vote — plus a likely lawsuit over whether the city can move ahead regardless of the results since it already approved the Royals deal — but a lawsuit charging that the state money being used for the project was passed illegally; the Missouri state supreme court is currently mulling whether that suit can move forward.
  • Chicago Bears officials are finally getting around to asking fans if they would still buy tickets if the team moved to Indiana, and are they taking the opportunity to sell fans on a “surrounded by restaurants, entertainment, and green space, creating a true gameday destination” with “one of the most robust gameday tailgating environments in the NFL”? You bet they are!
  • New Tampa Bay Rays owner Patrick Zalupski says his new $2.3 billion stadium, built with the aid of $2 billion in public money, will enable him to move the team’s payroll into the top 10 to 15 in MLB, after years at the bottom. That’s never really happened before with past MLB stadiums — there are some lovely charts showing this in J.C. Bradbury’s new book, wait for it — but there’s a first time for everything.
  • Speaking of Bradbury, he has a nice article over at The Conversation analyzing why we’re seeing so many new NFL stadiums being built with public money right now when economists and taxpayers alike think they’re a bad idea. Tl;dr: It’s the leases, stupid (and the stupid leases).
  • The NHL’s attempts to pit Houston and Austin against each other to compete for a expansion franchise have at least started to pay off, with Houston Mayor John Whitmire saying this week that “We’ll definitely be a better location than Austin” and “If you talk to the sports franchises in town, I think they’d tell you we’re great partners.” Still no word on what kind of money Houston (or Austin) might offer toward a new hockey arena, but you know that’s what Gary Bettman is waiting to hear.

 

Share this post:

D-backs exec calls lease talks “non-productive,” “draconian,” would like his $600m check already

access_time personNeil deMause

Arizona Diamondbacks stadium renovation talks appear to be at a standstill again, with team CEO Derrick Hall telling Axios that lease talks with Maricopa County have been “non-productive to date” and that “we need language that is not draconian in nature and reflects the spirit of that legislation without renegotiating it.”

The legislation in question is last year’s bill providing $500 million in state sales and income tax money for renovating the D-backs stadium, though the total could end up being more than $600 million once future increases are taken into account. That was all contingent on the team signing a new lease, something very little has been reported on over the ensuing 14 months; according to the Axios bulletisticle, sticking points include that team owner Ken Kendrick meets state procurement rules and guarantees that he’ll put in $250 million of his own money that he’s promised, which Hall now seems to be characterizing as trying to renegotiate the deal rather than trying to fill in everything that wasn’t decided at the time.

Either way, Kendrick has 600 million reasons to want to get a lease done, and Hall didn’t make any threats about what would happen if the stalemate continues, something he’s never hesitated to do in the past. So this should get hashed out eventually, unless…

I wouldn't be surprised if the D-Backs are seeing what the Rays and Royals are getting for new ballparks, and switch to seeking more money for a replacement rather than a renovation.

— J.C. Bradbury (@jcbradbury.com) 2026-09-02T12:45:48.530Z

Jeez, J.C., don’t give them any ideas! Though if Kendrick really did tear up his current deal and try for a new, bigger one, that might give Arizona elected officials the chance to get out of their $600 million obligation, maybe? Admittedly, it never seems to work out that way, but there’s a first time for everything.

Share this post:

What does $4B Angels sale mean for team’s stadium future, MLB expansion plans? Some investimagations

access_time personNeil deMause

Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno announced yesterday that he is selling the team to Los Angeles Rams/Denver Nuggets/Colorado Avalanche owner Stan Kroenke, and most of the news coverage has — rightly — focused on Moreno not letting the door hit him in the butt on the way out. Moreno, a billionaire billboard baron, bought the Angels in 2003 from Disney for $180 million, and since then has: angered locals by changing the name of the team from the Anaheim Angels to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim to try to appeal to more fans from the populous city to the north; squandered the presence of the best player of his generation by surrounding him with every overpriced, washed-up free agent he could find; tried to obtain $500 million worth of city land around his stadium for only $150 million, and almost getting away with it until the whole thing blew up in an FBI bribery investigation; and declaring that fans don’t care about winning after conducting a survey that didn’t include “winning” as one of the choices, among other lowlights. By this season, fans were openly chanting “Sell the team!” at home games, and it was apparently enough for Moreno to cash in his chips and sell to the Walmart-heir-by-marriage up the road at a huge profit.

Even as fans exulted in Moreno’s departure, some expressed concern about what a new owner — one who already broke the Rams’ lease in St. Louis so he could move them back to L.A. (The Athletic terms this a “proven track record” in stadium development, which is certainly one way of looking at it) — might mean for the Angels’ future. The team’s lease expires in 2032, though ownership has a series of one-year options that could extend it to 2038. And that juicy stadium parking lot land is still sitting there, though complicated by the fact that the state’s Surplus Land Act requires public property to be considered first for affordable housing before it can be devoted to other uses, something the city of Anaheim already paid a $96 million fine for ignoring once.

In addition, just last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law the Home Run for Anaheim Act, which requires the team to revert to being called the Anaheim Angels in any future lease negotiation or land sale agreement (CORRECTION: Only if the team first gets an exemption from the Surplus Land Act), which may or may not matter depending on whether Kroenke shares Moreno’s obsession with the L.A. name. The 79-year-old Kroenke inherits a stadium situation that is ripe for either opportunity or extortion, depending on how you look at it, and his track record for playing hardball in such matters should encourage Anaheim officials to sleep with one eye open, at least.

The other potential fallout from the sale involves the price tag: We don’t know how big a stake the “controlling interest” is that Kroenke is buying from Moreno, but we do know that it values the entire franchise at a new-MLB-record $4 billion. Coming on the heels of the San Diego Padres‘ sale for a $3.9 billion valuation, this is a sign that there are still plenty of billionaires willing to shell out top dollar for MLB franchises. That’s likely to whet league owners’ appetite for cashing in by creating two expansion teams; even if the available open markets are underwhelming and adding teams would just dilute existing owners’ shares of national TV contracts, it’s got to be tough to pass up a cut of what could be a pair of $4 billion or more checks. With the Athletics and Tampa Bay Rays stadium situations now seemingly settled — though we’ve said that before — the next step may be setting up a bidding war among the Portlands and Nashvilles and Salt Lake Citys of the world, to see if any wants to pay enough toward a new stadium to help an expansion owner afford that multibillion-dollar expansion fee. All the kids are doing it!

 

Share this post: