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Braves hired Andy Zimbalist to fire back on stadium impact criticism, and it went about as well as you’d expect

access_time personNeil deMause

When Kennesaw State economist J.C. Bradbury issued his comprehensive study in March showing that the new Atlanta Braves stadium was leaving Cobb County taxpayers on the hook for $15 million a year, Braves execs were not happy. And now, apparently on the principle that the best answer to a good economist with a study is a hired-in-house economist with a study, the Braves have commissioned a report from … oh, my goodness, it’s Andy Zimbalist!

For those who came in late, Zimbalist was part of the first generation of economists to turn a skeptical eye on sports stadium and arena deals, notably co-editing with Roger Noll the 1997 book Sports, Jobs, and Taxes, which remains an excellent overview of why claims of economic windfalls from sports subsidies are hoohah. Zimbalist was also one of the first to turn his expertise into a lucrative ($225 an hour) consulting business, taking on gigs from the likes of Brooklyn Nets owner Bruce Ratner, New York Yankees president Randy Levine, and the cities of Anaheim, Seattle, and Worcester to write reports and/or testify publicly on the costs and benefits of sports venues.

These reports were, ah, not always conducted with the rigor of Zimbalist’s other work. Memorably, his report for Seattle — which was arguing in court that losing the Sonics to Oklahoma City had cost the city money — turned out to be largely copied from his report for Anaheim — and since Anaheim was arguing that the presence of the Los Angeles Angels didn’t create a huge economic benefit, Zimbalist simply reversed his conclusions at the end. In the case of Worcester luring the Pawtucket Red Sox to town with a new taxpayer-funded stadium, he: cited University of San Francisco economist Nola Agha’s work to argue that minor-league subsidies are more justifiable, only to have Agha reply that that “virtually never works”; earned criticism from economist Victor Matheson, who actually works in Worcester at College of the Holy Cross, that “Andy is using his credentials and his prominence to basically give cover to the Worcester city council and [city manager] Ed Augustus to go forward with this project”; and later admitted (to me, for an article in pre-decimation Deadspin) that he hadn’t calculated all the costs of, for example, providing schooling to all the new residents he was crediting the Worcester stadium project for attracting.

As for the latest Zimbalist missive on behalf of Cobb County, let’s let the Marietta Daily Journal provide the takeaway:

Accompanying the county’s own numbers was a new, Braves-commissioned study prepared by Smith College economist Andrew Zimbalist, which is pitched as a corrective to Bradbury’s findings. The lead finding is that by 2046, the county is expected to see a return on its initial investment of between $19.6 million and $125.6 million.

Braves management touted the study as a long-awaited vindication of the deal, saying in a news release, “This should put to rest any questions on whether this project has been a win for Cobb County taxpayers, who have seen a major return on their investment.”

But have they really? The strength of Bradbury’s study was that he looked at the actual numbers for economic activity in Cobb County before and after the stadium — sales tax receipts, property values, and so on — and compared them with other neighboring counties to see if Cobb did significantly better as a result of the stadium. (Answer: It did not.) Zimbalist’s report, meanwhile, starts off with a long section on how the Braves owners put up a bigger share of construction costs than many other teams (the public share for Cobb County being 45% vs. an average for all stadiums from 1970 to 2010 of 70%, though as he doesn’t footnote the latter figure it’s possible he’s not comparing apples to apples here), charges Bradbury with providing “no foundation, either methodological or empirical,” for his sales tax figures, and accuses him of focusing solely on short-term losses for Cobb County when the real gains will be, he says, far into the future.

The MDJ didn’t bother to call Bradbury for comment for their article, but J.C. doesn’t need no legacy print newspapers when he has Twitter:

Phew! No reply yet from Andy on Twitter, but given that he tweets about 0.0001% as often as Bradbury, that’s probably no surprise. And anyway, as J.C. rightly points out, the proper forum for hashing this stuff out is in a peer-reviewed academic journal, whereas Zimbalist just typed out a Word file and sent it along to his client, which passed it along to reporters. This resulted in the MDJ’s headline “Braves tout new study on fiscal benefits, landing between ‘home run’ and ‘pop fly’,” as well as a way more skeptical article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (“Visitors paying less, businesses more for Cobb stadium bonds”).

In any case, this is yet another reminder that not all “reports” are created equal, and it’s important to look at who has paid for them, how rigorous their methodology is, etc. Or, as a far wiser observer once noted, it takes more than a clear plastic binder to make for good research.

 

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Worcester housing plan scaled back, city confident it can still pay off $150m stadium with ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

access_time personNeil deMause

Back when Worcester was approving its $70 million subsidy (which eventually rose to more than $150 million) for a new minor-league baseball stadium to lure the Pawtucket Red Sox to town, and the city’s economist-for-hire Andy Zimbalist argued that it was worth the cost because of all the housing development that would come with it, I spoke with a couple other economists who’ve studied the impact of sports development projects to see what they thought of this line of thinking. What they said at the time:

“It really does depend,” says [University of San Francisco economist Nola] Agha. “There’s a list a mile long of cities where it hasn’t worked. And there’s a really short list where it has.” Her question for Worcester echoes that raised over a decade ago in Brooklyn: “Is this development guaranteed? Is it going to happen regardless of if there’s a stock market crash or interest rates go up?”

[College of the Holy Cross economist Victor] Matheson is less concerned about whether the tax revenues will roll in, saying Worcester is, like many urban areas since the recolonization of cities by young professionals, booming: “I don’t think this is going to be an El Paso, where they promised all this development and it still hasn’t come.”

Interest rates haven’t gone up, though they may soon, and gentrification hasn’t stopped being a thing. But the promised Worcester development is already starting to be scaled back: The Cove, a mixed-used housing project that was originally supposed to include 318 apartments, has been cut back to 173; and a planned pair of hotels totaling 262 rooms have been sliced in half to a single 125-room hotel. The hotel developer, Madison Properties, blamed the hotel world being “a lot different today” thanks to the pandemic, while a Cove developer blamed the high price of steel.

Worcester officials say they still expect the new developments to provide enough taxes to pay off the stadium costs — which is not the same thing as providing enough taxes to provide a net positive return for the city, given that residential taxes are normally supposed to pay for things like schools for the new kids who move into the new housing — but if it doesn’t, Matheson worries that the tax increment financing district may have to be expanded to cover more of the surrounding area, after already being expanded once in 2020 after ballpark construction costs went up when it unexpectedly turned out hills exist. This is the template for what subsidy expert Greg LeRoy once referred to as TIFs “eating the lunch of the general fund,” as the district where taxes are siphoned off to pay for development gets larger and larger, leaving less to pay for normal city operations.

Or, it could turn out that the development eventually happens more or less as originally projected, and then the only question is whether Worcester spent $150 million on a baseball stadium in order to get a bunch of housing that someone would have eventually built anyway, because the eastern Massachusetts housing market is so crazy hot. So many ways this Worcester Red Sox stadium glass can be half-empty, you need a scorecard to keep track!

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Friday roundup: The perils of just-get-things-done-ism, and a happy zombie apocalypse to all!

access_time personNeil deMause

One of the special joys of running a web news outlet is the regular stream of emails you receive from people wanting to pay you to run their “articles” (really thinly disguised ads and/or link spam) on your site. I had a whole plan for a year-end roundup of the funniest of those, but various things happened this past week and — anyway, there was only one I really wanted to share with you, and that is this:

Hi Neil,

I noticed you shared an article from CDC.gov when you talked about the zombie apocalypse, here: https://www.fieldofschemes.com/category/mlb/los-angeles-angels-of-anaheim/

We recently published an article about a related topic, basement bunkers and why it isn’t just for wealthy preppers, that I thought might be interesting to your readers.

Followed a week later, when I didn’t respond, by:

Hi Neil,

I wanted to check in and see if you got my note about the zombie apocalypse?

Truly we live in the screwiest of all possible worlds.

On with the last news roundup of 2021, the year that ended up feeling like a repeat:

  • Calgary Herald columnist Rob Breakenridge is usually one of the more level-headed sports commentators — he’s even had me on his radio show — but his column this week falls into the trap of what might be called just-get-things-done-ism, arguing in the wake of the collapse of the Flames arena deal that both the city and the team owners need to “put egos aside and figure out how this can be salvaged.” Sure, if it’s just a matter of egos; if it’s a matter of this being a plan that looked pretty bad for the city and was looking worse and worse for the team as cost overruns piled up, maybe walking away from it is the better part of valor? There’s definitely a trend in urban governance punditry to credit elected officials who “get things done,” whether those things are a good idea or not — and getting things done is a skill, but also sometimes the best deals are the ones you didn’t make.
  • The city of Pawtucket, having lost the Pawtucket Red Sox to Worcester’s $150 million stadium bribe, is looking at replacing the team’s historic stadium with … a new $300 million high school? This would allow the city to sell off the site of one of its existing high schools and possibly repurpose the other as a middle school, so it’s a good lesson about how public assets are fungible, and the state of Rhode Island would reimburse most of the costs, so it’s arguably not a bad deal — still, for that price tag, I hope Pawtucket’s high school students get some crazy fancy cupholders.
  • Doesn’t look like I actually ran a link to the final environmental impact report for the Oakland A’s Howard Terminal stadium proposal, at least not before earlier in this sentence. Reading through that is another thing I didn’t get to do this week, but now that I’ve just finished canceling vacation plans for this month in the face of (waves hands around to indicate the entirety of everything), there should be plenty of time to discuss it here before planned hearings starting on January 19.
  • The Super Bowl is set to be played at the Los Angeles Rams‘ multi-billion-dollar new stadium, and already people are warning of its “notorious parking and traffic problems” and what a mess they could create. It’s tough to be notorious already at barely one year old, but I guess that’s one way of being “unprecedented and unparalleled.”

I could probably scrape up a couple more news items, but sometimes the best news item is the one you never write, right? Happy new year to all, thanks to everyone who threw money in the tip jar or joined this site’s Patreon, and I’ll see everyone back here on Monday.

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Mariners owners seek $117m in public cash for Single-A stadium in Modesto, inflation really is out of control

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s finally a bit of a slow news week, and I didn’t post anything yesterday, which usually means I would try to post something today, but all there is is this item about the owners of the Single-A Modesto Nuts looking to build a new stadium for — I’m sorry, how much money?

The proposal is based on Modesto and Stanislaus County providing the bulk of the funding for the stadium, which has a preliminary estimate of $85 million to $122 million. The proposal calls for private investment of $5 million to $10 million, and the city and county issuing bond debt to cover the balance.

That’s right, the Nuts owners — or technically “a group of Modesto business and civic leaders,” but surely they’re doing it on behalf of the Nuts owners, who in this case happen to be the owners of the Seattle Mariners — are looking to get as much as $117 million for a stadium for their lowest-rung minor-league affiliate, which would hold all of 5,000 fans (11,500 for concerts). That’s still slightly short of the reigning minor-league stadium subsidy record of $150 million for the Worcester Red Sox, but at least that’s a Triple-A stadium that holds 9,500 fans, even if it does look like a giant shipping container. Spending $117 million for a Single-A stadium is unheard of, or I guess was unheard of, until now. How is the Modesto business coalition trying to justify this crazy taxpayer expense?

Lynn Dickerson, the former Gallo Center for the Arts CEO and a member of the stadium project team, said it would not only provide the Nuts with a new venue but help with the revitalization of downtown and make Modesto a destination for residents from across the Central Valley and the Bay Area.

Yes, surely San Francisco residents will regularly make the hour and a half drive to watch the Mariners’ youngest minor-leaguers once they can sit in a new 5,000-seat stadium rather than the old 4,000-seat one. What else ya got?

Stadium proponents say it would help make Modesto a more attractive, desirable city and draw high-skilled, high-wage workers and spur the building of offices, housing and stores in downtown.

Okay, that’s about enough of that. There’s reportedly an economic impact study that the stadium proponents have given to the city and county, but the Modesto Bee doesn’t link to it or quote from it, either because they haven’t been allowed to see it or they can’t be bothered to read it, they don’t say which.

Scroll way down in the article, though, and you start to see where the Nuts owners and their friends are getting their chutzpah:

One reason plans were drawn up so quickly is Major League Baseball’s new facilities requirements for minor league teams. Under the new regulations, the Nuts will have to upgrade John Thurman Field, which opened in the mid-1950s, or submit to the MLB a plan for a new stadium by the start of the 2023 season.

The proponents of the new stadium say failure to do so could result in a fine or the revocation of team rights in Modesto and the end of minor league baseball here.

Yep, this is just one more bit of fallout from MLB’s takeover and downsizing of the minor leagues, which has allowed them to hold teams for ransom if local communities don’t cough up money for new stadiums. The difference is that nobody has asked for $117 million for one until now, but as Boyett Petroleum president Dave Boyett, a member of the stadium committee, told the Bee: “People said they’ve talked about a downtown stadium for years. I mean, I’ve talked about wanting to go to Mars, but somebody’s got to start somewhere.” Sure, next minor-league team up for a new stadium may as well ask for a rocket to Mars as part of the deal — after all, you can’t get if you don’t ask.

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Friday roundup: Mayor nixes downtown Bills stadium, another A’s vote in works, also world coming to end real soon now

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday! Let’s check out the non-sports-stadium news for a minute and see if there’s anything cheerier to start our weekend with and … no … no … nope, okay, sports stadium news it is, here we go:

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Friday roundup: Sports team owners saying stuff, and the journalists who love to reprint it, Episode #736

access_time personNeil deMause

That wasn’t a swing, was it? It sure didn’t look like a swing to me.

Sorry, right, enough about actual sports, back to the business of sports business:

  • The owners of the new St. Louis City SC MLS team want a new parking garage built next to their new stadium, arguing that the stadium “will have a magnetic quality that draws people to the district 365 days a year,” according to the garage’s lead architect. Team officials already demolished several century-old mixed-use buildings to make way for the garage, which would seem to be a lost opportunity for things like stores and restaurants that might more likely be in use year-round, but far be it from me to argue with an expert in economagnetism.
  • Albuquerque city officials say they won’t decide where to build a New Mexico United USL soccer stadium until voters approve the money for it — which makes total sense, because the cost of a project doesn’t depend at all on what land needs to be acquired, and also no landowner would ever jack up the price of property knowing that the city needs it for an already-approved project. Today is Opposite Day, right?
  • Arash Markazi no longer works for the L.A. Times after being exposed for promoting friends’ projects in his columns and reprinting press releases almost verbatim, but Substack and Twitter don’t care if you’re ethical so long as you get eyeballs, so we have Markazi announcing, unsourced, that “The Oakland Athletics are expected to announce a handful of finalists for a potential $1 billion stadium in Las Vegas after the World Series,” and that getting turned into entire news articles elsewhere. Never mind that A’s exec Dave Kaval already said as much last month, or that “narrows down sites for stadium that nobody has proposed to pay for” isn’t really breaking news anyway, a famous reporter guy said a thing about famous business guys maybe saying a thing, everybody quick post updates at once!
  • Tennessee Smokies owner Randy Boyd says he’ll pay stadium construction workers at least $15.50 an hour but won’t sign anything making that promise enforceable, and won’t promise to pay concessions and other stadium workers anything above the cheapest the labor market will let him get away with. The Knoxville News Sentinel reports that Boyd says since he’s “a longtime community member, a community benefits agreement won’t be necessary,” a sentence that it’s amazing the News Sentinel production staff could type without busting out in visible lolsobs.
  • Pawtucket’s McCoy Stadium is in bad shape after the Pawtucket Red Sox left for Worcester and took all the kitchen equipment and office chairs with them. The city is considering whether to rehab the stadium for an indie-league team, but the two that kicked the tires said that at 10,000 seats it’s too big for them; or to redevelop the site for something else, but there are worries it will sink into the swamp.
  • Charlotte officials have noticed that they’re paying city police officers to provide security at Carolina Panthers games instead of having the team hire off-duty officers, because no off-duty officers want to work for the $42-an-hour rate that the team offers. I spent a bunch of time reading local articles to try to figure out if it’s the Panthers or the city or someone else chintzing on security wages, and felt bad that I couldn’t figure it out until I saw a quote from Charlotte’s police chief saying, “Listen Panthers or whoever, enough is enough?” and decided that if he doesn’t know, I shouldn’t be expected to either.
  • Do you really want to read NFL uber-insider Mike Florio speculating about whether the NFL will settle the city of St. Louis’s lawsuit against the league for moving the Rams by offering the city an expansion team? Even though Rams owner Stan Kroenke has promised to cover any losses the league is stuck with, and Florio doesn’t provide any sources at all other than “an acknowledgment in league circles of the possibility”? Probably not, but you’re a grownup, make your own decisions.
  • The Tampa Bay Rays may have been eliminated from the postseason, but that’s not going to stop the Tampa Bay Times editorial board from taking the opportunity to stump for a new stadium on the grounds that, um, let’s see, “far too few people will buy tickets to watch them play at their current stadium” and “the hard work needs to be done now to ensure the team stays in the Tampa Bay area, even if it’s part time.” One could point out that there’s no solid evidence that significantly more people would buy tickets at a new stadium, especially for a team that would disappear to Canada all summer, but the Times also says that “this is not the time to clam up or for grandstanding or unhelpful posturing,” so I guess they wouldn’t want lots of people writing them about this, huh?
  • Did you know that the USL is creating a new women’s soccer league, to be an adjunct to/compete with the NWSL, currently reeling under a sexual harassment scandal that has already brought down its commissioner and forced the relocation of its championship game? I had not, but more women’s pro teams can only be a good thing both in terms of growing the women’s game and providing more teams so that cities don’t have to outbid each other for them, though also more opportunities for teams to demand that cities outbid each other for them, because city officials are pretty much morons when it comes to this stuff.
  • Lots of times sports team owners argue that there’s no way to fund venue construction and repairs without public subsidies, but did they ever consider growing and selling soybeans? On free public land, oh, Canada, you just had to ruin this feel-good story, didn’t you?
  • Tokyo’s Olympic white-elephant stadiums are facing increased maintenance costs because they’re under attack by oysters. That is all.
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Minor-league owners seeking $555m bailout already got $78m in federal PPP cash

access_time personNeil deMause

With minor-league baseball owners looking to get a $550 million bailout from the federal government to repay themselves for pandemic-related losses — look, here’s a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article talking about how the money is needed to “save small-town baseball,” and here’s the Fort Wayne TinCaps president explaining why you should lobby your local Congressional representatives to pass the Minor League Baseball Relief Act — one faithful FoS reader with a desire to remain nameless and way too much time on their hands decided to look into exactly who the poor owners were who were being expected to cover their own losses. After digging into who’s behind various limited liability corporations that own a bunch of clubs, they came up with this spreadsheet, which shows that the roster of minor-league owners includes at least a few billionaires (Buffalo Bisons and Northwest Arkansas Naturals owner Robert E. Rich, El Paso Chihuahuas co-owner Josh Hunt, Salt Lake Bees owner Ryan Smith), a couple of members of the Baseball Hall of Fame (George Brett owns the Tri-City Dust Devils and co-owns the Spokane Indians, while Cal Ripken Jr. owns the Aberdeen Ironbirds), and Bill Murray, who is part-owner of the Charleston RiverDogs, Hudson Valley Renegades, and St. Paul Saints.

The most interesting part of the spreadsheet, though, is the “PPP” column, which indicates which teams already received funding via the Paycheck Protection Program, the federal program to help companies cover pandemic losses and keep their workers on payroll, even if that’s not always how the money was used. While that Post-Gazette article reported that “many minor league teams were ineligible for Paycheck Protection Program loans because they were owned by larger companies,” most, it turns out, got the money just fine: 86 of the 120 teams our peerless investigator peerlessly investigated received PPP loans, according to publicly available documents, totaling $78 million. Among the recipients:

There’s more — Bill Murray, if you’re curious, got a share of about $3 million for his ownership in multiple franchises, though it’s impossible to determine his cut without knowing how much of an ownership stake he has in each — but you get the idea. A bunch of not-super-duper-rich but still severely wealthy people got $78 million combined last year to help pay their staff, plus potentially other costs like rent and mortgage payments. (Though most of the MiLB money appears to have been initially designated for payroll, there’s nothing in the PPP rules preventing companies from changing their minds later about how to use it.) Those owners are now seeking $550 million more on the grounds that they’ll go out of business without aid, notwithstanding the fact that they’re already now back in business, and presumably on the road to those multi-million-dollar yearly profits again.

It would be great to see the books of some of these teams to see how much they actually lost last year and how it compares to the bailout cash they’re requesting — maybe that can be the next research project for FoS readers. (Or I can look into it once I’m back from vacation.)

 

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Worcester’s butt-ugly $160m stadium: an eyewitness report

access_time personNeil deMause

I haven’t gotten up to Massachusetts yet to see the Worcester Red Sox‘ $160 million giant shipping container, but FoS reader Jason did on Sunday, and sent along some photos and observations:

Jason: Party Terrace area in right field above home bullpen. As you can see, a large portion of right field and the dedicated line score is obstructed by the patio/congregate area next to and above it. For what it’s worth, I walked over to the far left side of this area, right next to the box seats, to see if the view was much better, and it was only marginally so, meaning seats in that section of “field box” seats would also have obstructed views.

FoS: That is some pretty egregiously terrible design right there — why not push the patio areas a bit farther back from the field so fans on the terrace next to them can see right field? (Also, why does a stadium need a “party terrace” and a “patio congregate area”? But I digress.) This design element was present in the original renderings, so you would have thought someone would have noticed, but maybe all that digging into a hill cut into the budget for VR walkthroughs, or even just for building out the damn thing in Minecraft.

Jason: Same congregate area, but a level higher.  As you can see, the light pole blocks a good portion of the view from this spot and in many places, obstructs either the plate or the pitcher’s mound.

FoS: I’m on the record as saying that I’m fine with obstructed-view seats if pillars allow for the upper deck seats to be brought closer to the field (f in chat, Tiger Stadium), but for a light pole? It looks like there was room behind the patio to place the pole, too, so I have no idea what they were thinking here.

Jason: The video board is tucked so far to the left side of the outfield, it’s essentially blocked by the stadium structure. This would certainly be better the lower you walked down in the section, but you would still need to get pretty close to the front row to completely open up the video board view.

FoS: smdh

Jason: One of the things I was struck by was how “small” the park seemed. From what I read, the park only has about 6,000 fixed seats and the rest of the capacity, making its way over 9.000, would be filled out by congregate areas and the large grass berm under construction in left field.  This facility just doesn’t seem to project the sense that you are only “one level away” from the majors. In fact, I would argue that the park in Hartford gives off a much stronger AAA vibe than this one.

FoS: Small is … good? Intimate? Though “We got to 9,000 seats by making one-third of the fans either stand or sit on the ground” is maybe not so good.

Jason: A look at some of the “finishes” in the ballpark. The seats behind the rail are the seats that come with the skyboxes. As best I can tell, these are identical to the seats used in the regular field box section of the park, with no extra padding or flourishes that one would expect in a “luxury” seating category. Also, the corrugated metal fascia in lieu of brick or some other concrete or masonry facade. Again, this is a facility that cost roughly $160 million?

FoS: While it’s hard to complain too much about high rollers not getting enough padding on their seats, it is totally legit to complain about plain-ass seats and corrugated metal running up a bill of $160 million.

Jason: This is the one that really baffles me. I cannot imagine the thought process that went into designing a stadium using crushed stone as the floor in a portion of the concourse. (This is the right field area behind the “Worcester Wall.” Why wouldn’t you use concrete here or at worst, asphalt? And what does this area look like after it rains?

FoS: “Crushed stone” is apparently technically different from gravel, but let’s face it: Most people would call this gravel. There are no doubt reasons for this design choice, but it’s hard to avoid the feeling that one of them was “Only eight dollars a cubic foot at Lowe’s!”

The trifecta of poor design, cheap materials, and massive cost overruns is a tough one to achieve, yet the WooSox — at least from initial reports — appear to have hit it. It’s tough to believe that Janet Marie Smith, who helped design Camden Yards and the renovation of Fenway Park, drew up this place, but maybe she wasn’t involved in decisions like where to place the light poles? I, for one, can’t wait for the oral history of the Worcester stadium design process, because everyone loves a good train wreck.

 

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Architecture critic: Worcester’s $160m ballpark looks like “giant shipping container,” was probably terrible idea regardless

access_time personNeil deMause

I’m a little pressed for time this morning, but I did want to share with the schadenfreude lovers among you this review of the Worcester Red Sox‘ new $160 million stadium by GoLocalProv architecture critic Will Morgan, which is a master class in well-honed disdain. Let’s start with this:

Its public face is that of an Amazon warehouse or a giant shipping container.

Oof. Though, really, it’s tough to argue:

On the positive side, writes Morgan, “Polar Park is beautifully sited in term of views of
Worcester. You can see the field from all the seats, and the touted mirror image of Fenway is almost believable.” But then he shifts gears to the bigger question of whether it can bring about a renaissance for downtown Worcester — something that you may recall has been a bone of contention ever since team owners employed economist Andy Zimbalist to make that claim — and rules: Naaah.

When the novelty wears off in a few years (as studies of Triple-A parks suggest it will), the aftertaste will be one of debt. What did the Commonwealth of Massachusetts get for their contribution, and when will Worcester’s outlay of bonded dollars see a return?…

Worcester heard the siren song of flimflam like that of the Music Man, with the seductive appeal of a magic solution to urban ills. Putting all your faith and dollars in a stadium was an exhausted planning trope decades ago. Will Polar Park really hold 125 events a year? Will it ever pay its own way? Will it attract middle class families to move to Worcester? Is this the best way to spruce up a city with an image problem?…

Right around the corner is Green Street, a somewhat gritty, crowded, but lively area of juice, coffee, and booze bars, a public market, ethnic shops and bodegas, and Thai, Mexican, and Vietnamese restaurants. Is this the kind of real city that will be replaced by the new development?

Excellent questions, all, even if not exactly architectural ones.

It’s also worth noting, of course, that this article appeared on a news site in Rhode Island, which is more likely to slag the new WooSox stadium because they’re still stinging from Worcester using it to lure their baseball team away after 48 years. Still, his observations are valid ones, and it’s hard to look at the included photos without thinking, “$160 million? Really?” I mean:

Worcester’s not too far from me, so I’ll try to provide a firsthand report at some point. (Or maybe a secondhand report if I can find someone even closer to pay a visit.) Honestly, word that there are decent Vietnamese restaurants in town is a bigger draw to me than yet another generic minor-league ballpark — I should ask Zimbalist if that factored into his economic impact studies.

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Friday roundup: Fresh subsidy plans for Titans and WFT, Flames arena “paused” amid overruns, Boston Globe can’t stop clowning on Pawtucket for not wanting to spend $150m on stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy Friday! I have a ton of week-ending stadium news to bring you today, or at least there’s a ton of news out there whether I’m bringing it to you or not. What is it about that that is confusing?

Onward:

  • Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks, according to DCist, wants to use “some of” the county’s $1.6 billion in state funding this year to build — wait for it — “infrastructure improvements” for the Washington Football Team‘s stadium that would include “restaurants and places to shop.” It sounds like Alsobrooks is only talking about $17.6 million, maybe, but still this earns a Stupid Infrastructure category tag until proven otherwise.
  • Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee wants to use $2 million a year in state sales tax money (figure roughly $30 million in present value) for upgrades to the Titans‘ stadium, though actually it could end up being more like $10 million a year (figure roughly $150 million in present value) if more development is built around the stadium, plus he wants to give $13.5 million to Knoxville for its Tennessee Smokies stadium. Did Lee call this an “infrastructure” plan? Not that I can find in the Tennessean’s news reporting, but everybody drink anyway.
  • The Calgary Flames‘ $550 million arena plan, which already includes about $250 million in public subsidies, has run into $70 million in unexpected cost overruns and is now “paused” until the team and city can figure out who’ll cover them. Actually, the report is that the Flames owners are demanding $70 million, and previously the city and team agreed to split overruns 50-50, so maybe it’s really $140 million over budget? Either way, there’s already a petition to scrap the whole deal, though “trim a little from the team’s design and both sides kick in a little more money” seems a far more likely outcome, especially with Mayor Naheed Nenshi declaring it “far better to have these issues sorted out at this stage than to have unexpected cost overruns after construction has begun.” (Are known cost overruns actually better than surprise ones? Discuss.)
  • The Boston Globe, not satisfied with its glowing report last month on Worcester’s new stadium for the Red Sox Triple-A team (top farm club of the Boston Red Sox, owner of the Boston Globe), ran two separate opinion pieces this week slagging Pawtucket officials for not offering up $150 million in subsidies like Worcester did and thus losing their team: Dan McGowan, the Globe’s Rhode Island politics reporter, wrote, “Imagine what we could have had if our leaders showed even a tiny sense of vision” and “It too often takes only one politician to spoil a really good idea” while condemning “extremists on both sides of the [stadium] debate” who think a thing can be either good or bad (while also calling the Worcester stadium “great”). The very next day, Mike Stanton, a UConn journalism professor who writes occasionally for the Globe, wrote that former Rhode Island House speaker Nicholas Mattiello “rightly deserves blame for his role in killing the PawSox,” though he also blamed WooSox owner Larry Lucchino for “demanding extravagant taxpayer support for a new ballpark” and harming negotiations for, I guess, less extravagant taxpayer support? Anyway, the Globe wants you to know that Worcester has a shiny new baseball stadium and Pawtucket doesn’t, and let’s not speak of what else Worcester could have done with $150 million.
  • Six Republican Congressfolk — Sens. Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, and Marsha Blackburn, and Rep. Jeff Duncan — have cosponsored legislation seeking to end MLB’s antitrust exemption in response to the league pulling the 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta over Georgia’s new voting-restrictions law. This is part of a long line of proposals to yank the league’s 99-year-old exemption from antitrust laws, which never seem to go anywhere; the last time by my count was when more than 100 Congresspeoples wrote a letter in 2019 threatening to rescind “the long-term support that Congress has always afforded our national pastime” if MLB didn’t back down on its plan to eliminate more than 40 minor-league franchises, a letter that was signed by none of Lee, Cruz, Hawley, Rubio, or Blackburn, all of whom were in office at the time. (SPOILER: MLB didn’t back down, and Congress did.) Waving the antitrust-exemption stick has become the standard way for federal representatives to express their anger at baseball over one thing or another, in other words, but actually using it is apparently beyond the pale, either because of partisanship or lobbyists or both, pick your poison.
  • Another U.S. representative, Georgia’s Buddy Carter, has introduced legislation — or maybe just drafted legislation and sent it to Fox News, he doesn’t seem to have actually submitted it to Congress — to block MLB from relocating non-regular-season events except in cases of natural disaster or other emergencies, under penalty of allowing local businesses to sue for damages for lost revenue as a result of the move. Which, as Craig Calcaterra notes, would be hilarious because it would put MLB in the position of having to argue in court that its events have no economic impact, which is pretty much the truth: “The evidence — like, all the evidence from multiple studies — would actually be on MLB’s side in such a case! And it’d likely win! And all it would cost MLB is the ability to continue to lie about how big an impact All-Star Games and stadiums and things have on local economies when it suits its interest.”
  • The Cincinnati Reds are offering discounted tickets to fans who can show they’re fully vaccinated, and Buffalo officials say the Bills and Sabres will be required to limit attendance to the fully vaccinated in the fall, though New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo says he’ll be the judge of that. Whatever the eventual admittance policies end up being, having going to things like ballgames (or traveling internationally) be less of a hassle if you wave your vaccine card seems likely to be the best way to encourage more people to get their shots, which is the only way to get to herd immunity, which is the only way to prevent lots more deaths and more re-closings of things like ballgames, so this is good news regardless of whether sporting events turn out to be insanely risky or relatively safe.
  • Finally, I can’t let this week pass without noting that the Buffalo Bisons, who have been temporarily relocated to Trenton to make way for the Toronto Blue Jays, who will be spending the summer in Buffalo thanks to Covid travel restrictions, will be playing their home games as the Trenton Thunder while playing road games as the Bisons. No word yet on how this Frankenstein monster of a franchise will be listed in the (checks revamped minor-league nomenclature) Triple-A East standings, though I wholeheartedly hope the Thunder and Bisons get counted as two different teams, ideally with players forced to wear fake mustaches in New Jersey and go by assumed names. “Marc Rzepczynski? No, he plays for Buffalo, I am of course Shmarc Shmepczynski, would you like my autograph?”
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