Nashville MLB team – Field of Schemes

Friday roundup: A modest economic impact reporting proposal, plus two, three, many vaporstadiums

December 22, 2023 Neil deMause

I was out sick yesterday, but fortunately nothing incredibly stupid happened with the $1.5 billion Virginia arena subsidy plan for the Washington Capitals and Wizards for the first time all week, so my services weren’t needed. (Other than the whole thing remaining incredibly stupid, but that’ll still be true today, and next week, and next month, and…)

Other things, though, kept happening, and my Decemberween gift to you is to present them all, neatly wrapped and suitable for pointing and laughing:

Veteran sports business reporter Alan Snel’s LVSportsBiz.com has announced a new policy of not reporting economic impact claims without also including how the numbers were calculated, and while that may sound like a simple matter of reporting out all the details, it becomes much funnier when you realize that this means Snel just isn’t going to report any numbers that don’t show their math. On a Las Vegas Raiders announcement of the economic impact of their team, Snel reported that he’s waiting on Raiders officials to grant “an interview about how the economic impact number was determined before we publish that number”; about a similar UFC impact report, he wrote that “LVSportsBiz.com will publish these numbers when UFC and Applied Analysis explain how they determined these economic figures.” I truly hope this will lead to stories like “A’s Claim New Stadium Will Create Some Damn Number of Jobs, So Far As We Know They Pulled It Out of Their Ass,” which honestly would be some of the most accurate reporting out there.
And speaking of goofy economic impact numbers: A new roof for Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, which already cost $1 billion in 1976 loonies, may or may not cost $750 million, but if it does it’s okay, says Quebec Tourism Minister Caroline Proulx, because then Taylor Swift might say “Joli toit!” and play five nights there and bring $350 million in spending that totally would be from out-of-towners who would all fly to Montreal because Taylor Swift never plays near them. [citation needed]
Not saying that a stadium district project called “Project Smoke” sounds like a grift, but when the guy presenting it is a Nashville pediatrician who pled guilty to billing fraud and people at the meeting were reportedly saying, “Have you Googled this guy? Can you believe this?”, it’s definitely not a good thing. Though it could make a good Avengers 5 plot to replace the one about Kang now that Jonathan Majors has been fired.
“Baltimore is not on the verge of landing a pro outdoor soccer team,” begins a Baltimore Sun article about the Maryland Stadium Authority commissioning a site study for a stadium for this team that, it bears repeating, does not exist and likely will not exist soon. The study cost $50,000, which is not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, but is maybe around $50,000 more than needs to be spent identifying places to build a stadium that likely won’t ever be built.
The Jackson County legislature on Monday put off a decision on whether to put a sales-tax increase for Kansas City Royals and Chiefs stadium projects on the April 2024 ballot, then the measure’s sponsor, county chair DaRon McGee, introduced a “corrected measure” that would specify that the sales tax wouldn’t take effect until the teams negotiated 40-year leases, agreed to community benefits agreements, and chose an acceptable site. We’ll see if that makes county executive Frank White hate it any less, but it is at least better than voting to collect a giant pile of money for the local sports teams and then negotiate the details later, we’ve seen how that works out.
Philadelphia’s law department has now denied more than 100 public records requests for information about the proposed 76ers arena, which is a lot! Activist and journalist Faye Anderson said one of her few requests was approved shows that city officials and other involved parties have been meeting weekly for more than a year on the project, but she can’t get any information about what they’ve been talking about. “What were they saying behind closed doors?” she asked. “What were they saying when they thought those conversations, those records, would never see the light of day?” An appeal has been filed with the state Office of Open Records, so we may find out next month, or later, or never.

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Friday roundup: D-Backs owners sad no one is throwing money at them like in Milwaukee

September 22, 2023 Neil deMause

The tchotchkes are in the mail! Repeat: The tchotchkes are in the mail! If you don’t get yours by the end of next week, please drop me a line and I’ll look into it.

And speaking of next week, I’m going to be traveling then, so expect to get your news updates somewhat irregularly and possibly at odd hours. In the meantime, here’s a pile of rounded-up news to slake your thirst for stadium and arena knowledge:

The Arizona Republic reports that the Diamondbacks owners still want to renovate Chase Field, but that “the organization thus far has been unable to find the sort of public/private partnership to make that happen,” which is a very creative way of saying “we keep waiting for somebody to leave a suitcase full of unmarked twenties on our doorstep, but it hasn’t happened.” Team CEO Derrick Hall told the paper: “We don’t have our hand out, but if you look at some of the other situations very similar to ours — like Milwaukee, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Baltimore — in each case they are getting strong investments from the public, from a mixture of city/county/state, and we just aren’t.” Hall added: “I’m starting to get concerned with the timing. I don’t think the city officials in particular understand the urgency of our lease, which expires in 2027.” That’s urgent for someone, clearly, but it’s not the city of Phoenix that would face having to go play in the street. Hall did say that the team would put in “more than” 75% of a potential $500 million price tag, though he also said he’d be interested in getting “land we can develop,” so be sure to read the fine print of any eventual proposal.
The state of Wisconsin and city of Milwaukee are now looking at spending $600 million in public money over 20 years to upgrade the Brewers stadium that a 2018 study found needed a maximum of $84.5 million in improvements, reports Urban Milwaukee’s Bruce Murphy. Milwaukee residents overwhelmingly oppose the plan, but the Republican leadership in the legislature is currently looking at just taking tax money away from the city and giving it to Brewers owner Mark Attanasio, which is exactly how democracy is supposed to work, A+ work there guys.
The House Oversight Committee approved a bill to let Washington, D.C. keep control over the RFK Stadium site, while defeating an amendment that would have prevented D.C. from using public funds to build a new Commanders stadium there. The politics is a little complex here, though, with some Congressmembers arguing against using public money while defending D.C.’s right to use public money, so there’s a lot more haggling to go where this came from.
The development team behind the Philadelphia 76ers arena plans released a report it commissioned on the economic impact of the project; please pick a random three-digit number and add six zeroes to it and you’ll be as close to accurate as the report. In related news, the 76ers’ developer partner is apparently kind of a dick.
Missed this one last week: The New York city council has approved a new operating permit for Madison Square Garden, but only for another five years. This can will apparently be kicked down the road until Penn Station gets renovated, or the sun burns out, whichever comes first.
The temporary cricket stadium in a Bronx public park is dead, with the 2024 men’s T-20 Cricket World Cup matches now to be held in a temporary cricket stadium in a Long Island public park instead.
The Associated Press declares the four front-runners for eventual MLB expansion to be Charlotte, Nashville, Portland, and Montreal, though then also mentions Salt Lake City and Austin, so it looks like they’re mostly going by Googling “baseball expansion cities” and taking whatever’s on the first page of hits.
“Local tourism agency releases PowerPoint on how cool a new sports arena would be” is exactly the kind of journalism I expect from 2023, deep sigh.

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Friday roundup: Calgary to pay bulk of Flames arena overruns, and why stadium subsidies are a “high school lunch table thing”

April 28, 2023 Neil deMause

Just a week with the largest stadium subsidy ever getting final approval, immediately followed by the largest arena subsidy ever getting initial approval. And the week, being an insensate unit of measure with no sense of mercy, wasn’t done with us yet:

Not all of the details of the proposed $837 million Calgary Flames arena subsidy deal are being kept a state secret, it turns out: The Globe and Mail reports that city taxpayers will also be on the hook for the bulk of any cost overruns. A city spokesperson said that the Flames owners and the city will share cost overruns, but only for the arena itself, a practice rink, and a parking garage; overruns on transit and infrastructure will be entirely on the public. Further details of how overruns will be covered will be “considered part of the next phase of work,” said Calgary spokesperson Ryan Murray, adding that the city has yet to “nail down the formal agreements that will set the fulsome course” for the project — he probably meant definition 1c of “fulsome,” but some of the other ones are even more appropriate.
Plans for an A’s stadium in Las Vegas may still have at least $500 million in funding holes, but that hasn’t stopped Google Maps from labeling the proposed site “Future Home of the Las Vegas Athletics MLB baseball team.” Feel free to propose a correction.
And speaking of the A’s, here’s a long interview with economist J.C. Bradbury about whether it makes any sense for Vegas to devote a huge pile of money to a baseball stadium. If you’ve read previous interviews with Bradbury, you probably already know the answer, but it’s still a good read, especially if you want to understand my near-certain future references to “high school lunch table thing” and “fiscal illusion,” which are excellent concepts that deserve broader play. (As is this Bradbury tweet from yesterday, he’s on a roll this week.)
And speaking even more of the A’s, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred says if that team moves to a new stadium in Vegas and the Tampa Bay Rays get a new stadium in their current home, it’ll be time to start thinking about adding expansion teams, and Nashville could get one if it plays its cards right. Manfred didn’t say what cards those are, despite the clickbait headline “Rob Manfred reveals what it will take for Nashville to get Major League Baseball team,” but it’s certainly reasonable to expect that one of them rhymes with “schmadium schmubsidies.”
WHYY-TV wonders whether a new Philadelphia 76ers arena could “jumpstart” development in the city’s Market East neighborhood, but given that it notes that commercial vacancy rates there are currently “on par” with the rest of the downtown area, maybe it’s asking the wrong question? And hey, what about all the tax breaks the project would potentially be eligible for, are we ever going to get more reporting about that? No? Cool, cool.
Arizona Coyotes execs are “worried” that they’ll lose their Tempe arena vote and have to move as soon as next season, according to Twitter, and Twitter wouldn’t lie to you!
I swear I read this headline and initially assumed that Rising Mississippi must be the name of a USL soccer franchise, can you blame me? This is a clear sign that I need to step away from Google News for a bit — have a good weekend, and see you all back here on Monday.

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Friday roundup: NM United owner still wants biggest USL subsidy ever, Bears owners levy gambling gripes, Coyotes arena could make planes crash

September 24, 2021September 25, 2021 Neil deMause

And now for the news that slipped through the cracks of the week:

Albuquerque and New Mexico United released the full terms of the stadium plan that residents will vote on in November, and it’s pretty what it looked like when first discussed last month: $50 million from the city, $8 million from the state, $10 million from team owner Peter Trevisani. The team will also pay $900,000 a year in rent and shared concessions revenue, which comes to maybe $12 million in present value, so we’re talking $46 million public, $22 million private, which would still be the biggest USL subsidy ever for the most expensive USL stadium ever. There’ll be a community benefits agreement, though, those always work out great!
The revamped Soldier Field that Chicago spent more than $600 million to build in 2002 would be hard to expand by much, plus the Bears owners are mad that the city won’t let them install a sports gambling location at the stadium. This latter is according to one “sports economist” who turns out to be, let’s see … Marc Ganis? Marc Ganis isn’t a sports economist, he’s a consultant who works for the NFL. Anyway, these seem like petty reasons to decide to spend billions of dollars on a new stadium complex in Arlington Heights, but nobody’s said yet whose billions of dollars those would be, so file all this under laying the groundwork for haggling.
The Arizona Coyotes‘ Tempe arena proposal might get in the way of airplanes landing, oops. They worked this out for the Los Angeles Rams stadium, but still worth keeping an eye on along with the whole how-much-would-taxpayers-pay-for-it thing.
Oakland A’s management has raised ticket prices and parking fees in the middle of a pandemic while threatening to move the team to Las Vegas, and lo and behold, attendance is down! There’s probably a term for this, but I can’t put my finger on it…
“Hochul: Study on Bills stadium site coming soon“! Hooray, Gov. Kathy Hochul has finally agreed to release the cost-benefit study that her administration has been refusing to release under open records requests, and … hmm, Hochul says the study is still “underway” but will be completed “in the next couple of weeks”? Even though it was presented to the state by Bills execs back in May? Hmm, maybe let’s withhold judgment until we see what’s actually released. [CORRECTION: Paul Wolf of the New York Coalition For Open Government points out that though Hochul and much of the news coverage implied that this was the Bills’ cost-benefit study, it’s actually a separate, unrelated study by the state on potential stadium sites only. More on this on Monday.] Meanwhile, state assembly speaker Carl Heastie has called questions about who would pay how much for a new stadium “a little above my pay grade,” which given that he’s literally in charge of a legislative body that would have to approve any plan deserves at the very least a Nobel Prize for Ducking the Question.
A poll of Kansas City residents has found that two-thirds would oppose using public money to pay for half the cost of a downtown stadium for the Royals, and a plurality are against a downtown stadium even if the Royals owners paid for the whole thing. But that’s not really the point, is it?
That new Long Island Railroad station New York state is building for the Islanders‘ new arena will be open this fall, so long as you don’t mind only using it to get to the game, and taking a different train back and transferring to get where you’re going. Or taking a shuttle bus to and from yet another nearby station. But still, spending about $41 million in state money on a new train station was absolutely necessary because Islanders fans would never put up with changing trains or taking shuttle buses, how crazy would that be?
Will a major-league baseball team ever come to Nashville? Ooh, ooh, I know this one!

I’m going to be traveling next week, so prepare for a possible light posting schedule. Though if past history is any guide, whenever I go on vacation, all kinds of news immediately happens, and I’ll have my laptop with me, so maybe it’ll just be a normal week from your perspective. We’ll all find out together!

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Friday roundup: Coyotes late with arena rent, Winnipeg move non-threats, and good old gondolas, nothing beats gondolas!

September 25, 2020October 5, 2020 Neil deMause

If you missed me — and a whole lot of other people you’ve likely read about here, including economist Victor Matheson and former Anaheim mayor Tom Tait — breaking down the Los Angeles Angels stadium deal in an enormous Zoom panel last night, you can still check it out on the Voice of OC’s Facebook page. I didn’t bother to carefully curate the books on the shelves behind me, as one does, so have fun checking out which novels I read 20 years ago!

And on to the news, which remains unrelentingly newsy:

The Arizona Coyotes are late on their rent payments to the city of Glendale, or maybe not late according to their lease which gives them until the end of October, but still later than usual. The rent payment is $500,000; the Arizona Republic notes that the city is currently spending $13 million a year paying down arena debt plus $6.1 million a year in arena management fees and maintenance costs. Man, this whole thing was a bad idea.
Former Winnipeg mayor and current Winnipeg Goldeyes owner Sam Katz has signed a ten-year lease on Ottawa’s minor-league baseball stadium, and swears this is totally unrelated to his displeasure with his successors in Winnipeg city government trying to renew his stadium lease there to raise his rent from $1 a year and eliminate $700,000 a year in tax breaks and parking subsidies. “I don’t threaten, never threaten,” said Katz. “What I am saying to you is we have a lease for a ballpark in Ottawa.” That is surely not a thing that anyone would ever say as a threat!
The great Alissa Walker of Curbed weighed in on former Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt’s proposal to build a gondola to take people to and from Dodger Stadium, and reached three important conclusions: “A stadium built at the height of car culture on a mountaintop with 16,000 parking spaces is working exactly as designed”; there’s no way you’re going to fit 12,000 fans onto a means of transport that even if packed to the gills would require people to start loading on two hours before game time and then continue doing so in even numbers until the first pitch; and there’s already a fast, efficient public transit technology to get people to Dodger games that doesn’t require massive spending on infrastructure, and it’s called shuttle buses. (Walker also calls gondolas “a kind of combination transit-slash-sightseeing ride,” which is both pretty damning and entirely accurate.) Add in that Los Angeles, unlike Oakland, already has plenty of existing bus routes leading to the stadium, and it’s really a no-brainer, unless you’re a rich dude looking to get city approval for a private gondola concession, in which case gondolas are the future, man, get with it already.
There’s a petition afoot in St. Louis to oppose the city’s plan to tear down a block of vacant buildings to make way for parking lots for St. Louis City S.C.‘s new stadium, presumably on the grounds that St. Louis already has too many vacant lots. A City S.C. spokesperson says the team is “exploring the opportunity” for a parking garage with stores on the first floor; hands up if you think it’s likely that they’re actually going to build this on their own dime.
The owners of the Tennessee Titans have come out against building a major league baseball stadium next door, which would seem to put a fork in the plan, even more than that the entire idea of an MLB team in Nashville is kind of dumb. So let’s take one last (?) opportunity to enjoy one of the more bonkers stadium renderings of our time.
If I had had to put my money on the next sports franchise to be displaced by the effects of climate change, I wouldn’t have wagered on a <strike>minor-league</strike> junior hockey team in Iowa having to shut down for a season because their arena was damaged by a derecho, but here we are.
The Super Bowl may or may not have live fans in attendance and, uh, yeah, that’s really the whole story.
This story has nothing to do with stadium shakedowns, except that it ends with the line “If it’s too expensive for the literal state of Florida to make some improperly obtained evidence go away, the defendant in the case will foot the bill himself,” so yeah, it really kinda does.

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Friday roundup: Everything old is new again

September 11, 2020September 11, 2020 Neil deMause

What a week! In addition to the new site design and new magnets and new sports subsidy demands rising and falling almost before you could even register them, this week featured the long-awaited debut of Defector, the independent sports (but not only sports) site launched by the former staff of Deadspin. Read it for free, subscribe if you want to post comments and, you know, help support journalism for our uncertain future. I am a charter subscriber, needless to say, and am currently trying to decide which color t-shirt to buy.

On the down side, the entire West Coast has been set aflame by the deadly mix of climate change and gender-reveal parties and looks like a post-apocalyptic movie. The year 2020 comes at you fast. Let’s get to some more news:

The owners of the New York Islanders are angling to downsize the Nassau Coliseum so that it doesn’t compete with their new Belmont Park arena for sports and the largest concerts, which is problematic in that they don’t actually hold the lease on the Coliseum, and already ironic in that the Coliseum was already just downsized once so as not to compete with the Islanders’ previous new arena in Brooklyn. Maybe this whole arena glut problem is something New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo might have considered before giving the Belmont project a whole bunch of land price breaks and a new train station? Meh, probably not necessary, we’re all friends here.
Hey look, we’re already calling the Los Angeles Angels stadium purchase a $320 million deal even though it’s really only $150 million plus a whole lot of “thanks for some building affordable housing and parks,” that was fast, Spectrum News 1.
Some rare actual good news from the pandemic: Somebody in Arlington was smart enough to include a clause in the Texas Rangers‘ lease on their new stadium that requires the team owners to triple their rent payments if parking and ticket tax revenue fell short of projections, which obviously they’re doing what with nobody buying tickets or parking this year. Sure, it’s still only another $4 million, which won’t go far toward paying off the city’s roughly half a billion dollars in stadium costs, but it’s better than a kick in the head. (Also, what on earth is going on in that photo of the Rangers’ stadium that D Magazine used as its illustration?)
The Inglewood city council approved the sale of 22 acres of public land to Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer for $66 million, which I don’t even know how to determine whether it’s a fair deal or not anymore, but given the city mayor’s idea of appropriate oversight, I’m not super-optimistic.
University of Texas-Austin will have about 18,000 fans in attendance for its season-opening college football game tomorrow, but rest assured that it will be keeping everyone safe by … requiring student season ticket holders to test negative for Covid before being allowed into the game, but not requiring the same of anyone else? (Also fun: They’re supposed to all go get tested today, and get their results back tomorrow, which is not how Covid testing works right now at all.) Clearly the desire to look where the light is better is strong.
The Las Vegas Sun has a loooooong article about the process by which the Raiders got their new stadium in Las Vegas that pretty much comes down to “Mark Davis was the sincerest pumpkin patch of all,” but by all means go ahead and read it if you like sentences like “The first major obstacle was how to get both projects done in what most in the resort corridor would feel was a reasonable [tax increase]. That took time to overcome.”
Marc Normandin took a great look back at that time the owner of the San Diego Padres tried to gift the team to the city of San Diego for free and MLB said no. It’s subscriber-only, so I’ll quote my favorite section: “There is a reason Mark Cuban will never own an MLB franchise, and that reason is that he’s the kind of owner who might shake things up in a way that forces other owners to have to spend money they don’t want to. On clubhouse comforts, on minor-league players Cuban might try to increase the pay and better the living conditions of in order to produce happier, healthier future MLB players: there is no guarantee Cuban would do those things, necessarily, but his actions and spending helped shape the way the current NBA locker rooms look, so the possibility exists, and that possibility is too big of a risk for MLB’s current 30 owners to take. So, instead, they aim for safe options, like a minority owner in Cleveland becoming the majority owner in Kansas City, as he’s already proven he understands the game and how to play it.”
First Dave Dombrowski and Dave Stewart, now Justin Timberlake — if building 1990s star power is the way to get an MLB franchise, Nashville is a shoo-in. Though as Normandin notes, they’d probably be better off finding a minority owner from Cleveland.

Okay, I have to go pick up my computer from its trip to the computer mechanic so I can go back to typing these updates on a keyboard I can actually see the letters on. (Yet another thing that happened this week.) Try to have a good weekend, and see you all on Monday.

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Does a Nashville MLB team make any damn sense? A brief investigation

July 9, 2020July 9, 2020 Neil deMause

While MLB tries to figure out if it can cobble together enough players for a shortened season amid the increasing number of players testing positive and opting to sit out the year, a different group of rich dudes are working on another possibly quixotic quest: landing a major-league franchise for Nashville. As you may recall from the before times, said rich dudes had previously drawn attention for speculation by announcing that their team that they don’t have would be named the Nashville Stars, then releasing stadium renderings that featured previously unheard-of crimes against geometry; there was also that rumor that the Baltimore Orioles could move to Nashville, which presumably wasn’t the wannabe owners’ doing, though since the report cited just “one rumor” as a source, it could well have been them.

Anyway, this week saw two separate headlines about Nashville’s MLB dreams:

Music City Baseball LLC (that’s the rich dudes) have hired former MLB GM Dave Dombrowski as a “consultant,” which presumably is meant to convey credibility or something? If the key to landing a major-league franchise turns out to involve signing aging players to exorbitant contracts, Dombrowski certainly brings that skill set.
Nashville could become MLB’s first majority-Black-owned team, says Dave Stewart, an even worse GM who is also currently on the Music City Baseball payroll.

The managing director of Music City Baseball is John Loar, who is a real estate developer (of gated communities in California!) and film producer (Teenage Paparazzo, an Adrian Grenier–directed documentary that according to one Rotten Tomatoes reviewer was “more thought provoking than I would have expected“) and looks like this:

I don’t normally like to make assumptions about people’s ethnicity, but I think it’s pretty fair to say that this guy is white.

Neither Stewart nor Loar, it turns out, said anything to USA Today about how the team would be majority Black-owned, but they did drop a whole lot of references to African-American things in hopes you won’t notice what the main owner and public face of the non-franchise looks like:

They plan to present MLB through a feasibility study and economic analysis why Nashville would be ideal for MLB. The plan is to build a 42,000-seat stadium, in honor of Jackie Robinson, with privately-funded money, and a surrounding mixed-use family sports and entertainment district.

“We have something unique here, and a way to unite the country,’’ said Loar, who also is creating a diversity oversight committee. “I really think MLB has a chance to be very proactive. We will honor the Negro Leagues with the name, the Nashville Stars. The connection to the Negro Leagues, diversity and inclusion is a big part of the foundation. We reached out to the black community here, our board is majority minority, and our current investors are over 30% diverse.

To recap: The stadium will “honor” Jackie Robinson, the Stars name will “honor” the Negro Leagues, and about a third of the individual investors (not a third of the shares, presumably) are “diverse,” however that’s being defined. To be charitable, one could say that Loar is reading the room well; to be less charitable, he’s a white guy trying to gain entry into the lucrative MLB owners’ club by portraying it as a way to “unite the country” around race.

None of which is likely to matter all that much to MLB, which will almost certainly select any future expansion franchises on the basis of 1) how much money an ownership group offers, 2) how big a media market it represents, and 3) see 1. On that count, Nashville scores pretty poorly: It’s the sixth-largest Nielsen market without an MLB team (behind Sacramento, Charlotte, Portland, Indianapolis, and Raleigh-Durham, plus Montreal, which as a Canadian city isn’t covered by Nielsen). It does have one of the better-attended Triple-A franchises, the Sounds, and is bigger than San Diego, Kansas City, Milwaukee, and Cincinnati, so you could make a decent case that it could be a marginal MLB market; however, you could make just as good a case for any of those other cities, so it’s hard to see why Nashville should be seen as at the top of any heap.

Also, MLB probably isn’t expanding anytime soon, though it’s possible that could change if owners decide they want a quick cash infusion to make up for Covid-related losses. More likely is that Thom Loverro is right:

Baseball's newest Washington https://t.co/yGvqegEqgv

— thom loverro (@thomloverro) July 6, 2020

A savvy negotiator creates leverage, and you can’t have leverage without other suitors. Maybe Loar is hoping that other MLB owners will be so happy with him for giving them a move threat candidate to shake in the faces of their current homes, they’ll eventually reward him with a team of his own? That would indeed be a kind of unity, but probably not the one most people would be hoping for.

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Phantom Nashville MLB team releases stadium design that would require changing Earth’s orbit to work

October 2, 2019 Neil deMause

The would-be owners of the would-be Nashville Stars MLB team don’t have much more than a team name and, uh, that’s pretty much it. But now they also have some renderings of what a Nashville MLB stadium might look like, and oh my goodness:

There is a lot going on here: the usual fireworks (in a location unviewable from the seats, which are empty anyway) and gratuitous spotlights. There’s also a quintuple-decker seating plan that, if this is remotely to scale, would put the cheap seats about 200 feet in the air, plus what initially looks like some sort of enormous curving sun shield in foul territory down the right field line — though honestly the stadium could use a sun shield in fair territory, given that batters would be facing almost due south, which isn’t normally done because then the sun is in their eyes. (The Detroit Tigers‘ stadium is close, but not as bad as this proposal; of course, it’s always possible the geometry of the rendering is off, given that it seems to have eliminated a nearly 90-degree curve in the Cumberland River at that point.)

Any other pretty pictures that aren’t quite as goofy?

That appears to be … a sold-out rock concert going on at the same time as a sold-out baseball game? Is there any world in which this would be a good idea? Did those fans on the hazardous-looking sky bridge buy tickets to the concert or to the ballgame, or does tickets to one get you access to the other for free? Do you have to choose which to watch, or does the band only play between innings and during pitching changes?

The pointless curving sun shield, meanwhile, turns out to be in fact a curving retractable roof. Except that the first image shows no tracks for it to slide on, and it’s not nearly thick enough to provide the multiple sliding panels that a retractable roof would require, and in any event there would be like a 200-foot-high gap for the setting sun to shine through and get in the eyes of right-handed batters.

“Completing our objective to bring Major League Baseball to Nashville will be a long process. We’re in the very early stages of that process,” Music City Baseball managing director John Loar told the Tennessean, which, tell me about it. The newspaper adds, “The group says it will not seek public money to fund stadium construction or development around the stadium, but has said it wants to explore building on city-owned property (such as that near Nissan Stadium pictured in the renderings) in partnership with the city.” So, we’re looking at a “We’ll build the stadium if you give us a pile of lucrative development rights” plan along the lines of the New York Islanders arena and Los Angeles Angels stadium renovation plans. I, for one, would rather see detailed renderings of who’s going to pay for what rather than these fanciful stadium pictures — but then, that’s exactly why team owners and wannabe team owners choose to release these vaportecture images, the better to misdirect you with.

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Friday roundup: Will Royals sale spark new stadium, is Miami asbestos report a Beckham ploy, could developers influence Bills’ future?

August 30, 2019 Neil deMause

Happy last Friday of summer! You’re probably busy getting ready to go somewhere for the long weekend, but if you’re instead staying put (and enjoying the space left by all the people going somewhere for the long weekend), consider spending some time if you haven’t yet reading my Deadspin article on “What’s The Matter With Baseball?“, which interrogates the various theories for MLB’s attendance decline and determines which ones may not be total crap. Do I conclude that it’s all the fault of team owners who’d rather charge rich people through the nose for a lesser number of tickets than try to sell more seats to less deep-pocketed fans? No spoilers!

And now to the news, and lots of it:

A new rich guy is buying the Kansas City Royals, and already there’s speculation about whether John Sherman will demand a new stadium when (or before) the team’s Kauffman Stadium lease is up in 2031. The Kansas City Star editorializes that “Kansas Citians should reject any plan that significantly increases public spending for the Royals, either for a new downtown stadium or a ballpark somewhere else,” and further notes that there’s no guarantee a new stadium would even help the Royals’ bottom line (“Winning, it turns out, is more important than a new stadium”), which is all a nice first step; let’s see what happens when and if Sherman actually opens his mouth about his plans.
Miami has closed Melreese golf course after determining it had high levels of arsenic and reopened Melreese golf course after environmental officials determined there was nothing “earth shattering” about the pollution levels. And now there’s concern by at least one city commissioner (Manolo Reyes, if you’re scoring at home) that the release of the arsenic findings is part of a ploy by David Beckham’s Inter Miami to get a discount on the lease price of the land, which is still being hashed out. The Miami Herald reports that the team and city are at loggerheads over whether to take environmental remediation costs into account when determining the land value; this epic Beckham stadium saga may have a couple more chapters to go yet.
Buffalo developers Carl and William Paladino are really excited about the possibility of a new Bills stadium near land their own, because they could either sell it to the team at an inflated price or develop it themselves once people are excited to live or shop near a new football stadium. (No, I don’t know why anyone would be excited to live or shop near a football stadium only open ten days a year, just go with it.) Carl Paladino once ran for governor of New York, so it’s worth watching to see if he uses his political ties (or skeezy lobbyist friends) to try to influence the Bills’ stadium future.
A group trying to get an MLB team for Nashville may not have a stadium or a site or a team, but they do have a name for their vaporteam: the Nashville Stars. Guy-who-wants-to-be-an-MLB-owner John Loar tells the Tennessean he decided on the name “after reading a book on Nashville’s baseball history by author Skip Nipper,” which is presumably this one; the Seraphs, Blues, Tigers, Americans, Volunteers, and Elite Giants honestly all seem like better names than the Stars, which was last used by a franchise in the World Basketball League (the basketball league where tall players weren’t allowed, which, yes, was actually a thing), but it’s really not worth arguing over the name a team that may never exist in our lifetimes.
The Richmond city council’s plan to approve spending $350 million on a new downtown arena without consulting the public has hit an apparent snag, which is that four or five members of the nine-member council reportedly oppose the plan, and seven votes are needed to pass it.
The editor of the San Francisco Examiner has penned an opinion piece saying the Golden State Warriors‘ new arena is overly opulent and expensive — premium lounges feature wine butlers and private dining rooms, so yeah — but is resigned to this as a necessity (or at least the headline writer is) that it’s “the price we pay for a privately-funded arena.” Which, does anyone really think the Warriors owners would have passed up the chance to charge through the nose for wine butler service if they’d gotten public money? This is the price we pay for rampant income inequality, and don’t you forget it.

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