Category: Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim

Friday roundup: Bucs want “major renovation,” won’t say yet who’d pay for it

access_time personNeil deMause

Today’s main event will be the liveblog of day two of the sports economics conference at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, which tons of presentations on stadiums and stadium-adjacent topics, but first here’s the regular Friday weekly news r0undup, written entirely on Thursday! If anyone’s roof blew off this morning, it’ll just have to wait till Monday.

  • Tampa Bay Buccaneers owner Joel Glazer wants a “major renovation” of his stadium once the Bucs’ lease expires in 2028, funded by, uh: “We’re going through a phase right now where we’re assessing the stadium and what might be needed. And I know [Hillsborough County and the Tampa Sports Authority are] assessing the stadium and what might be needed, and once both of us are done with our assessments, then we come together and go talk about it, work through things.” Asked last summer about Bucs stadium funding, Tampa city spokesperson Adam Smith said team execs “haven’t approached the city about anything like that” and “we don’t expect them to”; either that was code for “paying for this is the county’s problem” or Smith really believes in the power of positive thinking.
  • Unlike the [Sacramento] Athletics, the Tampa Bay Rays have managed to sell out their 10,000-seat minor-league stadium in their opening series, even at prices running more than $100 for every seat that comes with an actual seat. Tampa Bay Times columnist John Romano blames this on the Rays needing to make up for “a potential loss of revenue from ticket sales, concessions, luxury boxes and the associated costs of relocating for a year,” not the desire to capitalize on artificial ticket scarcity. It’ll be interesting to see if those high prices hold up once the Florida summer heat hits — for what it’s worth, there are still plenty of seats available for next week’s series against the Angels.
  • Speaking of the Rays, the clock officially ran out on their St. Petersburg stadium deal on Tuesday, and now owner Stu Sternberg is free to shop around for another city that wants to give him a billion dollars. Anyone? You in the back? You were just stretching your arms? I see.
  • Cincinnati Bengals VP Katie Blackburn was asked what’s up with the team’s lease that’s set to expire in 2026, and replied, “We could, I guess, go wherever we wanted after this year if we didn’t pick the up option up. So, you know, we’ll see.” NFL move-threat stan Mike Florio of NBC Sports called this “a powerful, loaded comment“; one might also argue that it’s exactly the kind of vague non-threat threat that you issue when you don’t actually want anyone noting that no cities have newer stadiums ready to offer. Potato, potahto!
  • The Jacksonville Jaguars need a place to play for two years while the city of Jacksonville is paying for stadium upgrades, so they’re asking Orlando to play them to play there, cool, cool.
  • A Massachusetts judge ruled that the demolition and reconstruction of White Stadium for the Boston Legacy F.C. can move forward, though opponents say they’ll continue to fight against it. (Boston Legacy, btw, is the new name for the much-derided BOS Nation F.C. women’s soccer team, presumably meant to honor the easiest way to get into Northeastern.)
  • Chicago Bears president Kevin Warren says the team is now focused on building a stadium in Arlington Heights, except for the portion of its focus that is on the Chicago lakefront. More news as actual news comes in, not just attempts at leverage plays.
  • Los Angeles elected officials are finally starting to get steamed about how the 2028 Olympics are being planned in a city that is recovering from disastrous fires, though so far it seems to be mostly about where the sailing competition will be held. If history is any guide, the real outrage won’t come until the Games actually begin.
  • Wondering how the affordable housing promises attached to the Brooklyn Nets arena are going? Does “Empire State Development (ESD), the gubernatorially controlled authority that oversees/shepherds the project, says it might enforce the $2,000 a month penalties for each unbuilt apartment, though that process may be fraught” answer that question? If you’re wondering why ESD only “might” enforce the penalty clause that was designed to make sure developers actually build what they promised, ESD VP Arden Sokolow says that if the state fined them, “you wouldn’t be getting any housing there,” whereas this way … oh, would you look at the time, we’ll have to cut off questions there!
  • Former Anaheim mayor and illegal helicopter registrant Harry Sidhu was sentenced to jail time for deleting emails to hide them from an FBI investigation into soliciting bribes related to a proposed Los Angeles Angels stadium deal — if you had “two months in federal prison plus a $55,000 fine” in the betting pool, you’re a winner!
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Friday roundup: Angels owner could be skimping on stadium repairs, St. Pete may send Rays owner a bill for their wasted stadium time

access_time personNeil deMause

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

Meanwhile, back in the now:

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

access_time personNeil deMause

Greetings from New York, where we now have two terrible mayors instead of one! That’s hardly the worst of today’s political news, so instead let us distract ourselves with some (mostly) terrible stadium and arena news:

  • The Baltimore Ravens‘ $434 million stadium renovation project is now a $489 million renovation project, and 64% of the additional cost is set to be covered by state taxpayers. Or, if you’re whatever AI is writing the headlines over at Sports Illustrated, “Ravens Spending Over $50 Million More on Stadium Upgrades,” sure, that’s probably right, no need to read your own story to check.
  • D.C. United‘s owners want to add 10,000 seats and a roof to their (checks) not yet 7-year-old stadium, and “what remains unknown is the potential price tag or whether the team will ask the city for subsidies.” Also the Axios reporter passing this along (from an original source of “two sources,” not even “familiar with the team’s thinking” or anything) calls D.C. United “American soccer royalty,” what ever happened to no more kings?
  • Missouri House Speaker Jonathan Patterson is turning up the heat on Jackson County, saying “time is running out” for “a plan and course of action” for new Kansas City Royals and Chiefs stadiums, or else … the teams will kick everything back a year and try again, again? Too many showrunners these days really do substitute overbearing string sections for viable suspense plots.
  • D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser says a Washington Commanders stadium “will be the anchor that attracts other investment–housing, amenities, jobs, and opportunities,” guess somebody doesn’t remember what the late Allen Sanderson said about NFL stadiums and cemeteries.
  • In 2023, the city of Anaheim commissioned a $325,000, two-month study of how to keep the Angels‘ stadium viable for decades to come, and now the study may not be done until 2026 and will cost over $1 million, cool, cool.
  • New Sacramento Republic F.C. vaportecture! And it looks like, uh, a soccer stadium? At least there are some smoke bombs, on both ends of the pitch for some reason, but no fireworks or people holding up scarves dramatically and we can’t even see what ridiculous formation the players are in, I give this a B-minus for entertainment value at best.
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Friday roundup: Royals float stadium atop public park, A’s financial plan may not be ready until December

access_time personNeil deMause

And so we come to the end of another programming week, one that at least managed to avoid having anyone propose building a new privately used stadium in a public park — oh, wait!

  • Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas has revealed that Royals owner John Sherman is considering other downtown stadium sites after there was so much opposition to his plan to build one atop the Crossroads neighborhood, and naturally one site is on top of a public park, that will go over so much better. Also, Washington Square Park and the adjacent site that would be used for the stadium only total 11.6 acres, which isn’t really enough for a modern MLB stadium and certainly not for one plus a whole entertainment district like Sherman wants. (The Crossroads site would have been 17.3 acres.) Can’t wait to see how the eventual renderings avoid explaining this!
  • Oakland A’s owner John Fisher’s financing plan for a Las Vegas stadium is “rounding third and heading home,” according to Nevada authority chair and unregistered A’s lobbyist Steve Hill, which is another way of saying it may not be ready until early December. Yesterday’s stadium authority meeting did include a bunch of lease details, like Fisher committing to keep the team in Vegas for 30 years but having the option to extend it to 99 years if he wants, and Fisher having the option to buy the stadium for its appraised value at the end of each lease term, and if there’s anything Nevada taxpayers get out of the lease other than $600 million in debt and tax expenditures, the news coverage didn’t mention it.
  • Cleveland.com has noticed that $461 million in city spending on Browns stadium renovations over 30 years isn’t the same as $461 million now, good work, gang. (Their estimate of the present value of Mayor Justin Bibb’s offer is about $234 million, mine was $240 million, reasonable people can disagree.) They also note that it’s not clear in Bibb’s plan who would sell the stadium bonds — Bibb’s office sent a terse text: “City will not bond. Some other public entity” — or how they would be paid off if alcohol or cigarette taxes fell short — Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam didn’t text “Not us. Taxpayers somehow,” but they really didn’t have to.
  • Speaking of the Browns, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has entered the chat.
  • The California state legislature is auditing the Los Angeles Angels lease extension that was approved in 2019 by Anaheim Mayor Harry Sidhu while he was in the midst of negotiating a new stadium deal in exchange for (allegedly) demanding $1 million in campaign contributions. There was previously some talk on the Anaheim city council about voiding the lease on the grounds that the whole deal was covered in slime; we’ll see where this audit leads, if anywhere.
  • WUSA-TV reported this week that the Washington Wizards and Capitals arena renovation deal with D.C. still hasn’t been finalized despite passing a July deadline, and I’m still waiting for any other news outlets to think this is worthwhile news and not just haggling over the fine print, but keep one eye on it nonetheless.
  • The Dodger Stadium gondola project lives! No matter how dumb an idea it is!
  • This has nothing to do with stadiums, but if you think I’m going to pass up an article that begins “Billionaire Milwaukee Brewers owner Mark Attanasio has allegedly been stealing sand from an exclusive Southern California beach,” you don’t know this site at all.
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Friday roundup: Oakland Coliseum redevelopment moves ahead (maybe), DeSantis writes $8m taxpayer check to Inter Miami stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

In case you’re wondering why sports team owners keep on releasing incredibly amateurish vaportecture stadium renderings that are just going to subject them to ridicule, check out these headlines from just the last two days: “Browns players share thoughts on Brook Park stadium renderings,” “Cleveland Browns stadium saga: Fans react to renderings of Brook Park proposal,” “Cavaliers Star Donovan Mitchell Chimes In On Browns New Stadium Proposal.” Pretty pictures, or even doofy-looking ones, are red meat to click-starved news outlets, and so long as they keep getting coverage that is more “ooh, shiny” than “who’s going to pay for this exactly?” the CAD mills are going to be kept busy.

And speaking of busy, let’s see what else happened this week:

  • Oakland A’s owner John Fisher has agreed to sell his half of the Oakland Coliseum property to developers African American Sports & Entertainment Group for $125 million, which is $20 million more than the city of Oakland got for its half. Now AASEG will convert it into a “$5 billion megaproject that could include a new convention center, restaurant, hotel, youth amphitheater and restaurants,” and maybe a soccer stadium — or could, you know, not, depending on how the economic winds blow. That the group’s private equity partner says the money will come from “investors” isn’t exactly reassuring, but at least a Coliseum development might pencil out as a better investment than the plan that Fisher is trying to sell.
  • One thing to breathe easy about with Inter Miami‘s much-delayed new stadium is that at least it’s not getting any public money, and … wait, why is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis holding a giant $8 million check made out to the stadium? He can just do that? (Answer: Yes, it’s from an infrastructure slush fund he controls.) Technically the money is going toward traffic improvements around the stadium, but still, handing over $8 million to support a stadium that’s going to happen whether or not you spend the taxpayer dollars on it and then declaring “we just don’t believe that we give money to build sports stadiums” is a nice trick if you can pull it off.
  • And speaking of privately funded soccer stadiums getting public funding, how about Kansas City spending upwards of $30 million in cash and tax breaks for a parking garage for the KC Current‘s newly opened stadium? The deal isn’t final yet, so no publicity photos of oversized checks for now.
  • Signal Cleveland speculates that the proposed $2.4 billion Cleveland Browns stadium in Brook Park could use tax increment financing to cover some of its bills, with the $740,000 a year in property taxes the site currently generates continuing to go to local schools while anything above that number would be kicked back to help pay for the stadium. Except if you believe transit blogger and Browns dome enthusiast Ken Prendergast, the newly developed land would “generate millions more in property taxes or payments in lieu of taxes for Brook Park schools than it does now,” and both things can’t be right. We’ll just have to wait and see what’s actually in the financial plan, which the Browns owners seem perfectly content not to reveal anytime soon, not when they can get Donovan Mitchell making headlines by tweeting that a new stadium is “gonna be fire.”
  • The new Worcester Red Sox stadium has “put the Canal District’s emergence on overdrive,” according to a Boston Globe article citing … some bars that opened nearby? Not mentioned: What the numbers show about the city’s bang for its 150 million bucks, despite there being local economists who could have easily told the Globe the answer.
  • In Anaheim, meanwhile, the presence of the Los Angeles Angels has spawned a group of about 40 hot dog vendors who’ve set up outside the stadium, and Angels execs hate it because that’s money that’s not going into team pockets — no, of course not, they’re just concerned about someone “getting severely sick or even dying due to food poisoning,” because we know how devoted the Angels organization is to ensuring people get quality food.
  • Thomas Tresser, not the DC Comics villain but the author of a book on the successful campaign to defeat Chicago’s Olympic bid, has launched a petition to demand that the city of Chicago not provide any public money or land for sports stadiums, feel free to sign if you’re the petition-signing type.
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Friday roundup: Philly paper mysteriously pulls article about 76ers arena being called human-rights violation

access_time personNeil deMause

So this was originally going to be a minor bullet point in the Friday roundup: An international human rights organization called The Shift had declared the Philadelphia 76ers‘ arena plans to be “inconsistent with international human rights law” and called on team owner Josh Harris to work with Chinatown residents to “help realize, rather than interfere with, that community’s human rights.” Okay, sure, international human rights law is a bit of an odd legal footing to appeal to, but if anybody’s authorized to do so it’s an international human rights organization, so that’s worth a small note.

Until this happened:

That’s right: Click on the original link on the Inquirer site and it 404s, though the article still shows up in the Inquirer’s own search results. (I had previously saved the article to Instapaper, and you can find a PDF of that here.) Debbie Wei of Asian Americans United, one of the Philadelphia groups strongly opposed to the arena, says she believes the article was taken down at the request of “the billionaires,” but I haven’t been able to get any more details yet from her.

It’s extraordinarily unusual for a news outlet to outright pull a story without even an editorial note stating why it was removed. It actually goes against most journalism ethics policies, which is that stories should be corrected, but not outright deleted. (The Inquirer does have a committee to de-index older stories that may be unintentionally harmful, but even then the stories remain searchable on the Inquirer site, just not on search engines like Google.)

The whole thing is, frankly, bizarre, doubly so since the original article was fairly tame, with the statements from The Shift countered by statements from team spokesperson Nicole Gainor that The Shift’s letter “isn’t based on a clear understanding of how we are thoughtfully approaching this project.” I’ve reached out to the Inquirer for comment, but haven’t heard back yet; if I get any more information today, I’ll post an update here.

UPDATE: Just got this emailed statement from Gabriel Escobar, Inquirer editor and senior vice president: “The article that briefly appeared Thursday on Inquirer.com, in hindsight, required more context and more reporting. For those reasons, we decided to take it down while continuing to pursue the story.”

Meanwhile, on with the rest of the news:

  • The new Forbes NFL team value estimates came out this week, and there have been lots of headlines about how the Tennessee Titans‘ value jumped 26% after getting their new $1.2 billion stadium subsidy. Which, yes, it’s an indication of how stadiums let the rich get richer on the public dime, but some grains of salt do apply: The Forbes team value estimates are very handwavy and much less reliable than their team revenue estimates (which generally check out), and the average NFL team rose an estimated 14% in value next year, so it’s tough to say exactly how much more the Titans are worth now. If anything, it’s notable that even according to Forbes, the Titans only appreciated in value by $420 million more than they would have without the $1.2 billion handout, which implies that Nashville and team owner Amy Adams Strunk both would have been better off if the city had, say, written a half-billion-dollar check to Strunk and let them keep playing in their old stadium.
  • Add the Bronx Council for Environmental Quality to the list of Bronx groups who really hate Mayor Eric Adams’ idea to build a temporary cricket stadium atop public cricket fields in a public park to host the T20 Cricket World Cup: In a Bronx Times op-ed, the BCEQ wrote that it could take two years for the parkland to be fully restored, and “You can add the NYC/ICC proposal to the growing number of ‘mega-events’ that, according to sports economists, drive wedges between localities and global brand-building strategies and fail to deliver promised economic benefits.” At press time, the Bronx Times had not pulled the op-ed.
  • Just when you thought illegal helicopter registration was going to be the weirdest thing about the now-defunct Los Angeles Angels stadium land sale fiasco, now comes the news that the city of Anaheim can’t find the email where an Angels consultant laid out how Mayor Harry Sidhu and city council members were expected to rubber-stamp the deal, even though the FBI already has a copy. Please consider kicking the nonprofit Voice of OC some cash for keeping on top of these things, if only for the LOLAngels value.
  • The insane Jackie Robinson (not that one) Las Vegas arena for no tenant at all is maybe finally dead, after it blew past a county deadline on Wednesday. That only took, let’s see, ten years? Andy Warhol said you get 15 minutes, man, and you already played seven years in the NBA, quit hogging all the attention already.
  • The Las Vegas Raiders stadium has a leak in its roof, time to build a new one.
  • I forgot to link to the KSHB-TV story last week that interviewed me about the Kansas City Royals stadium situation (sample sound bite: “For this to create the kind of new spending that the Royals are claiming, it would be the first time in sports history that occurred”), but you can still check it out here, along with my living room wall art. (Diego Rivera and Jon Langford, if anyone’s curious.)
  • Finally, thanks to everyone who signed up as a Field of Schemes subscriber to get the brand new set of 25th anniversary fridge magnets! (Or, you know, to support the work this site has been doing for 25 damn years now. But I know it’s mostly the magnets.) If you want to get in on the swag, or just encourage me to spend more time on this apparently never-ending mission, sign up now!
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Friday roundup: It was the best of summers for team owners demanding stadiums, it was the worst of summers for the rest of us

access_time personNeil deMause

The calendar on my screen says it’s September, which means we made it through another summer. (Not technically until the equinox on September 23, I guess, but if Labor Day weekend doesn’t mark the end of summer, I don’t want to be a part of your arbitrary seasonal delineation scheme.) And quite a summer it was, kicking off with Oakland A’s owner John Fisher fighting for (and getting) $600 million in public money for a new stadium in Las Vegas, then proceeding with Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman ramping up talk about a new $2 billion stadium project either in downtown K.C. or in the next county over, the mayor of Oklahoma City saying the Thunder need a new arena because their 22-year-old one “will keep getting older,” the San Antonio Spurs owners exploring a new arena to replace the one that they just had renovated for them a few years back, many anonymous people claiming that the Milwaukee Brewers will move somewhere without $400 million in publicly funded upgrades to their 22-year-old stadium, and of course the great New York City cricket stadium fiasco, which just gets more fiascoey by the day.  Plus the Chicago Bears are still shopping themselves around to every possible Chicago suburb, the Arizona Coyotes owners are doing the same with every town in the Phoenix area, and the mayor of San Francisco wants to build a soccer stadium without even knowing for what soccer team for some reason.

There are a bunch of possible reasons why we’re seeing this flurry of new sports subsidy demands: lots of stadiums built in the ’90s getting to a point where team owners aren’t embarrassed to ask for new ones, flush state budgets and the promise of federal infrastructure spending getting owners salivating, a rush particularly in MLB to secure new stadium deals before expansion maybe takes some cities off the potential move threat table. Or, you know, this is just the sort of hellscape we’re doomed to live in after our government decided to give all the money to the rich people and then let them spend it on buying elections. Either way, this site’s work clearly isn’t going to be done for a while yet, so I better get started on some fresh tchotchkes to keep you all interested in helping to support it.

And if you prefer news items to tchotchkes, we got you covered there too:

  • Lease extension talks between the state of Maryland and Baltimore Orioles owner John Angelos might still be going nowhere fast, but Gov. Wes Moore (pictured here wearing an Orioles uniform and here doing it again, because that’s how he rolls) says he’s confident of “being able to not just get the lease done, but also making sure that getting the lease done includes all the other lenses that I think are going to be important in this long-term deal.” “Lenses” here apparently means a plan to redevelop the area around Camden Yards, which Moore painted as a win-win for the city and state, and surely not just a giveaway of $300 million in state money plus public land to Angelos so that he can profit from the redevelopment, heaven forfend.
  • Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno is still trying to get the city of Anaheim to pay him $5 million for costs associated with “processing the illegal cash sale of Angel Stadium,” as the Voice of OC puts it. That’s pretty ballsy, but keep in mind this is a guy who’s also trying to get out of paying MLB luxury tax by cutting all the players he just traded for in July and hoping someone else signs them, not to mention tried to push through an illegal stadium land purchase to begin with, so ballsy is pretty much par for his course.
  • Two New York City council committees have voted to give Madison Square Garden just a five-year extension on its operating permit, half the length of its previous permit and infinitely smaller than the perpetual permit that the owner of the Knicks and Rangers was seeking. While this could raise hopes of seeing the city’s Padlock Unit chain up the arena gates, more likely it’s just the council kicking the can down the road again; especially since, as the New York Times notes in classic Timesian we’re-not-saying-we’re-just-saying style, “the Dolan family has shown itself adept at bending the will of the government to advance its own interests, particularly when the various branches of government are not on the same page.”
  • The kerfuffle over the Philadelphia 76ers owners’ terrible “community info sessions” on their new Chinatown arena plans continues, with the first public Zoom meeting held in Mandarin criticized as “garbled” and lacking proper translation; no word yet on how this Tuesday’s meeting in Cantonese went.
  • The Charlotte Observer sent questionnaires to city council candidates asking how much the city should be contributing to upgrades on the Carolina Panthers‘ stadium, and if “any answer would be premature” is the kind of response you were hoping for, then you will be very pleased by the efficacy of candidate questionnaires. (To be fair, it is kind of dumb to ask about how much should be spent without taking into consideration things like whether the team owners would pay additional rent, say; to also be fair to the Observer, it really does sound like the candidates mostly used this argument as an excuse to duck the question entirely.)
  • Construction has finally begun on Inter Miami‘s cursed new permanent stadium! Or at least “earthwork and site work” has begun, according to a team press release, jeez, Miami Herald, you couldn’t even be bothered to drive over and confirm it? The stadium is now scheduled to open sometime in 2025, but we’ve been hearing similar predictions for, good lord, has it been five years already? At this rate Lionel Messi’s kids are more likely to play at a new Inter Miami stadium than he is.
  • If you thought what Congress needed was a Historic Stadium Caucus to work on ways to upgrade older college football stadiums, including possibly with federal infrastructure money, U.S. Rep. Garret Graves has some great news for you.
  • The promised housing construction that was supposed to be built as part of the Brooklyn Nets arena is set to miss a May 2025 deadline, and New York state is considering greasing the skids by restoring a tax break that expired last year, because of course it is.
  • There might be worse ways to frame a story about how the owners of the San Antonio Missions are trying to get city money for a new minor-league baseball stadium and city officials haven’t been returning their phone calls until the next day than “Missions can’t get to first base on downtown baseball stadium,” but between the what’s the holdup with approving subsidies? and the terrible baseball play on words, it’s hard to imagine one.
  • The company that owns the Boston Red Sox is buying the company that owns the TV rights to Pittsburgh Pirates games, which Marc Normandin points out means that going forward it’ll be easier for the Red Sox to outspend the Pirates if the Pirates make more TV money. Normandin calls this “just a weird sentence to type”; me, I’m reminded of syndicate ball, which was a fun time.
  • What do “Spring training season brought $418M to state’s economy in 2023” and “Beyoncé’s Renaissance Tour has a huge economic impact” have in common? If you guessed “They’re both as big a load of BS as that time people insisted LeBron James leaving the Cavs destroyed Cleveland’s economy,” you’re a winner!
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Friday roundup: Anaheim ex-mayor faces prison over Angels land deal, Sixers owner calls public arena input “harassment”

access_time personNeil deMause

Ah, the dog days of summer, when news slows to a trickle and [opens up Instapaper and is hit by a firehose of saved items] BLEEAARGH!

Twenty-five years, people. I’ve been writing this stupid blog for 25 years, and the only thing that’s changed is now there are fewer decent outlets providing actual news, and the number of zeroes on the subsidy price tags keep going up. I hope you’re enjoying continuing to read this stuff, because it seems like we’re going to have to keep on rehashing the same tired absurdities even longer than The Simpsons, and nobody’s ever going to learn not to build the monorail.

Anyway, it’s Friday, let’s do what we do:

  • Former Anaheim mayor Harry Sidhu has agreed to plead guilty to obstruction of justice charges and will face up to 40 years in federal prison following an FBI investigation for soliciting bribes around a new Los Angeles Angels stadium land deal as well as something about illegal helicopter registration. (In classic getting-Al-Capone-for-tax-evasion fashion, the guilty plea is for the coverup, not for the initial alleged crimes.) That land deal is now dead, along with Sidhu’s political career; it’s possible that the Anaheim city council could even void the Angels’ sweetheart stadium lease extension on the grounds that Sidhu negotiated it, though given that no current council members would comment on the possibility when asked by the Voice of OC, probably best not to hold your breath there.
  • The Philadelphia 76ers held the first of five online forums about their new arena plans this week, one that some people criticized for only showing team executives on camera while not allowing the public to speak live. Sixers co-owner and lead developer David Adelman replied during the event, “Some people are disappointed that they can’t harass us on Zoom,” and the team subsequently rebranded the forums from “community meetings” to “community info sessions,” all of which went over about as well as you’d expect.
  • MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, in trying to argue why the Kansas City Royals need a new stadium either in downtown K.C. or North Kansas City, declared that it would be “a tremendous opportunity for this community — forget the Royals,” and then in the next breath said that “new facilities provide a ballclub with an opportunity for revenue generation that simply doesn’t exist in older footprints.” All evidence continues to be that Manfred is very bad at this, but also that he doesn’t have to be very good at it to be successful.
  • The Clark County Commission has voted to spend $440,000 in pandemic recovery money on bringing corporate CEOs to the Super Bowl in hopes that they’ll move their businesses to Nevada. Apparently neither spending $750 million on an NFL stadium for the Raiders nor being Las Vegas was enough to put the city on the corporate relocation map, but once the billionaires have been wined and dined at a Super Bowl, that’ll surely do the trick.
  • Longtime Cleveland city official Ken Silliman has a new book out about the city’s sports deals, and Signal Cleveland’s review includes some enticing snippets, including that Silliman shielded details of Guardians subsidy talks from public records requests by briefing public employees verbally but not in writing, and that he thinks Congress should “resurrect 1998 legislation written to curtail what’s known as ‘franchise free agency,'” which maybe means Rep. David Minge’s Distorting Subsidies Limitation Act that would have made sports subsidies subject to a federal excise tax, though that was actually 1999. [UPDATE: Silliman writes to say it’s actually this bill, which would have exempted sports team relocations from antitrust law.] Clearly I’m going to have to read the book before reporting fully on it, this journalism thing is a lot of work!
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Friday roundup: Mets casino gets bill, Angels deal lurches from grave, news outlets everywhere need editing help, stat

access_time personNeil deMause

Thanks to everyone for helping us make it through another week! (I’m assuming here that it’s you readers who someone make time progress; I don’t actually know that much about science.)

Here’s what’s been happening that we haven’t talked about yet:

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Moreno decides not to sell Angels after all, because his heart is with all the fans who despise him

access_time personNeil deMause

Oh, never mind, Arte Moreno isn’t really selling the Los Angeles Angels after his sweetheart land grab fell apart, he was only joshing us:

“During this process, it became clear that we have unfinished business and feel we can make a positive impact on the future of the team and the fan experience,” Moreno said in a statement. “This offseason we committed to a franchise record player payroll and still want to accomplish our goal of bringing a World Series Championship back to our fans.  We are excited about this next chapter of Angels Baseball.”

Moreno added that he had met with “a number of highly qualified individuals and groups who expressed strong interest in the Club. However, as discussions advanced and began to crystallize, we realized our hearts remain with the Angels, and we are not ready to part ways with the fans, players, and our employees.”

Isn’t that sweet? After declaring that “my family and I” have decided that “now is the time,” turns out he doesn’t want to sell after all, because he has so much love in his heart for everyone around the Angels! Because when you think Arte Moreno, you think unbridled affection for your fellow humans.

The obvious question everyone now wants to know the answer to is “What will this mean for the chances of Shohei Ohtani re-signing with the Angels once his contract expires after 2023?” But this, of course, is not the website for that question, so instead let’s ask: What will this mean for Moreno’s now-decade-long quest to get control of the parking lots around his stadium so he can either build a new one there, build a bunch of other development there and use the money to remodel his current stadium, or both?

It’s possible the end of Moreno’s six-month hissy fit was prompted by indications that he thought he might have a shot after all at reviving such a deal with the new city leadership that took over after the old mayor resigned in a cloud of bribery scandals and illegal helicopter registrations; new mayor Ashleigh Aitken told the Voice of OC in an emailed statement in response to questions that “After the dust settles and when the time is right, I am open to talking about any proposal that would be good for our residents.” Or it could be that Moreno just didn’t like the purchase offers he was getting; or, sure, love of the people, anything’s possible. Whichever it is, it does not seem likely that he’s going to give up on his stadium dreams just because everyone hates him and his biggest political ally is under FBI investigation.

The Athletic’s Sam Blum notes that the Angels’ lease runs through 2029, but Moreno has an option to extend it to 2038, so it’s not like he has to make any urgent decisions there. (Moreno will turn 92 in 2038.) He could certainly use the possibility of not signing a lease extension to try to shake down Anaheim for more money or free land, a la pretty much every other team owner out there, he could try to threaten to move to Tustin or Long Beach again, or he could bide his time for a couple of years and wait for everyone to forget how poorly acquiescing to his demands went last time. Or Moreno could forget about trying to shake down the city for a windfall subsidy and just focus on building a winning ballclub — nah, he should probably just stick to what he knows.

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