It Will Be Bad For Baseball, And Devastating To The City Of Milwaukee, If Major League Baseball Allows The Brewers To Leave And Move To Nashville
Front Office Sports - Milwaukee’s nearly seven-decade run as an MLB market could end unless there’s a dramatic turnaround in ongoing stadium negotiations, according to a new report.
For months, the Brewers have detailed $448 million worth of needed renovations, work that currently falls to the state’s Southeast Wisconsin Professional Baseball Park District. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred has similarly pressed state officials to honor their obligations.
Prior rumors of the Brewers’ potential relocation have been dismissed as overblown brinkmanship, but efforts by Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers to secure $290 million in funding for stadium improvements continue to run into political resistance.
The Brewers’ lease runs through the end of 2030, but the team has been pressing for immediate facility improvements.
I know Cubs fans are celebrating this news, as they'd much rather turn Nashville into Wrigley-South 4 times a year rather than making Milwaukee Wrigley-North. But I actually like Milwaukee the city. I like it a lot. And I like the people there even more. They're great people, shit head baseball and football fans yes, but great people otherwise and they don't deserve this bullshit.
By this bullshit I'm of course referring to a billionaire ownership group attempting to hold a city and state's taxpayers hostage to fund their investment, or else lose their beloved sports team. A tale as old as time and one that's continuing to play out over, and over, and over again. Because we continue to let these jerkoffs get away with it.
Speaking of jerkoffs, I'm not a big Bill Simmons guy by any means, but the one thing his dreadful HBO show nailed was the trailer in which he told billionaire owners to fuck off-
(p.s. - one of my favorite El Pres bits ever was the hatred he had and amount of shit he used to dish out to Simmons on the blog and on twitter back in the day, blasting him for calling himself "The Boston Sports Guy" when he lived in LA. Everybody knows you can only be the voice of Boston Sports if you live in Massachusetts, or New York, or Miami Bill.)
Just last night, Journalist David Williams broke a story about Crain's breaking a story that the Chicago White Sox are also considering leaving their hometown…
The new location being floated? Nashville of course.
Nashville is like the new girl in school who wears the tennis skirts and knee-high socks. She's a 6 or 7 but the fact she's new, seems like she's down for anything, and every other guy in school wants her makes her unjustifiably hotter.
These Brewers rumors started circulating early last week, and started to pick up some steam so of course Reinsdorf caught wind and decided to float the White Sox name out there as also considering Nashville through his minions in the local media.
Textbook Reinsdorf.
People forget he pulled this same bullshit back in the 90s with Tampa Bay.
Now don't get me wrong, Milwaukee is pulling the same shit, and this isn't a White Sox blog. Just pointing out the fact that it's been known for a while now that MLB wants and is targeting Nashville. It's an amazing city, continues to fucking BOOM development-wise, and their triple-A affiliate, The Sounders, crush there already. It would be a marquee free-agent destination with awesome nightlife, primo tail to chase, beautiful weather, and a very attractive income tax rate. Tennessee is also a baseball hotbed and the state could use more pro sports teams. It makes perfect sense. But for an expansion franchise. Not for a team that's an institution, has decades of history, and means so much to a large market's fans. HUGE DIFFERENCE.
Let the billionaires with tiny pp's fight over who gets the expansion team and give them Nashville Manfred. Be a good commissioner for once and nip this in the bud now. Stop allowing these elites to pretend to cry poor and tell their fans if the state governments don't foot the bill for a shiny new playground for them, they're going to have to look elsewhere.
It's horseshit.
Tell them to do what Bob Kraft did back in 1999, and personally fucking finance the stadium themself. Yah, no joke. Probably the rarest thing to happen in sports these days. A billionaire using their own money to make even more money.
It would be one thing if these owners borrowed taxpayer money, and paid it back at say 10% interest or something decent so the state actually profited in helping them out. An actual win-win. Or if the ownership groups cut the city or state in on the real estate, ancillary businesses, or other revenue that'll be generated by the lavish new digs. And before you jump to tell me, "that's what taxes are for stupid. They already pay taxes" spare me. It's all a farce. Remember, there's a reason billionaires are billionaires. Either because they're born into it, aka they hit the sperm lottery. Or because they're a lot smarter than you and I. They've somehow managed to sell this story that new stadiums are amazing for tax bases and local economies. The reality is it's bullshit. It's good for them and their bottom lines. Which is why they should be the ones paying for them.
Investigative Post - “The typical baseball team has no more impact on the local economy than a mid-sized department store and a football team, which is there for only eight or nine games per year, has even less,” said Micheal Leeds, a sports economist with Temple University and co-author of the book “The Economics of Sports.”
“So, they’re really not that big a business but, because they are so much a part of the sort of cultural fabric of a city, we don’t realize just how small potatoes they are.”
From a return-on-investment standpoint, economists and researchers almost universally agree that stadiums are unlikely to generate anywhere near the level of tax revenue needed to offset the public subsidies tied to their construction.
Doing so would require a stadium to generate a lot of spending from people outside the community who attend games. But the vast majority of Bills fans live in the region, and the money they spend on tickets, concessions and the like are dollars that would otherwise be spent on other activities, such as dining or attending a show. That’s why many economic development programs, including local industrial development agencies, don’t offer subsidies to retail businesses that fail to grow the local economy.
And what about all that "job growth"?
While stadium construction does create jobs, LeRoy of Good Jobs First said it is only a benefit to the local community if the stadium is built under agreements that guarantee the hiring of local companies and workers.
Once a stadium is built, LeRoy said they tend to offer primarily low-wage jobs that are only available, in the NFL’s case, for less than a total of two weeks per year.
“The big ripple effect issue is that you don’t have continuous employment except for security guards and groundskeepers,” LeRoy said.
Leeds, the Temple University economist, found little to no ripple effect when he assessed the impact of sports stadiums in Chicago, home to five major league franchises, including: the Cubs and White Sox (baseball), the Bears (football), the Blackhawks (hockey) and the Bulls (basketball). He found that the income generated by those teams had an impact on the city’s economy of less than 1 percent.
So why have so many communities poured so many millions — and even billions — of dollars into the construction of pro sports stadiums, ballparks and arenas?
“Our perception of sports occupies far more attention and time than the pure finances of the sport would merit,” Leeds said.
With so much research suggesting stadiums are bad investments for the public, why would taxpayers in New York consider investing upwards of $1 billion to build a new stadium in Western New York for the Bills?
“I’m at a loss. I’m really at a loss,” Leeds said. “I cannot think of any reasonable argument to justify a billion dollars going towards this stadium.”
The real kicker of the whole thing, is the majority of the tax revenue generated from having a professional sports team in your city actually comes from the individuals making up that sports team itself…
SOURCE - A study commissioned by the state and conducted by the private consulting firm AECOM found that the Bills generate more than $25 million a year in various taxes. The bulk of that money — $19.5 million — is state income tax paid by players, coaches and staff.
Garofalo, the sports subsidy expert, characterized the study as “one of the more honest assessments of an NFL stadium’s economic impact that you’ll see.”
“I think that this is actually a really useful tool for folks to argue against publicly funding the stadium because the document shows that the impact of the Bills on the local economy is actually pretty negligible,” Garofalo said.
In most other cases, he said stadium impact studies, especially those commissioned by team owners and the league, include “wild claims” about teams and stadiums generating hundreds of millions of dollars of economic impact in the communities where they are located.
Milwaukee baseball fans already lost the greatest home run hitter of all time and The Braves. They shouldn't be subjected to losing the team that gave them Robin Yount, Paul Molitar, and Dante Bichette. It's time for Manfred to do his fucking job and shut this shit down before it picks up any more momentum.
p.s.- I think the craziest part of this whole thing, unless I'm the crazy one, is I fucking love Miller Park. (now named American Family Field). It's an amazing place to see baseball. And it only opened in 2001. How does that make it "old" now? Since when did 20 years become old for sports stadiums? What am I missing here?