The Futility Infielder

Neil deMause's book Field of Schemes (co-written with Joanna Cagan) has been in my reading pile for quite a while, and I thought of him a couple times over the past few days while reading and writing about the Milwaukee mess. The book's subtitle, "How the great stadium swindle turns public money into private profit," serves to remind that the people of Milwaukee are not alone in being bilked by club owners.

There must be something in the air, because today deMause has an excellent free article at Baseball Prospectus called "The Stadium Game." The piece examines the boom which has seen 19 new stadiums built in 18 years, counting the new ballparks in San Diego and Philadelphia slated to open next spring. According to deMause, these new parks have cost taxpayers around $5 billion, On the boom, he writes:

The start of the new-stadium craze is easy to pinpoint. In 1989, SkyDome demonstrated that a retractable roof was technically feasible (if pricey--the SkyDome lid drove its total cost over $600 million in Canadollars), while introducing baseball's first full-scale food court, complete with baseball's first seven-dollar hot dogs. It also shattered attendance records: the Jays are still the only team other than the Rockies in their Mile High days to sell more than four million tickets in one season, demonstrating that fans would turn out just to take a gander at a new building (though the two titles won by the Jays in SkyDome's first five years helped some, too). When two years later Camden Yards inaugurated the "retro" craze, single-handedly sweeping HOK's old concrete-bowl blueprints into history's dustbin, it set off a feeding frenzy among teams to be the next kid on the block with a shiny new toy.

The result has transformed baseball. On the field, the new home run-friendly parks have helped create the surge in offense that typifies Selig-era baseball, while turning such traditional homer havens as Wrigley Field into relative pitcher's parks. In the stands, the layers of luxury seating that are de rigeur in modern facilities have made the cheap seat with a good view a thing of the past, as nearly every new park has featured upper decks more distant from the field than the old buildings they replaced. The new parks raised demand for tickets, and owners have taken full advantage--new parks have seen average ticket price as much as double in a single off-season.

DeMause examines the remaining candidates for new parks, rating them from contenders to long shots. The most obvious contender is the World Champion Florida Marlins, about whom he writes:

Though Marlins execs have never stopped griping about the unsuitability of Pro Player Stadium for baseball... the team's real problem is the albatross of a lease that Huizenga designed as a way to siphon off funds from the team while crying poverty. (Economist Andrew Zimbalist estimated that in the 1997 championship year, it enabled the former garbage-hauling king to turn a $14 million profit into a $34 million paper loss.) What really needs to happen, says Zimbalist, is "Huizenga ought to renegotiate the lease. If he doesn't, they'll probably get a new stadium, and he won't get any money out of it. Pro Player is a decent stadium, and with a decent lease, that place can work."

DeMause also notes that we're unlikely to see another privately-financed stadium like San Francisco's Pac Bell any time soon:

Pac Bell Park became the only privately funded ballpark of the last four decades for a reason: It was built in a city with the world's highest concentration of dot-com tycoons, at precisely the moment when they were flush enough to be hit up for the long-term seat licenses that laid the foundation for the new park...

The dodgy prospects of even an unmitigated success like Pac Bell--one estimate by Sports Business News projected that the team needs to sell 30,000 tickets a night for the next 20 years just to break even on its stadium debt--points to the dirty little secret of the stadium boom: On their own, they don't make money. Though team owners have been enriched by their new digs, it's not from the new luxury-box and concessions revenues, which wouldn't even pay debt service on all the steel and concrete. The only money to be made in new stadiums is by subsidizing team profits with the public purse.

That doesn't exactly paint a pretty picture for going the Pac Bell route -- not that Bad Rug Bud is about to let another team try. But with no stadium currently under construction for the first time since 1985 (when the Toronto Skydome broke ground), let's hope that the taxpayers in these candidate cities take a long, hard look at the disasters that have taken place in Milwaukee, Detroit, et al before falling into similar traps.