Field of Schemes

by Neil deMause

  In San Diego, for example, when the $66.6 million expansion of Jack Murphy Stadium went over budget (among other things, the stadium had been built on sandy soil, leading to problems in earthquake proofing), the city quickly agreed to raise the additional cash, selling the stadium’s naming rights to computer company Qualcomm for $18 million. “The trick is to get the deal going,” says San Diego stadium opponent Richard Rider. “Once it’s going, you say, ‘We can’t quit now!’”

  When the city of Toronto first planned the stadium-and-hotel complex known as SkyDome in 1985, estimates were that construction costs would be in the neighborhood of $150 million (Canadian), with the city and the province of Ontario kicking in $30 million apiece. In fact, the stadium, complete with the world’s first working retractable roof, would ultimately clock in at a whopping $600 million (roughly $500 million in U.S. dollars), the second-most-expensive sports facility in North American history. (Number one in that category: Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, built in a hurry for the 1976 Olympic Games, which cost $1 billion Canadian and features the world’s first non-working retractable roof.) As a result, SkyDome was a hit with fans and tourists but a disaster for its government owners: In 1990, the new stadium’s first full year of operation, the Blue Jays drew a record 3.9 million fans and turned a profit of $13.9 million; SkyDome, meanwhile, saddled with its enormous bonding cost, lost $23 million.

  Desperately looking for a way to reduce the $60,000 a day in interest building up on the SkyDome bonds, the province of Ontario had two choices. It could pay off the debt immediately, reducing treasury reserves in order to eliminate the incredible interest payments, or it could sell the stadium for whatever cash it could, in an effort to get rid of this massive money loser. Bizarrely, the province did both, first writing off the debt and then selling SkyDome to private interests for $151 million. By the time the government finally rid itself of the dome, the Ontario public had taken a $262.7 million bath.

  The ultimate stadium wheel-and-deal, however, occurred in Milwaukee over several years in the early ’90s, as Brewers owner Bud Selig managed to take his own promise to build a privately funded stadium for his ballclub and turn it into one of the biggest public bailouts in urban planning history. A Wisconsin lobbyist would later call the whole process “one of the fanciest pieces of parliamentary maneuvering [he’d] ever seen.”

  The dance began in 1989, when Selig approached Milwaukee elected officials, asking for permission to build a privately financed park on state land. Only one problem: The land in question had a highway running through it, state highway 41, which would have to be moved at a cost of $6 million. The Greater Milwaukee Committee agreed to move the highway if Selig would pay for the stadium.

  Five years later, Selig approached Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson, already then gaining a national reputation for slashing state welfare benefits, with a new dilemma: He couldn’t afford to build the stadium himself. At first Thompson proposed a statewide lottery to raise the money, similar to that which had funded Camden Yards; that plan, however, was rejected nearly two-to-one by Wisconsin voters in 1995. Thompson made sure that his next gambit wouldn’t be subject to any messy public votes: He asked the state legislature to hike the sales tax by one-tenth of 1 percent in a five-county area around Milwaukee. When the state senate twice voted down the sales-tax hike by one vote, state senator George Petak entered Governor Thompson’s office; at 2 a.m., Petak emerged to announce he was changing his vote. Three hours later, at five in the morning, the state senate approved the tax increase.

  Enraged constituents petitioned for a recall election on Petak. (He would be recalled the following June and immediately hired by Thompson as associate director of the Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Agency.) But the deal was seemingly done: The five-county sales tax would provide $160 million, and the Brewers would chip in $90 million of their own funds. Even this, however, proved too much for Selig to handle. Although $40 million would come from the sale of stadium naming rights to Miller Beer (Thompson obligingly vetoed an antismoking bill to avoid angering Miller’s parent company, Philip Morris), the source of the other $50 million remained a mystery for months to come.

  Selig was in a bind; even if he wanted to borrow the money himself, he was blocked by Major League Baseball limits on the amount of debt a team can carry. So Selig instead asked the state to borrow the money for him, using tax-exempt bonds to lower the costs of interest payments by $2 million a year. “This does not mean taking one cent more from the taxpayers,” announced Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce chair Robert J. O’Toole. This was true enough if he meant only Milwaukee taxpayers, but that $2 million a year would instead come out of the federal treasury, which would be giving up income tax revenue from the federally tax-exempt bonds.

  Although the $50 million state loan was ultimately rejected, Selig still was let off the hook—that portion of the money was instead divided up among loans from the city of Milwaukee and from local foundations and business leaders. In the end, Selig would be responsible only for the $3 million in yearly loan payments, plus $1.1 million a year in rent. And because the state also agreed to pay the Brewers $3.85 million a year for “stadium maintenance,” the Brewers owner and baseball commissioner, the much-reviled man who, to avoid settling a strike, had cancelled the World Series for the first time ever, will ultimately receive his new ballpark virtually as a gift from the people of Wisconsin, just ten years after promising to build one himself.

  Step 7: Review Steps 1 through 6

  Follow these rules well, and you can count on receiving a gift-wrapped stadium or arena sitting under your tree within a Christmas or two. The San Francisco 49ers found that out—despite many PR debacles along the way, their combined use of all the tactics in the stadium-seekers’ playbook, from economic promises to predictions of on-field doom to the move threat, ultimately won them a $100 million subsidy from a city that had previously denied every request for public sports subsidies.3

  San Francisco Examiner columnist Stephanie Salter compared the 49ers’ pitch for a new stadium to that of a door-to-door salesman: “Good morning, madam. You have five minutes to do what I say. Buy this vacuum cleaner. Never mind how it works. I’ve explained it to the Chamber of Commerce. It’s a great deal. Trust me. And if you don’t buy it, I’m going to come back on Sunday while you’re in church and bust up your old vacuum cleaner.… Furthermore, madam, it may look as if my main purpose is to get you to buy this vacuum cleaner, but, trust me, my needs are inconsequential. Your welfare is why I’m here.”

  Notes

  1. It would ultimately take another nine years and a new mayor before Steinbrenner would get to break ground on his dream home. See chapter 15.

  2. Baseball’s streak would end at thirty-three years in 2005, when the Montreal Expos moved—or, rather, were moved by the league, which had taken over ownership of the club—to Washington DC. See chapter 14.

  3. Thanks to a series of mishaps—including a riverboat-gambling scandal that forced owner Edward DeBartolo Jr. to yield control of the team to his sister—the 49ers had yet to cash in their $100 million taxpayer IOU by 2006. Late that year, with plans for a combined stadium–mall project stalled, team officials announced their intention to seek a stadium near San Jose instead.

  5

  Deus Ex Pizza

  The city has been so desperate for something new. They want something new that’s going to look good from the Goodyear Blimp. I almost think that if they built a pyramid at the foot of Woodward Avenue on the riverfront, people would get excited. —Bill Dow, Tiger Stadium Fan Club

  I have little patience with people who are paid that well wanting us to spend hundreds of millions of public dollars so that they have a nicer place to take a shower. —Frank Rashid, Tiger Stadium Fan Club

  Of all the citizen groups that formed in response to move threats by sports teams, the one that garnered the most media attention may have been the least typical: Save Our Browns, the spontaneous fan mo
vement that burst forth during Cleveland’s battle over its football team. It was everything that sports fanatics are supposed to be: equally furious at fly-by-night owners and impotent politicians, and desperate to keep the team in town no matter the cost.

  In truth, though, sports fans are a varied bunch, and their lives extend far beyond just following their favorite teams. They are also taxpayers, parents of school-age children, residents of neighborhoods that would be affected by stadium-siting plans. Despite politicians’ claims that “the public” would crucify them if they allowed a sports team to leave town, public opinion surveys have shown overwhelming opposition to building new sports facilities at public expense, at least until the owners rev up their media campaigns.

  In recent years, stadium proposals have brought together numerous citizen activist groups from across the political spectrum to ask why residents should lose either their teams or their wallets. They have included everything from social-justice activists who advocate spending public money on schools instead of stadiums to foes of any government spending whatsoever. All, though, have returned to the same arguments when confronted with the prospect of a new multimillion-dollar sports facility to be built at public expense: It’s too expensive, it isn’t needed, and above all, don’t ask the public to pay for it when the people benefiting will be among the richest in the nation.

  Of all these citizen groups, the one that stands out for its longevity, if nothing else, is the Tiger Stadium Fan Club. These were fans, all right—but as two local millionaires would learn over a decade of public battles, they were fans with a vengeance.

  Queen of Diamonds

  It was a September night in 1987 when five friends gathered at Buddy’s Pizza in northeast Detroit to talk over the looming demise of their city’s ballpark. Sitting around the table that night were Mike Betzold, a reporter for the Detroit Free Press; Jerry Lemenu, an illustrator and courtroom sketch artist whose cartoons often appeared in local newspapers; Bob Buchta, a local photographer; Kevin Rashid, a poet who worked days as a groundskeeper at a local college campus; and Kevin’s brother Frank, a professor of English at nearby Marygrove College. As they sat eating pizza and listening to the baseball game on the radio, the five lifelong Tigers fans mulled over how to protest what they saw as the needless destruction of a cherished landmark.

  Tiger Stadium was just three years younger than baseball’s oldest ballpark, Chicago’s Comiskey Park—it had opened for business on April 20, 1912, tying it with Boston’s Fenway Park as the second-oldest baseball stadium in existence—but the site’s history went back a good deal further. Pro baseball had first been played at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull, just a few blocks west of Detroit’s downtown, in 1896, when the Tigers’ owner covered the cobblestones of the city’s Woodbridge hay market with sod and erected an L-shaped wooden grandstand. That original wooden park was torn down and built anew in steel in 1912 then enlarged again by the team’s owners in 1936. The final result was a fifty-five-thousand-seat structure that would house some of the best teams and most devoted fans in baseball, consistently averaging in the top half of league attendance figures year after year.

  But following the Tigers’ 1968 championship, local business and political leaders began making noise about joining the first wave of public stadium building, which was then in full swing. They set their sights on a new dual-sport dome on the Detroit waterfront to house both the Tigers and football’s Lions, which shared Tiger Stadium at the time. Wayne County, which encompasses Detroit and its western suburbs, actually got as far as issuing $126 million in bonds for the dome before a pair of local activists sued the city and won, arguing successfully that the bond issue had been fraudulently presented—the county had led voters to believe the bonds were backed entirely by stadium revenue, when in fact county taxpayers would be liable for paying any shortfall. The bonds were recalled, and the dome died on the drawing board.

  Shortly afterward the Lions football team relocated to the new Silverdome in suburban Pontiac, and the city of Detroit pumped $18 million in renovations into Tiger Stadium, financing the work with a ninety-cent ticket surcharge. The stadium’s old dark-green wood seats were replaced with garish orange-and-blue plastic ones, and aluminum siding went up over the gray masonry outer walls. But the thousands of inexpensive bleacher seats were still intact, as were the memories of generations of fans. And the Tigers, unlike the Lions, still played downtown.

  But almost before the paint was dry from the stadium’s refurbishing, rumblings began in city political circles about tearing the place down. The ballpark was too old, it was said, structurally unsound, insufficient for the needs of a modern sports franchise. As the stadium steamroller geared up once more, Tiger Stadium seemed destined to join the list of historic ballparks that had fallen beneath the wheels of progress.

  Act One: Rusty Girders

  As Betzold, Lemenu, Buchta, and the Rashids gathered in the fall of 1987 to discuss the fate of their home-away-from-home since childhood, they understood the uphill battle they faced. In addition to being rabid baseball fans, the five were also experienced political activists: Mike Betzold had been a leader in local nuclear-freeze circles; Jerry Lemenu and Frank Rashid had worked for a local civil rights group; and Kevin Rashid had helped spearhead a doomed campaign to stop garbage incinerators from being placed in city neighborhoods. Betzold and Lemenu had also been frequent contributors to Fifth Estate, a well-respected anarchist newspaper based in Detroit. Saving Tiger Stadium seemed like a fun way to combine their passions for baseball and social activism.

  “We decided to start this thing a little bit on a lark,” recalls Frank Rashid, who still lives on a tree-lined block not far from where he grew up on Detroit’s inner west side. After moving into his current home, Rashid discovered that Clyde Manion, an obscure Tigers catcher from the 1920s, had lived there after retiring from baseball; photos of Manion and a young Frank Rashid, each in catcher’s gear, now face off across a hallway in the house.

  He and his friends, Rashid notes, all regular attendees at Tigers games since the early ’60s, knew few details apart from the fact that their beloved stadium was facing a date with the wrecking ball. “We didn’t want the stadium to go without a fight,” he explains. “We didn’t know a lot about public financing at the time—we thought it was crooked, we thought it was crazy. But we just didn’t know an awful lot about it.”

  Calling themselves the Tiger Stadium Fan Club, the five set out to drum up support among fellow fans. By pooling their savings, they were able to scrape together enough money for two hundred T-shirts and one thousand bumper stickers reading “Save Tiger Stadium.” In the waning days of the 1987 season, as the Tigers drove to the American League East pennant, the small band of diehards could be found each night standing outside Tiger Stadium, handing out blue-and-orange bumper stickers to anyone who would sign their club’s mailing list.

  The initial response was overwhelming. Hundreds of people sent in a $10 membership fee. At the Fan Club’s first public meeting in January 1988, three hundred people packed the small, brick Gaelic League Irish–American Club, a short drive down Michigan Avenue from the stadium, to form committees to fight the demolition. By the time the 1988 season opened, the rapidly growing group had decided to stage a group “hug” of the old ballpark to mark its seventy-sixth birthday; twelve hundred people gathered in a cold rain to encircle the stadium then filed into the ballpark to present the team’s grounds crew with a giant birthday card signed by hundreds of supporters. Fan Club member Mike Gruber, a high-school English teacher who had been brought into the group by his college classmate Frank Rashid, had loaned $5,000 of his own money for the publicity campaign for the hug, helping pay for printing a twenty-four-page souvenir program detailing Tiger Stadium’s history, and full-page newspaper ads urging fans, “Don’t Let Them Make the Biggest Error in Baseball.”

  It was a popular sentiment at the time. Polls consistently found two thirds of Detroiters favored simple renovation of t
he old stadium over replacement, and 64 percent of local residents opposed the use of city funds for a new stadium. Even team owner Tom Monaghan, the Domino’s Pizza czar who had bought the Tigers in 1983, seemed to like the old ballpark, insisting at every turn that he would love nothing better than to keep the team right where it was. Asked on one occasion if he was angling for a new ballpark, Monaghan replied that he wanted no such thing but would go along with whatever local politicians decided: “I’ll let them build a new stadium, then I’ll cry.”

  Behind the scenes, though, Monaghan was telling local politicians that he desperately wanted out of Tiger Stadium, which was, he insisted, out-of-date and decrepit, despite the recent renovations. The politicians dutifully repeated his claims—particularly longtime mayor Coleman Young, the former union activist who as mayor had become a staunch advocate of city subsidies to private developers.

  The first major skirmish in the battle over Tiger Stadium came in January 1988, when the Tigers announced the results of the engineering study they had commissioned the year before to “determine the costs of shoring up [Tiger Stadium’s] long-neglected foundation and superstructure.” This was the study that, the Tigers claimed, had found the existing ballpark in need of $100 million worth of repairs. In particular, the team charged, salt spread in the aisles during snowy Lions football games, in the years before that team moved to the suburbs, had severely corroded the building’s steel girders, requiring costly repairs. “Our perspective is that the stadium isn’t going to fall down tomorrow, but this grand old lady is getting old,” Monaghan stadium aide John McDevitt told reporters. Mayor Young enthusiastically agreed. “Nobody in their wildest dreams expects that stadium to last beyond ten years,” the mayor announced. “Most people say it will fall down in five.”