Field of Schemes

by Neil deMause

  There was briefly, in the early 1990s, an attempt by economist Andrew Zimbalist, sports agent Richard Moss, and others to create a competing professional baseball league, the United Baseball League (UBL), that would have teams owned by consortia of players, municipalities, and private investors. Mike Stone, the former president of the Texas Rangers, was to be the proposed league’s first CEO. Citing the league’s unique philosophy as what drew him in, he said in a 1995 interview that “baseball should be a partnership among owners, then between owners and players, between franchises and communities, and between franchises and their fans.”

  In the UBL, cities would actually have received some revenue. And teams would have pooled half their television and radio revenues, and 30 percent of their gate receipts. Initial hopes were to have teams in Florida, Puerto Rico, New York, and Washington, DC, in its Eastern Division, and Los Angeles, Portland, Vancouver, and New Orleans in its Western Division. The hope was to have play begin in 1997, but when an all-important promised TV contract fell through in 1996, the league officially suspended operation.

  If Only

  If sports teams were municipally owned, sports stadiums would not be nearly as expensive to build. Existing structures wouldn’t have to be razed to satisfy an eager owner’s desire to see team profits or his own net worth rapidly increase. Instead, cooler heads might prevail when changes in architecture or money making cause some to cast a longing eye toward sparkling new facilities. For if they aren’t inherently cooler-headed, local politicians at least have some democratic accountability to local taxpayers—something corporate owners are sorely lacking.

  “It’s a logical thing to happen,” says Zimbalist. “Sports teams are just perfect vehicles for public ownership for all sorts of reasons—the most important being the large investment the public is expected to make in these teams, but also because it’s really a public good, and it has a cultural dominance that’s unlike anything else in our society.”

  True municipal ownership might have to mean a radical rearranging of our society, and a significant challenge to powerful interests who will not stand passively by and let this happen. To bring this public good—that is, the ball clubs that are invested not only with public money but with public spirit as well—under public control raises broad issues about how other resources are to be managed in our society.

  When Seattle attorney Shawn Newman went to testify in the spring of 1997 before state senate hearings on publicly funding a new stadium for the Seahawks, he had one crucial point to make. “I said the bottom line is that a lot of people out in the audience have T-shirts on which say, ‘It’s our team. It’s our team.’ And I said, ‘It’s not our team. It is Paul Allen’s team, or it’s this Ken Barron, the bad developer’s, team. It’s not our team.

  “State law, believe it or not, would allow us to buy the damn team. Counties or cities can buy the team. I talked to the governor’s lobbyists over here, and he said we can’t do that, we can’t buy the team, because the NFL has changed the rules. No more Green Bay Packers—you can’t do that anymore. So it’s not our team. What it is, it’s our debt.”

  Notes

  1. Representative Minge’s Distorting Subsidies Limitation Act never made it out of committee in several tries. Minge himself was voted out of office in 2000.

  2. Sadly, even public ownership didn’t make Green Bay immune from stadium shakedowns. In 2000, Packers execs lobbied for a public vote on a 0.5 percent sales tax hike to raise $169 million toward an expansion of historic Lambeau Field. “There’s well over $100 million worth of work that has to be done on the stadium,” declared team president Robert Harlan. “If the referendum would fail, it doesn’t mean that the stadium would stand for thirty years on its own.” But Harlan didn’t leave it at the image of the forty-three-year-old edifice suddenly tumbling into Lake Michigan; he also publicly speculated that, without a new stadium, the team could go bankrupt in a few years, at which point the NFL could rescind the franchise and grant it to another city, such as Los Angeles. Sports-industry reaction was largely a hearty guffaw—L.A. had resolutely shown no interest in shelling out public money to lure a new NFL franchise—but local media reports were full of Harlan’s non-threat threat. Six months later, the referendum passed, with 53 percent of voters supporting it, so neither of Harlan’s claims was put to the test.

  11

  Winning Isn’t Everything

  Seattle activist Chris Van Dyk has noticed a new term emerge in civic debates in his town. When it’s time to discuss budget issues or policy decisions, a relatively new expression is thrown around. When the merit of supporting a new project arises, concerned taxpayers or city council members now ask, “Is it a More Important Thing?”

  A little more than two years of furious lobbying and petitioning, granting media interviews, and suing as part of opposition to two stadium deals did not produce victory for Citizens for More Important Things. But their impact on the political vocabulary in Seattle suggests that they had a real, if modest, impact on consciousness there.

  So did the Cleveland Teachers Union (CTU) and other opponents of out-of-control tax abatements in Cleveland. In a town that had seen three new publicly funded stadiums authorized in six years, they succeeded, in the summer of 1997, in getting a public vote on the future of tax abatements. It was one of the only times in memory that a community group had brought the way corporate construction projects are typically financed nationwide onto the table for discussion. That measure ultimately lost but not before receiving national media attention—including a glowing endorsement in USA Today—and having an impact on the way people in that city talk about stadiums and schools. Indeed, in the midst of their collective-bargaining battle a year earlier, the CTU threatened to march from each major symbol of tax abatement and opportunities lost for the Cleveland schools—Jacobs Field and the downtown Tower City shopping mall—to City Hall. And, in a significant departure from most economic struggles, which tend to be defined in very narrow terms, in that 1996 campaign the CTU successfully projected the connection between public spending on sports boondoggles, tax abatements, low teacher salaries, and poor service to their pupils. When the administration learned through polling that the teachers had won widespread public support, their once-resolute opposition collapsed and they yielded, allowing the CTU to win a historic agreement.

  The lessons to be learned from all the stadium battles past and present are complex. The money, media, and resources behind team owners and local politicians make them formidable opponents, and their winning streak in getting new stadiums is impressive. But the terms of debate are changing, even if so far the teams have consistently won the arguments. Politicians must be increasingly careful to appear to stand up to owner greed—witness Cleveland mayor Michael White’s attempt to lead the opposition to Art Modell’s pulling the Browns out of Cleveland at the same time he was speaking out on holding down costs in the construction of the new football stadium. The fact that White’s rhetoric seems to many observers both insincere and misplaced does not change the fact that, as an astute politician, he felt he had to take an anti-owner stance in response to changes in popular thinking.

  Team owners must devise increasingly devious and manipulative ways of gaining access to the public’s wealth to finance their new sports facilities. The popularity of personal seat licenses, naming-rights deals, and roundabout tax-financing schemes are no coincidence—they’ve come about because owners and their political allies have learned that many city residents don’t want publicly funded new stadiums. More newspaper and magazine articles are written exposing the stadium swindle, and fewer people now take seriously the argument that funding sports stadiums is good business for city governments.

  There’s a tendency, particularly in the sports world, to frame success in terms of winners and losers. Yet the “losses” for the grassroots anti-stadium campaigns—and for the schools, the public housing, all the public amenities that are forced to go without when corporate welfare is made
a priority of public spending—point only to how necessary these types of campaigns are. When a multimillionaire sports team owner can sway politicians, buy elections, and con the public all through the power of the purse, what better sign that something drastic needs to happen to change the balance of power in our society?

  For the activists fighting block by block and referendum by referendum to put an end to sports subsidies, seeking small victories in the larger defeats has become a familiar pursuit. “Moral victories are wonderful, but I’d still rather win the election,” says Seattle’s Van Dyk with a laugh.

  In Captain Newman, M.D., his classic novel of American GIs during World War II, Leo Rosten writes of the importance of people’s ability to hold onto important values while resisting seemingly overwhelming forces. He addresses both the dignity of undertaking apparently quixotic struggles and the necessity of working for meaningful and winnable change.

  What if Destiny came down to an island community, Rosten asks, and told the inhabitants they’d be inundated by a tidal wave tomorrow? Rosten’s wise man responds that he’d study how to live underwater. “I too never forgot that story,” his Captain Newman says. “When our cause seems doomed and the future lost, when despair becomes unbearable, and the heart is on the edge of breaking, let men summon hope and honor and high resolve in yet one more stubborn affirmation: Come let us assemble our wisest men and begin at once to think, to study, to try to learn—even to learn, if we must, how to live underwater.”

  The effective blackmail that professional teams wield over cities is not good, it is not correct, and it is not eternal. It is the consequence of a particular state of affairs in which public agencies have become beholden to private power. It can be changed, and it’s worth changing.

  12

  One Year

  Buying the team, instead of building a stadium, could save New York City $35 million to $530 million. The cost of buying the Yankees could be paid off using profit from the yearly Yankee Stadium and media revenue of $130 million. Yearly profits after the investment is paid off could be designated to go to support New York City schools or economic development projects in low-income neighborhoods. —New York state assemblyman Scott Stringer

  Scott Stringer’s proposal is a concept that could conceivably work in two places: Communist China and Cuba. —Colleen Roche, press secretary to New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani

  The year 1998 began quietly enough, with only a few new teams entering the stadium derby. The Minnesota Twins’ threatened move to North Carolina, declared a certainty the previous fall, remained on the back burner as team owner Carl Pohlad bargained with residents of his intended home. The New England Patriots began negotiations with the Massachusetts legislature for a new stadium in Foxboro, while Montreal Expos manager Felipe Alou opened the team’s winter promotional caravan by declaring, “If we don’t have a downtown ballpark, the team will leave.” But by and large, it was an uneventful winter for stadium demands, and as April dawned more eyes were fixed on the new baseball season than on luxury-suite prices and tax-abatement schemes.

  Then the roof fell in. Literally.

  Crumble in the Bronx

  At 2 p.m. on April 13, Anaheim Angels team muscle therapist Bill LeSuer was walking in the outfield at Yankee Stadium when, he later told Newsday, he “heard a tremendous bang.” He recalled, “I saw a big puff of smoke and chunks of concrete coming down. I said, ‘Did anyone else see that?’ Then I realized I was alone, talking to myself. I thought the stadium was falling down.”

  What had fallen was an “expansion joint,” a quarter-ton chunk of steel wedged between two beams to allow them to adapt to changing temperatures. The foot-square joint had somehow worked its way loose that afternoon and crashed through the roof of the stadium’s loge level, leaving New Yorkers to wonder aloud whether the House that Ruth Built was falling apart.

  The timing of the “crumble in the Bronx,” as the New York Post headlined it, made it all the more momentous. Three days earlier, as the Yankees opened their season before a record 56,717 fans, team PR guru Howard Rubinstein had declared, “The traffic and the parking are horrendous on a packed house like today. The skyboxes are inadequate. Things like the bathrooms and the seating are sort of uncomfortable and inadequate. And all of the other teams with new stadiums outdraw [the Yankees].” It was a common complaint for Yankee management, which had been angling for either a new stadium or renovations to the old one for more than a decade, and when the rogue joint seemed determined to prove the stadium’s inadequacy, there was much speculation on the convenient timing: Daily Show host Craig Kilborn quipped that owner George Steinbrenner was “unavailable for comment because he was at Sears returning a blowtorch and a hacksaw.”

  The morning after the beam incident, New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, a longtime booster of a new stadium over Manhattan’s West Side rail yards, stood outside the shuttered stadium and reiterated his contention that “both the Yankees and the Mets are entitled to new baseball fields.” From there the mayor ran through the stadium playbook in record time. First up was the obsolescence claim. Alluding to the stadium’s approaching seventy-fifth birthday, Giuliani argued, “You couldn’t have a more dramatic argument that the Yankees need a new stadium.”

  Dramatic, certainly. Yet as with Tiger Stadium and Comiskey Park before it, Yankee Stadium was actually in fine shape for its advanced age. A weeklong city inspection confirmed this, finding only superficial damage to the stadium’s concrete facade. (Upkeep had been left to the Yankees, who had somehow neglected to schedule an inspection in the last nineteen years.) “From a structural perspective, there’s no reason why Yankee Stadium can’t be around for another seventy-five years if it’s maintained properly,” declared city buildings commissioner Gaston Silva.

  By then, however, the mayor had already moved on to economic arguments. On April 19, as Silva was granting the stadium a clean bill of health, Giuliani announced that a Manhattan ballpark would cost the taxpayers less than a new stadium in the Bronx—conveniently overlooking the option of retaining the old stadium. A new West Side stadium, the mayor added, would create $1 billion in economic impact and generate $45 million a year in taxes and “thousands and thousands and thousands of jobs.”

  The next morning, the New York Times revealed that a 1996 study, issued by consultants KPMG-Peat Marwick in the mayor’s first push for a Manhattan stadium, had projected an economic impact of only $102.5 million, a mere tenth what the mayor was claiming. Shortly thereafter, the city’s Independent Budget Office (IBO) issued its own report on the stadium plans, finding that new stadiums for both the Yankees and Mets (who were turning up the heat on their own stadium demands) would generate a mere 570 jobs and $5 million in new city taxes—nowhere near enough to pay the estimated $75 million-plus in yearly bond payments. Giuliani’s projections, it turned out, had assumed the construction of two new luxury hotels as the result of the new ballpark, an assessment that baffled the IBO’s Stephen Mark. “I guess they thought that somehow the stadium would transform the neighborhood,” says Mark. “And they’re assuming that there’s no reduction in activity elsewhere in the city.”

  The next week, local tabloids cited unnamed sources (presumably in the Yankee hierarchy) as saying that “secret talks” were under way to hustle the team across the Hudson River. When New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman denied any interest in luring New York teams to her state with ballpark subsidies, Giuliani declared that he had successfully scared her off by threatening to steal New Jersey’s teams (a proclamation that would not stop him from continuing to raise the specter of a New Jersey move throughout the upcoming months). A week after that, it was the need for “competitiveness” that was paramount, said the mayor. “I would like New York to have competitive baseball teams,” announced Giuliani on May 6, as the Yankees surged to the best start in their history, en route to breaking the league mark for most wins in a season. “Whether you like it or not, that means they have to spend a lot of money. Otherwi
se, you’re going to be in the cellar.”

  In making a pitch for a new stadium, however, Giuliani was going up against more than resistance to public funding. Even as George Steinbrenner disparaged its Bronx location at every turn, Yankee Stadium was incredibly popular among fans. For years, polls had shown overwhelming support among city residents for keeping the Yankees in the Bronx; perhaps more significantly, even New Jersey residents wanted the team to stay put, with a mere 27 percent voicing support for a Yankee move to the Garden State.

  At Yankee Stadium’s reopening on April 24, some of the thirty-nine thousand fans in attendance jokingly wore hardhats and carried signs reading “Good For 75 More.” “If you build a new stadium for more luxury boxes, what that means is you would leave the ordinary fans out. It will be a stadium for corporations, not a stadium for you and me,” one fan told a reporter. Another simply remarked, “This is the center of the universe. You can’t move the center of the universe.”

  The mayor’s response? “I bet if we were playing in Baltimore, we would have more than forty-five thousand people.”

  Baltimore became a particular fixation of Giuliani’s throughout the spring, and when the Yankees made their first road trip to that city, the mayor took full advantage of the moment. Ostensibly in town for a fundraising event (for a Republican gubernatorial candidate who, it so happened, opposed stadium subsidies), Giuliani took the opportunity to tour Camden Yards and loudly proclaim how wonderful such an edifice would look on the West Side of Manhattan. He also made an appearance on the Yankees’ radio broadcast, chatting up announcers Michael Kay and John Sterling for the first of many times that summer on the benefits of a new stadium.