A little tax money doesn’t always go far enough when it comes to sports stadiums. Detroit is having a tough time paying for the upkeep on its old baseball stadium. Cincinnati isn’t getting as much from its stadium-supporting sales tax bump as it wanted, making it difficult to pay off the $647 million the county borrowed to build two stadiums and a joint parking lot.

It’s sad that Detroit hasn’t been able to do anything with Tiger Stadium. Don’t get me wrong, I’d prefer they were still playing there, if only because the Cubs, Red Sox and Yankees have figured out how to do quite well in stadia of similar vintages. But those who wanted to preserve the playing field after the days of peanuts and cracker jack were over should have known it would severly limit any development options.

Maybe it’s time to take it down. Give everybody a walk around, have a picture day (though after five years of decay, maybe we don’t want any more pictures) and start selling stuff.

In Cincinnati, the problem is where people are buying stuff. Growing suburbs (like the one we live in) are attracting their own shopping centers, meaning people no longer have to go into Hamilton County to buy things. Don’t feel too bad, taxable retail sales grew about $1.5 billion between 1997 and 2003. But that’s an average of less than 2.2 percent growth per year and the county guessed 3 and had been getting 5. And they’re committed to it for 30 years.

People love the Reds (especially when Griffey’s hitting) and the Bengals (now that they’re winning), but they might like that property-tax break more. And this is probably not the time to point out that the San Francisco Giants were able to build their stadium with much less public funding and that Denver built stadiums based on a regional tax. Apparently, the Cincinnati region isn’t known for its great foresight.

And there’s a piece about soccer being more American than baseball, at least where the capitalism vs., shall we say, socialism debate is concerned.

For when you look at the business of professional sports—in both Europe and the United States—American sports are virtually all socialistic while the European soccer leagues more closely resemble the entrepreneurial capitalism we Americans fetishize. … To different degrees, Major League Baseball, the NFL, and the NBA are examples of European-style socialism among billionaires and Fortune 500 companies.

It’s all about relegation - where the worst performing teams in the top leagues are sent to a lower division the next season, while the top teams from that division are promoted to the world of television, advertising and bigger crowds, and all the renevue that comes with them.

I’m not sure how it work on these shores, especially where the top baseball teams also own their minor league affiliates (or at least the players that populate them). But I would like to have the billionaires stop whining that they aren’t making enough money on their sports teams after the taxpayers built them their place of business.

And don’t even get me started on the Montreal Expos. I haven’t read the Washington Post’s whole series yet, but take a look at some of the subheads:

• Expos for Sale: Team Becomes Pawn of Selig
  
• The fate of the Montreal Expos illustrates how baseball uses its exemption from antitrust laws to control markets.
  
• The fate of baseball in the Washington area may depend on the relationship between the commissioner of baseball and the owner of the Orioles.

This entry was posted in the following categories: Economics