I haven't followed baseball closely since high school, but I still enjoy it. I played in community leagues for a long time growing up (my contributions at the plate were negligible, but I was a decent pitcher and a damn fine center fielder, thank you very much), collected baseball cards, and attended a slew of Phillies games. I haven't spent nearly as much time in recent years following or playing sports as I used to, mainly because I fill my time with other activities I've come to enjoy more. And these days, of course, professional sports are more of a corporate playground than ever, which makes me ambivalent about the rare occasions when I do attend a game.
The Washington Post just ran a few days of articles on the current status of the campaign to move the Montreal Expos to DC or Northern Virginia, and also about the larger political framework of baseball as a business. Particular attention is paid to the background and personality of Bud Selig, the current commissioner of baseball and former owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, who wields extraordinary power over the sport's operations.
Here is the first piece; once you're there you can find your way to the others.
The most significant issue at play (at least in my politicized mind) is the public financing of sports stadiums, and here's a quote from the series from someone who's had first-hand experience with it:
"I would be very, very nervous if I was a taxpayer in the Greater Washington, D.C., area," said [Wisconsin] state Sen. Michael G. Ellis (R]), the former majority leader and a Selig critic. "Nobody is better equipped to show people how to fleece the taxpayers into building them a new stadium than Allan H. [Bud] Selig. He could write a textbook on how he committed the taxpayers of Wisconsin to build a stadium at no cost whatsoever to the Seligs."
Tony "the Rat" Williams, the rabidly pro-gentrification mayor of our fine city, is doing everything possible to make Washington an attractive location for the Expos. As public officials in many cities across the country have done, he's offering a fully publicly financed stadium to the tune of between $278 million and $383 million. (Virginia is offering $360 million in taxpayer money to try to lure the Expos there.) Seeing these figures, one might be excused for bringing up the lack of affordable housing in DC, or the lack of homeless shelters, or the abysmal funding for public libraries, or, perhaps most of all, the troubled school system. The argument for bringing baseball to the District is no more nuanced than trickle-down economics. Presumably, the same argument is driving Tony the Rat's campaign to attract 100,000 upwardly mobile, free-spending, childless white people (ed. note: I don't think that's
quite how the official literature refers to it) to the city over the next few years. The needs of the majority of DC's residents have very little in common with the needs of Major League Baseball or those of the crushingly complacent young investment banker set.
This
Post graphic shows the percentage of public money used in the funding of new baseball parks over the past decade. This pattern is a microcosm of Actually Existing Capitalism, where privatized profit is often preceded by socialized risk and investment. Sure, at the end of the day many of the citizens whose tax dollars helped build a stadium get to enjoy games there, but only after paying - again - at the door. But publicly financed sports ventures are a windfall for the private owners who bear little of the risk of investment but reap most of the benefits. Selig, the current commissioner who used to own the Brewers, is a central character in the now notorious construction of Milwaukee's Miller Park. The Post describes the funding sources for the stadium:
The governor [Tommy Thompson, now Secretary of Health and Human Services] had arranged to have a quasi-public agency, the Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority (WHEDA), lend the Brewers $50 million. The team would use the money as part of its $90 million contribution to the stadium. The $90 million was key: Lawmakers wanted to know Selig, too, was chipping in.
The WHEDA loan was a political solution to a hard reality: The Brewers didn't have the money. The team came up with the remaining $40 million by selling the ballpark's name to the Miller Brewing Co., then using the 20-year, $41.5 million contract as collateral to obtain more debt. In other words, the Brewers' only financial contribution would come from selling the name of a ballpark for which Wisconsin taxpayers had paid.
Thompson ultimately pulled the plug on the WHEDA financing, which led the team to have to look elsewhere for that money:
Rejected by the state, fully leveraged with the banks, the Brewers turned to the Milwaukee business community. The team negotiated a series of grants and low-interest loans from local foundations.
It came to be known as the $50 Million Club.
Like the aborted WHEDA loan, these loans would be serviced by annual taxpayer-funded maintenance payments.
Among his other shady pre-gubernatorial business ventures, President Bush profited from the same kind of scheme when a new stadium was built for the Texas Rangers, a team in which he had invested $606,000 in 1989. The Rangers scored big off the success of their publicly financed home, and our Dear Leader sold his shares for $14.9 million. Since the Post was kind enough to do the math, I can report that that is a 2,358 percent return. That money made Bush
"financially secure enough to enter politics."
It looks likely that baseball will come to the District, despite opposition from local groups and from the Baltimore Orioles, who desperately don't want to have to compete for fans among the 7+ million people who live in the Baltimore/Washington metro area. The problem isn't baseball, nor is it really public financing of social infrastructure. I think it's great, for example, that the city of Green Bay owns the Packers, who are a consistently good team with a deeply loyal fanbase. (Unfortunately, I think that's the only publicly owned major sports franchise in the country.) The problem is the pattern, both in sports and elsewhere, of citizens fronting money for services which make huge profits for a handful of already wealthy individuals. Perhaps a DC stadium will be a complete scam and a bust, like in Milwaukee, or perhaps it won't. Either way, the burden of risk should fall on the denizens of this city only if they want it to and if they will be able to fully enjoy the economic rewards if it pays off.
When I played Little League, my jerseys featured the names of local businesses: Cressman's TV, VFW Lodge 245, Terry's Barber Shop, and, yes, Pizzazz Beauty Salon. (It's worth noting that there was something more than simple loyalty to Terry's able cuts that kept me from ever actually patronizing Pizzazz.) It may sound tautological that community sports leagues foster community involvement, but the relationship is rarely replicated on a larger scale. Why couldn't DC own its own team like Green Bay? What if the city bought the Expos and financed the stadium, and in the end was able to use all the money eventually generated toward social programs? Frankly, I'd still be skeptical of such an outlay of money to an entertainment venue that may or may not prove attractive to local fans when there are so many immediate life-or-death needs in the city. But my point is that we need not assume that corporations and other private interests are essential to the operation of a fun, diverse, functioning city.
