SubscribeThe best I can hope for is that the people of Minnesota don't blink- and baseball finally stops extorting citizens for stadium welfare payments because no one's biting.
More accurately from ESPN: his ownership was placed in a blind trust which is run by trustees, while the team is run by his daughter who is not an investor. However, when/if he ceases to be the commissioner, his ownership is returned to him in full- with any increase in investment value that comes along with it. That's still a huge conflict of interest.
evixir: I don't understand how you could completely ignore one glaring and extremely important difference... Do not tell me building a new ballpark is definitely not the answer.
Hey, new ballparks are cool- and if MLB, with its nearly $3 billion dollars in total annual revenue wants to build a new ballpark for a team, they're free to knock themselves out. One new stadium a year- or a new stadium for each team every 30 years- would cost about $8-10M per team each year. Not chump change, but doable- unless, of course, they don't need the stadiums after all, or suddenly realized that if they were footing the bill, old stadiums could be retrofitted or not replaced as often to save their money. But this extortion routine- "Better pay up with a new tax-payer funded stadium, or the team gets it!"- is getting old. Besides, for a fraction of what it costs to build a new stadium, you could mount a legal attack on MLB to prevent them from pulling the team out of town or get that antitrust exemption lifted, and in the end MLB would build the stadium anyway if they truly needed it.
ibid: it was extremely hard for me to encounter an admitted Twins fan anywhere in Minnesota until they started having a winning season in the last couple years
In the last couple of years? What's the revisionist history trick for? Remember, they were drawing 3 million + in attendance in '87 and '91- y'know, before it was cool to draw 3 million fans. These would be those years when they won two World Championships. Look, I don't think either Milwaukee or Minnesota should be contracted, but by posing it as a dilemma, you're falling into the owner's trap: having cities squabble amongst themselves and debate the merits of giving huge tax-payer funded bribes to MLB to not move their teams.
In 1997, Pohlad said he was going to move the Twins to sell the team to a new owner who'd move them to, of all places, Greensboro, North Carolina. The public assumption was that the whole story was a bunch of B.S.: that is, because the public wouldn't build him a stadium, he was going to move the team to N.C., to a market 1/3 the size of the Twin Cities, where the local public didn't want to spend money on a stadium? Come on.
Then Pohlad said he'd donate a bunch of his money for a stadium if the Minnesota taxpayers would kick in some. After the press conference, reporters picked over the deal, and figured out that in the fine print the donation wasn't a gift, it was a loan to the State, and Pohlad expected the State to pay interest on it.
Ever since those two comedy sketches, nobody around here is willing to trust Pohlad with their kid's lunch money. Stadium drives have become so unpopular (latest polls--78% opposed to public financing for sports stadiums) that politicians can get elected just by promising not to spend money on a stadium. Just last year we had several candidates--even for Congress and such, where the issue wasn't even involved--who ran TV commercials with such a promise.
A non-Pohlad group of investors tried to buy the Twins in '99, conditional on the City of St. Paul ponying up tax dollars for a stadium. It went to a referendum, the stadium referendum went down in flames. Admittedly, that deal would have put the brunt of the costs on St. Paul (pop. 270,000 or so), rather than spreading them out metro- or statewide.
Another aggravating theory that has been floated recently is that the Twins might never have been in financial trouble at all; that Pohlad kept them in red ink intentionally as a tax write-off to offset his banking income. He sold off his banks a couple of years ago; now that he doesn't need the tax write-off any more--so this theory says--he's going to throw the Twins in the garbage. Doesn't need 'em anymore. How true that is, who can say, but it's been floated by the local media around here. Pohlad, incidentally, is richer than Croesus, one of the wealthiest individuals in Minnesota, and the various dollar amounts that are being thrown in this controversy are all assumed by the public to be chump change to him.
Bud Selig marching onto the scene behaving like Montgomery Burns hasn't helped matters.
"Contraction" was talked about all summer up here, but nobody thought it would happen now, partly because of the flurry of lawsuits it would start, partly because the Twins played pretty good ball in 2001 and attendance was way up, and because either Tampa or Florida looked like much more obvious targets. Now it turns out that Tampa has some huge long lease tied to it, but the Twins only have one more year on their Metrodome lease. That may be the clincher. That, and the fact that Pohlad doesn't give a crap.
Another wild card: while all this is going on, the Vikings are saying they need a new stadium too.
And yet another tidbit: there's been a group of downtown Minneapolis types trying to put together a plan for a completely privately financed ballpark in the Minneapolis Warehouse District. They want to build a smaller, "boutique ballpark", with a Camden Yards or Wrigley Field feel. The Twins organization has consistently told them to get lost.
Half the people you talk to say that if the Twins go belly up, people will be shocked and the Vikings will get a fresh new stadium handed to them on a silver platter. The other half say that the stadium issue is so poisoned now that Red will consider the stadium situation to be utterly hopeless, give up and move away without even making another bid to the Legislature.
The Vikings played an exhibition game in San Antonio this fall; apparently ticket sales were underwhelming, and Red McCombs was left with a little egg on his face. San Antonio, of course, has no more of a proper stadium than Minneapolis has, so he'd be starting from square one--in a smaller market--if he moved there. (Even though it's his hometown.) Los Angeles has just started being mentioned in reports, but it could be a more serious threat, being a bigger market with any number of facilities for now, and resources to build bigger facilities in the future. Portland, Oregon, of all places, has been mentioned as another longshot if the Vikes leave town.
Vikings have no trouble selling out the current Dome, even when they suck. People up here are more than willing to shell out big bucks to watch Randy Moss yawn and scratch his ass for ten, fifteen minutes at a time, hoping he'll find a few seconds in his day to make the monster catch that wins the game.
One stadium-issue advantage the Vikes have that the Twins don't is that the Vikings can share a new stadium with the Univ. of Minnesota Gophers. That way, they can say something like "we need public money for a stadium, but it's for the Gophers too, not just for Red McCombs, so that's okay". That might just work.
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ESPN has a good article about all this here.
posted by mmesker at 7:20 PM on November 6, 2001