Call from the Bullpen by David Maull
Stadium Game Not Worth Playing
From the Oct. 22, 1998 TV Times
Why would anyone in his or her right mind support a public tax increase to fund the construction of a new professional sports stadium or arena?
Let's take a look at the benefits voters would receive in return for their tax dollars:
- The right to pay $40 for an upper level seat that is so high one runs the risk of getting a nosebleed or having an encounter with some form of winged wildfowl.
- The personal seat license, which requires a person to purchase the right to purchase season tickets. How this scam has escaped the scrutiny of our justice system is beyond me.
- Less money in the community for education, public works projects and recreation centers.
Throwing panic into the hearts of sports fans is one of the favorite pastimes for professional sports franchise owners in the 1990s.
By now, we're all familiar with the diatribe (hankie and violin music, please):
"In our present facility we cannot generate the revenue necessary to field a competitive team. The only way to generate that revenue is through the construction of a new (insert appropriate choice here) 1. baseball stadium, 2. football stadium, 3. hockey arena, 4. basketball arena. Without the tax increase to fund construction, we must explore other markets that might be more financially advantageous to the franchise."
In other words, build us a new stadium or we'll move the team to another city and break your hearts. It's the same as holding a person hostage except the perpetrator is wearing a finely-tailored three-piece suit instead of a ski-mask. Now, the time has come for citizens to call the owner's bluff and reject such measures.
Team owners would have you believe everyone in a community has a stake in a new sports facility. But in reality, those buildings are nothing more than places where doctors, lawyers and politicians can have unlimited buffets and prime mezzanine-level seats.
Since it would be impossible for ordinary fans to acquire, or even afford, decent seats, they would basically be paying for the right to watch the game on television for the next 30 years.
Philadelphia provides a good illustration. At the Spectrum, which for years was home to the Sixers and Flyers, a seat in the first few rows of the upper level offered a terrific view of the action and was affordable. In the new First Union Center, those same seats are sky-high and make the players look like ants.
It's no coincidence that I've gone from attending three or four Sixers games a year in the Spectrum to attending none in the First Union Center. Paying more money for a seat in the rafters to watch a team that hasn't been decent in nearly a decade doesn't seem logical to me.
Meanwhile, Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie is lobbying for a new football facility to replace Veterans Stadium. To get fans excited about the project, he has put a team on the field that is an unadulterated embarrassment and has failed to use the millions available under the team's salary cap to sign some impact players.
But we're forced to support the construction of a new stadium, which we'll probably never see a game in, because if we don't, he could move our Eagles to another city.
These issues also infiltrated the World Series.
On Nov. 3, San Diego residents will vote on the proposed use of public funds for a new baseball stadium. If the measure is defeated, the Padres could be on their way out of town.
Fortunately, the team's success this year will likely guarantee its passage.
Here's another interesting note, the Atlanta Braves, the team the Padres defeated in the NLCS, have a brand-new ballpark but fell 8,000 short of capacity for Game 2 of that series. The whole high price, bad seat thing appeared to have burned the Braves and Major League Baseball this time.
Recently, The Sporting News printed a tidbit noting four of the five NFL teams that have spent the most money on signing bonuses this season play in older stadiums. They are San Diego, Seattle, San Francisco and Minnesota. It seems the revenue stream really isn't as bad as it's been made out to be.
To say that middle-class citizens should not be expected to provide meal tickets for wealthy team owners would be redundant. If owners really want to sell a tax increase to the public, they would provide free game tickets to everyone who votes in favor of the measure.
We all know the chances of that happening -- about the same as me ever again getting a decent seat to a Sixers game.
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