Atlanta Braves Are a Terrible Baseball Team, But "A Fairly Major Real Estate Business"
Small-town Southern taxpayers subsidize minor league ballparks for baseball's worst team.
The Atlanta Braves are currently baseball's worst team, with a 7-20 record (and just 1 win in their home stadium, Turner Field), and a manager whose job is reportedly in jeopardy.
However, the team's billionaire owner, Liberty Media chairman John Malone, recently told Braves shareholders that they need not worry about their investment because "the Braves are now a fairly major real estate business as opposed to just a baseball club."
Malone knows that of which he speaks. Turner Field is only 20 years old and is widely considered a perfectly nice ballpark with all the modern amenities, but 2016 will be the final season in the House that Ted Turner Built because the team is building a brand-spanking new stadium in the Cobb County suburbs called SunTrust Park. More than half of the financing for the Braves new home will come from the taxpayers, as will the funding for the buses shuttling fans from the mall to the stadium.
Ira Boudway and Kate Smith write in a recent article for Bloomberg Businessweek that the public will provide $392 million of the $722 million needed to build the new stadium, an amazing figure given that it's no longer a secret that professional sports stadiums almost never provide a boost to local economies and in most cases are a drag on the public coffers.
But the Braves (valued at $1.175 billion) and Malone (reportedly worth $6.5 billion) aren't done with goosing the public to pay for their ballparks. The team's minor league system is dotted with publicly-financed ballparks throughout the Deep South. According to Boudway and Smith, "Over the last 15 years, the Braves have extracted nearly a half a billion in public funds" for three minor league parks to go with their soon-to-be christened major league home.
The Braves' modus operandi is consistent: they court a downtrodden city's political class, then threaten their current host city with leaving, and pit the two against each other as the cities offer up public money they don't have in order to keep or import a Braves minor league team.
The team wines and dines local pols with owner's box seats at Turner Field and visits from team legends like Hank Aaron. In turn, local officials impose new sales taxes and property taxes, as well as surcharges on tickets, parking, and purchases at local businesses to cover the costs of the stadiums. The elected officials generally negotiate with the team behind closed doors, often without providing any transparency of the process to the city commissioners tasked with approving the deals.
But it can always get worse, as in the case of Pearl, Mississippi, a city described by the Braves' hired "dealmaker," Tim Bennett, as "the trailer park capital of Mississippi, so that basically means it was was the trailer park capital of the world."
Of the consequences suffered by Pearl taxpayers because the stewards of their government decided to subsidize a billionaire's vanity project, Boudway and Smith write:
Altogether, the taxes and fees were supposed to be more than enough to pay the debt back. But just in case, Pearl pledged to cover as much as $950,000 annually from other sources if money didn't come in as planned. It hasn't. In 2014, the most recent year on record, the city paid $911,748, more than 5 percent of its general fund spending for the year, to cover shortfalls. The year before, it paid $967,944. [Mayor Brad] Rogers says he isn't sure why Pearl paid more than it pledged.
Boudway and Smith also note that the city of Pearl paid Bennett (the architect of the deal who so colorfully described the city as the "trailer park capital") more than $1 million as a finder's fee, or "about a fifth of what the town collects each year in property taxes."
Watch Todd Krainin's recent Reason TV doc on a taxpayer-funded minor league ballpark boondoggle in Hartford below.
Editor's Note: As of February 29, 2024, commenting privileges on reason.com posts are limited to Reason Plus subscribers. Past commenters are grandfathered in for a temporary period. Subscribe here to preserve your ability to comment. Your Reason Plus subscription also gives you an ad-free version of reason.com, along with full access to the digital edition and archives of Reason magazine. We request that comments be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment and ban commenters for any reason at any time. Comments may only be edited within 5 minutes of posting. Report abuses.
Please
to post comments
Malone knows that of which he speaks.
What, whereof is too archaic for your tastes?
I don’t know why the Braves even need to leave Turner Field given that it’s still a solid park.
I’m a White Sox fan. In 1991, my team moved into a giant pile of garbage that they’d piled up in the middle of the ghetto and which gangs would periodically shoot at during construction. The Braves are so spoiled.
Their lease is up and some stupid county somewhere in the vicinity of Atlanta is throwing them cash.
I love the new stadium’s old-timey look – like it’s downtown somewhere instead of parked off a cloverleaf in the middle of an office park.
Well, it’s not like they moved to the ghetto in 1991. New Comiskey was built directly across the street from Old Comiskey. And Bridgeport isn’t ghetto. It was directly adjacent to ghetto, but I lived there for a few years and it was a fine area.
Turner Field is in a terrible location, and the Braves were apparently tired if dealing the Atlanta city government and its cronies. They wanted to crony for a government that was more appreciative of them.
Main reason is that the majority of season ticket holders are in the northern suburbs (mainly Cobb and Gwinnett County). Getting downtown to the stadium during evening rush hour is a traffic nightmare for everyone. Moving the stadium up to the northern part of town should make this better.
Unfortunately, it also means that every time that there is a home game, there will be a butt-load of additional cars going around the top end of 285 from Gwinnett to Cobb… during evening rush hour… when I’m trying to drive the same stretch on my way home from work.
FML
I think the Pearl deal is why they invented woodchippers
People live in Pearl because it is so much better governed than neighboring Jackson.
Conspiracy theory – future Emperor Trump bribed Kasich early in the electoral process to stay in until the end to suck away votes from his opponents.
I maintain that Cruz could have beaten Trump. A few states were very tight with Kasich’s votes making the difference. A lot of the primary process is just momentum.
Unlikely. Trump would have won quicker without Kasich in the race. The Ohio governor stayed in hoping for a brokered convention where the establishment would have been happy to crown him over Trump and Cruz.
Oakland is a horrid city, but at least they had the guts to tell the Raiders no, even if it means losing them to Las Vegas.
The machinations that went around getting the Braves the public financing for their new stadium in Cobb County (I’ll never be able to hear about Cobb County, Georgia without getting the Big Boss Man’s theme stuck in my head) are criminal. Or they should be
Oh, thank dog, it’s not just me. About the Boss Man, that is.
Most of us want to have good income but don’t know how to do that on Internet there are a lot of methods to earn money at home, so I thought to share with you a genuine and guaranteed method for free tto earn huge sum of money at home anyone of you interested should visitt the site. More than sure that you will get best result.
===== http://www.Alpha-careers.com
Same with the San Diego Padres.
1) Get a taxpayer-funded stadium
2) Raise ticket and concession prices
3) Field a cheap and horrible team
Voila! Instant profit!
The team wines and dines local pols with owner’s sex bots at Turner Field …
*spit take* *reads again, more betterer* *disappoint*.
So the article just got 300% less interesting.
Theater of Whores?
Can’t wait for this situation to come back to the Tampa Bay Rays in the next couple years.