Jeff Passan of Yahoo Sports calls out the “swindlers” who run Major League Baseball’s Florida Marlins for lying to
A look at the leak of the Marlins’ financial information to Deadspin confirmed the long-held belief that the team takes a healthy chunk of MLB-distributed money for profit. Owner Jeffrey Loria and president David Samson for years have contended the Marlins break even financially, the centerpiece fiscal argument that resulted in local governments gifting them a new stadium that will cost generations of taxpayers an estimated $2.4 billion. They said they had no money to do it alone and intimated they would have to move the team without public assistance.
In fact, documents show, the Marlins could have paid for a significant amount of the new stadium’s construction themselves and still turned an annual operating profit. Instead, they cried poor to con feckless politicians that sold out their constituents.
The ugliness of the Marlins’ ballpark situation is already apparent, and the building doesn’t open for another 18 months. Somehow a team that listed its operating income as a healthy $37.8 million in 2008 alone swung a deal in which it would pay only $155 million of the $634 million stadium complex. Meanwhile, Miami-Dade County agreed — without the consent of taxpayers — to take $409 million in loans loaded with balloon payments and long grace periods. By 2049, when the debt is due, the county will have paid billions.
Most harrowing is the takeaway that baseball’s biggest welfare case could have funded a much greater portion of the ballpark. In 2009, when the Marlins started spending some of their profits on their portion of the stadium, they still had an operating income of $11.1 million. The team fought to conceal the $48.9 million in profits over the last two years because the revelation would have prompted county commissioners to insist the team provide more funding. Loria, an art dealer with a net worth of hundreds of millions, wouldn’t stand for that. He wanted as much public funding as possible — money that could’ve gone toward education or to save some of the 1,200 jobs the county is cutting this year.
Passan rightly called the Marlins’ taxpayer-funded stadium a “bailout.” Baseball, politicians, and most of the mainstream media would have you believe these welfare mausoleums are “economic development.” Although Passan is off-base in thinking the money that went to the Marlins would have been better spent on more government bureaucrats — how about refunding that money to the people it was stolen from?
It’s also noteworthy that the Marlins’ fraud was not uncovered by any traditional bastion of establishment “journalism,” but by Internet-based reporting, not just from Passan but the sports blog Deadspin, which obtained and published financial statements for a number of MLB clubs including the Marlins. (Funny how Congress and the media never has time for stuff like this, but they have inexhaustible interest in the personal drug habits of baseball players.)
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You don’t have to look any further than the New York Yankees to know that professional sports is a scam. It is the single most profitable sporting franchise in the world and could easily build its own stadium. Yet they STILL seem to think it’s somehow the responsibility of the city and state of New York to pay for half of the $1.5 billion building (no doubt even had Federal dollars involved somehow).
So many mega-franchises out there can fund themselves. The Dallas Cowboys, Atlanta Braves, Chicago Blackhawks, New England Patriots, etc. Yet they all get massive subsidies for the stadiums they call home.
Despite all of the glaring evidence that the stadium building scam is a scam, local governments continue to fall for the nonsense and are still agreeing to finance new ones. Take the money and run…
Take the money and run is right. Here in MN everyone is Gaga (pun intended) over the new stadium. I attended a game this year and the pregame festivities included a line up of the Union reps for those that built the stadium. You know you have the public duped when you can parade your scam blatantly in front of them and they cheer.
I don’t see that it’s a scam, exactly. The majority of peasants literally beg in the most humiliating fashion to be *allowed* to pay for the stadiums. There was a horrifying documentary about it on YouTube that I saw before ESPN in their stupidity decided that they didn’t want more people to watch it. I’ll still shill for them this one time and maybe you can find it on television:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-e1wqXx9B8
Maybe people just don’t see it in the proper perspective–if Wal-Mart asked for taxpayer money to help build a new store, people would scream bloody murder. But would it be any different than a stadium? It would be “economic development” (quotes deliberate). The fact that the stadium is related to sports doesn’t make it any less a business than a retail store.
A baseball stadium is a cathedral of the civic religion. In this religion, free enterprise is the Devil. Is it any surprise how followers react to a building of a Devil’s Shrine?
I remember the days when sports stadiums were being touted as “economical development”, a boon to local business, etc. When that sham was proven categorically false, franchises began toting publicly financed stadiums as a means to increase civic pride. When the taxpayers refused to allow these embezzlers to fund their hobby in the name of “civic pride”, local governments just ignored them and paid for stadiums anyway. But at least our local sports teams allow us to escape the reality of our lost liberty. Stadiums today, Wal Marts tomorrow.
Perhaps we should take a page out of the UK’s book and end public financing of stadiums. Sunderland built their Stadium of Light, which holds 49,000 people, for 24M pounds. Meanwhile the new Yankee Stadium which has a similar capacity cost $1.5B. When you can get government to fund stadiums you increase demand for them, thus raising costs, plus milk it for everything it’s worth.
I am a Miami resident, and this scenario is a perfect lesson in why government stimulus funding is a waste of resources with alternative uses. Even if some of the resources going into the stadium construction were idle, the use of the land will surely be a horrible mistake (it’s right by downtown Miami). During Marlins games, the stadium is more than half empty. No one goes. And taxpayers are going to be on the hook to pay for this monstrosity for years to come.
What a lesson in the importance of people spending their own money.
Well managed facilities can operate well within budgets that leave room for respectable profit levels. Government funding takes the pressure off of managers to keep running a tight ship.However the benefits of having a stadium, economic (taxes), social etc. can be well argued to justify government spending/support.Interesting problem, Scam might be a little to harsh at this stage of the game.
So by your logic, it is ok for the government to take money out of my pocket to the tune of 2.1 billion dollars over the long term, in return for what, 30 million a year in tax revenues? Big freaking deal!
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