Tag Archives: politics

The political costs of a new baseball stadium

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In his role as Cobb County Commission Chairman, Tim Lee probably thought that pushing through an expensive plan to relocate the Atlanta Braves from their downtown home to his northern suburban jurisdiction by skirting public referendum and delivering the pork for large business interests would, in return, lead to his reelection.

Once again, however, Lee has miscalculated. Challenger Mike Boyce, a retired Marine colonel, nearly defeated Lee outright in an election this spring. Boyce only secured forty-nine-percent of the vote, however, which sent him into a runoff election with Lee this summer.

As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution explained last month, “Boyce’s candidacy is drawing on a deep well of resentment over the deal, which was struck in secret without a public vote.”

Last night, that resentment drove Boyce to victory. He toppled Lee by securing sixty-four-percent of the runoff vote.

This won’t reverse the new stadium deal, of course, but it may serve as a warning to other politicians who, in the future, contemplate similar boondoggles.

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Previously
Previewing the 2016 Atlanta Braves
The Braves are failing on their own terms
New Braves stadium project continues to falter
Georgia Supreme Court Upholds Cobb’s Braves Stadium Bond Deal
Braves Break Ground on Baseball Boondoggle
The yard sale at Upton Abbey continues
From Barves to Burbs: What’s happening to baseball in Atlanta?

Obama in Cuba brings the pain of loss to a Miami exile family (via Miami Herald)

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I’ve never known anything but freedom. My grandparents and parents made sure that was so. But now my grandparents are dead, and my parents are old, and the Cuban regime that strangled them somehow lives on … lives on to play a baseball game with our country this week. America extends its hand toward a dictator who has the blood of my people on his own. And now my parents, old exiles, have to watch Obama and Jeter and ESPN throw a happy party on land that was stolen from my family … as the rest of America celebrates it, no less. That’s going to hurt, no matter how you feel about the politics. … Read More

(via Miami Herald)

Dan Le Batard is a writer for the Miami Herald and the host of a daily talk show on ESPN Radio, as well as a cohost, with his father and Bomani Jones, of Highly Questionable, a daily television show on ESPN.

Veterans Affairs: The Uneasy Marriage of Military Money and the NFL (via Grantland)

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patriotsAll of sports is a pageant. All sports are, in their own way, propaganda. They create a self-contained ecosystem within which people are convinced to vest themselves — emotionally in their teams, and economically in the various corporate partners with which the institutions of sports have allied themselves. It is a universe of cognitive manipulation that has grown thicker and more complex as the media has changed and accelerated. This is fine for selling beer and shoes and expensive automobiles. It should not be used to sell the idea of military service, and it should not be used to create a false iconography of vicarious heroism for the folks in Section 444.

Most veterans you will see on the field in an NFL stadium, or standing on top of a dugout between innings, are genuinely worthy of the country’s admiration. They’ve earned every cheer they get. They also have earned decent health care and a chance at an education and whatever counseling they need to get beyond what they’ve experienced. What they don’t deserve to be are front people through whom the rich get richer, to be walking advertisements for the services that they already have paid back in full. This is a transaction grotesquely inappropriate for their sacrifices. … Read More

(via Grantland)

Can Golf Save Congress? (via Hot Dogs and Golf)

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An article on NPR posited the idea that if members of Congress played more golf together, like in the olden days, they would get more work done.

It’s an interesting idea — one that has been proposed many times over in different forms. If members of Congress drank together, ate dinner together, took trips and retreats together. If their spouses did volunteer work in DC together, if they moved their family to DC so their kids could go to school together, we could break through the incivility and gridlock.

In the late 1990’s, the Aspen Institute hosted 3-day retreats hoping to bring members of Congress from both sides of the aisle together to get to know one another — and face the issue of incivility in Congress head on. Around 200 Members, their spouse, and children attended. Did it work? Sort of.

But, what of this idea of bi-partisan golf? … Read More

(via Hot Dogs and Golf)

Baseball blogger proposes extremely traditional training tactics

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cistuwarmyThe rapid seep of the internet across the biophysical landscape has allowed, in pooling pools of athletico-scriptology, the fomenting and indeed rise of a baseball-centric analytical community that fashions itself both advanced and numerological in both its substantive and aesthetic drapings, trappings, and driftings. The aforementioned pooling-facilitated rise occurred not within a vacuum chamber or bag or filter or hose but in the context and– the soon-to-be-mentioned contextualizers would announce– against the preexisting backdrop of an often-organized and, in the metaphorical and sometimes literal literal sense, gated or bound collection of Baseball Writers who, it must be noted, likely never anticipated being intransitively thrust in any respect, and much less being so thrust into a, and really, the, (readily accepted, it also must be noted) position of defending, together with the practically necessarily wholly inclusive and thus merged task of defining, both Traditional Baseball and the traditional mode of observing, considering, and understanding baseball. They awoke to find themselves Anti-Federalists, to put a probably only partially enjoyed-by-them historical frame around it. One cohort generally granted minimal time and nominal credit to the other, and vice versa, is the point.

And yet. If there is a commonality in individual operational course of dealing it is entrepreneurially this: the need to distinguish oneself. The terminology in the following sentence is positive rather than normative. From the linguistic vantage of the traditional-minded, those of the upstart class distinguished their output, and themselves thereby, progressively; inversely, retrograde. At the extremes, both vectors have their mortal/temporal/terrestrial limits, however: points at which, for example, the only way to be more progressive is to turn, perhaps suddenly, perhaps violently, retrograde– to adopt the most traditional of traditions as the vessel in which to carry forth your message still. And vice versa. (Perhaps.)

And so. We have arrived at the above-depicted depiction of the broadcasted baseball blogger. While this is not about him but about what he has done, it is maybe worth noting, or commenting or remarking upon, that he exists, or existed, among those on the unbound progressive fringe. The worth of such notation would ripen, if at all, in the lack of surprise that should accompany one who, having understood the foregoing, observes the indicia of another who has reached the terminus of his respective– if not universally respected, see supra— vector and made the only available subsequent move, here to an admittedly extreme degree.

There exist those individuals who postulate that, as the virtual world waxes, the corporeal world necessarily must wane and further wonder whether, as a consequence, the ostensibly beneficial activity features of the virtual world become diluted so as to require a severe return to the very most traditional (meaning “old”) corporeal traditions in order to affect anything meaningful, in actual terms. Here, the rarely depicted baseball blogger, in a joint venture with the United States Army,[1] brings forth a proposed plan of training and development in which those professional, as in full-time, baseball players not yet in the Major Leagues subject themselves to the complete, as in unbridled, brutality of military engagement in order to be evaluated and thereby prove their worth as those now capable of conducting Our Nation’s Pastime at its highest (unembargoed) level. War is good for this, he is saying.

 

[1] Sporting mascot: Black Knights.

From Barves to Burbs: What’s happening to baseball in Atlanta?

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News broke Monday morning that the Atlanta Braves were planning to leave their downtown location at Turner Field and relocate to a new, as-yet-unbuilt stadium in Cobb County, north of Atlanta, near Marietta, Georgia. This is a bad idea.

https://twitter.com/Mr_Griffey/status/399928757127225344

First, to clear out my personal interest, I do not like this move because it means I will attend fewer games. I live and work in town. It is very easy for me to attend games, because I can take public transportation (MARTA) from my office or home and be at the park in roughly thirty minutes. As a result, I was able to attend about eight games this season (as mostly documented here), something that would not be feasible following the proposed move. For a few of the games, I had planned to attend long in advance and coordinated large blocks of tickets with friends. For probably most of them, though, plans came together at the last minute, and I was able to shoot off from work and make it there in time for the first inning. I was shocked, then happy, when I first realized how easy it was going to be for me to attend major league baseball games in my new city. It would be a great personal disappointment if I no longer had that accessible opportunity to attend games.

Even bracketing my subjective, selfish perspective, the proposed move is an objectively bad idea. Continue reading →

August Bodies: Cabrera, Upton, and the Ex-Presidents

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August is the only month in the American calendar without a holiday, which leaves us free to craft ad hoc celebrations of events taking place in the moment.

For baseball fans, this is the time of year when the action really starts to heat up. There are a deceptively large number of games remaining in the season, but it’s the beginning of crunch time for teams looking to secure their positioning for the postseason.

The Detroit Tigers and Atlanta Braves are two of the best teams in baseball this year, and they happen to be two of the teams followed closely on this site. Each also has a star hitter who has ramped up his performance this month.

I’ve already noted that Miguel Cabrera is following up his 2012 season– in which he won both the MVP and Triple Crown– with an even better 2013. This month, it is widely becoming clear we are witnessing a special season from the Detroit third baseman, who is becoming something of a living Babe Ruth-Kirk Gibson combination. Due to injuries, Cabrera basically is playing on one leg, making it difficult to do things like run the bases. His response has been to hit a lot of home runs so he doesn’t have to run the bases. He has sixteen hits in eleven games in August, and six of them were homers. Here are his numbers through last night, broken out by month:

As more and more turn their eyes to the Motor City to gaze upon this remarkable production, the number of articles testifying to Cabrera’s greatness to which I could link here are many. Consider this one from yesterday, though, which nicely combines text and visuals describing Cabrera’s recent exploits.

While Cabrera’s August is allowing us to marvel at his ability to persistently perform in historic fashion, Justin Upton is offering up a late-summer burst that shows him rising to the great levels expected of him when he joined the Braves in the offseason.

After a ridiculous start to the season, which included five home runs in his first five games, the younger Upton cooled off. He hit a total of twelve HRs in April, but he only hit four in all of May, June, and July. He’s already hit six through thirteen games this month, though, and his .380 batting average is the highest monthly mark he’s posted all year by almost one hundred percentage points. Here are his numbers through last night, broken out by month:

juptonstatsFinally, we come to the (mostly) ex-presidents. The United States Senate often is referred to as an “august body.” The president of the Senate is the vice president of the United States, and the president of the vice president is the president of the United States, and so here we have scouting reports on the pitching prospects of all of the United States presidents since William Howard Taft. Enjoy.

America Has a Stadium Problem (via Pacific Standard)

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Over the past 20 years, 101 new sports facilities have opened in the United States—a 90-percent replacement rate—and almost all of them have received direct public funding. The typical justification for a large public investment to build a stadium for an already-wealthy sports owner has to do with creating jobs or growing the local economy, which sound good to the median voter. “If I had to sum up the typical [public] perspective,” Neil deMause . . . told me via email, “I’d guess it’d be something along the lines of ‘I don’t want my tax money going to rich fat cats, but anything that creates jobs is good, and man that Jeffrey Loria sure is a jerk, huh?’” This confused mindset has resulted in public coffers getting raided. The question is whether taxpayers have gotten anything in return.

Economists have long known stadiums to be poor public investments. Most of the jobs created by stadium-building projects are either temporary, low-paying, or out-of-state contracting jobs—none of which contribute greatly to the local economy. (Athletes can easily circumvent most taxes in the state in which they play.) Most fans do not spend additional money as a result of a new stadium; they re-direct money they would have spent elsewhere on movies, dining, bowling, tarot-card reading, or other businesses. And for every out-of-state fan who comes into the city on game day and buys a bucket of Bud Light Platinum, another non-fan decides not to visit and purchases his latte at the coffee shop next door. All in all, building a stadium is a poor use of a few hundred million dollars.

This isn’t news, by any stretch, but it turns out we’re spending even more money on stadiums than we originally thought. In her new book Public/Private Partnerships for Major League Sports Facilities, Judith Grant Long, associate professor of Urban Planning at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, shatters previous conceptions of just how much money the public has poured into these deals. By the late ’90s, the first wave of damning economic studies . . . came to light, but well afterwards, from 2001 to 2010, 50 new sports facilities were opened, receiving $130 million more, on average, than those opened in the preceding decade. (All figures from Long’s book adjusted for 2010 dollars.) In the 1990s, the average public cost for a new facility was estimated at $142 million, but by the end of the 2000s, that figure jumped to $241 million: an increase of 70 percent.

Economists have also been, according to Long, drastically underestimating the true cost of these projects. They fail to consider public subsidies for land and infrastructure, the ongoing costs of operations, capital improvements (weneedanewscoreboard!), municipal services (all those traffic cops), and foregone property taxes (almost every major-league franchise located in the U.S. does not pay property taxes “due to a legal loophole with questionable rationale” as the normally value-neutral Long put it). Due to these oversights, Long calculates that economists have been underestimating public subsidies for sports facilities by 25 percent, raising the figure to $259 million per facility in operation during the 2010 season. … Read More

(via Pacific Standard)