McCoy Stadium – RI Future

February 18, 2016March 4, 2016

Joe Kayata strikes out in his interview with Larry Lucchino

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I watched NBC 10’s sportscaster Joe Kayata interview Pawtucket Red Sox owner Larry Lucchino not once but twice on February 17. It was hard to tell if this was a late Valentine’s Day for the sports franchise owner or if Kayata was just trying to give the Tolman High School softball team a run for their money, but either way it was a wasted opportunity that failed the fans, the taxpayers, and the viewers that was strangely reminiscent of some business involving bears and hand stands.

ONLY ON 10: @NBC10_Joe talks with PawSox owner Larry Lucchino about rebuilding fan trust. Watch NBC 10 News at 5:30. pic.twitter.com/lfRneFHMMN

— NBC 10 WJAR (@NBC10) February 17, 2016

What the discerning viewer could grasp at from the interview, and which Kayata would not vocalize, is the true nature of Lucchino’s plan. Here are the highlights, picked apart for all their meaning.

“This franchise was a jewel franchise for a long time. It has fallen on harder times in recent years.”

Uh, excuse me Mr. Lucchino, that is kind of a stretch. After Ben Mondor died, the team did struggle because his widow was not tuned to business acumen. But as soon as you and the late James Skeffington showed up with haughty expectations of not just moving the team but expecting Rhode Islanders to finance the move to Providence (something Kayata left out conveniently), the fans left in droves. Could it possibly be that you chased them away?

“We just want to recapture that glory, reignite that fan base, (and) galvanize the business community because that’s what was special.”

As reported earlier, this is asking for a subsidy from the state and the business community so to gentrify the poor community out of their homes near the ballpark. Lucchino smudged history in regards to his discussion of the attempt to move the Red Sox out of Fenway when he got involved with the Boston franchise years ago, trying to make it sound like that was all his decision, saying “It took us a couple of years to answer that [relocation] question in respect to Fenway Park.” It was not, a large contingent of Bostonians got up in arms and raised a huge SAVE FENWAY campaign that made it impossible for him to do as he had in Baltimore and San Diego and flip the team at profit a few years afterwards, leaving the taxpayers on the hook for projects that benefited only his bank account.

“We sat down with Mayor (Donald) Grebien here in Pawtucket and are working on a study of McCoy to see what kind of facility we have and what it needs to play an important role in the years ahead and we are focused on getting the fan base back to the ballpark”.

So does that mean that tax monies are being paid to fund this study? Why do you need another study when, this time last year, James Skeffington was telling people that a study had shown repairing McCoy was too costly? What could it possibly need considering the fact that McCoy and the PawSox are cited by many as an exemplary franchise?

Will the team remain in Rhode Island after the end of the current McCoy lease in 2020?

“I don’t know. That’s an impossible question to answer right now.”

In a word, no, unless of course they are given plenty of free money at the expense of the taxpayers and disenfranchise a slew of people who pay a higher percent of their income to taxes than Lucchino and company do.

It seems like Gina Raimondo is not the only vulture capitalist here for the long term. When William Carlos Williams wrote an Introduction to Allen Ginsberg’s classic poem Howl, he said in closing a brilliant line that fits these circumstances perfectly:

“Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell.”

September 5, 2015September 6, 2015

PawSox Stadium opponents film music video outside McCoy

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On Saturday morning over 75 people assembled outside McCoy Stadium in Pawtucket to sing a slightly altered version of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” for a video planned to protest moving the Pawtucket Red Sox to a proposed new stadium in Providence. Director Murray Scott lead the crowd in singing the song, from cue cards, four times as volunteers stopped traffic. Surprisingly, none of the drivers of any of the cars evidenced anything but support for the effort, despite the inconvenience of being stopped. instead drivers honked horns, waved, or gave thumb’s up to the efforts of the singers.

Despite what appears to be recent victories for stadium opponents in the form of RI Speaker of the House Nicholas Mattiello‘s admission that a deal with Brown University and the City of Providence seems unlikely, organizers Tim Empkie, Sharon Steele and David Norton all feel that the pressure needs to be kept on.

Murray Scott says that the video made today will be premiered in a couple of weeks on the Motif Magazine and GoLocal Prov news sites. In the meantime, below is a preview.

June 26, 2015June 28, 2015

Mayor Grebien rallies support, says new owners are no Ben Mondor

The potential move of the Pawtucket Red Sox to downtown Providence has caused heated debate between the public and the General Assembly since the idea was first floated earlier this year. On Thursday, opponents of the move rallied outside of the State House to express their passionate disapproval for the move.

Pawtucket Mayor Donald Grebien shared his own memories of McCoy Stadium at the rally, saying that he knows that he’s not the only one with such an emotional attachment.

“Like many of you, the first baseball game I ever attended was at McCoy. As a kid, I used to go to McCoy with my parents and grandparents to enjoy the games and see the future Red Sox greats before they were household names,” he said.

“I am certain all of you have similar experiences and traditions that you hold dearly as well. The memories and traditions formed at McCoy are things we all cherish. Memories we fear Rhode Island’s kids may never get to experience for themselves.”

Grebien continued to speak about the stadium’s previous ownership under Ben Mondor, and how Mondor was dedicated to the Pawtucket community as well as the team. The new ownership does not hold such sentiment.

“The new ownership has a very different business model, one that some could say is totally contrary to what exists there now. It lacks the vision, compassion, and commitment to the core principles that have made the franchise so successful,” Grebien said.

After his speech, Grebien added that the citizens of Pawtucket have not been involved in any of the business decisions the new owners have made. Residents have not even been made privy to the feasibility study that was reportedly conducted to determine the condition of McCoy.

“What we’re trying to understand, and what we’ve asked for from the ownership, is a feasibility study that they’ve done to give us an idea. How bad is it? If it’s bad, show us it’s bad,” he said.

Grebien is not the only one who feels this way, though. Sam Bell, the Rhode Island State Coordinator for the Progressive Democrats of America, has his own reasons opposing the PawSox becoming the ProvSox.

“There’s so many issues,” he began. “It starts with the basic principles of the public planning. Taking away a public park, flooding the area with surface parking, clogging out businesses, creating massive amounts of noise that disrupts the residents who live there.”

According to Bell, most people who he has spoken with who live or work around the vacant I-195 lands, which is where the new stadium would be built, do not want it there. The request for public money to help fund the project is also wrong in Bell’s eyes.

“It’s the public’s money. The amount they’re asking for is grotesque,” he said. “The amount they are asking for here is obscene to a degree that we often don’t even see.”

“I actually think it’s bad for Providence, to move it into that location, which is going to be a park, and it would hurt Pawtucket to leave it. One of the great things about this is that there’s so many issues and people come at it with so many different perspectives, but everyone agrees, we have to stop this deal,” Bell added.

Economic development has been one of the biggest talking points in support of a new stadium. Sharon Steele, a board member of the Jewelry District Association, finds that exact reason is why everyone should be fighting against a stadium. If a stadium were to be built, it would only bring minimum wage jobs, rather than small businesses that could directly benefit the community. Steele also mentioned that the park would help to draw in business more so than a stadium.

“Parkland is a hugely important center place for appropriate development,” she said. “Whether you look at Central Park, or you look at all the other magnificent parks across the country, and the I-195 land was specifically made for economic development, and a stadium simply does not fulfill that specific requirement.”

With both the House of Representatives and the Senate in recess until September, it’s hard to say what the fate of the PawSox will be. Speaker of the House Nicholas Mattiello has given his support for the move, but he has also said that he will not go against what the public ultimately wants. Unless something major happens between now and September, the public seems to believe that the PawSox should stay right at home, in Pawtucket.

May 20, 2015

Video: Victor Matheson’s PawSox presentation

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buckingham_matheson — Dr. Victor Matheson

The presentation Dr. Victor Matheson, professor of economics at College of the Holy Cross, gave to a capacity crowd at the Blackstone Valley Visitor Center in Pawtucket last Wednesday on the economics of public money funding sports stadiums, and specifically on public money building a new stadium in downtown Providence for the Pawtucket Red Sox (PawSox), has many people wishing that they were able to see and here it.

My write-up could only skim the surface of Matheson’s compelling presentation, which was an in depth condemnation of the very idea of public money for stadiums or an economic boom commensurate with such and investment. As we wait for sports consultant Andrew Zimbalist to complete his report for Speaker Nicholas Mattiello and for Governor Gina Raimondo to resume negotiations with the PawSox owners in the aftermath of the surprising and sudden death of the stadium’s chief proponent, James Skeffington, I can present Dr. Matheson’s complete talk, with the original slides from his PowerPoint presentation.

Maybe not as good as being there, but it’s a close second.

May 13, 2015May 14, 2015

Sports economist Victor Matheson: No public subsidies for new ballpark

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Dr. Victor Matheson, professor of economics at College of the Holy Cross, spoke to a capacity crowd at the Blackstone Valley Visitor Center in Pawtucket on the economics of public money funding sports stadiums, and specifically on public money building a new stadium in downtown Providence for the Pawtucket Red Sox (PawSox).

Overall, Matheson was not very amenable to the idea.

Matheson is an engaging speaker, an economist who specializes in sports. He prepared his remarks and his PowerPoint presentation for the price of a PawSox game, a hotdog and a beer, a far cry from the money Speaker Nicholas Mattiello or Governor Gina Raimondo are spending for their experts.

“Let me just lay it on the table here,” said Matheson at the start, “I’m going to be a critic of public subsidies for stadiums.”

Showing the ubiquitous artists rendering of the proposed downtown stadium, Matheson said that it “would be a fantastic stadium for the owners to spend their own money on.”

Studying stadiums and their impacts, said Matheson, generates the “weird impression that the newer the stadium, the higher the attendance or the older the stadium, the higher the attendance.” McCoy Stadium, where the PawSox currently play, is the one of the oldest stadiums in the country.

Built for $1.5 million, McCoy was the most expensive stadium ever, in 1942. It’s construction, said Matheson, was a “massive debacle.” In 1966, when owners talked of moving out of the region, $100,000 in upgrades were done to McCoy, mostly taxpayer supported. In 1999, taxpayers ponied up for most of the $14.9 in needed upgrades, once again because the owners threatened to move.

Matheson is not a fan of “Economic Impact” studies. If there is one thing to take home from his talk, said Matheson, it’s that “any economic impact study published by the people who are trying to justify public subsidies, you should always take with a grain of salt. And many grains of salt.”

There is, “remarkable agreement among economists finding that spectator sports result in little or no measurable economic benefits on host cities,” said Matheson, pointing out that money spent on such ventures is then not spent on other things a city needs. (Such as infrastructure, school repair and Medicaid, I will point out.)

Matheson then went on to explain how modern stadiums, unlike Fenway Park in Boston or Wrigley Field in Chicago, are not centers of economic activity that benefit surrounding businesses. Instead, modern sports stadiums are self contained oases surrounded by parking. The restaurants and amenities are not located throughout the city but within the stadium itself, generating revenue for the stadium owners, not the city.

Matheson compared minor league baseball teams to average 16-screen movie mega-plexes. In general, they perform about the same economically, yet no one is suggesting that movie theaters be publicly subsidized in anything like the kind of deal that baseball stadiums traditionally receive. “Are movie theaters exempt from sales tax, property tax, market value leases, etc.?” asked Matheson, “We would say that’s crazy.”

The kind of low paying jobs a minor league baseball stadium would generate will end up costing the state around $80,000 per year, per job. Matheson compared this number to the good paying jobs lured into South Carolina with the new Volvo plant. Good middle class jobs there cost the state $3,500 per year, per job in subsidies.

Towards the end of his presentation Matheson explored the possibility of the PawSox moving out of state in the event that they do not get the deal and the land they want in Providence. Looking at population statistics and the current locations of Major League, AA and AAA baseball teams, Matheson doesn’t see many viable options.

Matheson talked about the threats made by the owners of the Patriots when they talked about moving to Hartford or Providence. After not getting the deal they wanted from these other cities, they decided to stay in the Boston area, and built Gillette Stadium, because it was the best location, just as the Providence region (which includes Pawtucket) is the best place for the PawSox.

I hope to have the slides from Matheson’s talk soon and will post a video of his talk with the slides as soon as possible.