I usually only care about baseball as it relates to the young players, coaches, and parents. I leave the bigger philosophical questions to the big guys, like ESPN and the like.
I admit that I am as guilty as anyone of only paying attention to my hometown MLB team, my beloved St. Louis Cardinals, but reading an article about the Miami Marlins and their treatment of their fans it made my blood boil. .
I’m not here to blame or take sides because I don’t have the facts, but the question I want to ask is, “Are professional sports teams holding cities hostage?”
When a city, that is, the taxpayers, agree to foot the stadium bill for a professional sports team, regardless of the sport, do the owners of the teams become partners in the city or masters of the city?
Pro sports will claim that they are a private company and can do whatever they want with the team, including moving to another city or stripping the team of its best players and the city has no legal rights to protest.
Now, I’m not a business genius and I know that private companies of all kinds negotiate tax breaks and certain commitments from cities regarding sewers, streets, etc. just an office with two employees and leave the rest of the complex vacant.
Worse still, they don’t return to the city three years later and demand that the city pay for the redevelopment of the building or else the company will move to another city and leave the city stuck with a vacant building and a huge financial burden. .
I hope you’re reading this and thinking “How absurd is this scenario”, but this is exactly what professional sports teams do. The Colts’ midnight move to Indianapolis from Baltimore, Houston to Tennessee, the Rams to St. Louis, and I could go on and on.
Speaking of the Rams, they have been successful in their demands that St. Louis foot the bill for a $700 million redevelopment of their stadium or the construction of a new stadium. Granted, the Rams did give fans thrills, including a Super Bowl trophy, but that was under different ownership.
The current owner has a less-than-spectacular track record of fielding an NFL-caliber team, but is holding the city hostage for an absorbing ransom with the threat of leaving town.
Professional sports leagues are monopolized. “Whip-sawing,” which is the act of pitting one entity against another, to get the best deal for them, in this case one city against another, is the only private commercial action leagues and businesses have in common.
Cities, which actually mean real life people from the community, who work their butts every day for a living and pay for these palaces through their taxes, deserve better than being treated like serfs. If MLB and the NFL specifically don’t change their grandiose opinion of themselves in regards to people, then, like AT&T and other monopolies, they should split up.