Sunday, July 27

Marlins stadium still a hard sell

 

 

By Charles Elmore, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Sunday, July 20, 2003

 

 

 

The Florida Marlins are adding fans faster than any other major-league team in 2003 with the aid of a simple discovery. It helps if you do not say that baseball is doomed in South Florida.

 

Toss in some advertising, add Dontrelle Willis and bingo: Attendance was up 33.4 percent at the All-Star break, the best rise in the majors. (Granted, really low box-office numbers the previous season made improvement easier.)

 

Sadly, the signs don't look so good for continuing this trend. The stadium issue is slithering back. Apparently, the Marlins cannot resist another swing at the pinata of taxpayer treats any more than Randall Simon could lay off that poor sausage mascot.

 

The Marlins are not commenting on reports that they have offered to contribute $100 million toward a retractable-roof ballpark in downtown Miami. To put it another way, they would be inviting local governments to pay for most of a stadium that would cost $325 million to $400 million, probably through convention or tourist taxes.

 

"The answer is that we continue to be dedicated to guaranteeing the future of the Florida Marlins," team president David Samson said.

 

If you're new to South Florida, you may not realize what this means. The quest for ballyard welfare is the tragic recurring theme in Marlins history. Owners who start out as neighborly fans, just trying to do a good turn for the community, end up as embittered misers holding their franchise hostage.

 

By the end, the owners insist that baseball is doomed in South Florida unless the public pays for a stadium. Politicians don't believe them, but fans do. They figure, "Why bother?" They stay away.

 

Alex Penelas, the mayor of Miami-Dade County, has made sympathetic noises about finding the money. With a recent sales-tax increase bringing in more revenue, the county may be in better shape to do a deal than it has been in several years. But any plan would require the county commission's approval, and not all members are convinced that it's a swell idea for taxpayers to subsidize millionaire owners and players.

 

"It's going to be a hard sell," Miami-Dade Commissioner Katy Sorenson said Thursday.

 

We've seen this movie before. Put your $100 million toward innovative, private financing of a stadium, Marlins. Or go on a spending spree on players. But please don't go down this road of threats and ultimatums so fatal to fan goodwill.

 

No doubt the Marlins would prefer that it never got that ugly. A back-room deal, a brisk commission vote and the bang of a gavel would be convenient. Samson said he has not thought about whether citizens should be asked to approve any deal in a referendum. "That's the first time I've been asked that," he said.

 

No stadium plan went so smoothly for previous owners Wayne Huizenga and John Henry, though.

 

It's understandable that the Marlins want a place of their own, with more control of advertising, concessions and parking revenues. The idea is that more revenue will allow them to increase the payroll and put a better team on the field.

 

Still, there's no guarantee that a publicly financed stadium will resolve baseball's fundamental payroll-disparity problems or make the Marlins permanently more attractive to fans. The same turnstile numbers that show the Marlins improving at football-oriented Pro Player Stadium also show something else: After an initial spike, attendance is down in 2003 for almost every baseball team that has moved into a new ballpark in the past dozen years.

 

It's not just the Clevelands and Baltimores. It's also teams with newer parks. In Houston, the Astros are down 8.5 percent compared to 2002's full-season average. The Detroit Tigers are off 6 percent. The Milwaukee Brewers are down 21.3 percent. Only the Reds are up at their new Cincinnati ballpark, increasing attendance by 29 percent.

 

For cities, a basic problem is that no government can force an owner to guarantee that he will put the money into salaries. An owner may well say that it takes all the money a new park can provide just to cover his deficits.

 

"A new stadium can have significant benefits such as revitalizing a downtown area, but you've got Pittsburgh, you've got Detroit, you've got Milwaukee, places where owners may take those extra revenues from the new stadium and pocket it, rather than spend it on new talent," said Patrick Rishe, a professor of economics at Webster University in St. Louis.

 

 

New venues losing money

 

The other teams in South Florida are not making a convincing case at the moment that publicly financed arenas made them any more competitive or interesting. You could argue the opposite is true. The franchise value of the Florida Panthers hockey team fell from an estimated $152 million to less than $100 million despite a state-of-the-art facility in Broward County. The team posted $17 million in operating losses last year, and its owner says the league needs to make structural reforms or he will sell.

 

The operating losses of the Heat's arena company have increased every year at AmericanAirlines Arena in Miami, and basketball attendance has declined.

 

Remember, the ballpark issue played a significant role in the deteriorating relationship between Marlins fans and Huizenga, the team's former billionaire owner. That was the stated reason for Huizenga's infamous player sell-off after the 1997 World Series championship: to make the team affordable to a new owner who would presumably have a better chance politically to get a stadium.

 

Henry came across as a disarming farm-raised financier with a passion for the game, until he tried to bury his early remark that a privately financed ballpark would probably be a necessity in South Florida. Advisers convinced him that he could get public money. To do so, he made threats to move or shut down. He failed, with disastrous results.

 

No one knows better than current Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria, whose ownership of the Montreal Expos was marked by a ballpark-financing controversy, what those threats meant for his first season last year. The team was on life-support. What fan wants to commit emotionally to a team whose previous owners insisted it was doomed?

 

Don't blow the goodwill painfully regathered in the past year and a half. Please come up with a creative way out of this, Marlins. The Giants found private financing for Pacific Bell Park, and they're only down 2.3 percent this year in attendance and selling at a healthy 94.5 percent of capacity.

 

Some guy even tried playing baseball at a privately financed stadium in South Florida, drew more than 3 million the first year and went on to win a World Series. It looked a lot like the place where the Marlins play now. People hadn't heard yet that baseball was doomed in South Florida.

 

charles_elmore@pbpost.com

You really do love this issue to death don't you

I think it is an important issue.

 

And this article is well written and says the truth to why people are so hesitant about this team.

If a stadium is built, Loria knows for a fact that the only way he can get people to come out to the ballpark is by using the newfound money on player and not pocketing it.

I think it is an important issue.

 

And this article is well written and says the truth to why people are so hesitant about this team.

I know, I just felt like writing that