The Chris Moeller Archives

Brooklyn loves its Dodgers

In a classic episode of Seinfeld, George Costanza encounters an attractive woman on the subway and follows her to a hotel room. There, he is handcuffed to the bed in his underwear in what he thinks is foreplay to sexual congress, but it is soon revealed that he is being robbed by the woman and she leaves him cuffed as she makes off with his wallet. As she exits, George cries out to her, “Can I call you?”

I think of George’s desperation in this scene when I read about fans of the St. Louis Rams and the football team that refuses to love them back. A judge last week ruled that the Missouri governor can pursue a financing deal for a new open-air football stadium on the city’s north riverfront without it being subject to a public vote. A lawsuit filed by a group of state lawmakers attempting to block the governor was also rejected by the courts. (Other suits remain.) What that leaves in St. Louis is a situation in which, if the funding deal comes completely together, taxpayers are going on the hook for the construction of a second football stadium in the Gateway City when the domed stadium that opened for business in 1995, and still houses the team, is still having its construction bonds paid for by the city and the county through 2021. Meanwhile, the Rams’ owner, Stan Kroenke, the son-in-law of Walmart co-founder Bud Walton and estimated to have a financial worth of $6.3 billion after taxes and toupees, has a plan in place to use his own money (almost unprecedented in professional sports) to build what would be a third football facility. What makes his plan unique from the others is that he doesn't plan to build his stadium in the immediate St. Louis area, but on a plot of land he recently purchased near the Hollywood Park race track in Inglewood, California.

Rams fans are harboring this odd illusion that Kroenke cares one way or another what St. Louis takes as its next step. The Rams are allowed to break their lease on the Edward Jones Dome on a year-to-year basis as of the end of last season. Would the enormous financial commitment of a new stadium by the region make any difference whatsoever? Kroenke has not initiated any talk or discussion with city officials in St. Louis. Instead, he spent last week presenting detailed schematic plans for his "shovel-ready" Inglewood project to an NFL ownership group that calls itself the Committee on Los Angeles Opportunities.

The front man for St. Louis' stadium "task force," and for a $998 million riverfront building proposal that is not, repeat not, a billion dollars, is former Anheuser-Busch president Dave Peacock. He's been making the media rounds lately, including a stop into the television broadcasting booth of a Cardinals game earlier this week. "The only thing that can get in our way is ourselves, as a region," said Peacock, speaking for other people's money. The certainly-altruistic Peacock is also in the running to take over an expansion Major League Soccer franchise, which could theoretically be housed in the new riverfront facility. Peacock doesn't point out that St. Louis' current facility for American football is already much newer and superior to the ones that house either the San Diego Chargers or Oakland Raiders, the two other organizations angling to claim all or a part of Los Angeles, and it's also worth noting that MLS, since 1999, has been steering its franchises into soccer-specific stadiums tailor-made for their sport and with smaller capacities than the one being proposed in St. Louis for the National Football League.

With other teams acting as suitors for Los Angeles, Peacock seems to believe that the NFL could impose its will on Kroenke if St. Louis delivers the Rams a new facility, but the league can't even defend a four-game suspension for slightly-deflated footballs. Are league owners, through their proxy, Commissioner Roger Goodell, going to deny the first man in two decades to deliver them the Los Angeles market with the combination of franchise ownership, land ownership, and will? And that, additionally, has almost more money than is humanly imaginable? The league has already been powerless to prevent Kroenke from flouting the league's cross-ownership rules for years-- he owns the NBA's Denver Nuggets and NHL's Colorado Avalanche in clear violation of NFL bylaws-- and the league has never championed St. Louis as a market. It passed the Loo over twice when considering expansion markets prior to the Rams' relocation.

It's well-documented that new stadiums bring a community none of the following: permanent jobs, increased income, increased tax revenue, or increased economic growth. Academia agrees with this assessment in full. The Brookings Institute says that no recent professional sports facility has returned anything close to a reasonable return on investment. The St. Louis case is technically not even the standard sports stadium extortion at this point. Kroenke has not asked St. Louis for a new stadium. A lawsuit over upgrades to the dome landed in arbitration, and the Rams won. Kroenke is now putting his money where his mouth is, and people seem confused. That's because he's not asking for anything, he's just leaving. His personal monument to corporate welfare, to borrow Dave Zirin's phrase about sports stadia, is being constructed eighteen hundred miles west of the point where the Missouri River meets the Mississippi. Figuratively speaking, St. Louis is hand-cuffed to the bed in its underwear, and now apparently some Costanzas are desperate to their days looking at not one-- but two-- NFL stadiums, both of them unpaid for and empty.

posted by CM @ 11:45 AM