Schools Over Stadium loses lawsuit over petition, but plans to start over

Schools Over Stadium has been slowed down, but they aren’t giving up on cutting off the A’s stadium funding in Las Vegas.

This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.

Let’s rewind to September for a moment. The A’s and the state of Nevada pushed ahead with plans for a publicly financed stadium, and the state’s educators pushed back with the filing of a petition meant to cut off said public finances. The plan was to get the petition its required signatures and put it on the ballot in 2024, so that the citizens of Nevada could decide if they wanted their tax dollars to go towards yet another new stadium, or if those funds should instead be put toward anything else. Like, say, the educational system that desperately needed them.

I wrote about that issue at Baseball Prospectus (no subscription required) after speaking with the Nevada State Educators Association:

Continue reading “Schools Over Stadium loses lawsuit over petition, but plans to start over”

Notes: Orioles’ new lease, A’s stadium supporters sue, Brewers, Royals updates

Just some Friday notes on the billions, plural, in public funding for a few MLB teams that are currently being discussed or handed out.

This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.

The Orioles have a new 30-year lease with the city of Baltimore to keep playing in Camden Yards. It should have been a pretty open-shut acceptance months and months ago, since the Orioles receive a $600 million public subsidy that’s already been set aside for them by signing said lease, all to be put toward stadium renovations, but team owner John Angelos has been a nuisance for at least that long, holding up a deal in attempts to acquire land, for free, that wasn’t available. All so the Orioles could build a Battery-esque space around Camden that they could profit from, just like the Braves.

Continue reading “Notes: Orioles’ new lease, A’s stadium supporters sue, Brewers, Royals updates”

Notes: MiLB lawsuit, Rob Manfred’s lies, Nevada educators

Another win for the latest suit against MLB, Manfred calls someone else a liar, and more on Schools Over Stadiums.

This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.

Earlier in September, a judge in New York state’s highest civil court declared that the lawsuits of the Tri-City Valley Cats and the Norwich Sea Unicorns, both former Minor League Baseball affiliate clubs, can proceed to trial in November. This was a significant victory for them, as Evan Drellich detailed at The Athletic, as Major League Baseball wanted to have the suits dismissed: not settled, but just gone.

Drellich, later in the month, tweeted out part of the transcript from the virtual meeting between the two sides, where the judge was “not having any of” MLB’s pleas for a delay in the trial — if the trial had to happen, MLB wanted to keep pushing it off as long as possible. From the sounds of it, though, the judge believes this should all proceed, which is good news for a few reasons. Most promising of which is that, the longer MLB’s antitrust exemption stays in the spotlight and looks like it does more harm than good, the better.

Continue reading “Notes: MiLB lawsuit, Rob Manfred’s lies, Nevada educators”

The Rays are staying in St. Petersburg, for 600 million reasons

A stadium in St. Petersburg is unsustainable for the Rays, unless someone writes a check for $600 million, anyway.

This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.

The whole saga of the Tampa Bay Rays has been something, hasn’t it? It feels like they’ve been trying to move out of the area they call home — or at least out of St. Petersburg, where they actually play their games — since they got there. To be fair, there are loads of problems with their current arrangement. Tropicana Field, as I’ve said many times in the past, reminds me of a rec center where I used to play indoor softball in the winter — that’s great for the rec center, less so for the Major League Baseball team that has to play in that setting. And St. Pete is considerably smaller than Tampa, with just under 260,000 residents compared to Tampa’s nearly 400,000.

Continue reading “The Rays are staying in St. Petersburg, for 600 million reasons”