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                                                                                BUSINESS, Page 50

Build It, and They (Will) MIGHT Come


America's cities play sucker to big-league team owners who look
for taxpayers to finance the fields of their dreams

By RICHARD CORLISS -- With reporting by Cathy Booth/St.
Petersburg and David S. Jackson/San Francisco, with other
bureaus


    The other evening, three guys ran across Candlestick Park
brandishing a bed-sheet sign that read PLEASE DON'T GO! Stung
by the announced sale of the San Francisco Giants to a
consortium representing St. Petersburg, Florida, these three
were exercising the birthright of any sports devotee: impotent
pleading. This was the charge of the night brigade. But the trio
might as well have been riding into the Valley of Death instead
of invading the blustery pasture of America's crankiest ball
park. The people who buy the tickets, whose taxes pay for the
stadiums, who fantasize and fret over their team like anxious
parents -- they are mighty Casey at the bat. All muscle, no
magic. Strike three. You're out. Game's over. The fans fan.

    Fan, of course, is short for fanatic. Nothing else
explains the loyalty, the emotional servitude of otherwise
sensible folks toward a professional sports franchise. Talk to
the proprietors of major league teams and you will hear that
many of the 26 clubs are losing money. With the average player's
salary topping $1 million this year, attendance slumping and TV
revenue due to drop in 1994, the owners seem noble just to stay
in the game, given all that hemorrhaging red ink.

    Perhaps the owners have more mercenary motives. Like going
where the money is. As one of half a dozen owners with a fortune
in excess of a billion dollars, Jack Kent Cooke probably has
enough money now. Cooke owns the N.F.L. champion Washington
Redskins, but like many a Joe Lunchpail, he wants to move to the
suburbs. Move the Redskins, that is, to a rail yard in
Alexandria, Virginia. No matter that Washington doesn't want the
'Skins to leave and Alexandria doesn't want them to come. In a
secret deal whose conspiratorial bravado would have set Boss
Tweed and Mark Hanna drooling, Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder
offered $130 million to construct roads and rail links to a
stadium Cooke would build and own. And Cooke gets to keep all
proceeds from food and parking.

    Some years back, the Virginia Retirement System, a state
pension fund, paid $350 million for these 320 acres of land,
intending to develop it for mixed commercial-residential use.
This is still mixed use: Cooke has use for free land and Wilder
for political glory. Virginians with sharp ears could catch the
sound of a state pocket being picked. Says Congressman Jim
Moran of a plan that would bring the city few economic perks:
"It is a classic case of how not to conduct public policy."
Officials in Washington could only fear that getting Skinned
meant the town would be rubbed off the map. "Brooklyn has never
been the same since the Dodgers left," keened D.C. council
chairman John Wilson, whose own city lost two baseball clubs in
the 1950s. "You don't even think about Brooklyn."

    It is instructive to think about Brooklyn, the borough
that Dodger owner Walter O'Malley abandoned for Los Angeles
after New York City's master builder Robert Moses blocked the
purchase of a crucial piece of land on which O'Malley had
planned to build a stadium. Not since the heady carpetbagging
of the 1950s, when five baseball franchises (including the
Dodgers) deserted multi-team cities to find gold in the West and
South, have owners been so restless. Some get bored and take the
pocket money, as Domino's pizza king Tom Monaghan did last week
when he sold his Detroit Tigers for about $80 million to a rival
pizza pasha, Mike Ilitch of Little Caesars. And some owners just
feel like raising hell. Al Davis, keeper of those movable beasts
the Oakland -- no, the L.A. -- Raiders, flirted shamelessly with
upstate bigwigs who thought he might return to the Bay Area. By
doing so, Davis won a sweeter deal in L.A. He was like a man who
tells his wife he's been cheating on her and expects her to
treat him more lovingly.

    And, poor thing, she does. As long as city and state
governments are willing to play the subservient wife, and pay
for it, owners will take every advantage. Local politicians are
obsessed with having their cities considered "major league."
That means lavish tax breaks, awarding of ancillary revenue and,
increasingly, funding of the team's stadium. No city would erect
a skyscraper and then hand it over gratis to IBM or AT&T. But,
writes Neil J. Sullivan in his book The Diamond Revolution,
"elected officials across the country have fallen all over
themselves to open the public purse to build stadiums that by
every reasonable standard should have been paid for by the ball
clubs that use them."

    The officials will go further. They will follow the advice
given Kevin Costner in the hit movie Field of Dreams: "If you
build it, they will come." St. Petersburg built a field on
nothing but dreams -- and $138 million, mostly from revenue
bonds the voters never got to vote on. Next year, if the
baseball owners approve, the San Francisco Giants will be the
St. Petersburg Giants.

    When St. Petersburg built the Suncoast Dome in 1987, it
aimed to be the first Florida city to attract a major league
baseball team. The recession didn't stanch enthusiasm for the
project. As assistant city manager Rick Dodge notes, in what
sounds like a bow to Clintonomics: "Cities that are coming out
of the recession are cities investing in the future." But this
brave leap seemed to be over a cliff. Three times the majors
took St. Pete to the altar, and three times the town was jilted:
first with the Chicago White Sox, then with a prospective
expansion team that went to Miami, then with the Seattle
Mariners. Says local booster Jack Critchfield: "We've been used
as a nuclear threat to other communities to make them give teams
whatever they want."

    Bob Lurie had become discouraged too. Lurie, who bought
the Giants in 1976 for $8 million, wasn't getting what he
wanted: a new stadium to replace drafty old Candlestick. Four
Bay Area referendums on the new ball park were defeated. By 1987
Lurie was warning that he would "consider anyplace that wants
us." In June he announced that he would accept the first
reasonable offer, and St. Pete's $110 million had the
cash-register ring of logic. Now San Francisco Supervisor Angela
Alioto has unveiled plans for a downtown stadium, and the
players' union is seeking to delay the transfer for at least a
year. But the writing is on the check. It's enough to make St.
Pete officials voice hedged optimism about the underused
stadium. "We just hope history will prove we were visionaries,"
says Councilman Bob Stewart, "and not horses' derrieres." And
San Francisco is as rancorous in losing the Giants as it was
ecstatic at stealing them from New York City 25 years ago.

    It can't be because a major league team brings a town
economic vitality. Although boosters claim the value of a team
cannot be measured solely in dollars, Teresa Serata, San
Francisco's budget director, says she can document only a $3.1
million annual net gain from the Giants; the city's gross
economic product is $30 billion, or 10,000 times as large.
"Opening a branch of Macy's has a greater economic impact," says
Roger Noll, professor of economics at Stanford University.
Besides, discretionary income is easily diverted. If there is
no ball club, citizens will find another way to spend their
discretionary income.

    A city has to work hard to earn money from a ball club,
especially when it spends $580 million (up from an original
estimate of $150 million) on a SkyDome, as Toronto did, or $100
million (up from $23 million) to freshen Yankee Stadium, as New
York City did. But an owner has to work hard to lose money. He
is a member of a most exclusive club -- a monopoly, thanks to
the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1922 ruled baseball exempt
from antitrust legislation and the demands of the open market.
"Major league baseball should have 40 or 50 teams," says Noll,
"not 26 or 28. Then you wouldn't have to give away hundreds of
millions of dollars to get one to relocate."

    Yes, it does cost money to run a team. Players make five
times what they received just 10 years ago. But athletes'
salaries are covered by merchandising, hefty ticket prices and
robust TV income. Even assuming that the owners' closely guarded
books are not cooked, there's still plenty of cash on hand.
"Revenues from these teams have gone up 10% to 15% a year," says
Noll, "and players' salaries are growing at the same rate. Other
costs are rising too, but only at the rate of inflation. It
stands to reason that all the book costs not related to players
are disguised profits."

    Nothing in sport has escalated as fast as the price of a
ball club or a ball park. In 1981, George Argyros, a California
real estate magnate, bought the Seattle Mariners for $13
million. He monitored baseball's worst team for eight years,
then sold it for a $50 million after-tax profit to Jeffrey
Smulyan, a radio-station mogul. This June, Smulyan sold it for
$135 million. That's a tenfold profit in just over a decade for
a product few consumers are buying -- except the next gullible
owner, the next town avid for major league status.

    The result of all this high financing and finagling is a
redistribution, from poor fans to richer ones, of the
baseball-going experience -- jock Reaganism. The luxury boxes
introduced at the Houston Astrodome in 1965 are now a
moneymaking fixture in most parks; the Toronto Blue Jays mint
$35 million a year from leasing Skyboxes -- more dens for the
haves to entertain the other haves. Someday a town might build
a stadium consisting of a thousand skyboxes and six rows of
bleachers. It would suit the owners -- men who seem bent on
making baseball a pursuit to follow on TV -- if you can get
cable and pay-per-view.

    There are good owners and bad ones, smart owners and dull
ones, as in any fraternity. But the bad, smart owners are at
heart corporate raiders, playing with other people's money (not
the stockholders' but the taxpayers'), fleecing the locals and
then fleeing them. Cushioned by the largesse and insecurity of
city administrations that are strapped to pay teachers or
collect the garbage, rich men play the new, high-stakes version
of polo: passing civic assets on to other rich men.

    And the greed goes on. When the baseball diamond is as big
as the Ritz, the real game will not be played between the foul
lines. It will be conducted in boardrooms and back rooms, on the
field of schemes. Franchise swapping will be the richest
established permanent floating crap game in the business world.
It's a no-lose game called Monopoly. And few of the players care
that it means winning ugly.