Free Friday: On the Road Again
Hi from Ottawa, Kansas! Spent the morning here at the Conference for Baseball in Literature and Culture, which is great fun. Lots of great baseball talk. Steve Lyons told some fun stories. Good time had by all; put it on your schedule for next year if you like just geeking out on baseball.
And it sparked a few thoughts to share:
The Royals’ Disastrous Stadium Campaign
OK, look, we try not to get political here. But, you know, if you’re putting together a campaign to build a new downtown baseball stadium in a city where the team already plays in a beloved stadium that, for pure baseball watching, can match any park in the world, maybe, just maybe, you don’t want to hire the guy who was national political director for Ron DeSantis’ “presidential campaign.”
Or maybe that’s just me.
No word on if the Royals then hired Boeing to handle quality control.
When I first heard about the Royals’ plan for building a new downtown stadium, I honestly thought it had a chance. The pitch seemed to be that:
(A) The team would be paying the vast majority of the money.
(B) They were asking for the extension of an already existing tax, which seems a bit less of a burden.
(C) Kauffman Stadium, while beloved and still beautiful, is structurally falling apart, and they would find independent experts who would conclude, as the team has, that a move from Kauffman Stadium is inevitable.
(D) The goal was to keep Kansas City moving forward as one of America’s great cities. People in Kansas City have proven eager to build on the city’s momentum. I am, at this moment, sitting in Kansas City’s beautiful new airport. A gorgeous new downtown stadium is something for people in town to dream about.
Now, there are holes to punch in each one of these points, and I always knew it would be a challenge to convince people in Kansas City to get excited about a new baseball stadium… and, let’s be honest, it hasn’t helped that the Royals have stunk for years. But I thought there was a case to be made, and if done in the right spirit, the vote had a chance. Early polling, from what I’m told, suggested that I was right; people were at least open to being convinced.
The Royals then put together a plan and campaign so bad, so astonishingly terrible, that I’m not even sure what they were hoping would happen. Their plan seemed to be, “Give us this money, because it will be great if you did, and if you don’t, we might move the team, though we’d never say that out loud, and also we don’t exactly know what the stadium will be or how it will work, but you can imagine it, right? Also, to be clear, give us this money because it will be great if you did, and also, not that we’d mention it, but, yeah, we could move the team, maybe, you know, not saying that we would, or even could, but just give us this money.”
The Royals (and Chiefs, who sort of put one foot into this campaign) outspent the opposition by more than 20 to 1. And what did they spend that money on? No idea. As far as I could tell, nobody had any idea what the plan even was. For example, look, I don’t know if Kauffman Stadium will structurally be a viable venue in a decade. I don’t know because, even though it is the singularly most important factor here, the campaign never made a powerful case one way or the other.
They never explained what a new stadium would actually mean for anybody. They never fully explained how much the team would be paying. They made implied threats, and while no place takes such things well, Kansas City seems to me to be the LAST place you’d want to make implied threats.
The final vote was 58-42 against. Maybe if they’d spent a little more money and time on the campaign, they could have gotten Kansas City to vote against the Royals even being allowed to stay.
Happy Friday! Our Friday posts are free so everyone can enjoy them. Just a reminder that Joe Blogs is a reader-supported newsletter, and I’d love and appreciate your support.
Talking Byes
One of the talks of this baseball conference—somewhat surprisingly to me—was the question of whether the best MLB teams in each league should get byes or whether that hurts their chances. Joc Collins from Carson-Newman University (who admits right up front that he’s a huge Braves fan) put together a little statistical overview of the first two playoff years with first-round byes, built around what we already know:
2022 teams with byes:
NL No. 1 seed Los Angeles Dodgers (lost to the Padres 3-1)
NL No. 2 seed Atlanta Braves (lost to the Phillies 3-1)
AL No. 1 seed Houston Astros (beat the Mariners 3-0)
AL No. 2 seed New York Yankees (beat the Guardians 3-2)
2023 teams with byes:
NL No. 1 seed Atlanta Braves (lost to Phillies 3-1)
NL No. 2 seed Los Angeles Dodgers (lost to Diamondbacks 3-0)
AL No. 1 seed Baltimore Orioles (lost to Rangers 3-0)
AL No. 2 seed Houston Astros (beat the Twins 3-1)
Now, yes, all of this can be easily explained by small sample sizes and the quirks of short series in baseball.
But seeing how passionately Joc spoke about this—and I heard about byes from several other people at the symposium—I was reminded that talking about small sample sizes does miss at least part of the point. Because, for the Dodgers and Braves and their fans, this isn’t about small sample sizes. This is about TWO FULL YEARS of their lives, years when those teams each won 65% of their games, despite all the injuries and slumps and bad breaks that a 162-game baseball season contains. It just feels wrong to be that good over that many games, only to have your season end because some team that probably had no business making the playoffs in the first place gets hot and takes three out of five from you.
Joc tried to put some statistics together to make some sense of it, which I appreciate, since, as he said, he’s a hurt Braves fan. But I suspect that’s a dead end. It is our instinct as human beings to create order out of randomness, to place meaning in coincidence, to invent reasons for things we can’t really explain. Maybe the bye team gets rusty! Maybe the team that doesn’t get the bye has the momentum! Maybe the top teams expend too much energy winning games in the regular season!
We can do this all day, because, as Bill James says, we are all proficient at BS.
Is there anything to any of those arguments, though? No idea.
I will say to the people who don’t like byes that you can take some consolation in this: I imagine if we have another year like 2023, where three out of the four bye teams lose, that something will be done. The byes will go away. They’re going away eventually, anyway; in my view, MLB will not stop expanding the playoffs until there are 16 teams.
Hey, if you feel like it, I’d love if you’d share this post with your friends!
Could this MLB uniform thing get any more embarrassing?
The Athletic reports that Nike has “isolated the issue” of baseball players sweating through their uniforms like Albert Brooks in “Broadcast News,” and, not to worry, they are “testing different options to lessen the moisture-related aesthetic color differences.”
Who writes this stuff? Moisture-related aesthetic color differences?
I don’t need to tell you how bad these see-through, sweat-through, mismatched, bottom-of-the-eye-chart-lettered uniforms are. It’s everywhere. As usual, MLB has managed to get more people talking about something embarrassing rather than, I don’t know… Mookie Betts, anyone?
The thing that blows my mind, however, is how blasé MLB seems to be about it all. Their stock answer to all this seems to be not, “Hey, we see the problem, and we’re going to make sure it gets fixed,” but “Um, Nike did it! Talk to Nike! Oh, and we love Nike, by the way! They’re the best!”
The feeling seems to be that MLB doesn’t want to do anything that might cause any waves with their Nike and Fanatics partnerships. I get that, sort of, but, I mean, this is Major League Baseball, for crying out loud. Fix the uniforms. Let’s go.
… And the Rest
I have some thoughts on the Oakland/Sacramento/Las Vegas situation/fiasco… and some thoughts about the Dodgers allegedly bullying a fan to return Shohei Ohtani’s first home run ball as a Dodger for a couple of souvenirs (estimated open market value: $100,000)… but you know what? This thing quickly turned out to be so much more of a bummer than I was hoping. I’m not even in a bad mood! It was energizing to be around so many passionate baseball fans the last two weekends, first in Cincinnati for the CASEY Award and then here for the baseball symposium. I’m totally fired up about the new season.
It’s just that, apparently, there’s a lot of annoying stuff happening in baseball right now.
JoeBlogs Week in Review
Monday: No. 9: Tampa Bay Rays and No. 8: Minnesota Twins.
Tuesday: No. 7: Toronto Blue Jays and No. 6: Houston Astros.
Wednesday: No. 5: Seattle Mariners.
Thursday: Baseball from Top to Bottom.
So, a little more about the Royals stadium thing (for anyone who cares) from someone who lives here.
When they launched the campaign, along with a couple of very generic, not well done at all, renderings, in November of 2022.
The "Concrete Cancer" as they called it, was something they did with an in house hired company, the independent study actually found that they would have to move (without significant investment in the stadium) sometime in the next 30-40 years. Notable was the fact that Arrowhead - in the same parking lot, built at the same time, by the same company, with the same concrete, did not show this alleged cancer and the Chiefs did not feel like they had to move. This began a campaign filled to the brim with lies and half truths. Also, a big part of the original proposal was them building, with private funds, a "world class" entertainment district around the ballpark. I immediately said that was a carrot that would disappear, and indeed it did.
Then they came up with 14 possible sites, promising to narrow it down quickly,and have it on last year's April ballot. (Which they moved to November, then this year) They announced, without details, narrowing it down to 5 at the beginning of 2023, in the midst of an off season where they did nothing, assuring that the team would be worse than the previous 97 loss team. (which it was , as they lost 106 games in 2023). Then they added a 6th site in an adjacent county, I guess to put pressure on county officials. In August of last year, they narrowed that down to 2, including the one in the adjacent county., and promised to have a site by September. Which they did not.
There was a push in January and February this year to get it on the ballot in Jackson County before the deadline. The county executive (former Royal Frank White) vetoed it citing the lack of any details or actual agreements with the county and the lack of preparedness and transparency from the Royals. The veto was overridden just before the deadline. Since only one of the sites was there, most thought that meant they had chosen a site. Not so fast my friends! After it got on the ballot, even after early voting had started, the Royals made a final selection to a completely different site, one that would involve displacing many businesses and a church and taking over a road that is heavily trafficked. The only entertainment district was a hotel and apartments, piggy backing on existing entertainment and a pedestrian bridge over a highway (which was already approved before the stadium, with other funds)
They had no details about the rest of the money. No detailed contract with the County. They want the money up front with the county recouping the money over the 40 year period. They had no community bargaining agreement, and still did not when the vote went to ballot. They had the Chiefs (who are interested in having the entire existing site) come up with what they would do with their improvement money, and the Chiefs responded with a rendering in which 90% focused on new amenities for a small portion of the highest priced season ticket holders that would have zero benefits for most fans. Much of their expensive advertising didn't even mention the new stadium, relying on fear tactics about both teams moving. (Not a shock from a Republican campaign manager)
Sherman bumbled his way through this entire process. It was large scale incompetence, and almost as if he wanted to lose. The county has two election boards, one for KC proper, and one for the other parts of Jackson County (suburbs and rural) The vote lost 58% to 42% (rounded) in both areas, so it is not as if they have to placate a certain section of fans. They failed across the board, and they deserved to.
From a Kansas City news report: “As a result of the outcome, the Royals are now being forced to move to Sacramento. Wait, I’m being told that another team is already trying that…”