So Malik build that stadium not just for soccer but for baseball, and make a public for MLB you been rezoned what are you waiting for?
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Then we can blank them out, but we’ve been cursed with NIMBYs, my dad was right they want Raleigh to be a quaint town. At least the older,more conservative white people, and some young folks who think we’ll become q crazy democrat-run city like Chicago or Portland, become a trash town. As for local media they have a audience they know who to serve. So maybe that why they won’t entertainment it the question to my friend who works at channel 11, maybe I can ask him why.
It’s not really feasible to combine a baseball stadium with another full-time sports use anymore. I think the only MLB stadiums that have been shared with another sport were shared with the NFL, but field conditions and seating arrangements are not ideal.
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I tend to agree there might be some more willingness for a partially publicly funded stadium in Raleigh from the general public.
But we’ve seen this before with the prior MLS stadium proposal, Charlotte lawmakers won’t play ball. Would think for a full MLB stadium, there will need to be some state involvement, and I think Charlotte would rather not have a team in NC at all than it not be in Charlotte. Especially if they’re going to be begging for us to let them build a non-Tepper funded Panthers stadium.
I think the local government can get behind it, but won’t we need more? This is where the Charlotte vs Raleigh competition for a team will end with neither getting one.
FWIW I wouldn’t fund 2 stadiums in Charlotte, so either Tepper stops being cheap or I’d rather have a Timbuktu MLB team than a Charlotte one.
I think we could use the hotel and tourism and entertainment tax. That’s our only hurdles we have the rezoning on the way. Malik literally make a bid for MLB, it’s not hard. I don’t just get it with Malik.
I don’t think Malik has nearly enough money to buy a team or pay for a stadium
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Yes- Haven’t looked at the numbers, But I bet an MLB Franchise Fee is an order of magnitude bigger then for an MLS team. Same for a stadium.
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I think the franchise fee would be at least 2 or 3 billion.
MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred has stated that he’s targeting expansion fees in the range of $2.2 billion, which seems realistic given what existing teams are selling for. So that’s a lot of capital you have to stump up. And that’s before you include the cost of a brand new stadium, which will cost at least $1 billion more. And there’s the rub, because much of that money would have to come from the taxpayers.
I can’t speak for anyone other than myself, but I feel like there are at least three different issues being conflated here.
- I personally think the Raleigh-Durham-Cary region can support an MLB team. (It’s important to remember, though, that “Raleigh” can’t support a team, and this reality would very likely be integral to both how the putative team would be branded and where a putative stadium might be located.) In the medium term, Raleigh would be one of the smallest markets in MLB. Your own chart shows that Raleigh’s metro market would be smaller than Pittsburgh and Cincinnati and only slightly bigger than Kansas City and Milwaukee, which are the four smallest metros in baseball. Yes, Raleigh is growing faster than all of these places, but these shifts happen very gradually. But, yes the region is either already at or rapidly approaching the point where an MLB team would be viable here. Fair enough.
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It’s nevertheless quite unlikely that Raleigh will get an MLB expansion franchise because, even if does happen, there will be only two to go around, and there are lots of cities that could also support an MLB team (baseball is not dying and is in fact still quite popular!), and Montreal is widely believed to be the frontrunner for one of those slots. When you read stories about possible MLB expansion written by journalists who write about MLB as a profession, the focus is typically on some combination of Montreal, Portland, Las Vegas, Charlotte and/or Nashville, and Raleigh is rarely mentioned. This is because the people who write about MLB as a profession have a solid grasp of the realities on the ground and report them accurately. But there are simply not enough chairs for every city that could support a viable MLB franchise, so some of those cities will just have to go without. Raleigh will likely be one of them.
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Even if an ownership group does emerge, and MLB is impressed with a bid, a franchise would, without question, be totally dependent on local taxpayers footing the bill for a new stadium. This is the big stumbling block, and it’s one that is noticeably absent from the discussion about whether Raleigh could support a team. The A’s move to Las Vegas is not a done deal because they still need to find $500 million in public money, and that’s actually an unusually small request. Raleigh taxpayers would have to put up at least that much, and probably a lot more, to build a stadium. And since there are mountains and mountains of mountains of economic analysis proving that stadiums do not, in fact, pay for themselves, the difficult tradeoffs don’t just magically vanish and taxpayers would just be on the hook for a massive subsidy for a lucrative for-profit business.
Okay, so let’s have a good faith conversation: Where does Raleigh come up with that money? In an ideal situation, how much of that money comes from asking people, most of whom are not baseball fans, to swallow higher taxes? How much of it comes from cutting budgets for parks or libraries or public safety? How specifically do we plan to raise the added taxes that would be needed? That’s part of what a “good faith” conversation looks like.
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There’s a really interesting point in there about how the team only makes sense if you look at the region as a whole, but the tax burden would pretty much entirely fall on Raleigh/Wake County taxpayers. Compared to a centralized metro area, we’d get stuck with a much higher per-person bill.
It’d be worth it for me, I love baseball and my team is (98% likely) moving so I wouldn’t worry about split loyalties, but it’s a tough sell to the general public.
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MLS was $350 million but they wanted a billionaire in the ownership group.
It may not come to North Carolina all together.
David , I would love to see a current AAA Team city get a MLB team. A Charlotte, Las Vegas, Nashville, Indianapolis,etc. Then see a AAA Team come to a stadium built in DTSouth & rival against The Durham Bulls.
- Maybe you get the Rays and there is no expansion fee.
- Maybe you attract an ownership group that is willing to foot some of the bill.
- Maybe you increase the hospitality tax
- Maybe you tap into the sports betting tax that will surely be passed by the time expansion arrives.
- Maybe you do a combination of the last 3 above. Something like Tennessee just did with the Titans where a portion was paid by the team and a portion was paid by the state.
- Maybe if all of that won’t cover it you propose raising taxes elsewhere and see if people will vote for it.
Look, Nashville and Tennessee just Ok’d a new stadium for the Titans. The bill was $2.1 billion. They found ways to pay for it. And the entire deal is listed here.
This isn’t some unprecedented pipedream. Any place that gets a new team and a new stadium has to figure it out. Charlotte did it with the Panthers. We did it with the Hurricanes. Charlotte is doing it again with MLS. Atlanta did it. San Diego did it. Milwaukee did it. This is simply how it works.
If you think we’re getting MLB without public funding, then you’re crazy. THAT would be unprecedented.
And if that’s a hard no for you, then just come out and say you don’t want baseball here. But don’t beat around the bush, act like you want a team here but also act like getting one is impossible because it will defund the libraries. When I say good-faith conversation, that’s what I mean.
The reason this isn’t our OPENING talking point is because it’s hypothetical and it doesn’t even matter if the data says it’s unviable and the community isn’t even into baseball.
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I know DTRaleigh has an irrational hatred of Charlotte but none of what you said is true. There is almost no chance Charlotte would have gotten an MLS team if Tepper did not buy the Panthers. Prior to Tepper’s purchase, Charlotte only had one semi-serious MLS bid which was submitted by Marcus Smith in 2016, and that quickly fell apart when the county voted against funding their portion and the city council refused to even hold a vote. MLS support from the state level also favored Raleigh over Charlotte, and I don’t know what you’re implying saying that Charlotte lawmakers won’t play ball as the city holds very little influence at the state level and would have almost no effect on Raleigh’s ability to get another professional sports team. I do think Raleigh got shafted by the MLS but it was the result of highly unusual circumstances, not Charlotte trying to undermine Raleigh’s efforts. Fwiw (after Tepper became involved) I think it would have been ideal for both Charlotte and Raleigh to be awarded MLS teams to finally have a professional sports rivalry between the cities.
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https://amp.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article162779123.html
This was the spot. It made so much sense but it required the state government to play ball. I know you’re trying to defend Charlotte on a Raleigh development page at all costs, but people here do remember these types of things. Not all the Charlotte bashing is completely made up.
Saw this today. Doesn’t get into any reason why but just was announced that they are both gone.
Paywalled. What’s the headline at least?
And Steve Malik’s inability to move away from building a stadium on state land when he could’ve went shopping for another space, instead of taking over a year to figure it out. By that time you know who took over.
