Say no to publicly funded stadiums

March 6, 9:57 PMSan Diego Padres ExaminerJudson Green

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Owners should pay the majority of the costs, not taxpayers.

After the 1998 season, owner John Moores attempted to resign ace Kevin Brown, who had helped lead the Padres to their second NL Championship. But he found his pockets no match for the larger market Los Angeles Dodgers. Brown signed with the Dodgers for seven years, $105 million. Moores pleaded his case to Padres fans, saying the team needed a new, baseball only park to generate the necessary revenue to compete with the large market teams. Furthermore, the park would improve the economy in downtown San Diego by encouraging development and consumer interest in the area.

In Moores's defense, he did up the payroll. I adjusted for 'baseball inflation', using the median payroll each year from 1999-2008, to create a 'real payroll' for the Padres. From 1999-2003, the pre-Petco years, the Padres' average real payroll was $62,361,632. From 2004-2008, it was $70,688,382. That is more than a 13% increase.

But that is a far cry from competing financially with large market teams, and the truth is, it was never going to happen. New stadiums just don't have that power. When Moores pushed for a new park to be paid for mostly by taxpayers, he knew it would not transform the Padres into a large market club. With the voting public still frustrated over the Padres losses during the 1998 off-season, and convinced market inequalities were responsible, it was easy to convince them to foot the bill.

Don't get me wrong, I think Petco is a terrific park. And aside from the upcoming season, where cutbacks have been caused by the recession and Moores's divorce, it has generated some extra revenue that Moores has been able to invest in the team. But when it comes to ballparks, the owner has to bear the burden of the cost. Because taxpayers get almost nothing out of their investment.

That's right. The boost to the downtown economy is a myth, at least according to the arguments put forth by Baseball Prospectus in a chapter titled Are New Stadiums a Good Deal? from their book, Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About the Game is Wrong. In a baseball-only park, the stadium is vacant 284 days out of the year. Studies of the impact of Jacobs Field (now Progressive Field) on Cleveland by the Plain Dealer and the Kingdome (which has since been torn down to make room for Safeco Field) on Seattle by economist Robert Baade showed minimal effect by the park. When the ballgames aren't going, the surrounding area is rather drab.

San Diego taxpayers were hit with the majority of the cost, but John Moores was the one who truly profited. It happened before Petco, and it has happened since. I offer this as a cautionary tale for Chargers fans. Much has been devoted to the threat that the Chargers will move to Los Angeles if they do not receive a new, state-of-the-art, football stadium. In economic times like these, such threats are fairly idle, but they will resurface. Chargers fans need to put their foot down where Padres fans failed to. They need to demand that Alex Spanos bear the burden for the new stadium's costs. When it comes to new stadiums, that should always fall to the person or group who stands to profit most.

Addendum: In the interest of fairness and accuracy, I should mention that several comments below have brought to my attention that the new Chargers stadium will indeed be privately funded. This was my mistake in not uncovering this vital piece of information. Ironically, I spent quite a bit of time researching this article, but somehow neglected that part. I will point out that the focus of the article was not on the Chargers' new digs, but on the mistake the Padres fans made in agreeing to publicly fund Petco Park (which is the spelling used in the Union-Tribune and pretty much every other paper I've read, so I'll continue to use it here), an argument I will stand behind. The segue into the brief part on the Chargers' new stadium was merely an attempt to give the article relevance, rather than have it seem pointless complaining about a dead issue. At this, it seems I failed, though I would hope I might encourage fans who actually do find themselves in the situation of being asked for a publicly funded stadium to reject that request thoroughly. Thank you all for the corrections.