Sports stadiums are a terrible investment. They sit idle for much of the time, they can take up a huge footprint on valuable land, and it costs a fortune to build the thing up front.
This is why team owners are always trying to figure out ways to have someone else pay for them, or at least a significant part of them. Sometimes you can make a shameless appeal to civic pride and cultural identity and get the whole thing covered by governments who are eager to hop on board. Hello, Quebec City. But more often the move is to wrap the stadium up in a visionary redevelopment: condominiums, office buildings, retail space, restaurants and bars and maybe a transit hub thrown in there. What a great deal for the taxpayers of Suckertown! Oh, yes, there will also be a stadium. As it happens, we also have a sports team that can use it. What luck!
Enter the Toronto Blue Jays. Canada’s only Major League Baseball team, unless the Tampa Bay Rays proceed with their insane plan to move to Montreal for half the year, is said to be in the early stages of departing the once-beloved, now-maligned Rogers Centre. The formerly revolutionary SkyDome, which Rogers bought out of the remainder bin for $25-million in 2004, has long been a bit of a wet firecracker as stadiums go. It lacks the intimacy and charm, not to mention the craft-beer gardens and pedestrian malls, of ballparks that became the trend almost as soon as the concrete dried on the dome. Talk of costly renovations and a new playing surface has finally given way to the realization that it might make more sense to just scrap the building and start fresh.
A report in The Globe and Mail on Friday, citing unnamed sources, says Rogers and a property developer are in discussions with various levels of government on a plan that would see the dome levelled and replaced with a smaller park amid the usual real estate accoutrements. It is a nascent proposal, to say the least. The dome sits on federally owned land, leased until the time when we would theoretically be able to go to a Jays game right after stepping off a return shuttle from Mars. There are already costly civic plans for the area immediately around the Rogers Centre. Those plans aside, how would a massive multi-year construction project work for the residents and business already in the area? And, no small thing: Where would the Blue Jays play while the dome was being turned into Rogers Field? Unless someone has misplaced a baseball stadium I’m not aware of, that’s a tricky one.
But the thing about all those questions is that they might never need answers. The plan leaked to the Globe reads a lot like a trial balloon wrapped in a beta test, if not yet a shakedown. A familiar part of any stadium or arena proposal is that the final version can look nothing like the original concept. The good people of Calgary not that long ago were advised of a grand plan to build a new hockey arena and football stadium while redeveloping a neglected part of town, which would cost something in the billions and for which the public would have to provide many hundreds of millions. After much consternation and public feuding between the city’s leaders and its sports franchises, an entirely different proposal was eventually accepted. Now there was no grand redevelopment of a new area, no football stadium or community field house, but a hockey arena next to the existing arena. And a lot of public money — at least $275-million — but much less than the original ask.
Could a similar scenario play out in Toronto? The specifics might be different but the end result the same: a big and complicated vision gets whittled down into more acceptable parts, and a lot of horse-trading ensues involving cost and land use and eventually a baseball stadium emerges at the end. Maybe it’s next to the Rogers Centre, maybe it’s somewhere else on the waterfront that is presently being imagined for better things.
The thing to remember as the process plays out is that Rogers has a baseball stadium that it already owns, and which it bought, at 15 years old, for less than five per cent of its construction cost. If it wants to replace it, that should be a project that is entirely up to Rogers management and its shareholders. The stadium gambit inevitably includes an appeal to public money to help with up-front costs, or tax breaks on the back end, or sweet land arrangements, or some combination of all three. Sure, that stuff benefits the team owners, but hey: New stadium! Outfield beer garden! Woo!
Already there are probably Blue Jays fans who are dreaming of a PNC Park North or an Oracle Park East — the lovely waterfront stadiums of Pittsburgh and San Francisco — and who would be fine if a few tax dollars went to that instead of filling potholes.
But that’s just the trap that the team owners set. Of course it would be nice if the Blue Jays replaced their fusty old dome. And if they do, the public should be willing to support it in one specific way, and one way only: by buying tickets.
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