“If there’s one thing the Braves know how to do, it’s how to get money out of taxpayers”
Is building a stadium for the Braves a good deal for anyone but the Braves? By Ira Boudway and Kate Smith Photographs by Matt Eich
Sometime in 2003, when he was
the mayor of Pearl, Miss., Jimmy Foster got a visit from a man he’d never met. The stranger, Tim Bennett, came to City Hall, an old brick schoolhouse on Pearl’s church-lined main street. “He just showed up in my office that day,” says Foster, “and started talking about baseball.” Specifically, Bennett wanted to know if Pearl might be interested in building a stadium for a minor league team.
A ballpark, it turned out, was just the kind of project Foster was looking for. Now 62, with gray hair and a potbelly, Foster, who spent 19 years as a policeman in Pearl before becoming mayor, was desperate to help his hometown shed its reputation as a poor neighbor of Jackson. “There just wasn’t a lot of commercial or retail in town,” he says. “And there wasn’t a lot of money.” The sewers, the streets—it all needed attention. “Having a baseball team in Pearl? That was a pipe dream.”
Nobody had sent Bennett to Pearl. He was working in construction and trying to launch himself as a dealmaker. “I was really a rogue,” he says. Now 47, he came to Mississippi from central Florida, where his father ran a lawn-mowing business. “We grew up in a double-wide trailer with six of us and a bunch of dogs and cats,” he says. “And we cut grass for the right people.” One of the lawns Bennett used to tend belonged to a part-owner of the Tampa Bay Rays, and he learned that the franchise’s Double-A team was looking to move elsewhere.
Bennett had no special fondness for baseball and never played, but he saw a chance to make some money: sell a Southern town on a team, get the Rays on board, and collect a piece of the action. He started in Jackson, the biggest city in Mississippi, which lost its Double-A team in 1999. The city wasn’t interested, however, and the Rays’ affiliate wound up moving to Montgomery, Ala. Bennett, close to broke, needed a new team and a new town. If Jackson wouldn’t listen, maybe Pearl, a scruffy suburb of 26,000 next door, would.
“Pearl was the trailer park capital of Mississippi,” Bennett says, “so that basically means it was the trailer park capital of the world.” He went to Foster’s office in City Hall with a blind offer. Bennett didn’t have a team in mind yet, but he figured if the mayor was willing, he could find one. He left with a handshake agreement. “I’ll handle the politics,” he recalls Foster saying. “You handle the baseball.”
Bennett caught wind that the Atlanta Braves’ Double-A team in Greenville, S.C., was coming to the end of a 20-year lease and potentially in the market for a new home. He saw an opening. In December 2003, with negotiations inching along in Greenville, he persuaded the Braves to let him pitch them on Pearl, only a 50-minute flight from Atlanta and with a mayor eager to make a deal. The Braves liked what they heard. A few weeks later, Foster found himself driving Bennett and John Schuerholz, then the Braves’ general manager, in his pickup truck at night to the acres of swamp near Highway 80, where a ballpark could go.
Over the last 15 years, the Braves have
extracted nearly half a billion in public funds for four new homes, each bigger and more expensive than the last. The crown jewel, backed by $392 million in public funding, is a $722 million, 41,500-seat stadium for the major league club set to open next year in Cobb County, northwest of Atlanta. Before Cobb, the Braves built three minor league parks, working their way up the ladder from Single A to Triple A. In every case, they switched cities, pitting their new host against the old during negotiations. They showered attention on local officials unaccustomed to dealing with a big-league franchise and, in the end, left most of the cost on the public ledger. Says Joel Maxcy, a sports economist at Drexel University: “If there’s one thing the Braves know how to do, it’s how to get money out of taxpayers.”
The Atlanta Braves own most of their minor league farm system, including, along with a Double-A team, the Triple-A team in Gwinnett County, Ga.; the Single-A team in Rome, Ga.; and lower-level teams in Danville, Va., and Lake Buena Vista, Fla. It’s an unusual arrangement. Major League Baseball teams always manage their players at every level, but they usually leave the day-to-day operations of farm teams to independent owners. The Braves prefer more control. “We can create a seamless thread all the way through our system,” says Mike Plant, the team’s president of development. The teams are all named the Braves and wear near-identical uniforms. Even the “Tomahawk Chop” chant is the same from Atlanta to Rome. “We definitely extend that Braves brand through everything we do,” says Plant.
The Braves are similarly methodical about using other people’s money to build their ballparks. In 2001, for example, while trying to persuade Rome to build a $15 million, 5,105-seat stadium for the Single-A Braves, who then played 150 miles south in Macon, the Braves brought local officials to Turner Field for executive dinners and to watch games from the owner’s box. “It was hands down the highlight of my life,” then-Floyd County Manager Kevin Poe says. That November, Rome voters approved a 1¢ sales tax to pay for the stadium by a 142-vote margin.
In those days, the owner’s box belonged to Ted Turner, who bought the team in 1976 and used it to fill out programming on his cable superstation, Turner Broadcasting System. Now that box belongs to John Malone, the billionaire chairman of Liberty Media. Malone and Liberty picked up the Braves for $450 million in 2007 as part of a larger deal with TBS’s parent company, Time Warner. Malone, 75, has been assembling and disassembling media companies for more than 40 years. His dealmaking helped drive the rapid expansion of the cable industry in the U.S., made him a billionaire
eight times over, and earned him a reputation as a master of arcane financial engineering.
Not long after Bennett first visited Pearl’s
City Hall, Foster brought his baseball dreams to the city’s bond attorney and financial adviser. They told him a standalone stadium wouldn’t pay for itself, no matter how you crunched the numbers. Foster was undeterred. He’d been chatting with Bass Pro Shops, the hunting and outdoor retailer, about opening a store in town. So he went to Bass with the idea of building next door to a new stadium. Bass Pro was interested. Early in 2004, Foster and Bennett worked with Plant, the Braves executive, to outline a plan to bring the team and a Bass Pro Shop to Pearl, with the city issuing bonds to pay for both.
For Plant, who was still in talks with Greenville, Pearl’s eagerness for a stadium was a useful bargaining chip. Greenville’s city manager at the time, Jim Bourey, says the Braves were clear about their expectations. “They said, ‘We have a stadium that’s going to be built for us in Pearl, Mississippi,’ ” he recalls. “‘If you’re going to be competitive, you need to build a stadium.’” Greenville scraped together some money to help pay for a new ballpark; the Braves wanted more. On April 1, Greenville and the Braves announced that the coming season would be the team’s last in South Carolina. The next day, Foster stood at a podium at the Mississippi state Capitol in Jackson before a crowd of about 200, by an AP reporter’s estimate. “Ladies and gentlemen, we got ’em,” he said.
A few days later, Plant hosted Foster, Bennett, and a handful of Pearl aldermen at Turner Field in Atlanta to watch the Braves play the New York Mets. They sat in Turner’s personal suite and met the team’s manager, Bobby Cox, and Hall of Fame slugger Hank Aaron. “They really pulled out the red carpet for us,” Foster says.
Under Pearl’s stadium agreement, which Foster closed in a marathon phone session with Bennett and Plant just before the announcement, the city would raise $78 million through a series of bonds, with $28 million set aside to pay for the ballpark. “The whole deal was very much behind closed doors,” says Michael Hotchkiss, a Pearl native, then an editor at the
Clarion-Ledger. “By the time it was public, the whole thing was done.”
The terms span almost 5,000 pages in three dusty blue hardcover books now kept in a windowless backroom at the law offices of Bob Wood, the Pearl bond attorney who worked on the deal. “Unless you were involved in it, you couldn’t know all the ins and outs because it’s a flipping huge book,” says Brad Rogers, Pearl’s current mayor. Rogers, 46, is sitting in the conference room in City Hall. He slowly taps both feet on the floor and drums his finger on the long wood table. After weeks of unanswered phone calls, he agreed to an interview when a reporter showed up unannounced. The bond books for Trustmark Park, as it’s now called, detail, among other things, how Pearl paid Bennett a finder’s fee of more than $1 million, about a fifth of what the town collects each year in property taxes.
Pearl planned to pay back bondholders through more than a half-dozen revenue streams, including a $1 surcharge on every game ticket and half of the sales tax from the Bass Pro Shop. (Bass didn’t respond to requests for comment.) The city also planned to collect $3 or $4 per car for