Even winning bidder surprised city rejected Double-A offer
Complacency turns bid into a wild pitch
Ottawa might have lost out on a Double-A baseball team because everyone assumed it was such a lock they didn’t have to work hard for it.
City council’s finance committee was to vote on Tuesday on leasing Ottawa Stadium, which was built for the TripleA Ottawa Lynx, to an ownerless team in an independent league, which its staff say is the best of the available options.
Ottawa wanted a minorleague team affiliated with a major-league club, a 20-year lease, a renovation plan and a scheme for sharing the costs and proceeds. And it could have that, but at a steep price: $40 million of public money to revamp the stadium up front, and ongoing public payments to keep the stadium up. That’s what a group led by Mandalay Baseball, which owns or operates numerous teams in numerous leagues, says it’s willing to go for, in exchange for a Double-A baseball team in the Eastern League, expected to be affiliated with the Toronto Blue Jays.
Instead, with Mayor Jim Watson’s blessing, city staff are recommending a much smaller, much less risky option: a $750,000 refit and a $400,000-a-year cost to keep the stadium up to to the standards of the Can-Am League, an independent, unaffiliated league generally considered to play the equivalent of Single-A ball. A league that failed here after one season in 2008.
The money for the Mandalay plan would have underwritten a major upgrade to the Coventry Road stadium to turn it into an entertainment centre going far beyond baseball, a place a bit more akin to the Canadian Tire Centre but closer to downtown and a short walk from the planned light-rail line, with a sports bar and amusements you might go to even if there’s no game that night.
Coun. Rick Chiarelli, who’s been pushing for the return of baseball for years, still likes the sound of that.
“People come out of a Mandalay team’s game and they don’t know what the score was. ... They know who won, but they don’t know what the score was, they were having such a good time with the rest of it,” Chiarelli said.
It’s more or less what Ottawans were led to expect when the city threw out two years of negotiations with potential team owners and started over: The fix was pretty much in for Mandalay, but the city, made wiser by its experience with Lansdowne Park, held a public bidding process just to make sure.
The result was the $40-million price tag for Mandalay’s plans, which, Chiarelli said, is just too rich for Ottawa’s politicians, even though Mandalay might have gone for a less ambitious renovation, or work staged over years, if only the city had asked.
Mandalay isn’t saying. Its New York-based president Art Matin declined an interview Monday.
The city billed the search as a request for potential occupants’ “best offers to lease” the stadium, which sounds pretty definitive and final, but the formal documentation for potential bidders made it clear that the bids were anything but. The city could take or leave any offer, call two offers a tie and play the bidders off against each other, have city council decide among multiple options, or “enter into negotiations with any or all Respondents on any or all aspects of their Offers, to ensure best value and that the City’s requirements will be met.”
In other words, Mandalay could be forgiven for thinking it had the inside track, that the bidding was just a formality, and that the details could be sorted out later.
Unfortunately, agreeing to Mandalay’s bid would have required politicians, who had been told that $30 million was as much as anybody had even talked about having the city spend, to vote for a bid $10 million more expensive than that, and for a team that wouldn’t start playing till 2015, which is after the next election.
‘I think Mandalay overplayed its hand a bit. They probably thought we had no choice but to take their bid.’
COUN. RICK CHIARELLI Discussing Mandalay’s bid
“I think Mandalay overplayed its hand a bit. They probably thought we had no choice but to take their bid,” Chiarelli said. “While their offer would probably net out the best result for taxpayers, it has more risk.”
Even the Can-Am people didn’t expect what happened.
“We were surprised and pleased when the nod came to us,” said league commissioner Miles Wolff from his office in Durham, N.C. “Everything seemed to point to the Eastern League was going to get it.”
The Can-Am League intends to own and manage the team itself until it can find local owners; winning the bidding seemed like such a long shot that the league hasn’t even looked for anyone who wants to up take the franchise.
Wolff hasn’t had deep conversations about why his group is more attractive to the city than Mandalay’s, but his understanding is the same as Chiarelli’s: “My feeling is the $40 million was a lot for the city to swallow.”
The league has a “good product” that’s good value, Wolff said, and it includes former major-league players and youngsters with big dreams. Good players don’t instantly get sucked up to play for higher-level teams, either. “We make our own stars.”
An Ottawa team would be the Can-Am League’s sixth, though the other five aren’t exactly stable — there were eight when Ottawa last had a team in the league and two of the existing five have been started since 2010. Last year they started playing occasional games against another independent league with teams mainly in the U.S. Midwest and Texas to fill each team’s schedule out to 100 games a season; affiliated minor leagues typically play 140.
Chiarelli frets that the Can-Am League won’t survive. Wolff said that’s not a thing to worry about.
“He’s right we’ve had some instability. But right now, for 2015, we’re optimistic that Montreal will come in with us,” Wolff said. Quebec City already has a team and the prospect of being able to sell Montrealers on a rivalry with nearby Ottawa, too, is appealing.