Ballpark boosters out in left field
Pro baseball is not and never will be a prime attraction in Santa Fe.
There’s never been a better title for a book about baseball than The Boys of Summer. With it, author Roger Kahn stirred emotions about the bond between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the borough where the team played before it bolted to Los Angeles for a new ballpark and valuable real estate.
After the Dodgers moved west in 1958, owners of other professional sports teams realized they could extort cities to enrich themselves. Never is corporate welfare so popular as when a team wants a new stadium and pits cities against one another to get it.
At the highest level of football, the NFL, Indianapolis stole the Colts from Baltimore. Jilted and ruthless, Baltimore took the Browns from Cleveland, then renamed the team the Ravens. Cleveland built a new stadium with luxury boxes to land an expansion team. And, just last year, the Rams fled St. Louis for Los Angeles. These same Rams had moved to St. Louis from Anaheim, Calif., in 1995.
I could go on, but you get the idea. Team owners who want a publicly financed stadium to make more money for themselves don’t care about loyalty to cities or fans.
Santa Fe is not a major sports town, but it’s still susceptible to stadium lunacy. People at the grass-roots level and one with a column are calling for a highdollar ballpark to hold on to a low-tier baseball team. They say public money should be spent to either build a new stadium or remake Fort Marcy Ballpark to keep the Santa Fe Fuego from moving.
This is a trap. Team owners know that ballparks aren’t profitable if they have to build and maintain them, so they pressure taxpayers to cover the costs and absorb the losses. Pompoms waving, boosters rally to the owners’ cause. They say a new stadium would improve the community’s quality of life and the economy while keeping the ball club in town.
This is another trap. Building a stadium or ballpark doesn’t help a city’s economy outside of the construction phase. After the opening-day ribbon is cut to great fanfare, taxpayers usually spend 30 years paying off debt on a stadium that will be used only a few weeks or months a year. Ongoing maintenance and operational expenses add to the burden.
The Fuego is a niche entertainment option in a city with a celebrated opera, galleries galore and summers filled with concerts and art festivals. The team also is small-time in the world of sports, a fact that its loudest boosters choose to ignore when pitching a publicly financed ballpark. The Fuego has no affiliation with either the major or minor leagues. It’s part of an obscure league that has franchises in outposts such as Alamogordo and Trinidad, Colo.
Having a baseball team in town is fine as long as the club doesn’t reach into the taxpayers’ pocket. But if we see a time when the Fuego demand a better ballpark than the one at Fort Marcy, the team has two choices: It can spend its own money for new digs or it can leave town.
Santa Fe, with an understaffed police force, weedy public parks and bumpy roads, has more important needs than a ballpark. Still, city politicians may feel pressure to build a ballpark at taxpayer expense. Teams are skilled at drumming up public support for stadiums by overstating their economic value to a city.
Twenty years ago, I covered the campaign by the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Pittsburgh Pirates to secure new, publicly financed stadiums. Both prevailed, thanks to plenty of political dealmaking after voters rejected a sales-tax increase to finance two stadiums.
Art Rooney II, the Steelers owner, proudly told me his team employs 2,000 people on game days. He didn’t mention that the Steelers only play 10 to 12 home games a year, depending on whether they make the playoffs. Most of the jobs at his $300 million stadium are lowpaying — people staffing concession stands, ticket booths and gateways. It’s no wonder that economists call the boom in professional playpens “the stadium racket.”
As for the advocates of a new stadium in Santa Fe, they might see the Fuego as a hometown version of The Boys of Summer. But pro baseball is not and never will be a prime attraction in Santa Fe.
They have floated their trial balloon. It’s time to shoot it down. A ballpark to accommodate a private enterprise should be rock bottom on Santa Fe’s list of what’s important.