Ballpark

To get their new ballpark approved, the Tampa Bay Rays made many promises to local students…now that the deal is done, the Rays will just ignore almost all of them.

It has been reported this week that the city has agreed to a community benefits agreement (“CBA”) with the Tampa Bay Rays. In this agreement, the Rays are forced to do little except say that they made efforts to do small things for local citizens. Overall, the CBA has the city giving the team $80M of taxpayer money while the team is promising to give $21M worth of benefits to the city. As the Tampa Monitor wrote about the community benefits agreement, the deal “relies too much on the Rays voluntarily keeping their promises.” Additionally, there is almost “nothing…

Arena Ballpark Stadium

Will news sites ever properly label people who are clearly biased or have an interest in the venue?

Yesterday, I saw an opinion piece in the Sports Business Journal. The point of the piece was just how great the World Cup will make our stadiums look for future events. The article claims that the current stadiums that are hosting World Cup matches shortly are all in top-notch form and can handle any future “World Cup (matches), Super Bowl(s) & specialty events, concerts, and more.” About here is where I started to wonder whether this was an actual opinion piece or essentially an advertisement by a financially biased individual/group. It is the latter. Before we go into that,…