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Field of Schemes: How the Great Stadium Swindle Turns Public Money into Private Profit by Joanna Cagan and Neil deMause. Common Courage Press 1998; 226 pp.

What could be more wholesome than America’s love for sports? Whether it’s football, basketball, hockey or the great national pastime, baseball, millions of Americans find camaraderie, recreation and an exciting diversion in the spirit of friendly competition that these games exemplify. Sports also provide our youth with positive role models promoting fitness, service to community, and teamwork.

If that’s the impression of sports that you’ve always had, then reading Field of Schemes will shock and anger you. The sad truth is that the sports we love have become little more than another commodity, driven by commitment not to the fans’ enjoyment, but to the team owners’ bottom line. Nowhere is this more evident than in the expanded use of public funds to build new, expensive and, above all, unnecessary stadiums to placate greedy owners.

This compelling book, the authors of which are both established journalists within the leftist press as well as self-proclaimed baseball fanatics, is sure to provoke outrage among sports enthusiasts and non-enthusiasts alike. On one level, it is a heartbreaking chronicle of how corporate greed has forced its way into one of our last cultural refuges and thoroughly corrupted it in the pursuit of increased profits. DiMaggio may have only recently passed on, but the bygone days that his career symbolized, of a sports world where the fans are king, died decades ago.

On another level, the book is a precise, well-documented account of how the evolution of sports, from innocent leisure activity of the masses to dollar-driven industry controlled by billionaires and faceless corporations, has taken an added turn in recent years to cash in on the corporate welfare craze. Since the late 1980s, new professional sports stadiums and arenas have been popping up like crabgrass in cities and suburbs across the country as wily team owners have devised creative methods for raiding the public coffers.

The scenario has become so formulated that Cagan and deMause even prescribe six easy steps that professional team owners invariably take in extorting public subsidies for their projects. These steps, outlined in a chapter called “The Art of the Steal,” include whining that the current stadium is obsolete or even too old and decrepit to host a serious sports team, blackmailing the city by threatening to pack up and move to greener pastures if the team’s demands aren’t met, and commissioning “consultants’ reports” (often at taxpayer expense) to present poorly substantiated claims about the numerous economic benefits a new stadium will bestow on the community. Readers who have followed the recent overtures by D.C.’s mayor and city council to attract Major League Baseball back to the District (E. Lipton, “D.C. Bid for Baseball in Full Swing,” Washington Post, Feb. 24, 1999, p. B3) will recognize many of the same ploys being invoked by our public officials.

Indeed, Field of Schemes is particularly relevant to D.C. residents and activists at this point in time because of our own impending stadium scam. Among the book’s pages, one will find highly useful information on how team owners routinely use hidden public subsidies to fund new stadiums while simultaneously claiming that the public is not paying. Surcharges on tickets, as well as vendor and restaurant sales taxes, are common. Personal seat licenses, or PSLs, are a relatively new form of bilking the public. With PSLs, fans are convinced to accept condominium-style ownership of stadium seats, whereby they pay thousands of dollars for multi-season reservations. In reality, most fans end up paying far more in the long run than they normally would for tickets, and are often left with ownership rights of diminishing worth should they want to sell when the team hits a slump or moves to another stadium.

In addition, stadiums, like other private development, are increasingly taking advantage of “tax increment financing” schemes, or TIFs, in which the city fronts public money for private development on the promise of repayment from anticipated sales tax revenue from the project. If the expected revenue stream comes up short, the public is left holding the bag. Financing stadiums by issuing bonds backed up by the public treasury is another risky venture that puts public money in jeopardy to promote private development.

Selling naming rights, while not exactly a public payment, is nonetheless a lucrative income source for the owners that minimizes their out-of-pocket expenses while adding yet another reminder to the cityscape of corporate domination over public space. Thus we get facilities with such charming monikers as Pacific Bell Park in San Francisco, TWA Dome in St. Louis, or D.C.’s own MCI Arena.

The truth about who professional sports really exist to serve was made most obvious in 1989 when Joan Kroc, having inherited the San Diego Padres from her late husband, McDonalds founder Ray Kroc, decided to donate the team to the city itself. Major League Baseball, however, refused to allow it, because true public ownership of a team would mean that the League’s financial books would be open to public scrutiny. (The authors wryly suggest that an honest rendering of who controls the sports industry would give us teams like the Steinbrenner Yankees, the Turner Braves, etc.)

Tax loopholes are another way in which the public pays for stadiums. For instance, the Cleveland Teachers Union, angered over tax abatements granted to Jacobs Field (recently built for the Cleveland Indians using public funds, and currently being touted by D.C. officials as a model for our new stadium) did a study that found more than $3.5 million in 1995 alone that city schools lost to stadium tax breaks. Corporate skyboxes and luxury suites, which are increasingly taking over space within new stadiums, are really stealth subsidies from the public because these are often used by their clients as tax write-offs, thus depriving the treasury of funds it might otherwise collect.

And for all that the public is forced to give away to the team owners, it gets little in return, as the new stadium designs make the action inside far less accessible than it was in the older stadiums. The farthest bleachers in many now-demolished facilities, like Tiger Stadium in Detroit and old Comiskey Park in Chicago, were closer to the field than the closest seats in many new stadiums. This is because new stadiums prefer to devote prime space to corporate luxury suites, amenities for the media, and high-priced concession services, areas in which the bulk of sports profits are made these days. And of course, the seats that are left for the regular fans are so expensive that many can’t even get inside the gate.

Field of Schemes is an excellent resource for activists getting ready to fight the battle of budget priorities here on our own turf in D.C. The District’s inner-city neighborhoods are about to be assaulted with stadiums, parking lots, “intermodal transportation centers,” convention centers, and various other entertainment and tourist facilities designed to move out residents and move in fast cash for developers. The attitude of the forces we’re up against is perhaps best exemplified by the quote cited in the book from Baltimore Ravens owner Art Modell: “The pride and presence of a professional football team is far more important than 30 libraries.” If you beg to differ, then pick up this book, read it, and act on it.

Field of Schemes can be ordered from Common Courage Press, Box 702, Monroe, ME 04951. Phone: 207-525-0900; Fax: 207-525-3068; comcour@agate.net Also check out the authors’ website www.fieldofschemes.com for book orders, the latest stadium swindle news, and to email the authors directly.

Steve Donkin is a member of the Green Party of D.C. and can be reached at (202) 986-9438 for information on beginning efforts to oppose the new D.C. stadium.

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