Downtown Baseball Stadium

Discussion about new sports facilities in Kansas City
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Cratedigger
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Re: Downtown Baseball Stadium

Post by Cratedigger »

GRID wrote: Fri May 05, 2023 12:29 pm
phuqueue wrote: Fri May 05, 2023 10:02 am It can be hard to notice how bad the area around Kauffman Stadium is when what's going on inside the stadium is so much worse, but uh, good luck with the vote, Sherms. Asking the public for a billion dollars while the team loses 110 games is not what I would have done, but hey, he's the successful businessman, I'm sure it'll all be fine.
If the team were winning then people would just say, they don't need a new stadium because the Royals do just fine with the current one.

I really don't understand what the Royals did though. They were great for 2 years and then right back to being the worst team outside of Oakland who is basically homeless right now. The Astros were getting competitive about the same time the Royals were an they stayed that way for a while.

I just don't now how a team can screw up so bad with all the young players they had. And they were starting to suck even before they lost all their star players.
Not signing/drafting quality young players, missing on a couple of big free agent signings (I'm looking at you, Ian Kennedy), being too sentimental to trade away any of the big names to replenish the team with young and cheap talent have all led to the failures of the past few years.

The good news is that their drafting performance has been better over the past three years, and you're starting to see that trickle up to Kansas City.

I like the coaching that's being done and think the Royals will bounce back, but this start is the most disappointing stretch I've ever watched. Even with a new coach and GM, you still see the same results. Ultimately, the Royals were terrible last year and didn't sign anyone of note, so I guess my expectations of hovering around .500 were just too high.

Now watch them run Aroldis Chapman into the ground and blow his arm out before they can trade him
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wahoowa
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Re: Downtown Baseball Stadium

Post by wahoowa »

really bad coaching in high impact player development fields, too in the handful of years before 2023. need to find those little edges when you aren't going to compete payroll-wise.
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Re: Downtown Baseball Stadium

Post by shinatoo »

I'll be the ray of sunshine.

Pitching is dramatically better than last year, we just can't score runs. However we are in the top 5 in hard-hit balls, but the bottom five in batting average for balls in play. This points to bad luck which will regress to the mean.

The defense has been a problem also. But we have been moving players around like chess pieces. It appears that is settling down (or was until Isbell got injured). Pratto has been playing like a superstar since he was called up.

Do I think they are going to get back to .500, no. But they could play .500 ball the rest of the season.

Seasons young, and players are young. I'm optimistic. Really doesn't look any worse than the 2013 Royals did.

One thing of note is Greinke has played on some of the worst teams in the Royals' history.
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Chris Stritzel
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Re: Downtown Baseball Stadium

Post by Chris Stritzel »

Just my two cents, but building a new ballpark, and surrounding mixed-use district, is a damn good business play to boost the team.

I see it as a way to take revenues generated from rent and additional ticket sales (because even if the team plays poorly, the convenience of a downtown stadium will yield higher ticket sales) and put those revenues towards higher pay for better players and managers. It's a package deal in my book.

Right now, the Royals and Cardinals are in 5th place in their respective divisions with very similar wins-losses numbers. Yet, more Cardinals fans go to Cardinals games and hang around pre- and post-game than Royals fans simply because of what's nearby. In the case of the Royals, why go to a game when there's nothing nearby? Even if your team plays like crap, you can still have a good time with fellow fans and friends. Add in cheaper ticket prices from a slump, and the need not to drive to a game (in STL's case via Metrolink and future KC's case via Streetcar), then the assumption that Royals gameday attendance will be higher is not a "pie in the sky" idea, but rather an implied fact. The team will get revenues from rents and ticket sales and the city/county will get revenue from sales taxes and people who choose to drive and park in city owned garages. All avenues are beneficial to all parties (residents, fans, governments).

Build the downtown ballpark. Watch the improvements to the team happen. I almost guarantee that's what will happen. But voters, and fans, need to have faith in this team.
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Re: Downtown Baseball Stadium

Post by phuqueue »

GRID wrote: Fri May 05, 2023 12:29 pm If the team were winning then people would just say, they don't need a new stadium because the Royals do just fine with the current one.
I don't think this is how most people think. People get invested in successful teams and they stop caring about terrible teams. If you want the public to hand over a billion dollars, it would help for them to care about your team. I think the number of people who would look at a new stadium proposal for an already-good team and think "they're already good, they don't need this" is vanishingly small, because I don't think most people are making their decision based on a calculation of how much better it will make the team. And they shouldn't, because a new stadium is not going to make the team better. Bad teams get new stadiums all the time and stay bad. Good teams open new stadiums and remain good, but they don't really get better than they had been. In the last fifteen years, these teams have gotten new stadiums:

Texas: have yet to post a winning percentage as high as they had the year before their new stadium opened (and that was still a losing season too)
Atlanta: did complete a rebuild the year after their new stadium opened, but then returned to the same level they had been at for the 23 years before that rebuild began, timing seems pretty coincidental
Miami: only one winning season since opening their stadium, and it was the covid season where they finished two games over .500, eight years after their stadium opened
Minnesota: had already been good, had a good first year in the new stadium, then entered a rebuild and have been inconsistent ever since
Mets: six straight losing seasons after opening Citifield
Yankees: were already good, stayed good for a few more years after opening their stadium

Whatever reasons there are to build or not to build, it has nothing to do with the product on the field.
Chris Stritzel wrote: Fri May 05, 2023 7:45 pmRight now, the Royals and Cardinals are in 5th place in their respective divisions with very similar wins-losses numbers. Yet, more Cardinals fans go to Cardinals games and hang around pre- and post-game than Royals fans simply because of what's nearby. In the case of the Royals, why go to a game when there's nothing nearby? Even if your team plays like crap, you can still have a good time with fellow fans and friends. Add in cheaper ticket prices from a slump, and the need not to drive to a game (in STL's case via Metrolink and future KC's case via Streetcar), then the assumption that Royals gameday attendance will be higher is not a "pie in the sky" idea, but rather an implied fact. The team will get revenues from rents and ticket sales and the city/county will get revenue from sales taxes and people who choose to drive and park in city owned garages. All avenues are beneficial to all parties (residents, fans, governments).
More Cardinals fans go to Cardinals games because, April 2023 aside, the Cardinals have been very successful for a very long time. If Busch Stadium were in St. Charles or Alton or wherever, the Cardinals would still draw well because they are a good team. And if the Cardinals play as they have for the past month over an extended period of time -- for years and years on end -- people will stop going to Busch even though it is well-located downtown. Team success is a major confounding variable that is popular to gloss over in this thread but that much more readily explains comparisons between Royals attendance and other cities than stadium location, transit options, nearby amenities, or whatever else.
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Cratedigger
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Re: Downtown Baseball Stadium

Post by Cratedigger »

Another year without any action on legalizing sports betting in MO smh
WoodDraw
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Re: Downtown Baseball Stadium

Post by WoodDraw »

Sports betting is such a hard thing for me. If it were put to a vote, I'd vote to approve it because everyone else has.

I'm not convinced it's a super good thing for society though. At the very least, I'd like to see the advertisements controlled a touch more.

I'm not against blowing money on stupid shit or vices. I was at a casino a few months ago in California and blew a couple hundred dollars, but I went in expecting to lose it because the weather was bad and we were bored. It was entertainment.

I worry about people that have grown up in the casinofication of games that can now just bet on shit from their phone with real money. I'm not a very prudish person, but I'm not sure we've gone down the right path.
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Re: Downtown Baseball Stadium

Post by langosta »

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Last edited by langosta on Mon Aug 07, 2023 2:58 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Downtown Baseball Stadium

Post by Sani »

Sam of Wendover Productions produced an excellent video on the impact of online betting on American sports and goes into details about how it's caused huge problems in Australia. How the Sports Betting Industry Quietly Consumed America
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Re: Downtown Baseball Stadium

Post by Noahfleshman »

Alcohol is just as bad as gambling.
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Cratedigger
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Re: Downtown Baseball Stadium

Post by Cratedigger »

If it was legalized, the Royals would get a % of the revenue
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alejandro46
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Re: Downtown Baseball Stadium

Post by alejandro46 »

I posted this before, but worth a read again about all the lobbying for sports betting in KS and across the state.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/20/busi ... ansas.html

I'm for legalizing it, but it should be better taxed and regulated than what KS did. These companies should not be able to write off all of their "entry promos" as marketing expenses. KS saw way less revenue than expected as per the article.
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FlippantCitizen
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Re: Downtown Baseball Stadium

Post by FlippantCitizen »

WoodDraw wrote: Mon May 08, 2023 5:05 pm Sports betting is such a hard thing for me. If it were put to a vote, I'd vote to approve it because everyone else has.

I'm not convinced it's a super good thing for society though. At the very least, I'd like to see the advertisements controlled a touch more.

I'm not against blowing money on stupid shit or vices. I was at a casino a few months ago in California and blew a couple hundred dollars, but I went in expecting to lose it because the weather was bad and we were bored. It was entertainment.

I worry about people that have grown up in the casinofication of games that can now just bet on shit from their phone with real money. I'm not a very prudish person, but I'm not sure we've gone down the right path.
Legalizing online sports betting just seems to be the direction these days. I also don't really see it as positive though and the advertising for it is out of control. It's not gambling or sports betting per se. It's really about how it gets served up on an app and the way it is aggressively advertised especially to young men. I'm all for everyone being allowed to place a bet but the advertising needs to be banned or restricted ala tobacco and we should think a lot harder about allowing it to happen over an app.

I spent a number of years grinding online poker through grey area off-shore sites, playing in private (illegal) cardrooms in Brooklyn, and making frequent trips to Atlantic City (always stayed away from the sports book though as that was a guaranteed drain on my ROI). I'm not a prude about gambling. Online poker is only legal in six states and just a few years ago it was only legal in two. I used to wish online poker would be relegalized nationally and on some level I still do. But poker is way more niche and was never advertised with the aggression of sports betting to the masses.
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Re: Downtown Baseball Stadium

Post by WoodDraw »

I'd be a lot more comfortable with it for sure if you had to go to a physical sportsbook to place bets.

But all the leagues have gone from like this is evil to inject it straight into me. Not sure there's any going back.

I would ban the betting on random shit too. Like the next play will be a touchdown. That's clearly just encouraging and helping create addictive behavior.
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Re: Downtown Baseball Stadium

Post by FangKC »

If sports betting, or online betting, must exist, make it easy for a spouse to get a quick divorce from the party with no responsibility for their losses or their addiction to it. Non-gambling spouse automatically gets the house and car, all other assets, and custody of kids, on demand. Let's call it "Your Fault Divorce."
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Re: Downtown Baseball Stadium

Post by DaveKCMO »

LOL @ the language around this "wagering". It's gambling. That's why it was illegal until laws changed.

The fact that people want to do it is or that it's a new source of tax revenue irrelevant.
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Re: Downtown Baseball Stadium

Post by Sani »

DaveKCMO wrote: Fri May 12, 2023 7:09 am LOL @ the language around this "wagering". It's gambling. That's why it was illegal until laws changed.
No, no, it's gaming, not gambling. Gambling sounds seedy and morally questionable, but everyone loves to play games!
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Re: Downtown Baseball Stadium

Post by Imarealperson »

DaveKCMO wrote: Fri May 12, 2023 7:09 am LOL @ the language around this "wagering". It's gambling. That's why it was illegal until laws changed.

The fact that people want to do it is or that it's a new source of tax revenue irrelevant.
If gambling is simply gambling, then it’s already legal in MO, right? I’ve been buying scratch off tickets for decades.
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Re: Downtown Baseball Stadium

Post by iamrealz »

Mayor Q is tweeting today about not getting in to regional bidding wars.

https://twitter.com/QuintonLucasKC/stat ... 0099471394
Kansas City and Jackson County have been strong partners for the Kansas City Royals since the team’s inception. Taxpayers from both jurisdictions have invested mightily in the success of the Kansas City Royals franchise.

Having already signed onto a border war truce with our Kansas neighbors, Kansas City will not now engage in an intrastate regional race to the bottom that ultimately does little more than fleecing our taxpayers.

We encourage the Royals to timely resolve the many questions surrounding their future home, so that all involved can speak openly and transparently on any future public involvement.
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Re: Downtown Baseball Stadium

Post by kboish »

It was in response to this tweet from Northlanders taking public their convo with the royals.

https://twitter.com/bryantd23/status/16 ... uP-mZI37zQ


Things are heating up!
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