It’s been three decades since Baltimore went “all in” on the promise of sports to revitalize a downtown community. Neil deMause of Field of Schemes tells Nestor that this Angelos family money grab and its parity clause benefit to Steve Bisciotti is the same in every city for American sports franchise owners. Socialize the debt; privatize the profit.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
stadium, team, years, orioles, city, yankees, baseball, money, people, happened, camden yards, cleveland, paid, owner, playoffs, baltimore, maryland, giving, win, lose
SPEAKERS
Nestor Aparicio, Neil DeMause
Nestor Aparicio 00:01
Welcome back at wn st Towson, Baltimore and Baltimore positive vibe where my Costas in shirt because we’re gonna be over there selling we’re celebrating continuing our 25th anniversary here. But more than that experience with crabcake towards back out on the road. It’s all presented by our friends at the Maryland lottery restaurant with scratch offs to give away. We had some lucky winners of Coco’s, and we’re gonna be failures this week we’re going to be Papist in Parkville. Next week, we’re going to be all over the place, including a gertrudes celebrating the holidays, a little later on in the month with Dan Rodricks our friends weathernation also 8669 donation, you buy two you get two free all month long through the holidays and Jiffy Lube. MultiCare. Oil up and stop by there, get your oil. I got my little reminder the other day when the orange light went on. I have been knee deep into the stadium thing. Luke and I are doing football the ravens are doing great. There’s all that the Orioles are gonna maybe sign some players maybe not. But the biggest story in the city to me. And if you’ve been listening to me, you know this is the stadium lease that doesn’t just involve the Orioles and involves the ravens, the Ravens aren’t the ones beating on the door asking for money. Steve shot, he will benefit the next ownership would benefit from any of this. This guy covers all of this treachery and filth. His site is called field of schemes. And now it’s not the Halloween season around here. But some of this specific information on what’s going on in other places, colleges, pro states, municipalities, sludge URI that we learn about later on? He is I don’t know how many years, Neil DeMoss. How many years have you been? And like I’d like to know the tipping point of when you got into this business of documenting the Civic rip off that sports has been trying to pull off the last 30 years here in America,
Neil DeMause 01:47
that would have been 19 ot six. I think it’s actually let’s see been 28 years. If you go back to the very first article that Joanna Kagan and I first started researching that, before it turned into the book and the website, what
Nestor Aparicio 02:04
made that happen? What what dirty deal, was it you’re going back 28 years, I’m thinking like I’m just doing the math on this 90 fiber mate. Let me PSL was PSL a part of this. Um,
Neil DeMause 02:15
it was they were they were two things, and it had a lot to do with the fact that I’m from New York and Joanna’s from Cleveland.
Nestor Aparicio 02:23
So, Arthur bimodal was in the middle of we
Neil DeMause 02:27
are both working both working at a little zine in Brooklyn at the time. And Rudy Giuliani man, you may remember was trying to get a new stadium for the Yankees, it was going to be in Manhattan at
Nestor Aparicio 02:38
the time, always the guy on the up and up as we learned later life, at
Neil DeMause 02:41
the same time that he was slashing library budgets. And in Cleveland, right, you had modell, taking the Browns out of town, and you had Cleveland putting up money for a new stadium to get a new brands expansion team. At the same time that the city schools were in receivership. And Joanna and I were like, Oh, this is this is really a fun little 1000 word story, look two cities where it’s going on at the same time. And somewhere in the middle of our research, we, you know, one of us, called the other and said I just had an hour and a half conversation with a state count, you know, state assembly person from Wisconsin. And the other said, I just got a 72 page facts from Seattle. And we’re like, maybe this is a slightly bigger story than just Cleveland, New York. So it was off to the races and I haven’t been able to escape this story. I have to say at the time, you know, we’re talking 19, late 1995. I really thought wow, you know, this is a sort of, we’re catching this weird moment, right? When cities are throwing all this money at sports stadiums. Really, you know, get a strike while the iron is hot and write a book about this. We could have saved our time. Because anytime over the next 28 years, it has not changed one iota and then anything just the numbers are getting bigger and bigger and bigger. As we’re seeing right now.
Nestor Aparicio 04:02
Well, if there is a team, okay, if there’s a team there football, baseball, basketball, hockey, some shenanigans have gone on. I mean, one way or another specifically, because none of this ever really gets paid for privately. It’s you know, it’s a social welfare for billionaires, and then you know, but it’s happening here for the third time in my life, right, like so. I’m 55 Okay, so when I was a little boy, we lost the bullets, right? And the arena wasn’t any good. We never got a hockey team. I’m watching the clippers, and then we’re watching Memorial Stadium sort of rot away and we’re like, Daddy, why does tuck the sensation Don Baylor play for the for the California Angels. That why? What happened? Reggie Jackson. He was here for five minutes. Why is he a Yankee? And then also why does Jim Palmer stay? And then as a 1012 year old kid with baseball I learned about free agency and a strike when I was 1213 years. Oh, then I’m 15. And this drunk batshit football owner takes my dad’s football team in the May flowers to Indianapolis. And then I got a job at the newspaper I was at the newspaper that’s I was 15 years old, 16 years old, working at the paper with John Steadman when all this happened. So if you wonder why I got born into this, or why 32 years later after doing radio I’m still talking about, but this is the first time in a long time that I’m an adult talking about it. Because when I was in my 20s, it was give Baltimore the ball. Let’s get Boogie wineglass. Let’s get the Glazer brothers, let’s find somebody to put it bring a team here. And it turned out to be art modell. And all of her bell grads, crabcakes when you were coming into this, but 30 years now we have these two stadia. They’ve been maintained by the Maryland stadium authority. And what is your understanding from the outside of what’s happening here? Because I feel like you’re on the forefront of trying. This is, this is a big story, but it’s not the only story. They’re not building stadiums here. You’re just giving money to owners as though they’re going to rebuild stadiums. It gets $1.2 billion, a lot of money.
Neil DeMause 06:08
Yeah, I was gonna say Baltimore really is kind of Ground Zero or you know, part of the origin story of all this, right? And you know, the the Mayflower vans are at the start of chapter one of the book, because they, you know, this really is kind of what got the ball rolling in the late 80s. Was, was, you know, the response to the Colts leaving and then and then Camden Yards and the way that happened. There were some others, right? You know, there was skydome in Toronto, there was the Chicago White Sox, it was, you know, it wasn’t only just one one stadium that may that may change. But then what we’re seeing now, right, is that all those teams that got stadiums in the 90s are starting to come back for new stadiums like the Braves did, and like the Rangers did, or for renovations, right. So you’ve got the Orioles. You’ve got the Brewers you’ve got who else is trying to get renovations right now Royals are talking about a new stadium.
Nestor Aparicio 06:58
Well, they got Tampa and Oakland they got in Vegas, they got to figure out to begin with, right.
Neil DeMause 07:02
I’m just saying that it’s like this is the thing right now is you know, Cleveland’s come back time and again, you know, for for for renovation money. And
Nestor Aparicio 07:11
they have a crane in the middle of third base right now in Cleveland baseball. Yeah.
Neil DeMause 07:15
So so yeah. So this is this is absolutely the move, right is it’s been 20 to 30 years, we can start saying, hey, this place is getting old. I mean, stadiums used to last 7080 years, no problem. Nobody thought of it as an issue. Unless, you know, they needed something that was going to be more multipurpose and work for both baseball and football or something. But, but now, you know, it’s gone down to 40 years to 30 years to 20 years, suddenly a stadium is considered, you know, starting to show its age. And, you know, the fact that you’re talking about the Orioles coming back for potentially around a billion dollars in subsidies when you count all of the cash and tax breaks and you know, free land, things like that. Then, you know, that which is I forget what the what the state price tag was on Camden Yards. It was like under 200. Right? There’s Oh, yeah.
Nestor Aparicio 08:11
So yeah, it was it was less than $200 million project. So we’re talking about football stadium was less than 300 at the time, right? So
Neil DeMause 08:17
we’re talking about even if you take into account inflation easily, like triple or quadruple, right, what was put into it in the first place? And this just seems to be the MO right, you know, is it’s not about what you need. It’s as a state as a team owner. It’s not about what the stadium needs in terms of upgrades. It’s what you think you can get away with. And as the dollar figures keep going up, you know, we saw last year, the Buffalo Bills, set a new, you know, standard with a billion dollars in subsidies. And I think everybody at that point, looked around and said, Oh, we’ve only been asking for half a million, we should be asking for closer to a billion because that’s the you know, the price that cities are willing to seize and states are willing to pay now. And, again, I’ve seen these numbers just soar over the last year to where you know, nobody asked for less than half a billion now because that would just be chump change. Whereas again, 30 years ago, even in 19 $95 people were asking for nowhere near that.
Nestor Aparicio 09:18
Near the losses are gaseous field of schemes. What is your professional background? I asked the same question as Tom Kelso last week from the Maryland State he was like What got you into this other than being a guy writing about it being a I don’t know civic watchdog stadium watchdog sports watchdog, billionaire watchdog, which is what I think of you from the outside, but I’m not familiar with what you do the rest of the day besides feel the scheme’s Neil, that
Neil DeMause 09:44
was its you know, sports fan and and journalists interested in city issues and how you know why the city spend on one thing and not another. I came into this not knowing really anything about stadiums other than that the The Yankees had threatened to move to New Jersey at one point. And, you know, both Joanne and I had to really sort of, you know, learn from the ground up and and be like, oh, let’s take a look and see what economists say about about, you know, which deals are better than others? And we would call economists and they would say, Oh, that’s easy. They’re all terrible, right? None of these pay off, then we would be like, let’s see, you know, whether cities or just are just, you know, approving these deals because the populace is demanding it right, because they’re afraid to lose their team, right? That’s the message that’s out there. Right. You know, if you’re a mayor, the worst thing possible is to lose your team. And then we would go and see the people who were actually if anything fighting against it, and we’re like, we don’t want to, you know, we already paid good money for tickets. We don’t want to spend our tax dollars on a stadium to steal I forget if I told you this before, but today, there’s still only one mayor who lost his job after a team left, which was the mayor of Seattle and the Sonics left. And when I’ve talked to people in Seattle, they’re like, yeah, that didn’t help. But really, it was because it snowed right before the election, and he didn’t shovel the streets.
Nestor Aparicio 11:09
Oh, well, yeah, it’s always it’s potholes is I was Wes Moore is an interesting spot here. He has this relationship with a baseball owner. But more than that, to your point, it’s like how much is enough? They went to the legislature, they got them a billion to sort of rubber stamped under the guise, the moral of the legislature I talked to saying, we thought it was outrageous then, but we kind of went along with it. Just saying, okay, it’ll be done with. And there’s a lot of interesting things, and Tom Kelso has educated me and others have educated me along the way. That part of the new verbiage for the Maryland stadium authority that the Ravens agree to and the Orioles kicked the can because they wanted the new governor and the buddy buddy deal. The bigger better deal for John Angelo’s was that the parody clause exists, so whatever one gets the other, and we’ll get right. But the notion that you want to break up the Maryland stadium authority that you want control of the money, and you know, I’m old enough to remember, and I get barky about this, because I’m 55. Now I was, you know, 25 when the stadium opened, and it all went down, and I was in my teens working at the paper, covering all of this every night of my life. I wasn’t reading the newspaper. I was putting it out every night. I was editing it every night. So I knew everything that was going on, that reporters were telling me before I even went on the radio in 92. But the notion that Camden Yards would change our city, that it would be an investment in tourism, the economy, hotels, restaurants, getting people white flight back into the like all of that. It all worked in 92 and 93. It even worked after the strike in 95. It stopped working when a really bad human bought the baseball team and really serve to destroy it. And I look I did 30 ballparks that 30 days and 15 I’ve been in I finally made it to the new Texas ballpark couple of weeks ago when the Orioles played that in Arlington, I’ve been to all of them. I’ve been to all of them many times in many cases. And Camden Yards was the real deal that if we had a baseball team like the Cardinals, or the Red Sox, or just a competitive team, the Tigers just a team that’s been competitive over 30 years and hasn’t lost 100 games a dozen times that it would have been a bigger economic engine. And this is a different story because Washington, the Washington situation we were Washington’s team when the stadium was built and drank in all of that. And Peter got it was forced upon Peter Peter never wanted to agree to any of it still hasn’t paid for any of it, quite frankly, even though he’s usurped the the cable bill for 17 years. But the situation has changed so dramatically here. For the Mojo for the team. There’s a football team in the parking lot. That’s won two championships, the baseball team. Everyone hates the ownership here, right. So it’s not just giving money to Mike Brown or giving money to a rich guy or whatever. This is giving money to the Angelo’s family who has just been awful upon awful upon awful at a time when they want to 100 games that year and still couldn’t sell tickets. But more than that disbanding the Maryland stadium authority and giving power and money, all of this money, literally, to the owners with no oversight should be frightening to people. And I’ll throw it to you with this after my soliloquy. I keep wondering who’s got the idea? The idea this isn’t about the land or the money or the casino, or what’s really going to bring people there. Besides we’re going to win every year because that’s bullshit because they gave me that 9092 And when you don’t win, nobody comes and then blame it on crime, politics, all the Freddie Gray stuff. I mean, this is a real this is a book here in Baltimore as to what’s happened over 30 years with feelings about Brooks Robinson and Cal Ripken to what it is at this point. But this notion of power and the land and what I’m going to make money on the land, you better have an idea that brings people because I, I don’t see the idea. You know what I mean? I wouldn’t mind asking for the money if we had someone brilliant, saying we’re going to build something that’s going to help people, but there’s never an idea, right? It’s just the money. And we’ll come up with the idea later.
Neil DeMause 15:25
Okay, a bunch of answers that right. Okay, first of all, totally agree with you on on John Angeles. But we have to remember that if anybody’s baseball fan has looked around the league and afflict around the crop of billionaires who own teams, there are a lot of really bad people. Right, you know, so this is not just an oil situation, right? There are plenty of people in plenty of cities who are right now looking at their owners and saying, you know, they’re terrible either. Just horrible people, you know, horrible at running the team horrible, you know, I mean, hard to support. It’s yeah, yeah, no, there’s there’s definitely and it’s and that’s all we you know, I used to close right you know, I mean, I remember my friends going and getting on the on the front page of the sports section for holding up a holding up signs that spelled out fire George in the in the bleachers. Right. So, you know, long tradition of it’s getting worse of you know, douche is owning sports teams. Okay, so that’s one second of all, when you mentioned the just want to say that when you mentioned the parody clause, this is not unique again, the same thing happened with the with the Yankees and the Mets right? The Mets basically had a deal when the Yankees and Mets were both won new stadiums that they would get one from the city, whatever the whatever the Yankees got. So they just backed off and said, Okay, Yankees you go, the Yankees arranged their deal. And it the parity was such that the Yankees were getting a whole bunch of different things. But one of them was that $300 million to like, build a new park to replace the one that was being demolished to make way for the for the new stadium. And people the Bronx were without a park at all for several years was horrible. But the mats were just building the parking lot. So they didn’t need to build a new park. So instead, to have parity. They got, oh, we used to share our parking revenues with the city. And it was like, I don’t know, how many millions of dollars a year. We’re just not going to do that anymore in the newly Is that okay? Sure. That’s fine. So they got that job.
Nestor Aparicio 17:30
They both got this in the new year, when Billy Joel comes to town, the city makes nothing nobody makes. So they’ve already given given away Taylor Swift and given away Billy Joel right. So
Neil DeMause 17:41
this is very common is what I’m saying, right is that you have two teams and one team will be the one to carry the water and be like, we’re gonna push for this. And then the other team will say, okay, us too. Same things gonna happen in Kansas.
Nestor Aparicio 17:54
He’s gonna die from Venable running the Maryland stadium authority, but dealing with John, but whatever John gets, Steve just gets it right,
Neil DeMause 18:04
which is gonna be very interesting when John gets a whole bunch of development rights to the warehouse and things like that, right? Because what’s parody for that? Third thing I want to mention is just not let it go. Right? You said they got the $1.2 billion dollars from the state. Let’s remember that, at least $1.2 billion, because that’s $1.2 billion in bond capacity, which means if they sell $1.2 billion in bonds, and they start paying off the bonds, let’s say they’ve paid off half of it, that’s another $600 million, that they can go and sell new bonds. So the
Nestor Aparicio 18:38
activator was a 15 year lease activator that anytime the team would ask for money and say, I need a new deck. I need a new left field. I need a new scoreboard. Hey, we got you covered. But you’re now on for the next 15 years. And you do the team never leave
Neil DeMause 18:54
but it’s right. But I mean, the team doesn’t want to leave if they’re gonna get $1.2 billion every 15 years.
Nestor Aparicio 19:00
Scoreboard keeping the Orioles here, as long as the American flag is flying over the harbor.
Neil DeMause 19:07
For a while there was I remember, man, this is probably like 15 years ago, the owner of the saints, right, the New Orleans Saints had been asking for, for money for stadium upgrades at the Superdome for years. And then he finally was just like, how about instead of that you just pay me to play there. And so for a while he had a lease where he paid negative rent and the team the city just paid him to play his home stadium. And you know, I almost feel like that’s more honest. Right? You know, because that’s really what we’re getting to at this point with these constant demands for more and more money is, you know, if you want a team, you just have to pay in tax money for the privilege of it, which is nuts, right? Because if you think about it, the team needs the city more than the city’s the team right Baltimore will continue to exist without would continue to exist without the Orioles Baltimore did continue to exist without the call. holds. But you have to have a place to play, right? If all the cities in America and North America said, Well, no, we’re not going to play this game, then, you know, the, the teams would have to just fold because right they don’t they, there’s, they can’t just say, well, we’re just gonna go play on a barge in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. So the last question you asked, right is, is what would actually change the oil situation, right in terms of selling tickets in terms of, you know, being able to keep their players things like that. And there’s always, you know, team owners always say, Well, if we just get this money, then we’ll be able to that was
Nestor Aparicio 20:35
massive. Peter was, hey, I want all of that DC to media revenue, money. That’s mine. That’s my area. So we can beat the Yankees and reds. And that has not worked out that
Neil DeMause 20:48
that is not the way that economics works, right? You know, it’s not the way running a business works, right? If you get a whole bunch more money, you don’t necessarily suddenly think, Oh, I have more money, I am going to go and spend, say, another 100 million dollars on players, unless you think you’re gonna get $100 million back in, in new sales, right? And realistically, for Baltimore, or really any team in the league, that’s not maybe the Yankees or the Dodgers, or maybe a couple of others, right? If you have a better team, you’re gonna sell a few more tickets. I’m sure the Orioles would do much better at the box office next year than they did like this year, right? Because suddenly, it’s a team that I mean, it didn’t help to get knocked out of the playoffs, but at least, you know, people are have been a little bit excited about it. And there’s like a little bit of a sense of like, okay, maybe if we go next year, they won’t lose 100 games, right? But that doesn’t mean you’re suddenly gonna be able to sell, you know, an extra million, you know, $100 tickets, if you spend $100 million on, on, on, you know, more players. So, you know, you’d be stupid as an owner to do that. And then it’s, the team’s in smaller markets are always as long as you have the baseball situation where, you know, the teams in the big markets control the media revenue, basically. Right? You know, not the baseball is not football, but football is very different. Everybody shares all that Fox money, right? And ESPN money and so. So every team has either you play in New York or Green Bay, you’d have pretty much the same money coming in baseball is extremely different. Because not only do you sell more tickets if you’re the Yankees than the Orioles. And by the way, I do want to mention, when George Steinbrenner was trying to get a new stadium, one of the things he argued was that the Yankees would never be able to compete with the Orioles if they did not have one. I swear to God, it was in the newspaper. But the only
Nestor Aparicio 22:50
time in life George wanted something that Peter had, it was always the I wrote a book on the other side, Peter just was he wanted to be George so bad, but they all use Seinfeld. You know, we all gotta
Neil DeMause 23:00
keep up with the Joneses. Right? You know, it’s we have to have this because the guy down the road has this. So, you know, I just I just really think that, you know, where we’re, you’re in a situation where it’s not going to move the needle, you know, anytime an owner says, you know, I will go out go on a spending spree. If I just get a new stadium. It’s not going to happen or if it does happen, it’ll be like what the Marlins did, right? Remember what happened? The Marlins got their new stadium, they went out and they signed Jose Reyes, they signed my burly they signed up a whole slew of people. And by May the team wasn’t like 20 games in first place. And Jeffrey Lurie, I was like, Okay, this isn’t working. And the next winter he traded everybody, and they’ve been you know, the same old firesale Marlins ever since, and I do not think I think you know, definitely changes need to be made in baseball to make sure that teams like the Marlins and the Orioles, you know, don’t get torn apart every few years and so that you can actually buy an Adley rutschman jersey and feel like it’s gonna last you more than, you know, a handful of years. But that’s separate from building stadiums, especially because you know, right, you know, that if the Orioles get a billion dollars worth of subsidies for upgrading their stadium, the Steinbrenner is are going to say, well, our stadium is almost 20 years old. The Orioles got scholars mind to upgrade there’s we can’t possibly compete with the Orioles unless we get money and they’re gonna come back to New York for more so it’s just an endless endless cycle, where cities all lose and taxpayers all lose and the team owners all win.
Nestor Aparicio 24:38
In our next episode with Neil DeMoss will describe our top five all time highs Marlins better be in there by the way. I mean, if you’ve watched them all right, that’s a top five for right 100% Yeah, I follow along I feel their schemes is the way to do it. Now this last because I did was an eruptive with you but like the San Diego situation. And I mean that was the dirt As the dirty dirty Lukina was out there a part of it they stopped construction mares got thrown away like all sorts of things happen there they lost our football team inevitably because of that right if that would have gone better, but the modern Padres in they got Machado they’ve got the players they went spent that was a build at Neil calm. We got to compete with our Yankees, which is the Dodgers up the road even beat them last year in the playoffs, which tastes nice. Now they’re broke, right? Like, and I don’t know if it’s real broke or not broke. That’s for you to figure out. But borrowing money sounds broke, and no media chain at all. I mean, the television model and the media model in the band model and the mass and model, the RSM, it’s gone. That’s at the heart of all of this. This is John thinking bad, bad bad, like Barney, Rubble, bad, bad, bad, bad. Like, at some point, something’s going to need the fun this, besides Ali’s bargain, basement night, Nate dollar tickets, and fans couldn’t even afford $100 playoff tickets, let alone had they gone another round or two or three. I mean, you know, my wife and I pulled two tickets up in the American League Championship was $890. And I looked at it and I’m like, Nah, now, you know, and I’m not the only now I think, in a lot of these places, even there’s a, there’s a price limit for all of this, for sponsorships for everything. And San Diego’s the one place that was like everybody else that stuck their foot out over the ledge a little bit and said, We’re going to act like we’re a big guy. And this is going to be a case scenario for John Angeles, they were not going to do what they did in San Diego go broke. And but how broke? Are they? Can I just ask you that?
Neil DeMause 26:30
I mean, it’s always hard to say right? You know, like, what, whether they’re really broke, or whether they’re just I mean, it’s certainly a little scary right now, and they, you know, spent like crazy. And I think they’ll probably end up just retrenching and, you know, not signing a whole bunch guys and dump and dumping salary and nothing that the teams always do. Right, you know, but you know, but that’s kind of baseball. Right is, you know, one of the things about is again, like other sports, it’s not like basketball, right? Where you can just go sign the three best players and suddenly win a championship. And especially now, right, where as we all just found out, right when you’ve got 12 teams in the playoffs, right? Even winning 100 games doesn’t guarantee you any, right. So you have to be both smart and lucky. And the Padres were probably not smart and that they spent a whole lot of money, but they made some horrible trades Go Go and look someday at who they gave up in like the Austin Nola trade, you know, it was just so many terrible, terrible trades. And then it didn’t get lucky. Right. You know, they made the playoffs last year, and then they lost and then this year, you know, a whole lot of things went wrong, that they managed to to, you know, stumble into the worst possible situation. Although, as a Mets fan, I feel like we’re always in the worst possible situation. But, but yeah, I mean, I think that that that’s definitely, I’m sorry, there’s a second part of your question, in addition to
Nestor Aparicio 27:58
the picking up the pieces of when it’s not working, and there’s no revenue, and you’re borrowing money to make payroll like that. That’s 1973 Baseball, to me, that shouldn’t be where they are in 2023. And that’s about Manford. To some degree, right?
Neil DeMause 28:11
Everybody in baseball at this point is rich enough that they can that they can afford to dig into their savings account and pay for things that they want to write, you know, it’s more about like, Well, okay, we tried that it’s not working. You know, we’ll we’ll try not spending money now and see if that does better. And honestly, years ago, when I was ready for baseball perspectives, I did a little study where I was like, let’s see which teams are doing the best at at, you know, spending money who’s getting the best return on their investment? Right? And can you guess which team had the best ROI in terms of how much money it was spending? You know, basically, you take like, what
Nestor Aparicio 28:48
erase, erase type erase?
Neil DeMause 28:50
This was, it was not the race, I think the race probably did pretty well. It was the Florida Marlins at the time, because they were getting the best number of wins per dollar, because they were spending nothing. And they were winning, like 80 games, you know, which isn’t great. But it’s certainly better than and especially again, now that you’ve got 12 teams in the playoffs. And this is one of the things that that I think that the players union is very concerned about why they may start pushing back on the expanded playoffs is they’re realizing that teams are going to look and say, Hmm, the Marlins made the playoffs this year. Look, they could have gone to the World Series, right. Look who else went to the World Series, right? So maybe, instead of spending big, we should be thinking let’s just try to spend just enough to win 85 games, maybe 90 games, right? Neither team in the World Series 190 games this year. Am I correct about that? Yeah. I think one 191 189 but neither one more than 90. So, so, you know, try and win 90 games just spend just barely enough and hope that you get lucky enough. Cober and it’s a rational strategy and I think the players are right to be concerned about and I think as fans everyone should be right to be concerned about it right? Because you don’t want someone like Don Angelo’s thinking, you know, we want 100 games. That was overkill. We didn’t need to do that. That didn’t help us anything in October, you know, if somebody leaves as long as we’re still somewhat competitive. Sure, that’s fine. Then we’ll roll the dice. Or
Nestor Aparicio 30:23
as Mike Flanagan said to me before the tragedy, back when he’s running the team, Andy macphails line was why feed him steak when they’ll eat hamburger. Neil DeMoss joins us here he is field of schemes. Please go read his work and read the lurid history of money and billionaires and things that are going on sort of like what’s going on here. I got my eye on the prize and we’re gonna be able to win the Marilyn crabcake tour. Now I’ll tell you what, man, I’ll treat you all the freight is up there and maybe some Nathan’s fries one day to at a messy, messy game in exchange for crabcake we get you down here. All right, so I’ve been wanting to read through that ordeal. Mets thing ever since 69.
Neil DeMause 31:04
I was hoping we mean the World Series this year, but it didn’t work out.
Nestor Aparicio 31:07
And we almost didn’t you know, there was some kind of Swoboda we almost didn’t let him back in. I mean, like, I don’t think he ever was allowed a crabcake after that. He is Neil DeMoss please go find him. You could find me looks at knowings mills. Were around here and keeping our eye on the prize of your money, our taxpayer money. And how much of it John Angelos is gonna get we are wn st am 1570, Towson Baltimore. Oh by the way is apparently close. So that means how much deeper shot he’s gonna get to so I can’t blame one without the other. We never stop talking Baltimore positive except when it’s not positive.
