Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/09/18/baseball-and-circuses.html
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3 Likes
Legion of Gloom.
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But our sportsball!
I am embarrassed to live in Seattle today.
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You can have nice things or sports, and since sports are popular, this is why we can’t have nice things.
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$135 million for a game of rounders? If anybody wants me, I’ll be in Huston, watching a real sport.
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It’s just regular blackmail, if they don’t foot the bill the team will leave and then people will notice. It’s sad that cities will cut off their nose so that a rich team won’t have to cut into their budget. Even worse is they’re not very good.
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I have yet to hear a good argument for public funding of billionaire sports teams, and their accompanying ridiculous shrines to toxic masculinity. But sports!!1!!, so I guess it really doesn’t matter. Can’t have the worst stadium, even if your residents are living in squalor.
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First, this is King County which includes Seattle but also more than a million other people and about 50 smaller cities and towns.
Second three of the four county council members who voted no are from districts which include big chunks of Seattle. One of the five who voted yes is from a Seattle district.
A much more accurate headline would be “suburbs around Seattle won’t…”.
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Is it too radical to propose tax dollars shouldn’t go towards sports stadiums where the pro sports teams using the stadium still doesn’t allow women to play alongside with men?
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“This is not going to be received well I anticipate with our taxpayers, with our voters. It certainly not sitting well with me. Be that as it may, it looks like it is a done deal and we’ll have to live with the consequences.”
I wonder how true that is? Taxpayers are often the ones that vote for public funding of privately owned sports franchises. We went through something similar in Arlington a couple of years ago when the Texas Rangers wanted a new stadium. It went up for a vote and voters overwhelmingly supported it.
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Totally agree with incentivizing equity, but taxpayer support for privately-owned for-profit entities boggles my mind.
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I second that.
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Oh geez.
2018:
" In $180 million ask for public money, Mariners cite retractable roof used 400 times per year"
2012:
“Safeco Field’s roof least used among retractable roof stadiums”
Whom are these people that are going to be pleased all the time ?
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The word you are looking for is “capitalism”.
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This right here is why more people need to pay attention to municipal elections, and the candidates listed therein.
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I don’t think that going co-ed would appreciably strengthen the case for public funding.
If this were sports apparatus the public was intended to use failure to be evenhandededly available to all subject only to basic scheduling constraints would be a serious problem; but they might have a case for funding along the same lines as other public goods if they solved that problem.
In this case, though, the stadium is for the nearly(they usually cram a few bits and pieces into the time that isn’t worth anything to them) exclusive use and benefit of a private sportsball team(and one that doesn’t even have the decency to provide the taxpayers with tickets of value commensurate with their subsidy, much less a choice about whether or not to subsidize).
When the public has basically zero shot at any status other than ‘paying spectator’ the facility is so heavily exclusive that the makeup of the team on the field is pretty much below the noise floor.
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Yeah, fuck’em, amiright?
Here’s what gets to me.
In the off seasons for these structures there are homeless people sleeping on their very doorsteps.
Well, during the seasons too, for that matter.
I think sports bettors ought go bet on cockroach races under the freeway and this land and these structures ought go to better uses.
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My city is currently doing something similar, cutting arts & culture funding to pay for a 2026 Winter Olympics bid.
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