Field of Schemes Read online

  Take the Money and Run

  The idea was first floated in the mid-1970s by business and political leaders in Indianapolis. The local government had already poured more than $400 million into a decade’s worth of downtown office blocks and hotel complexes; a new domed football stadium, they proposed, would complement the city’s convention center as the centerpiece of a hub of sports-based tourism. Construction of the Hoosier Dome was under way by 1982, its $78 million price tag financed by a 1 percent county-wide tax on food and beverages and $30 million in grants from two local foundations.

  Indianapolis had a state-of-the-art domed stadium rising in its city center, but it still had no team. Dome boosters had assured city leaders that the NFL would place an expansion football team in Indianapolis once construction was complete. By 1982, however, it had become clear that the football league was in no hurry to expand—thanks in part to an ongoing lawsuit over the Raiders’ move to Los Angeles the previous year. Furthermore, it was looking more likely that, once expansion did arrive, the NFL would favor booming Sunbelt cities such as Phoenix and Jacksonville over Indianapolis. Articles started appearing in financial publications with such headlines as “Will Indianapolis’ Domed Stadium Become a White Elephant?”

  This, clearly, would not do. So three-term mayor William Hudnut, sensing political disaster, reestablished an old contact he had made back in 1977, when the dome was still just a set of blueprints: He called Robert Irsay, owner of the Baltimore Colts. And he offered him a deal.

  A Chicago industrialist who had made his fortune in sheet metal, Irsay had bought the Colts in 1972 and watched as his new team took an immediate nosedive in the standings. In 1979, with the Colts floundering on the field and in ticket sales, the team’s owner demanded that the city pay for $25 million worth of improvements to twenty-five-year-old Memorial Stadium, which the Colts shared with the Baltimore Orioles baseball team. If not, he intimated, he would take his team elsewhere.

  The city capitulated to the Colts’ owner’s demands, but still Irsay’s eye wandered. By 1984 his flirtations had focused on Indianapolis, where Hudnut was offering a low-rent lease on the new dome to entice the team to relocate. Baltimore city officials, scrambling to keep the Colts in place, countered with an offer of a $15 million loan and a city-backed guarantee on ticket sales. But even as they held out this gold-plated carrot to Irsay, city leaders also readied an unprecedented stick: They asked the state legislature to consider condemning the team via the principle of eminent domain.

  Under eminent-domain powers, local governments can condemn a private asset and then seize it, paying the former owners fair market value for their property—in this case, the Colts themselves, which would then be sold to a new, local owner. It’s a tactic more often used for highway rights-of-way than for football teams; it’s also one that had failed two years earlier in Oakland when the Raiders skipped town. But that case had been rejected by an appeals court on very narrow grounds, and legal experts were hopeful that the city of Baltimore would have better luck with its case.

  It never got the chance. The Colts, tipped off to the city’s plans, hurriedly completed negotiations with Indianapolis. And so, on March 29, 1984, while the Maryland legislature continued to debate the use of eminent domain, in came the moving vans. That afternoon, the bill to place the Colts under state control was passed, but it was a few hours too late: Courts would later rule against the seizure on the grounds that by the time the law was passed, there was nothing left for the state to seize.

  The Baltimore Colts were no more. As fans grieved, local politicians plotted to obtain a replacement franchise, either through expansion or by moving an established team. And city officials across the nation braced for a new wave of demands from their own sports teams, under threat of becoming “another Baltimore.”

  “Mistake on the Lake”

  The last thing the city of Cleveland wanted was to become the next Baltimore. It was already the first, and hopefully last, Cleveland, and that was enough of an emotional burden for even the windy town’s hardiest souls. Once a thriving industrial center with dominating sports teams, Cleveland had seen its fortunes, its national image, and the reputation of its historic baseball stadium plummet over mere decades.

  In 1931 the successful completion of the new sports stadium on the shores of Lake Erie was hailed as the harbinger of great things to come. Cleveland Municipal Stadium, built by the federal Works Project Administration with the hope of luring the 1932 Olympics to downtown Cleveland, was “a monument to the progressive spirit of the city’s people,” according to the special section of the Cleveland Plain Dealer devoted to the new stadium.

  The city, not yet crippled under the weight of the Depression, was coming off one of its most successful economic decades ever. Cleveland had become the nation’s second-largest center for automobile manufacturing, behind only Detroit. Big steel was thriving, as was manufacturing. And the brand-new horseshoe by the lake, which cost local taxpayers some $2.5 million, was the crown jewel in an economic construction plan designed to give the city even more national attention. When eighty thousand fans jammed into Municipal Stadium’s wooden seats for the Cleveland Indians’ first baseball game there in 1932, headline writers crowed “Depression Given Black Eye.” It was there that the team reveled in its glory years of the 1940s and 1950s, when the Indians were one of the most successful teams in baseball, and their fans set attendance records that would last for decades.

  Fifty years later, the stadium had assumed a very different meaning. Municipal Stadium, and the city itself, were dubbed the “Mistake on the Lake.” As Cleveland struggled through a series of national embarrassments in the 1970s—from the Cuyahoga River catching on fire to the city becoming the first major American city to go into default since the Depression—the dreadful performance of the Indians, and their aging ballpark, seemed horribly symbolic of Cleveland’s misfortunes. Year after cellar-dwelling year, the team was considered an embarrassment to professional baseball, and talk escalated that opposing teams dreaded the trip to frigid Cleveland Municipal Stadium, with its bitter winds off Lake Erie and its tiny crowds, cramped locker rooms, and out-of-date scoreboard.

  And while many in the city turned critical eyes on the performance of the Indians, Cleveland itself was feeling the uncomfortable burn of a national spotlight that illuminated a shrinking population, deteriorating race relations, escalating poverty, and vanishing industrial jobs. The city, which had lost 23 percent of its population between 1970 and 1980, started the 1980s with its credit suspended by several Wall Street ratings agencies because of its fiscal woes.

  When Indians owner Steve O’Neill died in 1983, rumors ran rampant that the financially shaky team would be sold to buyers from another state, most likely Florida. Even before O’Neill’s death, league officials had come to town to announce that the Indians were very likely not long for Cleveland. Without a principal owner for the team, its future was suddenly even more precarious. And so in 1984 a new tax initiative to fund a domed stadium (domes were then in fashion—several cities had followed Indianapolis’s lead) was called for, in order, it was claimed, to keep the team in the city.

  The campaign for the dome was the brainchild of Cuyahoga county commissioner Vincent Campanella. Working largely without the organized support of his fellow politicians, Campanella proposed putting a domed stadium in the old Central Market area of downtown Cleveland; the new $150 million, seventy-two-thousand-seat stadium was to be entirely paid for by a countywide property-tax levy.

  Emotions ran high among fans and residents throughout the dome debate. The way some locals talked, the threatened move of a sports team would tear the heart out of the city. Yet many Clevelanders questioned the fiscal sanity of forking over public dollars at a time when the town overall was struggling to reverse years of financial woe. Others were reluctant to spend a great deal of tax money on a team that had performed so abysmally for so many years. “Go Browns,” a cynical graffitist scrawled on the w
alk to Municipal Stadium. “And take the Indians with you.”

  In May 1984, voters resoundingly rejected the proposal. The choice of a property tax to fund the initiative, the Indians’ poor performance on the playing field, and, most important, a lack of consensus among the city’s power brokers probably sent the campaign to its defeat. The effort never had the full support of then governor Richard Celeste or the city’s Republican mayor, George Voinovich. Indeed, Campanella himself would later speculate that the failure of the domed-stadium tax killed his political career.

  But if Campanella’s mishandling of the political situation temporarily doomed the dome, the idea of a new stadium had plenty of support, especially from the city’s powerful business community. As would become the national pattern, advertisements by dome supporters promised Cleveland taxpayers that the new stadium would result in magnificent economic dividends for the city as a whole, promises that continued after the referendum went down to a solid defeat. Soon after the initiative lost, the Washington Post reported, “Cleveland leaders can’t ignore a study that said a dome would result in the construction of three new downtown hotels, an office building and restaurants, that 1,588 full-time construction jobs would be created; that another 6,829 permanent jobs would result; that the total annual spending impact would be $62.2 million.” National and local media, the business community, and local politicians all firmly pushed the idea that a new stadium was needed for the team and for Cleveland’s hopes of reestablishing itself as an important city.

  And although their referendum failed, domed-stadium backers didn’t give up. The Civic Committee to Build a Domed Stadium was formed, chaired by the acting chair of the Greater Cleveland Growth Association, the town’s chamber of commerce. The Civic Committee would later become the Greater Cleveland Domed Stadium Corporation, which borrowed $22 million from local banks and the state to purchase a site for a new facility. Despite public opposition and construction, and financing plans that were sketchy at best, supporters were determined to plunge ahead with the stadium project.

  Before Cleveland’s power brokers could come up with a new pitch, however, the national sports-stadium scene irrevocably shifted—thanks in large part to events taking place back in Baltimore.

  “Just Give Me the Tools”

  The departure of the Colts in the spring of 1984 had an immediate impact on Baltimore politics. Seeing the outcry over the loss of one sports team, Mayor William Schaefer, who had been a steadfast opponent of spending public money on sports stadiums, abruptly became the biggest booster of a new ballpark for the Baltimore Orioles.

  A success on the field and off since relocating from St. Louis in 1954, the Baltimore club landed seven first-place finishes between 1966 and 1979, and their home at city-owned Memorial Stadium was a pleasant one, nestled in a residential neighborhood of single-family homes whose rooftops were visible beyond the wooden bleachers in right and left fields. In the mid-1980s a poll of fans ranked Memorial as one of the best ballparks in the major leagues.

  But for all its pastoral charm, Memorial was a no-frills ballpark, without such modern-day amenities as luxury boxes or lavish food-preparation facilities. As early as 1967, when municipalities across the country were building new concrete “dual-purpose” stadiums to house both their football and baseball teams, the owners of the Colts and Orioles had proposed such a facility for Baltimore, to be situated near the old Camden rail yards just west of downtown. In 1972 Orioles exec Frank Cashen upped the ante, proclaiming, “We are not going to be able to do anything in terms of a new long-term lease unless a stadium is built downtown.” But as it became clear that no such deal was forthcoming, the Orioles continued to sign short-term leases on Memorial, and no one moved to resurrect the idea of a new facility.

  Then, in 1979 local beer magnate Jerrold Hoffberger sold the Orioles to Edward Bennett Williams, a lawyer-to-the-pols from hated rival Washington DC. Many in Baltimore suspected Williams of harboring secret plans to move the ballclub to the nation’s capital—a suspicion that the new owner wasted no time in using to force the city’s hand on his demands for a new stadium. “For as long as the city will support the team,” he told the Washington Post, “it will stay here”—leading to rampant speculation that he would take the team south on the pretext of low attendance. When American League president Lee MacPhail followed with a public vow of league support for a new stadium on Interstate 95 between Baltimore and Washington, the pressure built for Baltimore to prevent a repeat of the Colts’ betrayal.

  By 1986, when Mayor Schaefer was elected governor of Maryland, he was not just a proponent of a new baseball stadium; he had become Williams’s greatest ally. The man who as mayor had declared that “unless private enterprise builds it, we won’t build it” was now missing no opportunity to stump for a new state-built ballpark. Bill Marker, a local community leader who would play a major role in the stadium battle to come, recalls watching Schaefer’s inaugural speech as governor: “I remember saying to friends, ‘Well, let’s see whether he mentions the stadium, and if so where in his speech.’ And it was basically: ‘Hi, Marylanders! We’ve gotta build a stadium!’”

  Schaefer knew just where he wanted to build it, too: the same Camden Yards site that had been considered for a multi-sport facility back in the ’60s. Ten years earlier, Mayor Schaefer had helped mastermind the reconstruction of Baltimore’s inner harbor as the Harborplace mall-and-museum tourist mecca. Now, Governor Schaefer concluded that a stadium could only enhance the attractiveness of the city’s rebuilt downtown to out-of-towners and their entertainment dollars.

  To keep Williams happy, Schaefer was prepared to build the project entirely with public money, proposing two state-run lotteries with a sports theme to raise the $235 million necessary to condemn the existing industrial park on the site and to fund the construction of separate stadiums for baseball and football. (As it turned out, Schaefer had seriously underestimated the cost of clearing land for the project. The total tab would ultimately reach $410 million, plus an additional $30 million for road improvements, to be paid out of federal transportation funds.)

  The plan was cemented at a memorable public hearing of the state senate in March 1987. The star attraction was Williams, who used every bit of his personal charm and political connections to sway the legislators. In attendance that day was Bill Marker, preparing to testify on behalf of his fledgling Marylanders for Sports Sanity (MASS), a hastily organized citizens’ group opposing public stadium funding. His hand-drawn placards, detailing alternate proposals that MASS had calculated could keep the team in town for far less money—including having the state buy the team outright for less than the cost of a new stadium—sat unused at his feet as he watched Williams testify at length that a new ballpark was the only solution to the woes of his team, as well as those of Baltimore. The Orioles’ owner, recalls Marker, was greeted as an old friend: “It was all these senators saying, ‘Oh, you were my professor in law school, and you were so wonderful.’”

  While Marker sat, several legislators expressed concerns about spending such a large sum on what was, after all, a private enterprise. When Williams remarked that he needed a stadium that could guarantee sales of fifteen thousand season tickets, state senator Julian “Jack” Lapides shot back, “It might be cheaper for the state to buy fifteen thousand season tickets.” Williams waited for the cheers from the gallery to die down, then replied, “I didn’t come here to ask for a subsidy.… I can make this thing go in the private sector if I get the tools.”

  The “tools” Williams wanted—a taxpayer-funded stadium—represented just as much of a subsidy as a direct cash grant, of course, but the state senate didn’t let that stand in its way. Four weeks after Williams’s testimony, the senate voted to empower the Maryland Sports Authority to build two new stadiums: a baseball park immediately for the Orioles, and a football stadium to follow once a replacement for the Colts could be lined up.

  With the governor, state legislature, and mayor united behind
a publicly funded ballpark, Marker and his fellow community activists had only one weapon left at their disposal. According to the Maryland state constitution, any government expenditure can be submitted to a binding public referendum. Within two weeks of the state senate decision, MASS had gone door-to-door to gather twenty-eight thousand signatures calling for a public vote. The state rejected the petitions on the grounds that the stadium-funding bill was not subject to referendum; MASS took the state to court. An initial ruling sided with the neighborhood activists. But that September the Maryland court of appeals overturned the lower court’s ruling, agreeing with the state’s argument that the stadium project constituted an “appropriation for maintaining the state government” and so was exempt from public vote.

  “I think they lost the distinction that the state was doing it for a private enterprise,” Jack Lapides later recalled of the court’s ruling. “If the state were condemning the land and building the facility for a state football team, or a state road, or a state hospital, or a state school, then there would be justification. But I thought that their rationale was very convoluted.”

  Opponents screamed long and loud that Schaefer had bullied his way past the democratic process, but the deed was done. The stadium—given the cumbersome appellation “Oriole Park at Camden Yards” at the insistence of Eli Jacobs, who bought the Orioles following Williams’s death in 1988—had cleared its final hurdle. On April 6, 1992, five years and $120 million worth of lottery tickets later, the new ballpark opened to a packed house. And the value of Jacobs’s team, according to figures compiled by Financial World magazine, jumped by nearly $100 million.

  At long last, the new stadium had taken its place alongside the other government-sponsored tourist attractions that now crowded the city’s Inner Harbor. But as important as it was to Baltimore, Oriole Park at Camden Yards was destined to play a still more pivotal role in the history of pro sports. For the Orioles had insisted on a building that would be not an antiseptic stadium but a ballpark; unlike every other baseball stadium built in recent memory, this one eschewed concrete walls and symmetrical dimensions for a self-consciously quirky design that used steel and brick to sheath its luxury boxes and ad-filled video screens. From the upper-deck seats, fans were treated to vistas not of suburban parking lots but of the city skyline. In a final touch that delighted architectural critics and baseball fans alike, the right-field wall abutted an eighty-seven-year-old brick warehouse that was converted into team offices, a baseball museum, and upscale shops.