McCormick Field | Pay Ball!

Owners of the Asheville Tourists baseball team insist McCormick Field needs $30 million in renovations. If Asheville and Buncombe County leaders don’t agree to carry most of that cost, the team is threatening to leave Asheville. Our guests today say that’s an age-old play: Owners of pro sports teams leveraging cash-strapped cities for new or improved stadiums.

Today's guests have studied this issue on a local and national level: Justin McGuire is a reporter for Mountain Xpress; Jonathan Brown is an economics professor at UNC-Asheville; and John Mozena is a Michigan-based writer and president of the nonprofit Center for Economic Accountability. The Asheville Tourists didn’t respond to an emailed request to speak with someone from their ownership group for this episode. 

You’ll hear about the history of this team’s requests for stadium renovations, the economics of public funding vs. the financial return to cities and how nostalgia, politics and other factors you can’t find on a ledger play into these decisions.

Transcript

Matt Peiken: Today on the Overlook you'll hear from three people who have studied this issue on a local and national level. Justin McGuire is a reporter for Mountain Express. Jonathan Brown is an economics professor at UNC Asheville and John Moena is a Michigan based writer and president of the nonprofit Center for Economic Accountability.

The Asheville Tourist baseball team did not respond to an emailed request to speak with someone from their ownership group. For this episode, you'll hear about the history of this team's request for renovations, the economics of public funding versus the financial return to cities, and how nostalgia, politics, and other factors you can't find on a ledger play into these decisions.

We'll first hear from Justin McGuire, a general assignment reporter with Mountain Express. I asked him about the roots of his interest in reporting on the Asheville Tourists off the baseball field. 

Justin McGuire: When this whole thing came up, I think it was in November when the tourists basically gave this April 1st deadline to have a funding plan in place, or they would leave after the 2023 season.

I decided from my background in baseball journalism and my love of baseball history, I decided to look back a little bit at the history of minor only baseball in. Asheville, particularly McCormick Field and looking at other times when the team has almost left looking at other times when money has been needed for upgrades and that sort of thing.

So I wrote a story that kind of looked at that, starting with 1959, which is a year, the minor league baseball came back to Asheville after a three-year absence, and we have had a team every year since then. So that's the beginning of a continuous stretch of Asheville, always having minor league baseball at McCormick.

Matt Peiken: So since 1959, have there been threats to leave in that time? 

Justin McGuire: Absolutely. There have been multiple threats over years talk years about, talk 

Matt Peiken: about that a little bit. Have they all been around stadium improvements? What have been the source of the threats to leave? 

Justin McGuire: The most relevant one, I would say was early nineties.

The Tourists were at that point an affiliate of the Astros, as they are now. They have since gone to the Rockies and gone back to the Astros. So it's not, they haven't continuously been with the Astros, but the Astros at that time basically said, this field's a dump. You need to fix it, or we're leaving. Sound familiar,

And so at that time, McCorick Field was still a. Basically a wood and metal concourse. It was a very old fashioned fire trap of a stadium. So they essentially in, after the 91 season, they tore the whole thing down, rebuilt it as a concrete stadium on the same spot, kept the same name. So they say it's been in con, in continuous use since 1924.

Really? It's a new stadium that was built in 1991, 92 on the same spot. You know? Yeah. I guess you could say spiritually it's the same stadium. So that was the last time this really came up. 

Matt Peiken: Let's talk about that stadium renovation or overhaul. How much did it cost? Who paid for it? 

Justin McGuire: What's interesting, and this, I don't know how much of the weeds you want to get here, but at the time the county owned the stadium rather than the city.

There was a period from like 85 to 2006 when it was under county control for reasons that are too boring to get into. But yeah, so these county ended up paying the bills on that one, and it ended up being, Uh, 3.5 million, something to that effect, upwards of three or four, maybe close to 4 million, which I think translates into six, 7 million or something in today's dollars.

So that was the last significant investment in the stadium. Again, it was the whole rebuild, but even at the time people were saying, They cut corners. The initial consultants study wanted more money than that, and they said they needed more than that. So there was an idea that even then they cut a few corners and they immediately were almost obsolete because all these brand new minor league stadiums came in places with luxury boxes and great sight lines and all these things that McCormick doesn't have.

Matt Peiken: I just wanna be clear, did the county pay a hundred percent of that? Did the team pay part of it? 

Justin McGuire: It was almost entirely the county. If this team put any in, it was a nominal amount. 

Matt Peiken: Now, back then, was the stadium used for any other purposes other than Tourists games?

Justin McGuire: I don't think it has been used significantly for anything other than tourist games since like maybe the fifties or sixties. Wow. As far as I can tell, it's pretty much been a tourist facility since then, so, so 

Matt Peiken: since that renovation in the early nineties, talk about since then, have there been other threats to leave previous to this?

Justin McGuire: Not that I could find. I think that was the last time there was really a lot of noise about it. This current issue is a result of the fact that in 2020, Major League Baseball revamped the entire minor league system. They eliminated about 120 teams nationally and they put all these, restrict these requirements in place for facilities, and that's the requirements that McCorick Field doesn't meet.

At the time. They eliminated 120 teams. The tourists were on the chopping block, and from what I've heard from a few people, they came really close to being eliminators at that point because of the quality of the stadium. They got a reprieve. You can speculate about why that is. Some people have some ideas about that I can't necessarily get into, but get into it a little bit.

Matt Peiken: You don't have to cite your sources, but what were the reasons for the reprieve that you understand? 

Justin McGuire: I'll just put you this way. The ownership group has powerful political connections.

Matt Peiken: The DeWine family of Ohio. Yeah. 

Justin McGuire: Major League Baseball has an antitrust exemption that they want to keep in place. They don't necessarily want to get in the position of offending anybody who has any kind of political sway. 

Matt Peiken: So for the past 30 years, there haven't been a lot of waves made around the condition of McCormick Field until now. 

Justin McGuire: I don't know that there's been a lot of public waves made about it. I'm sure behind the scenes there have been.

I talked to a guy who wrote a book about the history of Asheville Baseball, and he thing he told me was, it's a no big secret in the world of professional baseball Asheville, the McCormick Field is considered a dump, one of the worst facilities in all of professional baseball. Sure. And that's known. It's not, that's not a secret.

Matt Peiken: What are you hearing now about this proposed 30 million renovation? What are you hearing about how the city and county are going to step forward or not in terms of playing a role in the funding of these renovations? 

Justin McGuire: From what I'm hearing, the city has a plan in place that they're going to look at in more depth on March 14th. I'm not clear on exactly whether they to be voting on that on March 14th. They might be. And it's a plan in place that would require the city to basically pay somewhere in the neighborhood of $950,000 per year over like 20 years.

The county would help pay some, TDA would pay some that tourism and development authority and it, but it also, another part of this would be that the Tourists themselves would pay more. Right now they're paying a $1 a year lease on the stadium. It's obviously, it's, it is, for all intents and purposes, they're paying nothing.

It's been a free stadium for, for them to use. Right, exactly. So under this new plan, they would start paying real rents on a sort of a pro, on a sort of scale. They would start with $25,000 a year and eventually get to like $400,000 a 

Matt Peiken: year. That, that's still a pitance compared to what you're talking about, what the city and county would put up.

Justin McGuire: Yeah, it would be like 17% of the overall, I think is what I. If you're somebody who doesn't care whether Asheville has a major, has a minor league baseball team, it's a terrible use of money. Obviously, if you're somebody who thinks I'd like to have minor league team, but there's a lot of other things we could be spending $150,000 on, it's not a good deal.

And those are both completely defensible positions. Obviously. I think the argument from the Tourists would be, it's your stadium. We don't own the stadium. If these changes have to be made, then you should be the ones paying them. 

Matt Peiken: They're saying it's your stadium. I almost hear air quotes around that.

Right, because the Tourists ownership is demanding in Major League Baseball, by extension is demanding that these changes, these renovations be made in order to keep the team here. Have you tried to reach out to the DeWine family or the ownership group at all and what are they saying about why they won't?

Obviously money is, They could easily pay for this if they wanted to. They're a billionaire family. Why are they not stepping forward? What are you hearing about that?

Justin McGuire: I have had some conversations with the ownership group. They're not really addressing that question specifically. I will say in general, billionaires just don't pay for their own stadiums in America.

That's just the bottom line They in. In, no, in almost no case can you find Major League Baseball, NBA. NFL in which they paid the majority of a stadium. It's almost always the city or the region and or state governments, some combination of governmental funding, taxes, special districts created, all sorts of things like that.

And you, we could say, that's terrible and, and I think it is terrible. But the reality is if Asheville won't pay for it, they know some other city will pay for it. And that's the leverage that these sports teams always have. And they always know that there's another city available. It's one of the reasons Major League Baseball a lot of people think has not expanded for 20 some years is they want to keep these markets available for threats. When they want to get a new stadium, they say, if you don't build it, we'll move to Portland, or we'll move to Charlotte, or we'll, we'll move to Las Vegas. Once they fill those, they don't have that anymore.

So yeah, the idea is there's leverage. Because somebody else will pay it if Asheville won't. I think that's the idea. 

Matt Peiken: You were just talking about major league sport, right? The NFL and Major League baseball. It's a lot different at a minor league level and single a baseball level. Right, which the Asheville tourists are.

What sense do you get about the importance of the Tourists baseball team to Asheville proper to where the pressures that you're talking about that happen at a major metropolitan. , what are those pressures on local city officials, if any, to also kowtow to what the Tourists ownership group is asking for.

Justin McGuire: It is not the same as losing a major League baseball team or an NBA team or something. It's not on that level. Obviously. On the other hand, it is a team that's, again, it's been here since 1959, continuously being, there's been a minor team, more or less, most seasons since the 1920s, a hundred years or more.

It's been a part of the, the community identity, and for some people that's, I. . Some people could care less, but I don't, uh, it's, yeah. Again, it's clearly not as big an issue as it is the major league level, but I know some city council, like I know I, I talked to a city council member who said, yeah, she has memories of going to those games with her kids and go memories of family, friends, having birthday parties and kids enjoying it in the summer.

There are certainly a lot of people for whom that has a part of growing up in Asheville is going to those games in the summer and that sort of thing. And I think for people like that, They would hate to lose it. They would hate to lose this team that's been there their whole lives, and I think city council members feel some of that.

Matt Peiken: If this team were to leave, what do you think the fallout would be in this city? Do you think people would care, or do you think it's inevitable because of Asheville's growing nature, the size of the city, that we would get another minor league team that would come here .

Justin McGuire: every time it's happened before when they've lost a team or almost lost a team, some community group has stepped up, save baseball in Asheville Group or the community baseball group or whatever. I suspect something like that might happen with somebody saying, yeah, we need to get a team in here again to replace the tourists. It wouldn't. Under the current stadium though, what would inevitably have to happen is they'd have to make huge upgrades to McCormick Field, or they would have to build a new field to bring a team in.

Matt Peiken: So we're just back, right back to where we started. If we're gonna get a team, how many seats are they looking at with the renovation? 

Justin McGuire: I don't know that it would change the seating, honestly, because most of those changes are things you're not gonna see there in facilities, workout facilities for the players.

Player parking work at facilities for female employees, which is something they don't have. There's stuffed lighting and drainage, but I never, I haven't seen anything that indicates the capacity would change.

Matt Peiken: What are we looking at timeline here? You mentioned March 14th as a date where city Council will be at least discussing this.

What are some dates that we should be looking forward to here that will be pivotal? The one that you 

Justin McGuire: The one that you wanna circle on your calendar is April 1st. That's the date by which the Tourists have said they need to have a plan in. Or they're going to leave after this season? What do you believe is going to happen?

I'm a news reporter. I don't like to get into the prediction business. I will say that I think there is an appetite on city council to get something done. I think there's appetite on the part of the tourists to get something done, so just take that for what it is. I think there's a good possibility something's gonna happen, but I'm not gonna make any predictions.

I hope the team stays for selfish reasons. I like going to games. I like having a team here, and I have researched the history of this team a lot, and I love the fact that there is a history, that there's more than a hundred years of. Professional baseball history. There's a team that I wrote about last year called the Asheville Blues, a championship black baseball team in Asheville.

They played in McCormick Field. So there's that history as well. It's not just the tourists, and again, that's all part of the community of Asheville. So for me, sports is a big part of the community and I realize for not everybody it is, but that's my take. I would hate to see the Tourists go.

Matt Peiken: After this break, we talk with Jonathan Brown, an economics professor at UNC-Asheville, who has studied the public funding of professional sports stadiums.

I'd like to know how you feel about public funding for professional sports stadiums and specifically renovations at McCormick Field. Call our recorded line, (984) 278-7301. Leave a message and your thoughts could make it into a future episode of the overlook. Jonathan Brown is an assistant professor of Economics at UNC Asheville.

If you haven't already, do yourself a favor and listen to my conversation with him earlier this week about why Asheville lacks the kinds of businesses that would bring lots of high paying jobs to this region. Jonathan also has a background in the economics of sports, and he had some great insights about the public funding of professional sports stadium.

Jonathan Brown: It's always hard to gauge how much benefit a city is getting from a professional team, whether it's big league professional or minor league professional. There are certainly benefits to having the Tourists here. Cities take pride in their sports teams. Minor league baseball is a thing. You can bring your whole family to the game and go to several games this season without really making a huge investment.

So in that sense, It's hard to put a price tag on that. What does that mean to a community? What does that mean to your identity as a city? What are you hosting? You're not really seeing people traveling. To see a minor league baseball team. So it, it is a very much a local thing, and I think that's important, especially for community and an economy like Asheville's that's very much built for visitors.

Literally, the team is called the Tourists. 

Matt Peiken: But when you have a team that's owned by a very rich family, especially the DeWines, nobody is arguing that they don't have many tens of millions of dollars at their disposal. What is wrong with this picture? Where that rich family's asking this city, which is also inarguably strapped for cash to come up with any sizable amount to update that stadium. 

Jonathan Brown: Sports stadiums specifically are really difficult for cities to maintain, and cities are often added disadvantage because in economics we call it an all or nothing demand curve. If your town wants to host a big leap ball, , you can crunch the numbers and you can find that like the optimal number of games for your city to host, to benefit your economy, to benefit your fans.

You could find that it's 60 games. You can't host 60 games, you host 81, or you don't host any. So owners are really good at basically forcing you to buy things that you don't want or. So that you have the opportunity to buy the things that you do need. Anytime there's that sort of that binary, that all or nothing situation, the advantage always tips toward the seller, and in this case, the city is the buyer.

Yeah, we want to pay for this. We want this to exist in our community. And sports clubs are very good at taking that consumer value, that consumer surplus. And turning it into producer surplus.

Matt Peiken: Isn't it a fear-based leverage that if you don't do this, we're going to leave and what's that going to leave your city with?

Isn't all of this a fear-based threat? 

Jonathan Brown: Yes. Yeah. There's another term you have in economics called the Winner's Curse, where you end up basically bidding for something, in this case, a sports team, and then after you finally quote, win the bid. You're left being like, oh, actually I sacrificed all of the benefit of this team here just to get them to stay.

And you end up sacrificing all of the value that you would've extracted from that transaction to quote, win. You're sacrificing, and in some cases you're actually, it ends up becoming a cost to you instead of a net benefit.

Matt Peiken: It's absolutely fear-based because teams move and they do, which means then even if Asheville were to pony up a sizable percentage of the improvements here, nothing is contractually keeping the tourists to stay there forever.

They could leave, right? Yeah. 

Jonathan Brown: It's unlikely. I would say that if you invest in a stadium like that and the tourists leave, you'd have a brand new stadium. to attract a team to then enter your stadium. So it's not as though if we invest in a stadium only the tourists could use it. But certainly anytime that stadium sits empty is a cost to the city.

Matt Peiken: Which is every night when the Tourists aren't playing right, because I don't believe that field can be used for other purposes.

Jonathan Brown: It can't easily be used for other purposes.

Matt Peiken: Can't have concerts there. In my time here, there's never been a concert at McCormick Field. 

Jonathan Brown: I've eaten there. 

Matt Peiken: Like on the field? 

Jonathan Brown: Yeah. Like a restaurant will be there and there'll be tables on the field and you go and there's not a game.

Matt Peiken: Okay. But I can't imagine that generates a ton of revenue. How creative can cities and teams be in working with each other to create something where there's skin in the game from all sides? 

Jonathan Brown: There are certainly areas where you can compromise. There's a stadium financing tool called Incremental Financing where a team will come in and they will say how much revenue you're generating.

What are the taxes you're collecting on the revenue. Right now we're so confident that our new stadium will attract more people that we are going to only request funds. Beyond what you're making right now. So we're so confident that revenue will be increased, that we would request you to fund the stadium only with the increase in revenue that we bring.

Matt Peiken: Explain that. I'm not understanding that. 

Jonathan Brown: So I believe, I think it's still called AT&T Park out in San Francisco. I think the Giants tried to finance their stadium like this. They said, all right, how much you're collecting sales revenue in the areas surrounding the stadium, and we would like to use some of that, a revenue to fund this new stadium.

And they were negotiating with the city, and what they said was, there's a certain amount of revenue that's happening right now. We really think that if we invest in our stadium, the revenue around the stadium will go up and we would like so because the revenue will go up, your sales tax will go up, and we would like that.

Matt Peiken: Whatever increase is raised through that increase would go to the team. Would go to the team. So it's not any, it's no skin off the city's back up front. It's just that you're meaning like, so we as a city municipality doesn’t have to pay past a certain point right now, and that the team is placing a bet in a sense that through tax increment financing that whatever additional revenues come in, we will get that money. And that's not still not costing the city more money because it's just the increase. 

Jonathan Brown: It's just the increase. And it doesn't necessarily have to be, we're not collecting any tax revenue until the threshold and then we collect all of it. It might be that after you cross that threshold, we start taking a larger percentage of that revenue.

I see. It worked out well for the Giants, if I remember correctly, because the giants of us in the stadium and also started winning. 

Matt Peiken: Whereas here, how can the taxes increase here? How can the TIF work in an area like this, people are already going to the breweries. Do you see that as a realistic leverage point?

Jonathan Brown: I'd have to look at how many people are drawn to the tourist stadium for every game and where they're spending money. Cuz right now I think it's fairly easy to park for free to go to a tourist game. Fairly easy. Yeah. So there's not a ton of revenue that's generated other than the sale of the 

tickets and in concessions in the park.

Matt Peiken: And concessions in the park, which belong to the team.

Jonathan Brown: Right. So if you're taxing that, you're just end up taxing it and then giving them money back to right. The team to finance their stadium. Being a single a affiliate becomes a little bit more difficult. It depends on how the city wants to view that team.

When you have a major metropolitan area, a high level team is gonna be viewed as like a revenue generating entity for the city, but with a single it like the tourists, it becomes a situation where it's, do we want to view this thing almost more like a park? where like carrier park doesn't generate every, any revenue for the city.

Right. But we still pay to maintain it. Do we wanna offer this amenity to our community and how much is it worth? 

Matt Peiken: That would be opening a can of worms, I think just for community to, Hey, it's, I'm gonna reserve the baseball stadium to use for our game today. Sure. Yeah. how that could work? 

Jonathan Brown: Okay. But it's also just this idea of the Tourists, as a public good, I think is a really interesting economic question. Like who's extracting value from that and what responsibility does the city have to provide that value to its citizens?

Matt Peiken: Jonathan Brown is an assistant professor of economics at UNC-Asheville. Up next, we have more national context, particularly about the leverage pro sports teams place on their host cities. And what I found as a surprising revelation that underpins the call for Minor league stadium renovations.

Let's talk now with John Mozena, a Michigan-based writer with the Better Cities Project and President of the Nonprofit Center for Economic Accountability.

He's extensively studied the economics about the public funding of pro sports stadiums and the politics around it. In your article, sports Stadium's, subsidies Fair or Foul, uh, for a Better Cities Project. You said in your article that the deals tend to be even worse for smaller cities and minor league ball clubs than in major league sports.

What can you tell Asheville residents about why supporting. Some of, or all of, or most of the bulk of the financing would be bad deal for a city like Asheville that is very tourist driven, that hence the name of the team tourists. 

John Mozena: The simplest way to put it is that there isn't more money in people's pockets and more, there isn't more money in people's entertainment budgets because there's a minor league team there, or any kind of team there than if there.

Any dollar that gets spent at the Tourists ballpark is a dollar that's not getting spent someplace else. Whether the visitor is a tourist to themselves or whether it's someone in the community, if there weren't a ballpark there, somebody who might have used the, you know, the couple bucks that they had at the end of the week for, uh, beer and a dog or something like that at the game, might instead go bowling or just go out to dinner with a family or just hit a bar with friends.

And that's the thing is it's these stadiums aren't creating. Any new dollars, what they're doing is they're shifting around where those dollars are spent. 

Matt Peiken: One of the things that seems to be the angle that a lot of these pro sports teams lean on, whether it's major league or minor league teams, is that.

Think of your city without this team, that it's not something that they can quantify on an economic ledger, that these are intangibles, you know that, oh, we can say we are an N F L team, and what will it mean to our city if we lose this team? It probably is less of that kind of an argument when it comes to minor league sports.

Perhaps that's something that you can't put a price tag on. Talk about how pro teams use that, that emotional leverage to steer this argument. Yeah. 

John Mozena: Oh, absolutely. That, that's the heart of this, is that these teams, these leagues, these owners take advantage of the. Passion and pride that, that, uh, we have for our cities and for our teams.

The issue is that if you look at just the, basically what happens in history, it's not that having a team makes a place, major league. That's all to show you're a major league city, green Bay, Wisconsin has had a professional sports team, basically, as long as there's been professional sports, and I don't know that anyone would consider Green Bay like a major league city.

Matt Peiken: To play the other side of the coin, Green Bay is probably an outlier that most cities with major league teams do aspire to be seen as a major league city. And I want you to comment on this statement or this theory perhaps. The cities that are most prone to be leveraged are ones that are not the biggest of cities.

When you, like the Sacramento Kings, the only team in all the major league sports that are based in Sacramento, and there are other cities that are like. I would imagine they would feel a little bit insecure about that status and that these proteins give them a certain badge to hold up to corporations and other businesses that might locate, just because there's that feeling, oh, this is a big league city.

John Mozena: Absolutely, and that's why, that's a major reason why when the Rams moved to Los Angeles, the team owner ended up paying basically for his own stadium. There was a little bit of land game being played there, but for the most part, he paid for his own stadium because LA didn't need 'em. I'm sure there were people there who were happy, but the there he had no leverage over Los Angeles.

To get them to do it un unlike he would, as you said, in a Sacramento or you look at Portland, are they next for a team? That sort of small mid-market issue always. You're absolutely right that there's a societal pressure, there's a civic pride, there's a desire to be seen that realistically when you look at where teams are moving.

Where teams are starting up. It's not that a team goes in and then a place becomes a big league city. What is it? The relationship is the other way around that a sports leagues put teams in places or move teams to places that are in the process of growing. They're moving them to a Nashville, they're moving them to an Austin, to an Oklahoma City, places where the growth curve is already going up, and they want to try to capture that.

Matt Peiken: So when you look at a city like Asheville, is this legitimate. That a minor league baseball team would move to another city that's ready to accommodate.

John Mozena: This is a specific issue right now for Minor league baseball, which is different from other sports and other leagues, which is that Major League baseball has absolutely, frankly screwed the minor leagues is in the process of trying to contract the minor leagues, the major league teams.

Have basically said that they feel that they have too many minor leaguers, that they put too much money and effort into supporting farm systems that aren't generating in a high enough percentage of future major leaguers and are really in it to a great extent. So much of this, all of the issues with the tourists ballpark are supposedly, oh, it's not up to major league standards.

They're doing that intentionally to try to get rid of a whole bunch of minor league affiliates. They wanna shrink down the number of affiliates each team has. This is happening all over the country. It is not something that Ashfield is the only city dealing with and Major League Baseball knew. And the Minor League team moons knew that this was going to set off a scramble to be one of the sort of, they were pulling a bunch of chairs out of the musical chair circle and some cities were gonna be left without a team, and that was intentional.

On Major league baseball's part, major league baseball's in the process of really, they've never treated the minor leagues or minor leaguers terribly well. And right now they're in a process of contracting it even further. They're even to the point, I saw something in the paper the other day that said that the, they're currently lobbying Florida to try to exempt minor league baseball players from the state's minimum wage laws.

There's, they're really trying to chop away at what they see as too big of a cost structure for the big league teams. And so that's where Asheville’s getting this coming from the size, from the standpoint of, Could it move someplace else? That's really unlikely. Could it get contracted altogether and no longer have a Major League affiliate?

That's far more likely. From what I've seen,

Matt Peiken: that is huge news to me. And that this is a, a sort of silent, secret form of attrition. So you're saying though that, so this $30 million in renovations to meet Major League baseball standards, that they have set these standards. You're saying, are they arbitrary?

In a sense they are. Deliberately to be a high bar to meet for the purposes of attrition, not to first and foremost make these facilities major league grade. 

John Mozena: I think that you can have both. It's not in either or necessarily that if the Major League Baseball's goal is to have. As much of the minor leagues and as much of the minor league players as possible to be ready that they wanna invest in them being future major leaguers.

And if they're not gonna be future major leaguers, they don't wanna be spending a dime on them. They're not interested in the organization guy model of somebody who spends his entire career in playing games in front of fans in places like Asheville or around here, I think of the Tigers Village. It's Midland or Eerie or some places like that.

Then that makes sense because, so they want to invest. They're saying, okay, minor league teams invest in the facilities that make it as likely as possible that your guys are going to turn it into. Leagues. And at the same time, that gives them the opportunity to, like you said, create a mechanism that allows them to pair away at what they see as low performing or unnecessary parts of the minor leagues that aren't delivering an op.

They might be delivering a lot of fun and enjoyment to fans in the towns where they are, but they're not delivering what. Major League Baseball wants, which is future major league players.

Matt Peiken: Wow. And no politician wants to be known as the mayor that let the team go or the city council.

John Mozena: There’s always that, which is why an article that you were talking about that I wrote for an audience of municipal city level elected officials and appointed officials, which is why I made the point like, look, the simple answer here for you politicians is to like put this to the people for a vote, because that way you are.

If it goes down, then you get to be like, Hey, it wasn't me. It was the voters. Don't blame me for what the voters did. And if it wins, then you get to sit there at the ribbon cutting ceremony, taking credit for this great thing you did, even though you didn't do it. So the correct political answer for the folks in charge would be like, let the voters figure it out and put it on their backs.

That is, I think, more and more what politicians realizing gonna say, circulating some more backlash into this, especially at the like sort of smaller city minor league type level.