Nevada, Meet Jackson County: Missouri county told the Royals owner, “Build it yourself!”

By Jeff Kallman

Voters in Jackson County, Missouri did what at least one Nevada teachers’ union hoped Nevada voters would have the chance to do. The Jackson County voters told the owners of baseball’s Royals and football’s Chiefs to take their demand that taxpayers continue paying for the teams’ facilities and stuff it.

This logo seems sure to become a collector’s item.Photo byOakland Athletics

The now-failed ballot initiative would have extended the county’s 3/8 cent sales tax another quarter century, financing a new Royals ballpark and upgrades to the Chiefs’ Arrowhead Stadium. In essence, the voters told the Royals, “If you want to build it, you can pay for it yourselves. And don’t even think about upending established local businesses for it.”

Just a few days before the vote, according to several reports, Royals owner John Sherman promised to kick $1 billion in toward a new ballpark. Chiefs owner Clark Hunt promised to kick in $300 million for the Arrowhead upgrades. Mighty big of them.

“The billionaires don’t finance my follies. Why should I finance theirs?” asked Michael Savwoir, a leader with the KC. Tenants advocacy group opposing the extension. “I think we can all agree it was a pretty shabby job of selling anything, pretty shabby in terms of how it was delivered—the message, the deceit, the strong-arming and the extortion.”

Deceit. Strong-arming. Extortion. Those are polite ways to phrase the manners in which sports owners pry billions out of localities for new playpens for which they’d only have to kick pocket money in, if that.

We’ve come a terribly long way from the days when Walter O’Malley discovered the hard way that New York building and planning tyrant Robert Moses had no intention of letting anyone—not even the Brooklyn Dodgers’ owner—build a new privately-owned ballpark or other New York sports facility, if he had anything to say about it.

Nobody’s forcing the Royals’ hands. Kauffman Stadium isn’t anywhere near the rambling wreck into which the Oakland Coliseum was allowed to devolve for so many years. It seems plenty enough re-makeable. When people such as The Athletic’s Nate Taylor write, “[B]ased on Tuesday’s results, the long-term future of both teams, and where the Royals and Chiefs will host their home games, are unclear,” they’re describing false adversity.

“You know what would be cool?” asks Cup of Coffee journalist (and former NBC Sports baseball analyst) Craig Calcaterra. “If someone . . . would frame this as the owners of the Royals and the Chiefs putting their futures in question their own damn selves.”

Because they're the ones claiming they need a billion+ in taxpayer dollars to stay. They’re the ones who wove the fiction that their stadiums are decrepit and unviable when they clearly are not. They’re the ones who introduced the prospect of them leaving town as the ultimate end game. They, to use the parlance of wrestling/internet arguments, worked themselves into a shoot over all of this. They created a phony story about the dire need for public subsidies in order to get some goodies and now, apparently, they believe that story of dire need. Voters didn't do shit to them except call their greedy-ass bluff.

Nevada, take note. Las Vegas’s Tropicana Hotel has closed and faces an October date with the wrecking balls in order to make room for a new Oakland-to-Sacramento Athletics ballpark in Vegas. The A’s will share the Sacramento River Cats’ tiny Sutter Health Park from 2025 until whenever the Vegas ballpark gets built, if it ever gets built.

Remember: The Nevada State Education Association is suing over the legality of state lawmakers and the state’s governor ramming $380 million in tax dollars (before potential cost overruns, of course) through last year. That suit followed a court quashing the NSEA’s bid to force the dough to a public vote on a ballot initiative. Perhaps that court feared Nevada voters, like Jackson County voters, might prove not to have tumbleweed for brains.

A's owner John Fisher and his parrot David Kaval tried and failed to strong-arm Oakland into all but handing them a delicious new real estate development with a ballpark thrown in for good measure. Fisher’s ten-thumbed way has reduced them to rubble enough that they’ve resembled a minor league team for most of the past four or five years. (They opened the new season 1-6.)

There’s perverse poetic justice in the A’s winding up in a minor league ballpark. But it’s still hell to watch for A’s fans who’ve been abused nigh unto death. Sherman isn’t even half as likely to let that happen to his Royals, even if he claims their “last possible season” in Kauffman would be 2030.

“If the Royals are unable to move to a new downtown stadium before 2030,” Taylor writes, “one possible outcome is that the franchise could leave Kansas City altogether for another market willing to build a new ballpark.” Is that a threat or a promise?

Dallas mayor Eric Johnson has already said he’d love the Chiefs to think about moving there. (A homecoming: they were born as the Dallas Texans of the American Football League in 1960.) Who’s to say some other mayor won’t say he or she would love the Royals to think about his or her town?

And who’s to say Sherman won’t think about it? Especially if their taxpayers can be hosed the way Jackson County’s refused to allow?

Jeff Kallman is an IBWAA Life Member who writes Throneberry Fields Forever. He has written for the Society for American Baseball Research, The Hardball Times, Sports-Central, and other publications. He has lived in Las Vegas since 2007, where he plays the guitar and writes music when not writing baseball. He remains a Met fan since the day they were born.