Cards notebook: Jordan Walker to Memphis, the stadium grift is on the horizon, and early returns on the pitching makeover

Let's talk Cardinals, shall we?

If the Cards can win four of their next five against the Mets and Tigers, then they’ll finish with a .500 record in April. Given the challenges of the early schedule, that would be a feat of a kind. Beyond that, here’s what I've been thinking about lately. 

Return of the stadium grift

The current iteration of Busch Stadium is less than two decades old, which makes it quite young as concrete and steel structures go. However, that same lifespan apparently makes it outmoded when it comes to nebulous notions like “viability.” Eric Berger of the Riverfront Times recently reported: 

“Now the River City Journalism Fund has learned that the Cardinals owners hope to make significant renovations to Busch Stadium in the next five years — and will likely seek public funding for the project, which they say is necessary to keep the stadium viable. 

“The team president compares the potential scale of the project to two other franchises that each obtained more than $500 million in public funding for stadium upgrades.

“And so, three decades after the Busch Stadium negotiations, the Cardinals leadership could soon go to bat again over the idea that stadium projects help taxpayers and are not simply a big win for billionaire owners.”

Berger’s piece is a refreshing one as the sub-genre of stadium-funding pieces goes. That’s because he details what we know about public stadium investments, and what we know is that they are uniformly losers when it comes to giving the public adequate return on those investments and that “urban revitalization” arguments turn out to be unmistakable bullshit. I urge you to read it because it’s an object lesson in how publications should report on these issues. 

The grift is also at times an undemocratic undertaking. When subjected to public referenda, these boondoggles are usually quite unpopular with voters. It’s also something that should turn off both major political wings in this country. The left-leaning should want public monies invested in more essential and or fruitful undertakings, while the right-leaning should recoil at the prospect of higher taxes (even taxes in disguise, as is the usual stadium-funding m.o.). Too often, though, civic leaders of all ideological stripes are all too eager to raid the coffers for billionaire team owners and give them what they want with very little accountability attached. So an end run around the democratic process is often the only way forward for owners who want to enrich themselves and mayors who pine for a vanity project. 

The Cardinals are under lease through 2041 and cannot relocate during that time. This is why city leaders should tell the DeWitts to kick rocks when they inevitably show up asking for handouts. Will they? Probably not, but one can hope. 

Here’s where the stadium issue becomes a sore spot for rank-and-file fans who above all want to see the hometown team win games and titles. Teams should not be given such handouts because it’s not a wise use of public funds. However, when they don’t get every last bit of what they want, teams can barge ahead with more private money than they hoped would be necessary. That sounds desirable, but what can happen – what did happen with the Ricketts on the North Side of Chicago, to cite one example – is that owners can point to that debt service as the reason they can’t (read: won’t) spend more on player payroll. This is a hollow excuse, but it tends to play well enough. 

It’s not hard to envision the DeWitts’ trotting out a similar suite of excuses should they be forced to privately finance whatever upgrades they deem essential (though those upgrades may magically become less essential in the absence of bond offerings and hotel taxes and so forth). Cardinals ownership is already in a gradual and general state of payroll disinvestment, and they hardly need another convenient rationale to do even less. I refuse to “root” for the Cardinals to be buried in taxpayer dollars for what’s to come, but at the same time I fear how an increasingly uninterested ownership group will respond to such a rebuff. 

The Walker demotion