Backwards K

Backwards K

SHELL GAMES AND SUSPENSE HAVE MADE FOR THE MOST INTENSE ROYALS SPECTACLE IN YEARS

By Barb Shelly

Give it up, sports fans and taxpayers, for your Kansas City Royals—champions of suspense.

Not on the field, alas. The biggest question as the 2023 season winds down is whether the team will post its worst record ever or just something close to it. No one is waiting with bated breath for that answer.

The more riveting show is the one being staged by the Royals front office, which has held the region in thrall for weeks with a guessing game over the location of a ballpark to replace the venerable Kauffman Stadium.

Will it be the so-called East Village, just northeast of City Hall, where the Royals are promising to enhance the downtown revival with a year-round entertainment district?

Or will it be in North Kansas City, where some Clay County leaders think a major development like a ballpark district could convince people that the Northland is where they want to live and work?

Either way, the tactic is genius. By pitting neighbor against neighbor, Royals owner John Sherman and his team have short-circuited the debate about whether Kansas City actually needs a new ballpark project priced at around $2 billion. We’ve gone from if to where in about the length of time it takes a well-hit ball to leave the plate and splash down in the fountains beyond center field at the K.

Around the Horn

In the fall of 2021—two years after Sherman officially took over as the controlling owner of the Royals—the team announced it would be undertaking “a diligent, deliberate, and transparent process to explore the possibility of a new ballpark district.”

But when team officials started hosting public “listening sessions” a few weeks later, it was clear the fix was in. Royals brass swept in with architects, drawings, and economic studies tailored to favor relocation. The only listening that went on was the audience’s absorption of their talking points.

The stampede to abandon the K isn’t really surprising. Powerful Kansas City business interests have wanted to move the Royals downtown for years. (They hadn’t planned on the competing bid from North Kansas City, which we’ll get in a minute.)

What is surprising is the Royals’ success in commandeering the narrative.

Consider their rationale for abandoning Kauffman Stadium. According to team leaders, the 50-year-old K is old and terminally ill. It has been diagnosed with the dreaded alkali-silica reaction (ASR), known as “concrete cancer.” The architectural firm Populous, presumably a contender to design the new stadium, compiled slides detailing the dire condition of the ballpark, complete with photos that make it look like the place has been struck by a mortar.

The Kansas City Star, in a news story in January, noted that the Jackson County Sports Authority publishes annual inspection reports of Kauffman and Arrowhead stadiums on its website. The latest diagnosis, backed up by the Burns & McDonnell engineering firm, is that the stadium is in “satisfactory” condition.

“Minor physical deficiencies were observed throughout various locations within Kauffman Stadium and the immediate environs,” the report says. “Such deficiencies are expected in such a large facility and typical of a high-use facility. Most deficiencies can be easily addressed by the Kansas City Royals through standard maintenance procedures.”

The Royals told the Star that the reports” had “different objectives” and were not comparable.

The cancerous concrete story is key to a central team talking point—that the Royals’ current home is so far gone that it would actually cost a bit more to renovate Kauffman Stadium than to build a ballpark from the ground up. The cost for both projects is a little over $1 billion, according to Populous. The other half of the anticipated $2 billion-plus cost is for the entertainment district.

There is no independent analysis of the team’s claim. But in the months since Sherman and others made the cancerous concrete claim, it’s moved from a contention to an accepted fact. An Associated Press story published in late June declared without attribution that the concrete at the K “is beginning to show irreparable damage.”

Long Toss

To their credit, Mayor Quinton Lucas, Jackson County Executive Frank White, and some other elected officials have been properly skeptical about jumping on the Royals downtown express. They’re the ones, after all, who would have to put proposals for public investment before the taxpayers.

Their peers across the river have no such reservations. Clay County leaders seem all on board with the idea of public subsidies for a project they believe will vault the county and little North Kansas City, in particular, into the big leagues of the Kansas City metro.

There’s even an ad campaign funded by so-far anonymous backers but connected to Axiom Strategies, the firm belonging to controversial but successful political operative, Jeff Roe.

Sherman and his Royals team must love the intrigue.

We don’t yet know exactly what public investment the Royals will be asking for, but it begins with a dedicated sales tax amounting to nearly half a cent—three-eighths, to be exact.

Jackson County taxpayers are paying that already to maintain Kauffman and Arrowhead stadiums, so extending the tax doesn’t seem like an especially difficult sell. It would be a new tax for Clay County, however.

And let’s be real: The sales tax would only be the start of what the Royals are likely to ask for. Sherman wants the public to pay about half of the cost of the stadium-village project.

Get ready for tax-increment financing demands and who knows what else. Clay County, which has fewer residents and a smaller sales tax base than Jackson County, should expect to have to make up the difference through other subsidies.

Also, beware of claims that a ballpark entertainment complex would eventually pay for itself, drink by drink, T-shirt by T-shirt. Those same promises were made when Kansas City issued bonds in 2006 to pay for the downtown Power & Light District. They have never panned out.

Every year, Kansas City forgoes investments in other services because it has to make up the difference between what the P&L District generates in tax revenue and what’s required to stay solvent on the project’s debt. The city’s cut this year is $15.2 million, which will come from the general fund. Officials plan to look at possibly refinancing the loan, a spokesperson told The Pitch.

They might want to get that done sooner rather than later. A glitzy new entertainment district 10 or so blocks away, or even a couple of miles away in North Kansas City, is not great news for Power & Light. Or Westport. Or the Crossroads. While the Royals say they envision local businesses populating the hypothetical Ballpark Village, downtown is already hopping with the same kinds of local food and retail joints that Sherman seems to be talking about.

Pitch Clock

For most of the time I have lived in Kansas City, the Royals have been the backdrop of my summers. They were on my TV, part of my daily conversation. I would go on frequent outings to Kauffman Stadium, usually stopping at Gates BBQ on the way. My husband and I would settle happily into lawn chairs in the parking lot and have a beef-onbun and beer before the game started.

Then came 2020 and the pandemic, when the season was shortened, and actual fans were replaced by cardboard cutouts.

I heard someone refer to the cancellation of much of that season as the longest rain delay. For me, the sun has never come back out.

The 2021 season brought the nasty surprise that we could no longer watch Royals games on our streaming service. I could fork over an additional $20 a month for Bally Sports, and maybe I should. But the team lost 88 games in 2021, and 10 players—a third of the roster—were unvaccinated and couldn’t travel to games in Canada.

I was angry and opted not to pay to watch them. The Royals’ presence in my summers faded. If I want to see baseball now, I’d just as soon drive to Wyandotte County to watch the Kansas City Monarchs. Tickets are cheaper, you don’t pay for parking, and they usually win.

That infuriating year, 2021, was when talk started bubbling up about a downtown ballpark. I fired off an X (tweet, back then) to Mayor Lucas. Something like, “Until this team is 90% vaccinated and over .500, don’t even talk to me about subsidizing a downtown stadium.”

The significance of the vaccination rate has waned. But I still need the Royals to get their act together on the field before they ask me to subsidize a ballpark I’m not convinced any part of the metro needs.

You know those cool visualizations that have been in the news showing what a new Royals ballpark would look like? If you look closely, the seats in every picture are packed. But we in KC have experienced too many dismal seasons to believe in Field of Dreams miracles. They can build a ballpark, but beyond an initial novelty visit or two, the fans will not come as long as the team sucks.

The Royals and Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred tell us that a new ballpark district will draw fans, who will spend money, which will be invested back into the team, and everything will be great.

“A new ballpark district will help position us to compete with bigger markets on and off the field,” the Royals say on their promotional website.

I don’t buy that for a minute, and neither do people who follow the intricacies of sports a lot more closely than I do. Royals observer Jerry Edwards makes the point here that some teams have actually reduced their payroll spending after winning approval for new stadiums.

But suspense is the Royals’ new specialty, and I will wait on the edge of my seat to see if the team can cement that narrative, as it has done with the others.

If they succeed, then we, Kansas City, will most certainly have been played.

Bob Unell