Despite drain on city finances, Fresno had no choice but to play ball with MLB
Over a 48-hour span, Fresno sports fans had reason to both cheer and hiss.
Hooray! for the return of professional soccer in the new/old form of Central Valley Fuego Futbol Club.
Boo! for MLB strong-arming our Fresno Grizzlies three levels deeper into the bush leagues.
Seems like every time Fresno scores a few points in the fickle world of professional sports, we immediately get dunked on.
Considering our history, we should probably consider ourselves fortunate the Grizzlies didn’t wind up in the same memory warehouse that stores all of the city’s extinct minor-league teams. Let’s see. Just in my time here the list includes the Foxes (soccer), Falcons (hockey), Frenzy and Coyotes (arena football) and Flames (6-4 and under basketball).
Why are the Grizzlies still growling, albeit in a slightly diminished Low A capacity, following MLB’s sweeping minor-league revamp?
Simple: Because two decades ago Fresno decided to build a downtown stadium on what were mostly weed-cracked asphalt parking lots.
This week, as city leaders finalized a new deal with Grizzlies ownership over the team’s continued use of Chukchansi Park, the wisdom of that decision (and its drain on city coffers) has been hotly debated.
Some of the back and forth is fair and factual, but other parts have been misleading or heavy with hindsight. So let’s set the record straight on a few things.
To start with, Fresno City Council President Miguel Arias labeling the stadium “the city’s most expensive impulse buy” is only half true.
Expensive? Certainly. The Chuk had a $46 million price tag, and the city must make $3.1 million annual payments on the construction bonds. Impulsive? Certainly not. The decision-making process dragged out nearly a decade and culminated in one of the nastiest political fights in city history.
In fact, the Grizzlies had already played three seasons at Fresno State’s Beiden Field (where they were treated as second-class citizens) by October 2000 when the City Council overrode Mayor Jim Patterson’s veto of the city’s deal with team ownership. Public pressure to finally pull the trigger on the stadium was immense.
Patterson surely remembers. Several of the city’s most prominent businessmen joined an effort to get him recalled.
No sooner did the stadium open its gates (in May 2002) than gaps started to appear in the financing plan. Expected revenues from parking and city-sponsored events were grossly overstated. More strangely, none of the decision makers seemed to be aware the Grizzlies had amassed some $1.8 million in “rent credits” and thus for a while wouldn’t be sending the city any $125,000 monthly checks.
Oops.
An extravagance, not a mistake
Things have followed a similar pattern ever since. Each time the Grizzlies get sold, the new owners work out a new lease that involves a reduction in annual rent. (It’s gone from $1.5M to $1M to $500K to $100K.) And each time, city leaders go along citing the need to keep the team afloat and the peripheral effects the stadium has on downtown.
So was building the stadium a mistake? As someone who loves baseball and enjoys the downtown setting, I don’t think so. But it sure was an extravagance.
The stadium didn’t really need 12,500 seats (its original capacity) or 32 luxury suites. It didn’t need a swimming pool, nor a $330,000, 40-ton portable stage for concerts that was hardly used and later sold for 10 cents on the dollar. It probably didn’t need a second deck, even though that deck is what gives the place so much of its architectural charm.
A more modest version of the stadium we have now would’ve served the same purpose and provided the same benefits while not tapping city coffers to such an extent.
But that decision was made long in the past. It’s like complaining about a bad call at second base, or a managerial move, decades after the fact. There’s really no point. Fresno got to see 19 years of players such as Tim Lincecum, Buster Posey, Madison Bumgarner and Carlos Correa take their final step to the big leagues. Who knows what future all-stars just starting their journeys might we be reminiscing about in the future.
Fresno can side-eye Spokane
If it makes local sports fans feel any better, Fresno isn’t the first city to see its minor-league baseball team bumped down three levels in one fell swoop.
Between 1958-1971 and 1973-1982, the Spokane Indians were members of the same Triple-A Pacific Coast League the Grizzlies later joined. In 1983, the Indians dropped to short-season A ball.
Fast forward to 2020, and the Spokane Indians are still in business as members of the six-team Northwest League that just got elevated to High A. Matter of fact, the Indians now sit one rung above the Grizzlies in the Colorado Rockies’ farm system.
You might be interested to know the Spokane Indians play in a stadium built in 1958 at a cost of $550,000 with a seating capacity of 6,803. (It underwent $2.8 million worth of upgrades in 2013.)
Fresno, with its $46 million, two-deck stadium that seats 10,650, will be giving Spokane the side-eye from now on.
But, hey, at least MLB committed to Fresno and the Grizzlies through 2030. Which should give city taxpayers just enough time to pay off those bonds. Play ball? I don’t see how there’s much choice.
