Minor League Baseball Parks: A Case Study

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Minor League Baseball teams have good reasons for them to go through public funding to build minor league baseball parks for teams in downtown Charlotte, NC. Since Charlotte is a small market, the new stadium would bring people to cities and help increase expansions of businesses and buildings in cities. Public funding of baseball parks allows for the creation of job opportunities in those areas, which also helps strengthens their economies. Some benefits of public funding of sports stadiums include franchise owners’ profits, increase incomes along with job opportunities, and increase tax revenue (Wilhelm, 2008). The city of Charlotte will divert 7.25 million from a hotel/motel occupancy tax whether than using the money to spend on tourism …show more content…
When investors purchase minor league baseball teams, they know how to run them and make them successful. According to Bradley Reynolds, what keeps fan coming back isn’t baseball, but it is the affordability, family fun, and wholesome entertainment that makes the business unique and work (Schoenfeld, 2014). Investors can afford to purchase a Minor League Baseball park without needing to get a loan or seek funding, because they have other ventures that they operate, which produces a great amount of revenue. Privately owned baseball parks will enhance the value of the team (Miller, 2016) and if the team isn’t or doesn’t work in one area, the owners will move the team to another city, which allows the team to stay in existence. The privately funded ballparks would be able to create job, which would boost the economy of a city whether than putting the city at risk. “If the owner pays for a new stadium without securing a loan, then it incurs the construction costs and an opportunity cost associated with using its own funding to construct the stadium” (Miller, …show more content…
Public funding stadiums have to depend on taxpayers to fund the construction of a stadium, which puts the city the ballpark will be at risk, for example, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Miami taxpayers had to pay most of $634 million to build a stadium, which required the city to get a loan and end up repaying 2.4 billion over 40 years (Ligaya, 2013). If the owner of a baseball park takes out a loan for a private source, then the owner is responsible for repaying the principal and interest payment (Miller, 2014), so the taxpayer will not be affect in anyway by this, unless the owner can’t control the operation, which the ball park will be sold to another private investor who will have a better vision of making it succeed. Public funding of a ballpark is not a guaranteed to work in a city, so the ballpark would have to close or be sold to a private investor, which I believe it doesn’t only the ballpark but also it helps save the team. According to Bruce Schoenfeld, “Smart shoppers have been buying up teams, often clubs with negative balance sheets,” so that shows that many private investors have been taking unsuccessful teams and making them successful because they know how to market the team and handle the operations (Schoenfeld, 2014). There are many people that would disagree with public funding a baseball park because