Funding issues in Las Vegas and St. Petersburg are not the only stadium problems facing MLB.
The holidays are over and it is the first business week of 2025 and Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred is facing the same problems at the beginning of 2025 that he faced throughout 2024. The financial situations in terms of funding new stadiums in Las Vegas and in St. Petersburg did not change over the holidays. There are no concrete money plans from either Athletics’ owner John Fisher or the Tampa Bay Rays’ ownership to finance those owners’ portion of the stadium budgets in Las Vegas or St. Petersburg. But those are only two of Manfred’s stadium concerns as there are situations in Chicago, Kansas City and Phoenix that need to be resolved. One item off the table for Manfred is a stadium issue in Milwaukee that has been resolved.
But there seems to be very little movement in Kansas City in terms of replacing the Royals stadium. In April 2024, Jackson County, Missouri voters said no to extending a sales tax with that money going into building a new baseball park and renovating the next store National Football League Kansas City Chiefs franchise’s stadium. The Royals’ owner John Sherman has been looking for a site in downtown Kansas City or in the Kansas City market either in Missouri or Kansas and has come up empty so far. In Chicago, White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf wants about a billion dollars in Illinois subsidies to build a stadium in the city. The answer he received from politicians was a resounding no. Reinsdorf met with Nashville officials about that city’s plan to build a baseball park but Nashville is tapped out in the subsidy game right now. In Phoenix, the Arizona Diamondbacks ownership is looking for public money to either build a new stadium or renovate the Phoenix ballpark. Manfred has five stadium situations to solve.
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MLB has a problem in Phoenix
