It’s a swing and a miss for the Utah Senate to pass the bill for the new baseball stadium.
Salt Lake City is in the process of getting enough bonds to pay for a $900 million stadium for a Major League Baseball team in Salt Lake City.
I would love to see more baseball and more support for MLB. However, it is not necessary to make a new team, let alone build an entirely new stadium specifically for Utah. The money would come from the sales tax in the region where the stadium would be located. It costs an obscene amount of money for a stadium that will just sit without use for half the year.
If we look at the Rio Tinto stadium for soccer or the Delta Center, for the Utah Jazz basketball, we can see that these stadiums are used for much more than just their designated sport.
The Rio Tinto stadium can be used for concerts, other sporting events or some larger conventions. The Delta Center is used for concerts, shows and other smaller games. If we look at just about any other baseball stadium, they are very hard to change or to set up as anything else other than a baseball field. They are such specific layouts for the sport that it is best used as is.
With that in mind, during the six months of baseball season, it would be well used for games. After that time, usually the fields are just left waiting for the next season to start. Even if some company or event coordinator could pay the to rent out the stadium that would be built, the changes that would have to be made to the stadium to accommodate the event would be significant. Especially when trying to protect the field in the process.
The money that is going toward this stadium and team could go to many other things that the valley needs such as:
- school systems
- pay for teachers
- supplies for schools
- housing
- finding solutions for cleaner air
The stadium would then spend a good majority of the beginning years of being in service trying to repay that money with the profits made from viewers. It is possible that the stadium as well as the team won’t be super popular, which adds the risk of not bringing in a lot of money, especially for newer and younger generations.
Building this stadium and team is a foul play. To create something like this when there are bigger problems at hand to focus on shows a lack of focus on what’s truly important in society.
