Baseball, diversity and politics

There has been a lot of debate lately regarding the diversity of Jeff Lyash's baseball committee.

We were curious, so we looked up the political party affiliation of the 11 board members. As it turns out, eight are Republicans, two are Democrats and one is an Independent.

In honor of the ongoing election season, here's the breakdown:

Republicans:

• Co-chair Jeff Lyash, CEO of Progress Energy Florida
• Co-chair Judy Mitchell, president of Peter Brown Construction   
• Barbara Heck, president of the Council of Neighborhood Associations
• Russ Kimball, general manager of the Sheraton Sand Key Resort
• Steve Raymund, board chairman of Tech Data and former co-chairman of the St. Petersburg Area Chamber of Commerce's baseball task force
• Bob Stewart, County Commission Chairman
• Chuck Sykes, CEO of Sykes Enterprises Inc.
• Alan Bomstein, president of Creative Contractors

Democrats:

• Craig Sher, president of Sembler Co.
• Gregory Johnson, president of the Pinellas County Urban League

Independent:

• Ricardo Davis, president of Bay Area Medical Supplies

*

Comments

[John]

What about Kalt, Silverman & Sternburg? I'm willing to bet they're Republicans.

You know, the party that is supposedly against pork barrel spending, for a balanced budget, LESS TAXES & soforth?

Except when it comes to their buddies in MLB and big business of course.

Right, Mr Baker?

[Matthew]

Ah yes, the Republicans. The party of the rich get rich and the poor get poorer. I am sure the new good folk of the ABC will find a way to fleece our pockets so the millionaire Rays owners make out like bandits.

[Scaramouche]

So the thing called "politics," maybe better labeled "class warfare," has entered the public discourse on this stadium subsidy issue. I don't see where any of the ABC can safely be called "democrat" with the small "d." They all look like Right-handers to me.

I keep wondering what has happened to all those carpetbagger-provided blue and white signs that appeared and then silently disappeared. You know, the ones that read "LET US VOTE!"

Whattya think, Aaron and Cristina -- do you think that an issue of huge significance to this area will actually be submitted to a referendum? Or is this once again to be treated as a matter of the "philosopher kings" exercising "noblesse oblige" toward us uncomprehending peasants? Which if you spend some time with the dictionary, is more truly like the immemorial exercise of "le droight de seigneur," the noble's right to take whatever he wanted from the lesser classes, including the virginity of their new wives and pubescent daughters?

[matthew]

Thank you Scaramouche "le droight de seigneur," for bringing up the fact that, unlike the waterfront site, if the Rays get to build a stadium anywhere else in St. Pete we taxpayers get NO SAY at all. I would love to be able to vote on such a huge waste of my money, but no dice. Maybe that's why they withdrew their proposal for the waterfront site....they wanted a site where they could lull the politicians into some sort of testosterone induced state that would cause them to spend my hardearned dollars to line the pockets of a bunch of carpet bagging corporate welfare guys.

[Cathy Wilson]

I'd brace myself for a full scale tax-payer revolt should our elected officials try to foist yet ANOTHER stadium down our collective throats without a vote. Many people here are still carrying a great deal of animus over how the Trop came to be - enough to break the political careers of the pols who try it again.

I actually enjoyed the irony of the "Let's Build the Ballpark" folks using the "Let Us Vote" slogan for awhile - too bad they caught on to the inside joke. Most of the long-timers here passionately WANT to vote on a new stadium - so they can just say NO!

[Scaramouche]

I'll say it again:

I THOUGHT SLAVERY HAD BEEN OUTLAWED!

In an early Times story flacking the stadium subsidy, there appeared this quote, from a former Pittsburgh mayor who graduated from encumbering his “small market” town with a huge stadium subsidy payment to pimping public ballpark subsidies for other teams. It read something like “Cities give stadiums to MLB teams. It is the way it is.”

Maybe he’s right. Maybe the average people in most of the 28 cities who are "blessed" with the chance to “host” an MLB team will always be dumb or weak enough to suffer under the same kinds of "nobles" who forced the medieval serfs into grinding poverty, making them struggle for barely enough to keep alive under taxes and fees that just grew and grew. And for why? So these self-anointed “lords” could ride around on big horses, wearing grotesque, and grotesquely expensive, tin suits and silk brocade, with their high-tech (for the day) shiny swords and maces and lances. Which they bought with the blood and sweat they drained from those same serfs, and which they used to intimidate the serfs into prostrate subjugation, and occasionally to take a cut at one another. So this “nobility of power” could spend their days in “romance,” learning important things like the collective nouns for animals (one “lark”, an “exultation of larks”), dreaming up high-flown excuses for adultery and such, and enjoying the toadying of the lesser classes. Maybe the peasants will not recall that “hosting” is what prey species do to parasites, like leeches and tapeworms.

Now we have full-court-pressing, or maybe it’s full-press-courting if you read the Times, to let the tax-and-fee-paying public know that once again, they will pay to let the “lords” play. We’re told that father-son bonding at MLB, Inc. games, and a “winning home” (but ultimately portable) team,” provide such huge psychic value that we-all should just sign blank checks and hand over our 21% credit cards to “baseball developers.” We’re fed a sob story about how “our” team’s owners are gasping in poverty (compared to other “lords of MLB, Inc.” at least) due to the “enormous millstone” of the (publicly purchased and still publicly underwritten) Trop which they apparently willingly hung around their own necks.

But look at what the “really profitable” ballparks contain. Leather seats in high-end lounges, where the blessed can’t really even see the game. A place for the rich to “show off.” Ticket prices that clearly define the divide between “the poor,” who can just afford stay at home and watch on TV, and “the rich,” who plunk their expensively clad butts on the leather seats installed for their comfortable ease by the debts and taxes loaded onto “the poor” to pay off a billion-dollar “subsidy.”

Of course, there is NO ATTENTION GIVEN to what the Rays owners themselves pointed out in their initial PowerPoint slides last year -- that at least four MLB franchises ostensibly put up their pleasure palaces WITH NO PUBLIC FUNDING, or maybe very little. San Francisco is roughly market-equivalent to the Bay Area. And after the voters spoke very clearly in multiple referenda that they would not knuckle under for that billion-dollar subsidy, the team people managed to find their own means of financing AT&T Field, and are now in the upper ranges of MLB, Inc. profitability.

Which, as the Times pages make clear, is what this is all about. The stories to date skip right past the initial question of whether the peasants of the world owe a high-off-the-hog life to people who have turned the National Pastime into their own personal Cash Cow. They assume “It is the way it is.” Glossing over the fact that the statement is not uniformly true, and in this world should not be true.

The average taxpayer is already reeling under the cost of tax-cuts-that-somehow-result-in-higher-tax-bills, bailouts and just living day to day. If this subsidy thing is ever submitted to a vote, which appears highly unlikely given the government-corporate machinations now under way, what sane person would find any merit in the idea that he or she has a public duty to ensure that the team owners are guaranteed a higher profit on their very private asset? Then again, I guess we have all been proven pretty stupid so many Times in the past that maybe these grifting snake-oil salesmen will pull it off again.

“It is the way it is?” Say it ain’t so, Joe!

[Harold]

Aaron I don't know if you read these blogs. But I thought they were pretty bad when they were dominated by Rick K. But I was wrong. This blog is dead and a waste of time. It has become a posting site for paranoid conspiracy theorists and half informed bullying wannabe poitico's. It has been devoid of intelligent exchange for some time now. I keep checking back to see if anything relative has been posted and ,,,, well
I'll stop now.
Stop checking and stop writing.
They are coming to take me away.

[Marshall]

sounds like crony capitalism to me...