This forum died since I stopped posting here.

[SonySegaTendo617]

Originally Posted by kcmo

The Royals are NOT staying at Kauffman no matter how much people cry about staying there. If KC people want to keep Kauffman so bad, it will be without a team. The Royals will ultimately leave KC.

Kauffman needs hundreds of millions of dollars worth of renovations, (probably closer to a billion) for that stadium to last another 30 years.

It makes zero sense to put that kind of money into that stadium in that location. There is no return on the investment for the team or the city. That's why the Royals are not going to even entertain the idea of staying at Kauffman.

Arrowhead needs a ton of work too, but NFL and MLB are very different. It makes more sense to renovate Arrowhead. It's only used 10-20 days a year and requires a ton of parking. It would also cost a couple billion to replace it.

KC is a very small market now for MLB. When KC got the As and the early days of the Royals, the metro was like the 20th largest and the economics of MLB was very different. KC had a high payroll in the 80's for example. Now KC is like the 31st largest metro. KC also draws very poorly, even when dong well. In 2015, they drew a record 33k a game, but any other city (besides Tampa) would draw more. And the fans left as fast as they came and basically gone again by 2018. Milwaukee is the only metro smaller than KC and they draw 35k a game if the Brewers are even playing 500. Once Oakland moves, KC will be last in attendance and will have one of the most outdated stadiums. The Royals will become the number one candidate for relocation.

You have many cities that are desperate for a MLB team including Nashville, Charlotte, Orlando, Salt Lake City, Austin, San Antonio and Portland. If they can get a team, they WILL build a new downtown park for them. All of these metros were once smaller than KC and now all but Nashville are larger. Nashville will blow past KC in the next decade though.

I love Kauffman stadium. I grew up near it. Have been to hundreds of games there. But it's not that nice anymore. I have been to every park and I would rank it about the middle of the pack. It's not terrible, but it's not great either. And the location is just absolutely terrible. The area around those stadiums has deteriorated so badly. I mean in the 80's and 90's there were at least a few decent hotels. Now nearly everything out there is boarded up, trash everywhere etc. Do people in KC even realize how crappy that area of KC has become?

The Royals need new life. They need a stadium for all kinds of reasons. Mostly the team needs more revenue streams. Again being in a small market. They need to develop a younger more urban fan base. The Royals barely draw anybody from that demographic like you see in most cities. If you live in the city and are in your 20's, there is zero interest it driving out to Kauffman. The Royals need to be near people, offices, hotels and residents. Especially for weekday games.

KC needs to wake up or they are going to lose the Royals and they will never get a MLB back if they do. The metro is too small now.

I do see your points, to you and also KC_Retiree. I just hope their new stadium, still has some sort of waterfall feature beyond the outfield wall. And it's funny that in a way, the surrounding neighborhood not popping out and encouraging people to go to games probably also is a hinderance for the new(current) Comiskey Park, a la Kaufmann(sp?) Stadium. To me I see why both teams, are considering new stadiums. White Sox are thinking about building a new stadium in the South Loop area, and in a rare undeveloped part of it(the 78).

[James Bond 007]

I think it would be borderline blasphemy for the Royals to build a new park without fountains or waterfalls in the outfield, so I think it's safe to assume it will have those.

[MarketStEl]

25th, not 20th, largest metro when the Truman Sports Complex opened*, kcmo. But that doesn't really negate your point, which is that several cities have lapped it since the 1970s. (And I think the metro ranked 31st rather than 30th in the 2010 census — and the CSA hadn't been expanded to include Lawrence (Douglas County, KS) in that census, either.)

I thought I read some time back that the current Royals owners intended to stay in KC for the long run. Not investing in the team itself, however, doesn't give one much confidence that this will be the case. The infamous Charles O. Finley deliberately made the A's stink in the team's later years in KC in part so he could move the team to Oakland.

I'm with you on the downtown ballpark, but downtown KC needs more than a ballpark to bring it out of what seems to me to be a pretty deep funk. Save for the Power & Light District, a daiquiri bar right across from the downtown apartment building (former Traders National Bank HQ) we were staying in, and a pretty happening bar over near the base of Quality Hill, my bf and I saw preci0ous little life on the streets of downtown KC — even during the workday — when I took him back to see my hometown last June. (Even so, however, he fell in love with the place and didn't want to leave. That should say something about the pull the city can have on people.)

Actually, I think KC would be classed as a modestly growing metro rather than a slow-growing one: Its population grew by 9.1 percent over the decade from 2010-2020. (Compare that to cross-state rival St. Louis' 1.2% growth over that decade, or Greater Philadelphia's 4.7%. It also grew at a slightly faster clip than the country's two largest MSAs. And the nation as a whole grew by 7.4% during that decade.) Keep in mind that Kansas City is a fully mature city and not a recent upstart like the fast-growing ones in the Sunbelt — and also keep in mind that no city can continue to grow at a rapid pace ad infinitum.

Kansas Citians do seem to have a tendency to protest against change, but enough of them can be persuaded to support it: consider that voters did approve the bonds that gave Kansas City the fantastic airport it now has. (I wrote about that fight for what was then 435 and is now Kansas City magazine [and thank God for that: Whoever heard of a city mag named for the beltway around it?].)

I wouldn't give up hope that the Royals get the new ballpark they want, therefore.

*I sang the National Anthem along with my fellow Pem-Day Glee Club members at opening day of what was then Royals Stadium in 1973.