Gerry Fraley hates TBIA

Former DMN baffoon turned freelancer Gerry Fraley writes about ballparks that suck today, and as usual, takes his shots at the Rangers, concluding thusly...

Whomever Hicks sells to, and a group headed by team president and Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan should be considered the favorite, must be ready to peel off about $200 million to add the roof.

I'm not sure if Fraley is just hyperbolizing to get attention from basement-dwelling bloggers like me, or if he's serious...but the idea that the Ranger franchise is not viable without a domed stadium is foolishness.

Would TBIA be better with a retractable roof?  No question.  Would attendance be better with a retracted roof?  No question.

But is TBIA really such a hellhole that no owner can buy the team if there isn't a roof in place?

Give me a break.

I don't know where the $200 million number came from, if it is a realistic estimate or if was plucked from Fraley's nether-regions. 

But the reality is, if you are going to pay to put a retractable roof on TBIA, you're probably just as well off building a whole new stadium.

It has been made pretty clear that, regardless of the other engineering issues, putting a roof on TBIA isn't feasible because the infrastructure isn't set up for there to be air conditioning to cool the entire stadium with a roof on it...basically, putting a roof on TBIA would turn it into an oven, which would be counter-productive.

Fraley's theory is that the ballpark situation basically drops the value of the Rangers by $200 million from what Forbes has the team valued at.  And for the finances to work, if you amortize the $200 million spent on a new roof over an expected 20 year span, you'd have to make $18 million more per year in profit in order to cost-justify the expense.  I haven't seen the numbers crunched, but I don't think that a retractable roof is going to generate that much more in revenues, much less in profit.

So, yeah, I guess you could say the new owners could go to Dallas and ask for the city to build a new retractable roof ballpark there.  And in this economy, with a city that couldn't get the Rangers in the first place and couldn't keep the Cowboys, I imagine that's going to go nowhere.

So basically, Fraley's point is that the Rangers are a doomed franchise because their stadium doesn't have a roof.  Good to see his view of our team hasn't changed much since he was collecting a paycheck for the Dallas Morning News.