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.