Ballpark figures

FOR THE PAST FEW MONTHS, a dispute has been simmering between the Red Sox and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino. The Sox, along with some neighboring businesses and hospitals, have been lobbying for $55 million in state money for bus, subway, and road improvements near Fenway Park that would enhance the value of the property in the area, much of which the team owns and is developing. Repeatedly and firmly, the mayor has said he thinks the money would be better spent elsewhere.

Menino hasn't always been so frugal with the local baseball club. The last time the Red Sox asked for public funds, in a controversial and ultimately failed 2000 bid to build a new ballpark, Menino offered $212 million in city funds-on top of a state infrastructure package nearly twice the size of the one currently under consideration. City officials say the change is merely an adjustment to a new, straitened financial climate. But they also allow that the mayor is no longer sure it makes economic sense to grant the team's financial wishes.

For a decade and a half, the belief that sports teams were economic drivers helped persuade cities and states to shower billions of dollars on major league sports teams, most of it to build state-of-the-art stadiums like the Detroit Tigers' Comerica Park, the Seattle Seahawks' Qwest Field, and perhaps most famously the Baltimore Orioles' Camden Yards-the 1992 ballpark that set the standard not only for how ballparks would look, but how they would be built and paid for. ''Build the Stadium," went a 1997 slogan for a new San Francisco football stadium, ''Create the Jobs!"

But Menino isn't the only one to have had second thoughts in recent years about the wisdom of such largesse. Bitter public disputes have broken out in a few other sports cities over whether to give public funds to the local team. The most recent ballpark to be built, St. Louis's new Busch Stadium, was paid for almost entirely by the Cardinals after city and state officials refused to commit public funds. A proposed Manhattan stadium for the New York Jets died last year when the state government refused to chip in the asked-for $300 million. The political battle over the funding of Miller Park, in Milwaukee, was so vitriolic that former Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson refused to set foot in it for years after it was built.

This new skepticism of public sports team funding is thanks in part to a small community of economists who have taken up and methodically rejected many of the claims made about the economic benefits of major league sports teams: that they create jobs or bring money to local businesses or otherwise spur economic growth. ''Generally speaking," says Andrew Zimbalist, a professor at Smith College and a leading sports economist, ''the independent research suggests that we can't anticipate any economic impact" from sports teams and stadiums.

Still, despite wide unanimity on this point among economists, not even the harshest critics of sports team subsidies believe the practice is in danger of extinction. Less than two weeks ago, Washington, D.C., agreed to pay an unprecedented $611 million to build the Washington Nationals a baseball stadium, raising again the question of why it is we're so willing to throw money at our hometown heroes.

Economists are starting to take up that question, too. The answer seems to involve a potent combination of the business of sports, the workings of local politics, and the irrational human tendency known as fandom.

WHEN A TEAM WANTS money, and it's usually money for a new stadium, it commissions an economic impact study. The predicted economic impact tends to be dramatic. The study the accounting firm Ernst & Young did for the proposed New York Jets stadium in Manhattan predicted that it would bring in $72.5 million in additional annual tax revenue. A similar study by the consulting firm Economics Research Associates, ERA, calculated that the new Dallas Cowboys stadium in Arlington, Texas, due to open in 2009, will add between $12.48 billion and $27.65 billion to the county economy over an estimated 30-year lifespan.

Independent economists dismiss these numbers. Much of the envisioned economic impact, they argue, comes from the money spent by fans, either on tickets or concessions or in nearby restaurants, hotels, souvenir shops, and the like. The problem with this argument, economists say, is that most families, whether they keep a budget or not, spend a finite amount of money on entertainment. As Vanderbilt University economist John Siegfried puts it, ''What are people going to with their money if they don't spend it on the Red Sox, flush it down the toilet? No, they'll spend it on something else: books, maybe, or bowling, things that Boston would benefit just as much from."

As for new jobs, sports teams and their stadiums do create them, but remarkably inefficiently, according to Roger Noll, an economics professor at Stanford University and co-editor, with Zimbalist, of ''Sports, Jobs, and Taxes" (1997), one of the most comprehensive works on the public funding of sports. In Baltimore, he says, the cost per job created by Camden Yards was $125,000, whereas for the city's other urban redevelopment programs it was $6,000 per job. And $125,000, according to Noll, is actually pretty efficient for a sports stadium.

University of Chicago economist Allen Sanderson puts it another way. ''Cities would be better off," he says, ''if the mayor were to go up in a helicopter and dump out $100,000."

The jobs stadiums do create are mostly part time-baseball stadiums tend to be used only 81 times a year, football stadiums eight times a year (a few more if they host concerts and conventions)-and low wage: parking lot attendants, security guards, ticket-takers, and vendors.

Of course, a few people in a sports organization are handsomely compensated: the owners and players, who receive the bulk of a team's earnings. This tends to do the local economy little good, however. Many owners and players don't even live in their team's home city (Vanderbilt's Siegfried has found that only 29 percent of National Basketball Association players live near the city where they play), and even when they do, they tend, like most wealthy people, to save or invest most of their earnings rather than spread them around to local businesses.

ACCORDING TO Siegfried, there's a remarkable agreement on these points. In economics, he says, ''with most empirical issues there's lots of debate. Does the minimum wage cause unemployment? There's lots of debate about that issue. Here there's no debate." Even the consulting firm ERA put out an issue paper, back in 1995, cautioning against ''overblown claims of the economic value of major league sports teams" and concluding that, ''Compared with more traditional public investments of scarce economic development dollars. . .sports facilities are a rather poor investment."

But if public subsidies for sports teams are such an incontrovertibly bad idea, why is a city like Washington, D.C., still willing to pay $611 million for a sports stadium? Sports economists point, with varying degrees of frustration, to a combination of politics and unfortunate economic realities.

Major league sports, they argue, are essentially monopolies: They can ensure that the number of teams always stays below the number of cities that can support one. In economic terms, this creates a scarcity of supply and thereby drives up the ''price"-in subsidies, favorable land terms, or stadium lease deals-that a team can demand. Chicago built the White Sox a new stadium to keep them from moving to St. Petersburg, Fla., in the late '80s, for example. More recently, Nashville had to agree to build a new stadium to lure the former Houston Oilers to town.

Politicians, who like the publicity that comes from being associated with a major league sports team, see sports subsidies as a particularly glamorous use of public money-and are particularly vulnerable to the allure of gaining a team or the pain of losing one. As a business sector, major league sports is fairly small, and yet, points out Clemson economics professor Raymond Sauer, ''It's the only sector with its own section in every major newspaper in the country. It's an attention getter, so it's very natural for political people to align themselves with sports projects."

Still, there are also less cynical explanations. Mark Rosentraub, dean of the college of urban affairs at Cleveland State University, has consulted on a number of stadium projects, and has been vocally skeptical of many of them. But he believes that well-thought-out projects can benefit cities. Though they don't create economic growth, he argues, stadiums like Camden Yards and San Francisco's SBC Park (which was built almost entirely without public funds) have helped guide it.

The natural pattern of development, Rosentraub asserts, tends to be sprawl, but stadiums can function as focal points around which apartment buildings, stores, restaurants, and bars cluster. And they can help bring back hollowed-out downtown areas. In San Diego, the Padres' new Petco Park turned a desolate area full of abandoned lots and storage facilities into a landscape of luxury condominiums and boutique hotels. Washington is hoping a new stadium will do the same for the city's blighted Anacostia neighborhood. Of the recent stadium deal, Washington Mayor Anthony Williams's office has said the ''exciting economic revival" the stadium would trigger, ''will benefit our whole city for generations to come."

OF COURSE, THERE'S ANOTHER, more familiar factor that can skew the models of economists and planners alike. Many people, Rosentraub points out, just really like sports, and in a way that falls outside traditional measures of cost and benefit. Upon hearing the news last April that Washington, D.C., was, at long last, going to again have a baseball team, one Washington-area fan put it this way to a USA Today reporter, ''We don't know them yet, but we love them. We will cradle them to our breast." In deciding how much it's worth to have a sports team in town, as Rosentraub more drily puts it, ''Intangible benefits are a real value."

''Few people get real excited about a new plant (and they should)," he wrote in an e-mail, ''but we have to recognize [that] for several thousand years sports has occupied a unique place in virtually every society."

Gamely, a few economists have decided that if they can't persuade fans, they'll at least try to understand them, and have set out to quantify how much, exactly, having a sports team is worth to people. In a 2002 paper written for the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, for instance, economists Gerald Carlino and N. Edward Coulson found that people are willing to accept a 2 percent decrease in wages-and an 8 percent increase in rents-to have a National Football League team in their city.

Those gaps, if they're correct, represent the market price of fandom, the little bit extra we're willing to pay to have someone to root for.

Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail drbennett@globe.com.