The Portland Sea Dogs celebrated their 30th anniversary with big back-to-back wins last month: one at home at Hadlock Field, where they shut out the New Hampshire Fisher Cats 3-0 during a school-vacation-week day game; and one on the road in Augusta, where, the previous evening, state lawmakers approved a tax break worth up to $2 million for clubhouse improvements at the city-owned baseball stadium.
Everyone knows Mainers are generous and non-judgmental — we’ll help anyone, regardless of how rich or poor they are. Whether you’re holding a cardboard sign in the median or lobbying us over cocktails and caviar, we’ll always pony up: a dollar here, some loose change there, millions of dollars over the course of decades… whatever, just beg nicely and stop hinting that you might leave us for a fairer state!
Democratic Maine Senate President Troy Jackson sponsored the bill to give the ballclub, a minor-league affiliate of the Boston Red Sox, two million of our tax dollars to help them afford the stadium upgrade, which may cost $10 million in total. “Maine has a history of enacting tax credits that support good-paying jobs,” Jackson reminded his legislative colleagues, mentioning several multi-billion-dollar Wall Street corporations, like IDEXX and General Dynamics’ BIW, that need handouts from workaday Mainers to survive in this cold, cold world.
The Sea Dogs are wealthier than most of the white-collar needy — the team’s owned by Diamond Baseball Holdings, a subsidiary of the venture-capital firm Silver Lake Partners, which boasts of a portfolio worth over $1 trillion. This prompted some stingy critics on the right and the left to balk at the $2 million giveway Jackson proposed. The conservative Maine Policy Center denounced the tax break as “cronyist corporate welfare,” while the progressive Maine Center for Economic Policy published “8 Reasons to Call Foul on a Sea Dogs Tax Policy.”
The team never publicly said it would leave if it didn’t get public assistance — to the contrary, Sea Dogs President and GM Geoff Iacuessa told the Press Herald, “We are definitely committed to calling Maine home for the long term.” But state lawmakers, perhaps recalling all the manufacturing jobs that left Maine after similar statements by private equity–funded enterprises, apparently picked up a dog whistle suggesting otherwise.
“Today, I am voting to keep minor league baseball in the state of Maine,” said Republican House Minority Leader Billy Bob Faulkingham. “I do not view this as anything but an opportunity to prevent financiers from out of state luring a successful franchise away,” said veteran GOP lawmaker Sawin Millett, sounding less like a job-supporting philanthropist and more like a victim of blackmail.
Chris Cameron, the Sea Dogs’ Vice President for Communications and Fan Experience, told me, “The big thing for us is the visiting team clubhouse, which is in the basement of the Portland Expo, and shared with the [Maine] Celtics.” This and other aspects of Hadlock’s team accomodations are not up to current Major League Baseball standards, prompting the need to upgrade the ballpark, which the team leases from the City of Portland.
Are the Sea Dogs a good community partner? Absolutely. Last year, the organization contributed $510,409 to 870 organizations through in-stadium fundraising, monetary donations and in-kind gifts. Cameron further noted that the team routinely honors children “for being the most improved” at school, or for “reading books” or engaging in “healthy exercise.”
“We have so many programs where we honor students and try to get kids out to the ballpark and reward them for their efforts,” Cameron continued. “We do that statewide; that’s not just here in Portland.”
Cameron didn’t note this, but incentivizing kids to learn and stay active is especially important these days due to chronic staffing shortages in Maine public schools that also often lack adequate sports facilities, or even actual classrooms. We’d hire enough teachers, build more playing fields, and stop trying to teach in drafty trailers powered by generators, but — well, you know, hate to bring it up, but, um, yeah, tax money’s kinda tight right now.
Play ball!
Give Tom Major an e-mail suggesting a topic for this column at leagueofbollards@gmail.com or he’ll move out of state. Really. He’s not kidding this time. Totally gonna do it. Bollard editor Chris Busby contributed snark to this month’s column.
