Montreal and Anaheim are problems.
It was not a good week for Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred and his 30 owners as MLB got some news about possible funding for a new baseball park in Montréal and the group was told that there was a problem with a land deal in Anaheim. The Montréal problem should not be pressing at all. There is no team in Montréal. The Province of Quebec does not want to spend taxpayers’ money for a venue that would only be used about 40 dates a year by Tampa Bay Rays’ ownership in a sister city plan starting in 2028. Le Presse, a French Montréal newspaper, reported that Stephen Bronfman’s Groupe Baseball Montréal was looking for government funds to build a new baseball stadium in the city. But politicians quickly threw cold water on the notion. MLB has given a thumbs up to a plan to split Rays home games between the Tampa Bay area and Montréal but the plan needs players association approval, lots of public funding in Quebec and in Tampa and acceptance by local customers who would have a team for half a season.
In Anaheim, a deal between the city and Angels owner Arte Moreno that would have allowed him to purchase the Angel Stadium property has been ruled illegal by the California Department of Housing and Community Development. The city of Anaheim sold the roughly 150 acres of stadium land for $150 million in 2020 to Moreno. The department said Anaheim officials have failed to provide “any documentation to the housing department demonstrating that the City has declared the Property as either “surplus land” or “exempt surplus land” before it took action to dispose of it. Moreno had shopped his team around Orange County, California but settled on getting an Anaheim deal done. Moreno may have to start shopping again.
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