Major League Losers: The Real Cost of Sports and Who's Paying for It.

• Author: Henderson, Rick

In October 1995, one of my childhood dreams came true. Thanks to a friend in the Indians' ticket office, I attended my first post-season baseball games: game five of the American League Championship Series, pitting the Seattle Mariners against the Indians; and game five of the World Series, with the Indians facing the team I've rooted for since 1969, the Atlanta Braves. I had the time of my life.

Both series were played in the one-year-old Jacobs Field, one of baseball's new showplaces, along with the Ballpark in Arlington (Texas), Coors Field in Denver, Turner Field in Atlanta, and the stadium that started the 1990s run of "new traditionalist" ballparks, Baltimore's Oriole Park at Camden Yards. These new retro stadiums mix features of the turn-of-the-century parks (asymmetrical field designs, exposed structures, seating close to the field) with high-tech luxury boxes, ubiquitous TV monitors, concession areas with full-service restaurants that overlook the action, expansive pedestrian walkways circling the field, and abundant, clean rest-rooms. A few purists may complain that the distractions these new structures offer divert attention from the action on the field, but the soaring attendance levels - last year the Indians became the first Major League Baseball franchise to sell every regular-season ticket before the season opened - suggest that most fans don't mind.

One thing clearly not old-fashioned about these new structures is their price tags: Jacobs Field cost more than $176 million. Indeed, Cleveland's Gateway complex - the downtown area which houses Jacobs Field, Gund Arena (home of the NBA Cavaliers), and the forthcoming stadium for the NFL Browns - may eventually cost $1 billion, much of the money coming from taxpayers. Had I known the magnitude of the subsidies at the time, I still would have enjoyed the games (especially since the Braves won the Series). But that knowledge might have tempered my euphoria just a tad.

The story of the fiscal nightmare known as Gateway is but one juicy nugget served up by Mark S. Rosentraub, associate dean of the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University at Indianapolis, in Major League Losers. In meticulous detail, Rosentraub exposes what may be the most extravagant corporate welfare system in the United States today: the placement and maintenance of professional sports franchises. He marshals a dazzling array of statistics outlining the many ways well-heeled team owners...