From a Freakonomics.com symposium on realignment:
Why Your City Doesn’t Have A Major League Team
↵↵Robert Baade and Victor Matheson have noted that since 1991, 26 of the 30 Major League Baseball teams have had a new stadium built or an existing stadium extensively renovated. The cost of this construction has been $9.39 billion. Of this, $5.5 billion has come from taxpayers. How can baseball extract this amount of money from taxpayers? By keeping viable markets open and thus giving existing teams the ability to threaten to move if better facilities are not provided.
↵↵(H/T Baseball Primer.)
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