What price victory?

You may also have read that Philadelphia’s Please Touch Museum — one of America’s most ambitious children’s museums — is similarly jeopardized by its inability to pay off the $60 million it owes on the new $88 million home it moved to in 2008.

No doubt you also recall that the Philadelphia Orchestra — one of the world’s great orchestras — spent 15 months in bankruptcy in 2011 and ’12, only ten years after moving from the Academy of Music into its new concert hall in the Kimmel Center. The $235 million cost of the Kimmel didn’t cause the Orchestra’s bankruptcy — the Orchestra is merely a rent-paying tenant at Verizon Hall — but at the very least, the Orchestra’s change of venue failed to deliver the expected dramatic boost in audiences and donations. (That was more the doing of the Orchestra’s charismatic new music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who arrived in 2012.)

Finally, you may be aware that the Philadelphia Phillies, who moved into the new Citizens Bank Park in 2004, are suffering no financial difficulties whatsoever, even though their ballpark cost $458 million and their team is currently mired in last place in the National League’s Eastern Division. Quite the contrary: Forbes recently valued the Phillies’ franchise at $975 million, up from $392 million in 2005.

Planned obsolescence

Why is a mediocre sports team like the Phillies prospering in its new home while great artistic and educational institutions struggle in their new venues?

For one thing, the Philadelphia Theatre Company, the Please Touch Museum, and the Orchestra moved into their new homes primarily to better fulfill their missions. The PTC left the charming but antiquated Plays & Players Theatre for a state-of-the-art venue. The Please Touch Museum expanded from a Center City storefront to a vast children’s paradise in Memorial Hall in Fairmount Park. The Orchestra’s move to Verizon Hall fulfilled a century-old dream of performing in a concert hall that was actually designed for orchestral music, as opposed to operas.

By contrast, the construction of Citizens Bank Park was only indirectly related to improving the Phillies’ performance. It was driven primarily by the perception that a new park might attract new fans.

Building a winner

In an op-ed column in the July 30th Inquirer, William C. Kashatus applauded the Phillies management for embracing “If you build it, they will come” as the team’s operating strategy.

“New ballparks not only generate fan interest, but also the revenue stream necessary to attract star players from other teams and reward homegrown talent so they don't pursue free agency,” Kashatus approvingly observed. The building of the retro-classic Citizens Bank Park, he noted, “resulted in a dramatic increase in attendance, which in turn provided the money needed to attract big-name stars like [Cliff] Lee, Jim Thome, and Roy Halladay, and reward homegrown talent like Cole Hamels, Rollins, Howard, and Utley.” The Phillies’ previous glory era of 1976-83, Kashatus added, similarly “had its origins in the building of Veterans Stadium,” which opened in 1971, only to be demolished 32 years later.

So that’s what it’s all about: knocking down stadiums every generation or so in order to produce champions.

This strategy works for the Phillies because, after all, they’re merely rent-paying tenants in the stadiums they play in. (Taxpayers put up roughly half of Citizens Bank Park’s $458 million cost. Citizens Bank itself contributed nothing for the construction; the bank is paying the Phillies $95 million over 25 years for the naming rights.)

To be sure, you and I own Citizens Bank Park, for whatever that’s worth, until Phillies fans grow bored with it and our public officials choose to build them a new park at an even greater cost. (The newer MetLife Stadium and Yankee Stadium in New York cost $1.6 billion and $1.5 billion, respectively.)

Pete Carril’s reply

Are these investments worthwhile? Surely, spectator sports can invigorate and excite thousands of people for a few hours. But once a game is over, it leaves nothing of enduring value except, occasionally, a fond (or bitter) memory. By contrast, in its 39 years, Philadelphia Theatre Company has introduced and nurtured writers like Terrence McNally, David Ives, and Jeffrey Hatcher, whose works have slowly and inexorably infiltrated the American consciousness. (PTC has also staged its share of turkeys, but that’s the nature of taking risks with new material.) The Orchestra has generated and preserved the highest performance standards for the great music without which humanity can’t survive. The new Please Touch Museum in Memorial Hall has awakened and inspired thousands of young minds in ways that we can’t yet conceive.

Pete Carril, the legendary Princeton basketball coach, was a superb coach who won more than 500 games and devoted his life to the sport he loved. But when he was asked to comment on the occasion of his 250th victory, here’s what Carril said:

“I don't give a hoot about the first one, nor the 100th, nor will I care about the last one. They are so meaningless anyway. A victory is to be enjoyed for a while and then forgotten, and a defeat should be reflected upon for a while and then forgotten as well.”

Kevin Costner’s voices

So the relevant question for Philadelphians today is not “Why did the Philadelphia Theatre Company and the Please Touch Museum gamble millions on their new venues?” It’s “Why are professional sports teams relieved of risk on venues that are programmed to become obsolete within a few decades?”

In the 1989 fantasy-drama film Field of Dreams, farmer Kevin Costner builds a baseball diamond and bleachers in his Iowa cornfield after a supernatural voice tells him, “If you build it, they will come.” (The decline of civiization in one lesson: Joan of Arc’s voices told her to save France; Costner’s voices tell him to build a ballpark.) Sure enough, once Costner’s project is completed, the ghosts of the unjustly maligned 1919 Chicago White Sox emerge from the nearby cornstalks and spend a few minutes batting and throwing baseballs around the infield. And then, and then. . . .

In what must surely be the greatest anticlimax in cinematic history, the players wave goodbye to Costner and vanish back into the cornfields whence they came. Perhaps they’ll return again some other day. But you can’t help wondering: For what purpose? Ultimately a game is only a game. Art is forever.