Good morning and welcome to Episode 327 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from

baseball prospectus. I am Ben Lindbergh, joined as always by Sam Miller, and we have a guest

today. We've somehow gotten through our first 326 episodes without ever really talking

specifically about stadium financing, and this seems like a pretty good time to do our

first episode on that. So we have a guest today, Neil Demas, who is a former writer and

editor for BP, writes many other places, and also the author of Field of Schemes, which

came out originally in 1998 with an updated edition in 2008, and it's all about stadium

financing deals, and when they do and don't make sense. And so, some news broke Monday morning

that the Atlanta Braves may be moving after the lease expires. They're currently on Turner

Field expires after 2016 to a newly constructed $42,672 million stadium in Cobb County, a

northern suburb of Atlanta. So, Neil, people like me, who kind of follow this stuff

peripherally, or from afar, hear a lot about the race stadium situation, and the A-stadium

situation, wasn't really aware that the Braves were unhappy with their situation, or that

they might be changing locations. Was this completely unexpected to people who follow

this closely? Yeah, I mean, I've now been writing about stadium issues for longer than

the Braves stadium has existed, so it's a little bit of a shocker. There had been a little

bit of talk earlier in the spring that the Braves might want some public money to renovate

or add the amenities to Turner Field, and that didn't really go anywhere. But I don't

think anybody had the Atlanta suburbs of Cobb County on their radar until this morning

when suddenly it was announced, oh, hey, we've got a deal, we're going to take it.

Before we, I mean, I assume we're going to get into a lot about the county's role

in this, the government role in this and all that, but before we do, can I just ask

...