Fields of Dreams : Inspired by Baltimore’s Camden Yards, cities across the U.S. are building inner-city ballparks. But the movement overlooks questions about the economic wisdom of the investments.

On just about any score card, Orioles Park at Camden Yards is a home run.

Since opening in April 1992, the downtown stadium with the old-fashioned design and $290-million price tag has drawn architectural raves, swarms of fans and near universal plaudits for helping revitalize an area of Baltimore that until recently was the epitome of urban blight.

Camden Yards--where the major league All Star game will be played Tuesday night--also has become a prototype, leading cities away from the multipurpose, suburban stadiums that were the rage in the 1970s. A half-dozen major league cities--and a number of minor league towns--are building or planning downtown, baseball-only stadiums, all touting the economic windfall and nostalgia value.

But these cities are brushing aside warnings that the economic benefits don’t justify the stadiums’ immense cost. Boosters also ignore urban leaders who say the funds could be better spent on projects with more social value, such as new schools, added police or better roads.

Indeed, stripping away the enthusiasm that major league sports unleashes in many communities leaves a number of unanswered questions about the investment boom in urban stadiums.

Should government go to such lengths to accommodate private business--which, after all the cheering dies, is what a professional sports franchise is? Should public funds be used to benefit “millionaire players and billionaire owners,” as Maryland state Sen. Jack Lapides (D-Baltimore), truculently terms the recipients of public largess?

And what happens when the novelty wears off? The financing schemes for many of the new stadiums assume fan support of premium-priced seats in sky boxes and special club levels. A losing team in the loveliest of ballparks may be unable to sell those critical tickets.

Finally, cities that hope to emulate Baltimore’s success could be downplaying the peculiarly favorable circumstances that make Camden Yards so special. The Baltimore stadium is close to mass transit, popular downtown restaurants and other tourist attractions in the Inner Harbor redevelopment area.

All that having been said, cities are stepping up to the plate, swinging hefty checkbooks. Baseball-only stadiums costing hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds are under construction in Cleveland; Arlington, Tex.; and Denver. Others are being talked about in Detroit, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Miami and New York, plus a dozen or more minor league baseball cities.

“Camden Yards is a great model for us. It’s very urban, very comfortable and it reeks of baseball,” said Thomas V. Chema, executive director of Gateway Economic Development Corp. of Greater Cleveland, developer of a 42,000-seat stadium for the Cleveland Indians.

Chema is typical of stadium proponents when he says that Cleveland hopes to use “sports venues as a catalyst” for downtown redevelopment.

The new park is part of the $362-million Gateway complex, which also includes an indoor arena for the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball team. Both facilities will open next year, just blocks from Terminal Tower in Cleveland’s urban center. Most of the sports complex’s cost is being financed by a tax on liquor and cigarettes sold in Cuyahoga County.

Denver is hoping its new Coors Field, the $141.5-million home-to-be of the Colorado Rockies, will help spur redevelopment of its historic warehouse district in lower downtown. “It’s the major impetus for development of an area that’s always been Denver’s back door,” said Barbara Chadwick, a Denver planning program manager.

But one lesson from Baltimore is that other elements of downtown redevelopment have to be in place for a stadium to act as a redevelopment dynamo, according to Ron D. Barton, senior manager of KMPG Peat Marwick’s Tampa-based sports consulting group.

“Although a stadium can help widen a redevelopment area, it has to be the increment that pushes the other things over the top. It’s not the sole catalyst,” said Barton, who worked on the Camden Yards project. “If you build it in an area where the transition in land values is six years away, you’re not going to make that jump. No one can make that transition based on a stadium.”

In trying to re-create Camden Yards’ formula of nostalgia, intimacy and urban convenience, new stadium construction has come full circle from the days of Cincinnati’s Crosley Field, Manhattan’s Polo Grounds, Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field and other turn-of-the-century baseball parks. All fell victim to the wrecker’s ball, and now, cities and fans seem to be waking up to what’s been lost.

But there is more than nostalgia pushing the growing crop of downtown stadiums.

To meet higher payrolls and other costs, major league teams are trying to squeeze more and more dollars out of fans and cities. Revenues from the luxury suites and club seating that customarily are built into the new stadiums is what the owners are all lusting after.

Cleveland, Chicago and Baltimore, in fact, agreed to build their new stadiums only after team owners made thinly veiled threats to move away unless they got stadiums of their own--with tiers of sky boxes and club seats. Similarly, New York Yankee owner George Steinbrenner once again has been making noises about a move to New Jersey if public agencies don’t renew or replace Yankee Stadium.

In acceding to such demands, cities typically stress the intangible value of being “major league” and the importance of baseball as a public amenity, irrespective of economics.

“We didn’t want to be in a position to lose the team when we are trying to attract first-class business or professional talent to the area,” Chema said. “We could no more afford to lose the Indians than we could the Cleveland Orchestra.”

Not everyone in Cleveland agreed. Opponents of the Gateway complex--led by the United Auto Workers--thought the city could do without its sports teams if it came down to a choice between a new stadium and other public works. The auto workers and other opponents nearly defeated the 1990 sin-tax measure that will help finance the new stadiums.

“The tax was an inappropriate subsidy to billionaire team owners when there are crying needs in the Greater Cleveland area that remain unmet,” said Bob Nece, UAW community action program council chairman. “We’ve got a lot of unemployment and poverty here, and it seems the money could have gone to better purposes.”

In Baltimore, fans have been singing the praises of Camden Yards since the stadium opened. With its brick masonry facade, green steel superstructure and urban backdrop, the baseball park seems a throwback to a simpler place and time--which is exactly the point.

Looming over the right field wall is the red brick “warehouse,” an eight-story, turn-of-the-century rail freight storage facility that has been converted into offices. Nearly torn down to make way for the new stadium, the building is an essential part of the Camden Yards tableau, a visual connection to Baltimore’s bygone days as a rail and manufacturing hub.

“The warehouse adds instant history, a linkage with Baltimore that you can’t escape,” said Alfred W. Barry, the city’s assistant planning director. “That’s positive, because baseball teams do not exist in and of themselves. They are part of the community.”

Indeed, nostalgia seems a palpable--if somewhat manufactured--presence at Camden Yards. But it didn’t come cheap. Camden Yards cost the public $290 million (including adjacent land for a future football stadium), to be paid off mainly with proceeds from four special state lotteries to be held each year until 2020.

To promote the public investment, state and local boosters hyped the stadium as a redevelopment and jobs catalyst. Indeed, city officials say the stadium is proving beneficial, particularly in attracting $31 million in extra spending to the local economy last year.

But Roger G. Noll, a Stanford University economics professor who specializes in professional sports, said a typical stadium’s economic impact can be compared with that of a “good-sized department store.”

“With $200 million, you could go out and build an industrial park and generate 10 to 100 times as much taxes and jobs,” Noll said.

Baltimore officials acknowledge that most of the new employment credited to Camden Yards represents low-paying service jobs that conform with the city’s shift to a tourist-driven economy and away from the heavy-manufacturing and transportation employment that once were dominant.

“The city’s economy is going from Bethlehem Steel to tourism,” assistant city planner Barry said. “And to the extent that the stadium generates (tourism) and spurs future development, that translates down . . . to a stronger local economy.”

Not so sanguine about the shift is Kathleen O’Toole, an organizer for Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development (BUILD), a church-based civic improvement organization.

The economic payoff from Camden Yards has been disappointing for the city’s African-American community, “whose support was sought with the promise of good jobs,” she said.

“What we have discovered is that the jobs available at the ballpark are mostly low wage, largely temporary and seasonal, and usually with various outside cleaning and food-service contractors,” O’Toole said. “So while the stadium has been heralded for architecture and tourism, it’s not really for us.”

What is beyond debate is that Orioles fans are taking to the stadium in a big way.

Orioles attendance jumped to 3.6 million last year, up 1 million from the previous season and second only to Toronto in the major leagues. Until rainstorms this April broke the string, the Birds had sold out 65 straight home games.

“Whenever it’s game night, we see an increase in restaurant traffic and on weekends, a greater influx of people staying for the weekend,” said Richard Fahey, general manager of the Baltimore Marriott Inner Harbor. “People are using the game as an excuse to stick around and see the city.”

Because of Baltimore’s 20-year downtown redevelopment effort, Orioles fans have several tourism options, including the National Aquarium, the Revolutionary War frigate U.S.S. Constellation, the Inner Harbor complex of shops and the popular bars and restaurants in Fell’s Point and Little Italy.

Other cities counting on a redevelopment boost from new stadiums have not done as much spade work.

“Baltimore just has a wonderful confluence of things going for it that aren’t supposed to happen,” said David Petersen, managing director of Price Waterhouse Sports Facilities Group, a consulting practice based in Tampa. “You couldn’t just go into any downtown, plunk that stadium down and expect it to work as well.”

In San Francisco, doubts about economic impact contributed to voters’ rejection in 1987 and 1989 of new stadiums for the baseball Giants. San Jose voters also turned down a stadium proposal for the Giants in 1992.

“No one was ever able to prove there would be an economic return. It was all speculative, an imponderable. No one has ever measured it and, as far as I know, no one ever will measure it,” said state Sen. Quentin L. Kopp (I-San Francisco), who led opposition to the November, 1989, stadium vote.

“It was all public money,” Kopp said of the plan to build a $115-million waterfront stadium to replace drafty Candlestick Park. “The tenants were the beneficiaries, and they weren’t putting up a dime. Do we do that for businesses? For factories?” The Giants were all but packed for a move to Florida after last season until new local owners bought the team for $100 million.

In Baltimore, the Orioles had been campaigning for a new home since the 1960s. But the effort took on momentum in 1979, after Washington, D.C., attorney Edward Bennett Williams bought the team. He declared Memorial Stadium an uninhabitable financial loser and began pressing for a new stadium. He threatened to move the team down Interstate 95 to the nation’s capital--or elsewhere--if he didn’t get his way.

The threats took on added credibility in March, 1984, when Baltimore Colts owner Robert Irsay moved the football team to Indianapolis in the dead of night, leaving fans and politicians stunned.

Like most owners, Williams was after the increased stadium revenues available from the sale of luxury suites and from club seating--a special section or level that includes catered food, extra security and good sight lines. Orioles Park ultimately included 72 luxury suites--leased for $55,000 to $90,000 per year--and 6,200 club seats, which cost fans $25 per night.

Owners covet these high-tab seats because they can generate from $5 million to $10 million in annual revenues beyond ticket sales, KMPG Peat Marwick’s Barton said.

Nor is the impulse reserved to baseball teams. The Los Angeles Raiders have been unsuccessfully wrangling for new sky boxes at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum ever since co-owner Al Davis moved the team from Oakland in 1982. A renovation proposal failed in 1991 when the team could not lease enough $990,000 luxury boxes and $3,600 club seats to finance construction.

For baseball owners, special seating is an extra argument for a stadium to call their own. Where they share a multipurpose stadium, the baseball teams usually can argue that the extra revenues are controlled by the resident football team.

Baseballs’ desire for added dollars is heightened by rising player salaries and the peaking of revenues from television, said Timothy D. Romani, executive director of the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority, which in 1991 built a new Comiskey Park for the Chicago White Sox.

“The economics of baseball are such that teams are desperately looking for new forms of revenue, and they are best found in stadiums: club seating, sky boxes and advertising,” Romani said.

Williams didn’t live to see his new stadium in Baltimore. He died in 1988, and his estate subsequently sold the Orioles to their current owner, Eli Jacobs. But Williams had set the wheels in motion. And with the backing of Maryland Gov. William Donald Schaffer--a former Baltimore mayor and strong proponent of a downtown stadium--a novel financing method was in place to build the new park.

In 1987, the state authorized the Maryland Stadium Authority to issue $216 million in bonds and approved four instant lotteries per year to pay them off. The city and federal government pitched in more than $70 million worth of land, road improvements and business relocation costs.

Not everyone jumped on the bandwagon. State Sen. Lapides led a vocal but unsuccessful corps of urban activists who argued that public money would be better spent on housing, business revitalization and schools.

“Governments are supposed to do things that the private sector can’t do on its own,” Lapides said. “People are yelling for the downsizing of government, yet we find it in the middle of private sports financing, which is not its function.”

The New Crop of Stadiums

Nostalgia, urban redevelopment and threats by owners to relocate are the forces behind the construction of a new crop of downtown major league baseball stadiums. In addition to Baltimore’s Camden Yards, five stadiums have recently been completed or are under construction.

CLEVELAND

Name: Gateway Sports Complex

Baseball tenant: Cleveland Indians

Seating: 42,000 for baseball

Opening: April, 1994

Total acreage: 28 acres

Owner: Gateway Economic Development Corp. of Greater Cleveland, a city-county public-private partnership

Location: Downtown Cleveland

Cost: $362 million (including indoor arena)

How bonds will be paid: 50/50 from public and private sources; public portion comes mainly from taxes on alcohol, cigarettes.

ARLINGTON, Tex.

Name: As yet unnamed

Baseball tenant: Texas Rangers

Seating: 48,000 seats

Opening: April, 1994

Total acreage: 200 acres

Owner: Arlington Sports Facilities Development Authority Inc., an independent city agency

Location: Arlington’s entertainment district, adjacent to Six Flags Over Texas

Cost: $176 million

How bonds will be paid: 1/2-cent sales tax in city of Arlington

ST. PETERSBURG

Name: Florida Suncoast Dome

Baseball tenant: none

Seating: 43,000

Opened: March, 1990

Total acreage: 66 acres

Owner: Pinellas Sports Authority, an agency jointly controlled by the city of St. Petersburg and Pinellas County.

Location: Downtown St. Petersburg

Cost: $133 million

How bonds will be paid: 60% out of the city’s general fund and 40% from Pinellas County hotel taxes

DENVER

Name: Coors Field

Baseball tenant: Colorado Rockies

Seating: 45,000 seats

Opening: April, 1995

Total acreage: 65 acres.

Owner: Denver Metropolitan Major League Baseball Stadium District, a six-county special district

Location: Lower downtown Denver’s historic warehouse district

Cost: $141.5 million

How bonds will be paid: 1/10th-cent sales tax levied in the six-county district

CHICAGO

Name: Comiskey Park

Baseball tenant: Chicago White Sox

Seating: 45,000

Opened: April, 1991

Total acreage: 85 acres

Owner: Illinois Sports Facility Authority, a joint venture of state of Illinois and city of Chicago.

Location: South side

Cost: $185 million

How bonds will be paid: 2% room tax on Chicago hotels.