Assessor Scores Dodger Stadium at $99 Million

If you think professional sports salaries have gone through the roof, consider this.

A single Dodger pitcher is worth more than Dodger Stadium.

The Los Angeles assessor recently pegged the stadium’s value at $99 million.

The Dodgers pay Kevin Brown more than that.

How the Dodgers settled on Brown’s major league-leading contract of $105 million over seven years may endure as a mystery.

But how the county tax assessor figured the worth of Dodger Stadium can be explained.

The valuation consisted of the building itself, which was said to be worth $41 million; the 273 acres on which it sits, which were said to be worth $52 million; and the equipment inside the building, ranging from restaurant stoves to whirlpool baths, which were said to be worth $6 million and change.

The occasion for the appraisal was the 1998 purchase of the Dodgers by the Fox Group, a Rupert Murdoch company, for $305 million from Peter O’Malley and other members of his family. Real estate in California is reappraised for property tax purposes when it changes hands. New property owners are billed retroactively.

In the case of Dodger Stadium, which Los Angeles County previously valued at $67 million, appraisers decided they could not base the new value on the sales price, as they would, for example, when a house is sold. They did not know how to separate the value of Dodger real estate in Los Angeles from many other things included in the team sale price, ranging from Dodger properties in the Dominican Republic and Vero Beach to intangibles such as the value of the storied franchise’s name.

They also gave up on trying to figure out a value based on the income that the stadium generates as it plays host to 3 million fans per year. The Dodgers have other income streams such as broadcast rights that cannot be attributed solely to where they play.

Instead, the appraisers decided to base their work on how much the stadium would cost to replace.

For starters, they turned to a book published by Marshall & Swift, a firm that collects data on what it costs to build just about anything.

On a page devoted to major league baseball stadiums, they learned that stadiums cost anywhere from $1,200 to $2,500 per seat, said George Hickert, chief of the major properties division of the assessor’s office.

Multiplying by Dodger Stadium’s 56,000 seats, they found a value for the building of somewhere between $67 million and $140 million.

The most modern stadiums with luxury boxes commanded the higher end.

Dodger Stadium fell toward the bottom.

“It looks like a jewel,” said Hickert. “But when you get in the inner workings, it’s a 37-year-old building [with] cracks in the concrete . . . old plumbing . . . wet weather leaks.”

In the end, Hickert’s people settled on a value of $82 million, then depreciated it.

After depreciation, they decided that the building was really worth only about half that much.

To make sure they were in the right ballpark, Hickert said, they consulted another source--a chart they found in Baseball Weekly, which reported that the land and buildings of Dodger Stadium together had originally cost $23 million. They then applied inflation and depreciation to that.

Appraisal is not an exact science, said Hickert and his boss, Jerry Fritz, the assessor’s office director of appraisals.

But in the case of Dodger Stadium, they came up with a pretty precise number: $99,921,000.