We know all too well the endemic issues surrounding poor attendance at Rays’ games. For starters, there’s asymmetrical geography, an obsolete facility with a bad regional location and a chronic lack of mass transit. Then there’s a dearth of corporate headquarters, the challenge of allocating public money and the back-home allegiances of many relocatee residents. Then add the lure of golf, boating and escape to the Carolinas in the summer. So the one thing that can be most directly addressed–a well-located, modern stadium–has to be pitch perfect. Tropicana Field has not–and will not–work. “Raybor” Stadium didn’t wow the business community.
The clock keeps ticking contracturally toward 2027 and the end of the Trop use agreement, and not enough has changed since Vince Naimoli and Frank Morsani were eyeing an expansion franchise–for St. Petersburg and Tampa, respectively–in the 1980s. Thanks again, Vince.
So in what seems like a last-ditch effort to get this market off the baseball dime, the Rays have received permission from Major League Baseball, which begrudgingly signs off on revenue-sharing money for the Rays, to “explore” the bizarre idea of the team splitting its home games between St. Pete and Montreal, starting in, oh, 2024. What the hell, Montreal used to have the Expos, and the less-than-identical twin cities are in the same time zone.
This gives “scheme” a bad name. “Hustle” is a positive attribute on the baseball field; it’s a pejorative in business negotiations. That’s what this smacks of: the game of leverage. Prominent player agent Scott Boras, no stranger to hardball bottom lines, likely summed it up for most observers. “It’s a very interesting concept to force one city or the other to build a stadium rapidly, which I think is the real idea behind it all,” he noted pointedly. He may not be wrong.
Rays majority owner Stu Sternberg, who just bought a home in St. Pete, keeps stressing that he wants to make Major League Baseball work in this market and for everyone to “keep an open mind.” He said at the Rays Dali press conference that this blind-siding scenario wasn’t part of a “staged exit.” That he’s looking for a “permanent arrangement,” where the Rays could “thrive” in two places, each with its own new, roof-less facility. An expanded Al Lang Stadium could even be in the mix.
“We believe this is a creative, sensible, extraordinary solution,” underscored Sternberg. He wants, he says, to play ball with Tampa Bay and somehow make baseball, however customized, happen here. But it still sounds a lot like he’s shouting: “Ploy ball.”