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Earlier this week, at Baseball Prospectus, a piece of mine published explaining why it was that commissioner Rob Manfred — along with some team owners — were pressuring Stu Sternberg to sell the Rays. This one is free to read with an email login, so you can check out the whole thing if you’d like, but the key idea to take from it for right this second is that Sternberg was very likely to blow up the stadium deal he had been working on with St. Petersburg practically forever, because he only realized it was a bad deal for the Rays after agreeing to it.
Over the weekend, The Athletic reported that Manfred and Co. would even go so far as to use collective bargaining to pull a reverse A’s on Sternberg, if he couldn’t be convinced to sell the team before then. Basically, rather than using bargained and temporary revenue-sharing funds to help the Rays along in their search, like happened with the A’s, the other owners would instead use the CBA to throttle the Rays’ share of the revenue. If Sternberg barely has the funds he needs to operate the team at a high level now, or to pay for the increased costs that the delay in coming to a final agreement supposedly created, then having his revenue-sharing checks cut down was not going to help matters.
Sternberg’s counter to MLB for not taking the St. Petersburg deal was basically that it wouldn’t help the Rays escape their reliance on revenue-sharing, and it would be taking a bad deal for the next 30 years just to have a deal. Which is correct, to be fair — we’ve been over why the St. Pete deal was an expensive (for taxpayers) non-upgrade over the current Tropicana situation before, but it took a hurricane and some time checking out the Tampa-based spring training facility the Rays will spend their 2025 season in for their owner to notice as much. We can’t all be blessed with common sense or the ability to look at a map, I guess.
On Thursday, Sternberg officially announced that the Rays would not go forward with the stadium deal with St. Petersburg and Pinellas County, which also means he gave up the rights to the Tropicana Field land and will lose them once the Rays’ lease their ends. Neil deMause had some ideas for why Sternberg ended up canceling things, and I’m Team Sternberg Knows He Has To Sell, Anyway:
MLB owners made clear earlier this week that they wanted Sternberg to take the damn St. Pete stadium deal or else sell the team to someone who’d consider it, so that they can check off the Rays situation and resolved and move ahead with expansion plans without worrying that Sternberg would want to use a prospective expansion city as leverage with Tampa Bay. There’s no way a team sale could have taken place by the end of this month, so maybe Sternberg agreed to back out of the stadium deal now in anticipation of a sale process.
It’s not going to be his stadium project in the end, and he’s not going to saddle the Rays with the bad deal he argued against with the other owners. He’ll probably start transitioning more seriously into selling the franchise given the encouragement of Manfred and some owners — many of whom are probably tired of waiting for the Rays to settle in so that they can think about collecting expansion fees from new teams — and then walk away richer than he already is.
Minus the Rays, yes, but richer in dollars, at least.
Now, if a Tampa-based buyer wants to pick up the team and keep it in the region — a preference for Manfred, given Tampa is a whole other beast than St. Petersburg — then the team can finally end up in the place it should have been from the start. The St. Petersburg location was convenient, in that a stadium already existed there, but it’s difficult to access, it isn’t central to the region, and it takes forever to end up at the Trop even if you’re just in next-door Tampa. Consider how much less likely folks from Orlando are to make the trip to St. Petersburg, given that. It’s not just Orlando, of course, but even Tampa’s suburbs.
Now, if the Rays do sell, it’s not going to happen overnight or anything. But it’s hard to imagine that Sternberg decided to dissolve the deal a couple of weeks before the March 31 deadline, giving up land rights in the process, because he planned to stick around and fight. Given he was proposing a half-season in Montreal plan a few years ago, the Rays don’t really have anywhere they can credibly threaten to go to, either, especially with Jerry Reinsdorf planting his bluffing flag in Nashville and Las Vegas now off the table and American access to Canada maybe uh not being as simple as it has been in the past at some point in the near future. If Sternberg can’t afford Tampa, and he isn’t going forward with St. Pete, then it seems likely he’s calling it quits.
Or! He’s set to try something even goofier than splitting his home games between two countries. You never really know with this guy.
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