Tag: Tampa Bay Rays stadium

The Rays won’t have a new stadium in St. Petersburg after all

The Rays are likely to stay in the Tampa region, but it doesn’t seem like it’ll be in St. Petersburg.

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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.

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Climate change, new stadiums, and the Rays

The Trop is likely no more. The Rays’ new stadium deal might also be no more. A hurricane spawned by a warming Atlantic caused both of these issues, and there are more hurricanes to come.

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The Rays aren’t going to play in Tropicana again — the damage caused to both the roof and the inside of the domed stadium, and the no vote by the county commission to cover the costs of repairs confirmed that — but they also might not play in St. Petersburg again. To a degree, that’s about the upcoming vote on selling the bonds necessary for Pinellas county to fund the construction of a new stadium, but it’s also about what destroyed the Trop in the first place: a hurricane.

Florida is no stranger to hurricanes, but the intensity of the ones that make landfall, and the length of the hurricane season, are both growing. The Trop was built to withstand the hurricanes of a different era — the Rays began playing there in 1998, yes, but it was actually completed in 1990, when it was known as the Florida Suncoast Dome, and $70 million in renovations were made on a stadium that had cost $130 million to build less than a decade before.

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Notes: Diamond, the catcher market, Rays’ stadium deal dead or dying

Catching up on the week of holiday news, before the winter meetings shift.

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My latest at Baseball Prospectus (subscription required) published a week ago, but I hadn’t had a chance to share it in this space until now. It’s meant to, now that we’ve got clarity on the Diamond bankruptcy situation, point out how we could see this moment in time coming a few years ago as the players were locked out by the owners during collective bargaining, and that we’re not going to see the full effects of the league’s transition from primarily cable broadcast to primarily streaming happen without another CBA battle.

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The Rays are staying in St. Petersburg, for 600 million reasons

A stadium in St. Petersburg is unsustainable for the Rays, unless someone writes a check for $600 million, anyway.

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The whole saga of the Tampa Bay Rays has been something, hasn’t it? It feels like they’ve been trying to move out of the area they call home — or at least out of St. Petersburg, where they actually play their games — since they got there. To be fair, there are loads of problems with their current arrangement. Tropicana Field, as I’ve said many times in the past, reminds me of a rec center where I used to play indoor softball in the winter — that’s great for the rec center, less so for the Major League Baseball team that has to play in that setting. And St. Pete is considerably smaller than Tampa, with just under 260,000 residents compared to Tampa’s nearly 400,000.

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