Fox Sports’ Jon Paul Morosi celebrated his Thanksgiving getaway day by writing a completely speculative article about the Tampa Bay Rays moving to Montréal, in which he completely speculated about such a move, before concluding that it probably wouldn’t happen, though it, you know, could. The most contorted “look I just gotta write something before getting on a plane” part, though, was this:
The Rays’ local television rights deal with FOX Sports Florida expires after the 2018 season. So if the Rays assess the Tampa market for a year or so and decide there simply isn’t a viable home for them in the region, then it’s not as if a decades-long TV rights agreement will infringe upon their ability to relocate.
If you’re wondering how that makes any sense: That doesn’t make any sense. Sports franchises that relocate don’t have any trouble tearing up their old TV rights deal and signing new ones. And if anything, the Rays’ expiring Fox Sports Florida deal, which is one of the chintziest in baseball, should give the Rays more incentive to stick around the Tampa Bay area, since in just a few more years they could be looking at a nice payday from a new cable deal (because people love to watch the Rays on TV, even if they don’t got to the games). None of which really matters, anyway, because the Rays are locked into an unbreakable lease through 2027, and even if the mayor of St. Petersburg lets them buy their way out, any new lease almost certainly won’t let them look outside the bay area, so why are we talking about this again? Oh right, Thanksgiving.
In marginally more newsy Rays stadium news, meanwhile, Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn is sounding less and less enthused about building the Rays a stadium, noting that one proposed site, the ConAgra Foods flour plant near the center of the city, would cost $70 million to relocate, and that public money will be tough to piece together:
“I think this will be a monumental lift to find a financing mechanism that would work,” he said. “I think the Rays would have to come to the table with serious money. I think it would have to be a smaller stadium, 30,000-35,000. I think the financing would be multi-layered from multiple sources. It’s not going to be simple like Raymond James (Stadium) was, which was one source of revenue that’s bondable over 30 years.”
None of that means that Tampa couldn’t ever end up building the Rays a stadium, mind you. Just that any such deal would likely end up requiring a lot of moving parts, probably with some combination of TIFs and tax rebates and those new sports subsidies that the state is throwing around and lord knows what else. And when you add in the cost of the Rays buying out their old lease, you have to wonder at what point owner Stuart Sternberg would be better off staying put at the Tropicana Dome rather than getting an incremental bump in attendance from a new high-priced stadium across the bay. Once again, you have to ask whether this is a team that really “needs” a new stadium, or if what they’re really after here is the public money that comes along with one, because hell if hardly anybody can turn a profit spending half a billion dollars on a new stadium in the same old market.