Six months and change after the St. Peterburg city council said it wasn’t interested in letting Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg negotiate with other local cities for a new stadium without him paying a pretty penny to buy out his lease clause prohibiting that, a buyout is apparently back on the table again. Or at least talking about whether to talk about a buyout:
The chairman of the St. Petersburg City Council has called a special meeting to discuss letting the Tampa Bay Rays look at sites for a new baseball stadium in both Hillsborough and Pinellas counties…
The special meeting will start with terms [council chairman Charlie] Gerdes has crafted. Under his proposal, the Rays could look at stadium sites in both counties for free.
“I’ve chosen to allow the looking period for free because they’re looking in St. Petersburg, and I don’t want to charge them for that,” Gerdes explained.
That … huh? They can look in St. Petersburg for free now, without violating their lease. Gerdes’s plan would include at most a $20 million payout from the Rays to buy out the no-footsie-with-other-cities lease clause, which would be less than under the plan Mayor Rick Kriseman proposed and the council rejected in March; it’s not clear who would get development rights from the Tropicana Field site under Gerdes’s plan, which could be a $32.5 million sticking point.
Anyway, there’s a hearing set for next Thursday at 2 pm, at which point we’ll find out whether this is something the council might actually consider, or just Gerdes scoring some “I care about the Rays!” points with local sports columnists.
Neil have you or anyone looked specifically at how sports facility talks/demands/requests or pro sports team threats to move works perhaps differently in markets that have more than one major city?
Tampa/St. Pete, Mpls/St. Paul, D/FW, SF/Oak, etc?
It seems that the dynamics of major city vs. major city competition might be different compared to the typical one major city vs. suburban competition. Major cities are relative peers in contrast to major cities compared to suburbs which are, by definition and in informal ways, subordinate to a major city. Proximity would also seem to matter: Minneapolis and St. Paul are contiguous, divided at the most by the Mississippi River, like many city-suburb situations, while other multiple major city markets often have the major cities not being contiguous.
As you’ve covered it, Twin Cities are dealing with this regarding the MLS currently and have dealt with this city-to-city competition numerous times in the past, as have have Tampa and St. Pete.
Having more options to start a bidding war is always beneficial to team owners. But that doesn’t have to be major city vs. major city — see Atlanta vs. Cobb County. And SF/Oakland aren’t really competing since they’re seen as different markets, in baseball at least. And while they’re competing for the Warriors, that hasn’t really helped the team owners extract any more money.
I guess my answer is that market size/composition isn’t nearly as important as local political culture, local referendum requirements, business community “growth machine,” etc. It’s the kind of thing Judith Grant Long set out to study once upon a time, before she got distracted by other things.
MLB should help the Rays get out of that dump TROP-O- CRAP Stadium and the city of St. Petersburg……let the Rays find a new city that actually wants a team! Baseball is not working in the Tampa Bay area as in attendance and that monstrosity of a stadium
There’s a good chance that there would be no MLB team in Tampa if MLB hadn’t let the White Sox (and others) risk Congressional “review” of their antitrust deal when the Sundome was built.
So sure, if MLB pays the full buyout cost and the city gets full development rights, they can play in any city they want. Not sure that a stadium in Tampa is going to lead to the massive bonanza some expect: http://espn.go.com/nfl/attendance
GDub: True. The same can be said of a few other markets in the major sports also. Building a swanky new facility at which you can impose dramatically higher prices only works if there is someone else to pay for that level of luxury on the construction side, and willing ticket/suite buyers on the customer side.
As with Buffalo, Jacksonville and Oakland NFL clubs (among others), I’m not sold that a new facility can generate the kind of revenue people think. For MLB, I would agree that Tampa probably doesn’t either. It might be a better revenue generator with a new stadium, or (like Miami) it might not. But it’s clearly never going to be a sound market under any conditions.