Oh man, I can’t believe I missed this story over the weekend: On Friday, Tampa Bay Rays president Brian Auld gave a public talk about how “We don’t have a lot of time” for a new stadium deal because “right now, we don’t have a place to play” after 2027, and the setting was a weekly speaker’s series at the Oxford Exchange, which according to its website is a Tampa “restaurant, bookstore, lifestyle gift store, coworking space, design studio and event venue,” which is already quite the mashup. And then it also features this wall, which was the backdrop for Auld’s talk:
That is not only a wall of clocks, if you look carefully it is a wall of clocks all showing different times. And not different times like different time zones, but all off by arbitrary amounts with the minute hand. I have no idea what this is supposed to represent to the Oxford Exchange, but I guess I don’t understand the decor needs of a restaurant/lifestyle gift store/coworking space.
In any event, Auld didn’t pick where he got to give his talk, so at most there’s irony in the fact that he gave a the clock is ticking speech in front of clocks that are not actually marking any meaningful time. The full talk is here, and includes:
- “It’s a tricky thing to try to balance the magic of a postseason run with the urgency and importance of our situation. I know we haven’t always done it perfectly.” Yeah, no kidding.
- Tropicana Field is “old, but it’s our home,” which does not even quite rise to the level of backhanded compliment.
- “Our challenges around attendance are well-documented.” Also no kidding. The questions around whether Rays owner Stuart Sternberg deserves public money for a new stadium in Tampa Bay, or should consider moving the team to Montreal, or should consider moving the team part-time to Montreal, or deserves public money in Montreal for a part-time team aside, it is true that despite the Rays playing in the nation’s 13th-largest media market, their attendance is consistently crap. Though it almost certainly doesn’t help when team execs are constantly saying about the place they’re trying to sell tickets to that it’s “old, but it’s our home,” and how it’s too hard to get to from much of the area, and all the other gripes that Auld repeated on Friday.
- “We need 35,000 people, 81 times a year, night after night after night.” That would come to 2.835 million fans, a mark that only nine MLB teams reached in 2019, so “need” may be putting it a bit strongly.
- Tampa Bay is “not a suburban metropolis like Atlanta or Dallas or Phoenix.” Going back to those Nielsen rankings: True, though Tampa Bay is only about 6% behind Phoenix in TV market size. And those cities were carefully chosen by Auld: Tampa Bay is bigger than Minneapolis and Detroit and Denver and multiple other cities with MLB teams, and yes, those metro areas don’t have a giant bay in the middle that makes it a pain to get from one side to the other, but clearly Auld is trying to sell the point here that Tampa Bay shouldn’t expect to get a whole baseball team of its own because it’s really more Columbus, Ohio than Phoenix, so be happy with half a team, why don’t you.
- “A concise summary might be: Baseball doesn’t belong in a dome, it’s supposed to be played on natural grass, outdoors. And there’s too many games. Plus, in the summer here, a lot of people leave town.” That’s not exactly concise, but we get your point.
- “We spent three years working to build a full-season domed ballpark in Ybor City.” But you literally just said — you know what, never mind, consistency is clearly not going to be the hallmark of this talk.
- “There was simply not a way to rationalize building a $1 billion stadium for either the team or the municipalities. … It was depressing.” This should not have been surprising to team officials, especially if they believe their own argument that Tampa Bay is just a muggy Columbus, but as we have seen time and again, rich people who want a new toy will often treat a campaign to get one as merely requiring overcoming “obstacles,” even if one of the obstacles is “this thing you want so you can make more money would actually lose money, what are you even thinking?”
- Auld then began the hard sell on a shared Montreal-Tampa Bay team, and it’s worth watching to see how expertly he keeps a straight face as he says: “The weather up there is a perfect complement to ours. We all know about the affinity that already exists between Canadians and the state of Florida. Montreal is the same time zone as we are, so all the home games will be on TV at the proper time, and it eliminates travel experience for American League East opponents. The possibilities for artistic, culinary, arts, cultural, and business connections are next to limitless. And finally, they absolutely love baseball, and they appreciate what it’s like to being a caring fan base that has attendance challenges due to the fact that they’re just not quite there.” That’s a lot, and honestly I keep finding myself tuning out somewhere around “culinary connections are next to limitless,” but it is an impressive litany for distracting people from the fact that you’re proposing playing “home” games in two cities 1300 miles apart in different countries, making for all kinds of questions about how everything will work from season ticket sales to where players’ kids will go to school.
- “We may be able to double our attendance, perhaps even better!” Yes, if you sell the same 1.2 million tickets to Tampa Bay fans for half as many games, then also sell 1.2 million tickets to Montreal fans for half as many games, you will have doubled your attendance. That’s not how sports ticket sales actually work, though, which is undoubtedly why nobody else has tried this two-city thing since, I think it was the Kansas City-Omaha Kings, which did not work out great.
- “We could conceivably build two outdoor ballparks for around the same price the Texas Rangers spent on their retractable-roofed stadium in Arlington.” Presumably he means how much the Arlington stadium cost in total — the Rangers owners only spent about $500 million on it, with the other half coming from Arlington taxpayers — but sure, you could build two MLB stadiums for $500 million each. You would have to cut out not just the retractable roof but a lot of the other amenities team owners seem to want these days, and probably cut them down in size some, which will make selling 35,000 tickets a night a challenge, plus you’d still need to acquire land in both cities, but if the obstacle to building cheap stadiums is really that it’s cold in Montreal in April and rainy in Tampa Bay in July, then sure, let’s see your $500 million stadium designs.
- “We are committed to the facility being open and available 365 days a year, programmed with concerts, festivals, graduations, the orchestra, international soccer matches, and anything else this community desires, there’s a pretty good story to tell there, too.” Because the orchestra doesn’t care if it’s raining! This plan is clearly foolproof!
- “Change and uncertainty are always hard. But this can be great for our fans. Number one, we will finally secure the future of Tampa Bay Rays in this market for future generations.” Sure, that future will be in Montreal all summer, but maybe everyone can plan their summer vacations in Canada?
- “We will continue to be on television every single time we play.” Why even bother having your favorite team play in the city you live in, when there’s a magic box that will let you see games no matter where you live? In fact, you could even choose to be a fan of some other team that actually acquires good players rather than trading them all away as soon as they get expensive, wait, did I say that part out loud?
It’s always tough to tell when a corporate executive is drinking his own Kool-Aid and when just pretending to, but it almost doesn’t matter here: Auld’s job here isn’t to decide whether Sternberg is serious about a Tampontreal Ex-Rays two-headed monster, it’s to sell the idea as viable so that he can shake down two cities for stadium money at once. If that only works in one city, well, that’s a bridge they can cross then. In the future. Which will arrive — let me just check those clocks again…
Let’s recap. According to the Rays:
1. “There’s too many baseball games.”
2. There’s no way to “rationalize building a $1 billion stadium for either the team or the municipalities.”
On top of all the other obvious falsehoods and contradictions, the biggest one seems to be the Rays’ insistence that baseball should not be in Tampa Bay, as they publicly beg for Tampa Bay to pay for baseball.
This is the Dodgeball commentary of stadium pitches. “Bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off for them.”
I believe the kids today call this “negging.”
“…making for all kinds of questions about how everything will work from season ticket sales to where players’ kids will go to school. Not to mention how building two stadiums will pen…”
Got an incomplete sentence there, Neil.
Oh, weird, thanks — my connection dropped while I was writing this, so it may have lost part of whatever I was trying to say there. (Which I no longer remember, so I’ve just deleted the sentence fragment.)
Time is just a social construct when you live in Florida.
Fascinating. I’d generally believed this craziness was a way to openly flirt with Montreal while waiting out the lease in St. Pete (and still do) but this:
“There was simply not a way to rationalize building a $1 billion stadium for either the team or the municipalities. … It was depressing.”
Is a weird thing to put on the record if your end goal is still to get a billion dollar stadium out of Montreal. Maybe the Rays ownership really believes in this fever dream. Which makes it far dumber than if it were strategic.
I don’t put much stock in what Auld or Sternberg say.
It might just be a ‘throw it all at the wall and see what sticks’ proposition. The Rays are already in Tampa and already have shitty attendance. What’s the worst that could happen if they keep discouraging the fanbase (while ignoring the fact that their team is, despite their own best efforts, really really good)? How much worse could it actually get for them in Tampa? Avg attendance is nearly as bad as it can get (see McCourt’s Dodgers) anyway.
I doubt they believe in the two stadium solution (sorry). I think they are just desperate to try to create leverage, something they have failed to do all through this process (which, let’s not forget, has been going on essentially since Sternberg bought the team).
The problem they have is that the city is better off without them (thanks to the probable but not certain redevelopment revenues from the Trop site) and that only the relatively small number of citizens who pay to attend games will be angry if the Rays leave.
IF this ridiculous plan ever does come off, I would expect that it will be a short term sharing arrangement with Bronfman taking over full ownership of the team within a relatively short period of time and the Tampa games – if they continue at all – limited to April and early May. It won’t be a split home for long, in other words. It will be an Expos franchise that spends an extra month in Florida at the end of spring training. Not having to build a retractable roof stadium in a high snow load area could save Bronfman $500m in construction costs.
The topline sales pitch for the Rangers stadium was indeed 50-50 but the Master Agreement gave the Rangers the option to exercise some increment financing, which would be issued by the City of Arlington and paid for with parking and ticket taxes. The Rangers pulled the trigger on that just prior to the completion of the stadium (I think for something in the range of $350M), so the total amount of debt the city put on its books was closer to $800M.
That increment financing piece (again, paid back by ticket and parking taxes) was counted toward the Rangers’ share of stadium costs.
I am looking forward to the next Auld-Sternberg presser.
You just know the next step is both of them wearing 1972 era David Gilmour/Roger Waters wigs while “Time” plays on a giant video screen in the background.
Unless holographic displays have been invented by then. What’s the hold up with those things anyway?
Neil,
We are exactly in the same place in this story as we were in 2019. If uou go back nobody was commenting more on than me. Today we still dont know how any of this proposal in going to come together. We wont have any real story on this until 2024 at the earliest
Yeah, the pacing on this show is terrible. Especially since they’ll have to rush to wrap everything up in Season 8.
I still believe if the Rays are to stay in Florida, Orlando is there best choice. They can draw from the east and west coasts of Florida and points in between. With the large population growth in the area, they could become one of the larger markets.
Since Disney seems to be successful in getting tons and tons of money out of people who visit their theme parks, why not work a deal with them at the old Wide World of Sports Complex or near that area? Disney could raise ticket prices another 10% to 20% to help pay and people will still purchase tickets just because it’s Disney.
I say this half kidding with the Disney part, but Orlando would be a better place in my opinion based on the size of the fan base you could have and the television market potential. The question is are there enough politicians in Orlando ready to fall for the typical economic growth bs that is always used to justify sharing the costs of a new ballpark?
There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell a Disney ballpark would work — or, for that matter, an MLB franchise in Orlando.
1) WDW is almost as far from downtown Orlando as Tropicana Field is from downtown Tampa, AND the shortest route from downtown Orlando to Disney still has way more traffic than the shortest route from Tampa to St Pete… not to mention that much of the likely season ticket base in Orlando would be those living north of downtown, which would discourage the idea of driving down to a Disney ballpark even more.
2) *Tourists* may be willing to stomach a markup for MLB tickets just because it’s Disney, but unless they’re totally okay with punting on getting much (if any) revenue from the actual fans in the area, it makes zero sense to price out the locals, which gets to the next point…
3) Metro Orlando simply doesn’t have the corporate base or the disposable income to support another “major league” franchise. Hell, it’s barely supporting the one that is has now (though that’s probably more down to the team being a doormat every year). The very nature of the local economy — aka heavily reliant on tourism and its legion of low- to very low-wage workers — means there simply aren’t as many dollars left once the rent and the bills are paid off (if those can even be paid off at all).
4) The whole “draw from all over the state” thing is completely overplayed. They wouldn’t be creating any more fans across the breadth of Florida by moving to a more centralized location in-state; if anything, they could even stand to lose more fans in Tampa Bay than they’ll ever gain in the rest of the state. Not to mention that the state is full of transplants who stay loyal to the teams from the places they left behind.
The only things that Orlando *might* have going for them here are that the city and county leadership [sic] has never seen a marketing opportunity it couldn’t turn down… and that Orlando as a whole is so terminally image-conscious that it really could see an MLB team as a way to put themselves on the same tier as places like Miami, Atlanta, or even Tampa/St Pete.
But if the idea is to plop the ballpark in Disney, then there’s no point in the City of Orlando getting involved unless they decide they want to get a piece of the action for whatever reason…
Why can’t the Hard Rock Seminoles foot most of the bill and add slot machines in the concourse to pay for the darn thing? It’s only a few miles east of Ybor!
The players kids going to school isn’t a big deal, since they would be moving to Montreal right around the time the school year ends so they are off for the summer anyway.
Awesome column! My laughs for the day! Thanks Neil!