Rays exec suggests going halfsies on $700m stadium for half a team in Tampa

After years of Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg demanding a new stadium without being too specific about how much public money he would want other than “more,” we finally have an answer, sort of, or at least a hint:

On Friday, team president Brian Auld told an Ybor City audience at the Cuban Club the possible answer to that question was about $700 million, with the Tampa Bay Rays paying half.

And that’s all Auld said — or at least, all we know he said, since the Tampa Bay Times didn’t bother to quote him. (And their reporter Charlie Frago was there for his statement, too, as he took this very low-resolution and poorly-framed photo. Maybe he couldn’t figure out how to work his phone recording app?)

The Times, which has long since established itself as pro-Sternberg’s stadium demands, which surely has nothing to do with its business relationship with one of the proposed stadium developers, focused on how the $350 million public price tag is less than the $700 million Sternberg reportedly wanted toward an $892 million stadium in Ybor City a couple of years ago. But there’s another big shift in the numbers here: Auld had previously said the Rays could build “two outdoor ballparks for around the same price the Texas Rangers spent on their retractable-roofed stadium in Arlington.” The Rangers stadium cost around $1.2 billion — almost half of it in public money — so that implies each stadium, in Tampa Bay and Montreal, was going to cost around $600 million, making $700 million a price hike. (Unless the Montreal stadium would only be $500 million because of the exchange rate or something? Really wishing Frago had asked some followup questions here.)

And while $350 million in public money definitely sounds like a lower public price tag than $700 million, it might not be once all the fine print is in. There’s already been talk of “tens of millions” of dollars of Florida state infrastructure money going to a Tampa Bay stadium, and there could easily be other infrastructure funds, tax breaks, negative rent payments, or who knows. It’s really impossible to guess from just a single paraphrased comment from a blurry guy at an oblique angle.

If we take Auld at his word for a minute, though, this whole Tampontreal Ex-Rays plan makes less financial sense than ever. If Sternberg goes halfsies on two $700 million stadiums, one in Montreal and one in Tampa, that’s a cost for him of $700 million. If he’d been willing to put up anything close to that, he almost certainly would have been able to get the Ybor City plan in Tampa approved, and would now have a new stadium under construction right where he supposedly wants one. But now, he’s (maybe) looking at spending the same amount of money to get two stadiums, so he can have his team split time in two countries, with all the logistical problems that would entail.

There are two likely theories here: 1) Sternberg has actually drunk his own Kool-Aid, and thinks he can sell way more tickets by splitting time in two cities than by playing consistently in one, or 2) he’s using the two-city gambit to see which location he can get a better offer from, and will then look to put the Rays there. Either way, it looks like he’s trying to copy off the Buffalo Bills by having Auld apply some anchoring — if the local news outlets keep reporting this as “$350 million isn’t as bad as $700 million,” then we’ll know he’s won this battle.