Rays execs insist new stadium at Trop site would boost attendance, allow more player signings, no you can’t look at our fingers to see if they’re crossed

It’s Day 2 of “The Tampa Bay Rays are building a new stadium in St. Petersburg, maybe, if they can find money somewhere,” which means it’s time for the team to move into high spin gear! Team management’s pet media outlet, the Tampa Bay Times, is sitting right there, somebody send a team official or two to talk to sportswriter Marc Topkin and see what kind of headline results:

How a new stadium deal could improve Rays’ fortunes on and off the field

Oh, this should be good:

Speaking in generalities given stadium financing details have not been worked out, top Rays officials said the project should lead to bigger crowds at games, increased sponsorships, improved facilities and, most relevant, larger player payrolls.

“We wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t think it left the franchise in a better position that we’re in today,” Auld said after a Tropicana Field media conference. “Look, it’s been a wild offseason. We made our biggest free-agent signing ever (Zach Eflin) and I think it was one-tenth the size of a handful of other (teams’) deals.

“The economics of baseball are immensely challenging. This isn’t going to solve all of that. Does it help us to fight with 1-1/2 hands instead of one tied behind our back? We think so.”

Needless to say, Topkin doesn’t ask whether any of the above makes a lick of sense, so let’s think it through for him. The Rays currently don’t spend much money on player payroll: check. So they need a new stadium to increase their revenues so they can spend more on players — but a new stadium that team owner Stu Sternberg had to pay for wouldn’t increase their revenues, so they need tax money to pay for the stadium, so the stadium can turn a profit, so the profit can be used to sign more players, so the Rays can escape the terrible hole they’re in where they’ve only made the playoffs four of the last four years. This comes awfully close to “We don’t play in New York or Boston, so we would like the people of St. Petersburg to buy us some outfielders,” only with more disturbing body-horror metaphors about half-hands being tied behind backs.

And if economic thought experiments aren’t your cup of tea, there’s a perfect real-world example: The Miami Marlins, whose owner similarly demanded a new stadium so he could sign higher-priced players, only to turn around and trade all those players a year later when fans didn’t turn up in droves, at which point the team resumed its perpetual fire sale ways. Or look at the Pittsburgh Pirates or Cincinnati Reds or virtually any other perma-tanking MLB team, all of which play in stadiums that were built on the argument that it would prevent exactly this situation from coming to pass.

But regardless of whether it has any basis in fact, getting a headline in the local paper about how maybe you’ll stop selling off all your high-priced players every year if you get a pile of public money is a good first day on the job for your stadium campaign. The Tampa Bay Times has other writers, though, maybe send team officials to talk to sports columnist John Romano as well and see what they can drum up?

Why in the world would the Rays rebuild on the Trop site? Read on.

Romano is generally a better reporter than Topkin, and he’s here asking a question that lots of Rays fans (and Rays onlookers) would like to know the answer to: Seriously, the Rays are looking to build a stadium site in the same place that they and everyone else has been complaining is killing their attendance because it’s too hard to get to? And he got Rays officials to explain their thinking, sort of:

“I think it’s well understood that Tampa is the business and geographic center of the region. But it’s been proven to be challenging to get a ballpark built over there,” said Rays president Brian Auld. “Meanwhile, St. Petersburg continues to grow, continues to evolve and is continuing to support this team in a meaningful way. And there’s good reason to believe that, with a placemaking development like the one we’re talking about, we can increase attendance even more.”…

“This franchise has never had a new facility, not even a new spring training facility,” said team president Matt Silverman. “There’s a lot of upside for the team to be able to open a brand new, state-of-the-art facility with a roof, embedded into a development in a thriving downtown.

“For a fan it will be about going to bars and restaurants beforehand, enjoying a walk along Booker Creek. It’s not just about parking in a lot and walking to a game and going back to your car afterward. That’s something that we haven’t been able to offer to our fans forever.”

Strip away all the developerspeak, and this comes down to: Well, maybe people won’t mind driving across the bridge to go to Rays games if there’s a sports bar across the street where they can hang out afterwards and gear up for the long drive home. This is not the dumbest thing that a sports exec has said with a straight face, but it could be in the running for dumbest of 2023.

To his credit, Romano assesses Auld and Silverman’s verbiage as making lemonade when handed lemons: “They would rather be nearer downtown Tampa. But building in Hillsborough County is a much more expensive proposition.” But he then goes on to regurgitate their language about a downtown “revival” and “destination sites,” and ultimately lands on:

This feels like the best chance the Rays have had for a new stadium since beginning this odyssey with the suggestion of the Al Lang waterfront site in 2007.

For once, there is a combination of land and revenues. And a potential partnership between the team and a local government. For once, the optimism is based more on reality than hope.

And this, this is the achievement that every sports exec truly hopes to unlock: The point at which local news writers and opinion makers shift from “Why should we build a stadium?” to “How can we get this stadium built?” When the decision about whether to sink hundreds of millions of dollars of subsidies into a sports team owner’s dream stadium (or even second- or third-place dream stadium) to boost his profits is no longer presented as a controversial question that residents and lawmakers need to decide on, but rather as a gleaming opportunity that provokes “optimism” that maybe it can come to pass — that’s some serious shifting of the Overton window. It’s too soon to say if Sternberg and Ault and Silverman will be able to finally shake loose public cash for this project where they’ve failed time and again before, but they’re certainly doing their job making all the moves from the playbook.