Somebody wants you to know Rays owner could totally sell the team if he wanted

If you’re even a casual baseball fan, you likely know Ken Rosenthal as that guy with the bowtie who does sideline reporting for Fox during playoff games. He’s a consummate access journalism guy, and he and Chandler Rome just turned in a report for The Athletic that boils down to this paragraph:

At least one local businessman is trying to buy the [Tampa Bay Rays] franchise, according to sources briefed on the discussions who were granted anonymity so they could speak candidly. The team also is drawing interest from groups that would relocate the club to one of the cities that is a candidate for major-league expansion.

None of this is particularly surprising or even newsworthy, depending on what “trying to buy” means: There are a lot of billionaires out there, and a lot of them like sports, and with Rays owner Stuart Sternberg unhappy with his current stadium in St. Petersburg, you would expect some of them would at least be kicking the tires on how much it would cost to buy the Rays and either move them or not.

The more interesting question here is why this is being reported now. “Sources briefed on the discussions” can only be so many people: Anyone on the buyer side of talks — say, someone connected to local office printer baron Dan Doyle Jr., the one prospective purchaser named in the article — wouldn’t know about other bidders, so that leaves either 1) Rays officials or 2) MLB officials. So someone from either the team or the league decided to blab to Rosenthal about all the people who would like to buy the team, if it were up for sale. Why?

One immediately obvious possibility: This is coming from Rays execs who, fearing the bidding war to build the team a stadium isn’t heating up fast enough despite those much-hyped Orlando plans, figure that it wouldn’t hurt to plant a story in a major sports publication warning that the team could be sold and moved. Or the same could be coming from MLB execs for the same reason, since the league wants somebody to dump a few hundred million dollars on the Rays for a new stadium almost as badly as Sternberg does.

It also could be that someone in one of the organizations is leaking this without approval of their bosses, in order to … actually, I’m not sure why they would want to do that, other than to gossip with Rosenthal vaguely about how many phone calls they’re fielding from people wanting to buy the team. (Rosenthal isn’t relentless pro-league, by the way — in fact he was reportedly booted from his role on MLB Network for being too critical of MLB commissioner Rob Manfred’s negotiations with players during the height of the pandemic — but gossip, whether with management or players, remains his stock in trade.) The whole thing makes far more sense as a leverage move, but we can’t be sure, because Rosenthal and Rome have granted their sources total anonymity to allege whatever they choose.

This is the biggest problem with relying on unnamed sources (and with access journalism in general): Without knowing who’s making the statements, readers have no way of knowing how reliable it is, or whether sources could be dishing rumors for their own purposes. The Associated Press ethics rules specifically require that articles describe not just why sources requested to speak anonymously but “the source’s motive for disclosing the information” when relevant; NPR’s say reporters should “describe in as much detail as we can (without revealing so much that we effectively identify that person) how they know this information, their motivations (if any) and any other biographical details that will help a listener or reader evaluate the source’s credibility.” Not that AP or NPR or any other publication with similar rules necessarily follow these guidelines when there’s a juicy scoop being dangled in front of them — but there is widespread acknowledgement that granting anonymity too readily is a great way to turn your articles into a mouthpiece for people who want to get things out in the media without having to answer questions about them.

The upshot, then, is that somebody, probably a Rays or MLB exec, wants you to know, or at least to believe, that Stu Sternberg has lots of great offers to buy the team and maybe move it — at a time when Sternberg is in the middle of trying to get some locality to offer the most possible money toward building him a stadium. Sources close to the journalism industry say this strongly suggests the entire Rays sale talk is primarily a media stunt, though they declined to speak on the record because they didn’t want to reveal whether they’re actually just me.