The verdict is in for where the Tampa Bay Rays will play the 2025 season while waiting for their roof to be (probably) repaired, and the answer is: Steinbrenner Field in Tampa, spring-training home of the New York Yankees and rest-of-the-time home of the Tampa Tarpons. I’m going to go ahead and call this a fine enough decision: The stadium holds 11,000 people, not too far off of the Rays’ average 2024 attendance of 16,515; as a spring training site, it has major-league amenities; and it’s still in the Tampa Bay region, so Rays fans won’t have to drive across the state or the country to get to games. Plus, there are multiple fields on the site, so there’s no worry about schedule conflicts, since the Tarpons can just play on one of the back fields while the Rays take over the main one.
Of course, it’s also not in Pinellas County, which is already ticking off Pinellas County commissioners who already held up a vote on approving bonds for a new Rays stadium last month amid concern that the team might play elsewhere for a season or three. Commissioner Chris Latvala, who voted against the stadium deal in July, called the decision “unfortunate,” saying, “there’s going to be over $1 billion public funds dedicated from Pinellas residents to the Tampa Bay Rays, and the thank you that the Rays gave them was to play the games across the bridge in Hillsborough County.” Commissioner Rene Flowers, meanwhile, who voted for the deal in July, told the Tampa Bay Times she’s now not sure if she’ll change her vote, saying, “I’m waiting to see how it looks for us financially” — spoilers, Rene, it still looks just as bad as it did then.
And then there’s this tidbit:
The Yankees will receive about $15 million in revenue for hosting the Rays, a person familiar with the arrangement told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity because that detail was not announced. The money won’t come from Tampa Bay but from other sources, such as insurance.
Um, Associated Press, you drunk posting? First off, “Tampa Bay” is not a government entity, it’s a collection of disparate municipalities and counties, so who isn’t the money coming from, exactly? And “such as insurance” is both awfully vague and puzzlingly specific, as the only insurance policy that’s been discussed is that held by the city of St. Petersburg, which is already committed to paying for a chunk of the estimated $55 million cost of repairing the Tropicana Field roof.
Still many questions, in other words. Anyone else want to chime in?
“I’ll be excited to set a record for rain delays in a season,” Rays reliever and union player rep Pete Fairbanks said.
And as for the week’s other news:
- Orlando’s stadium formerly known as the Citrus Bowl is set to get $400 million in county-funded renovations, something that Orlando mayor-for-life Buddy Dyer first proposed last year and which the county gave preliminary approval to back in January. The money would come from the “tourist development tax” — the same pool of hotel-tax money that Pinellas County is currently debating whether to hand over to the Rays — which according to the authorizing legislation can be used for building stadiums, or building auditoriums, or funding aquariums or museums or zoos or beaches or advertising tourism or a whole lot of other things, so long as the purpose is to get more tourists coming to your county. It’s actually somewhat difficult to argue that renovating a stadium that hosts a handful of college football games each year in order to make it “fully symmetrical” is what’s needed in order to encourage tourists to go to freaking Orlando, but this is what the county commission is being asked to vote on in the next couple of weeks, with a straight face.
- A report by consultant Econsult Solutions Inc. commissioned by the city of Cleveland claims that the Browns leaving downtown would cost the city $30 million in annual economic activity and $11 million in annual tax revenue, which on the face of it doesn’t make any sense since Cleveland doesn’t have any taxes that are at 36.7%. A quick look at the report itself doesn’t reveal any more methodological details, except that Econsult apparently calculated its estimate that Cleveland would lose 29% of Browns-related spending by dividing the population of the city by the population of Cuyahoga County, LOLconsultants.
- Personal seat license prices at the new Tennessee Titans stadium are in some cases going up from $750 per seat to $10,000 a seat, and season ticket holders are not pleased. But at least the PSL money will help pay off the public’s $1.2 billion share of the construction — oh, what’s that, the seat license money is entirely going to pay off team owner Amy Adams Strunk’s share of the costs? The Hog Mollies didn’t mention that part!
- The city of Oakland’s sale of its half of the Oakland Coliseum site to private developers is on hold, apparently because Alameda County is dragging its feet on the transfer of its half of the site which it had previously sold to A’s owner John Fisher. No, that doesn’t make sense to me either, it looks to involve a lawsuit in progress charging that the sale violates the state’s Surplus Land Act requiring that public land first be offered up for development as affordable housing — similar objections were raised about the Los Angeles Angels deal, you may remember, but that fell apart before it was ever resolved, so who knows what’ll happen here.
- One long-rumored stadium site the Kansas City Royals definitely won’t be moving to is the old K.C. Star building, because it’s being converted into an “AI innovation facility.” A local wine bar owner called this “not the most exciting thing for the neighborhood” but at least a plan that wouldn’t require displacing local businesses, which is probably about right.
- Diamond Sports Group, aka Bally Sports aka FanDuel Sports, has emerged from bankruptcy reorganization, with lots of consequences for the MLB, NBA, and NHL teams it formerly provided cable broadcasts of. ESPN has a rundown, but the main takeaway is that a bunch of teams are going to getting less TV money than they expected, which will effect everything from their player budgets to the relative importance of market size in terms of team profitability, while fans will get some new options including the ability to do pay-per-view of single games for a mere (?) $7 a pop. More on this as more dominoes fall, maybe, or check Marc Normandin’s Marvin Miller’s Mustache newsletter later this morning, if I know him he’ll be weighing in on this.
I’m just guessing here, but maybe the AP report meant “Tampa Bay” as in the Tampa Bay Rays organization. As long as I’m guessing, maybe Major League Baseball helped pull together a few million so that the Rays could play somewhere (there’s been quite a bit of that in recent years with the Blue Jays’ covid moves and the A’s in Sacramento).
Surely there are enough Taylor Swift Concerts and Wrestlemanias to justify the citrus bowl renovation
Don’t forget the occasional Monster Jam
I love that the chief of Orlando Venues rationalized the latest money sink into the Citrus Bowl by claiming that it’s “going to be the nicest non-NFL stadium in the country” when it’s finished, as if that’s somehow going to mean anything to anybody.
$400 million to keep hosting the same B-, C-, and D-tier bowl games; maybe get five or six Jaguars “home” games for one year; maybe a demolition derby or two every year; maybe a Wrestlemania every decade or so. Those same dollars could (should) be made available for things that people who actually live here need, as opposed to things that people who come here for days or weeks at a time would like to have… but the city and county (and state, really) have willfully chosen not to do it, so here we are.
Orlando is a jumbo-sized real estate and public financing hustle with a faulty pyramid scheme for a local economy. The Citrus Bowl is part of the compacted dreck making up the bottom tier of that pyramid.
The huge issue with Florida’s tourist tax is that it has to be spent on “tourism development” instead of channeling that money into things that could help the residents who keep those tourism amenities running. But the next biggest issue is the sense among government officials locally and in Tallahassee (as well as most constituents and media outlets) that the tourism money is endless free money available to the entire state and it doesn’t really matter how it’s spent.
It’s ridiculous that the Rays are paying the Yankees to use Steinbrenner. One of the reasons that the Rays have had attendance troubles is that the huge presence of the Yankees makes a large group of Tampaons think of the Yankees as their home team ( even though many of them have probably never been to NYC).
If MLB had incentivized the Yankees to move their spring year-end minor league operations elsewhere, maybe the Rays might not be constantly struggling to expand their fan base.
That was supposed to say “spring training and minor league operations”
The Yankees have had a presence in Tampa since long before the Rays existed. They utilized what was Redsland (the former training site for the Reds before they moved to Plant City and eventually to Goodyear) for some minor league and extended spring training as far back as the late 1980s/early 1990s. And they started planning what is now Steinbrenner Field before the Rays franchise was even awarded.
Steinbrenner loved Tampa. There wasn’t going to be any incentivizing them to move elsewhere because of the presence of a team in St. Petersburg (which was the only stadium option at the time, the Tampa Coliseum project having fallen through before that).
As for Commissioner Chris Latvala, I feel ya, bud, but GMSF is the largest spring ballpark in the region and all the ones on the Pinellas side don’t offer what they can on the Hillsborough side. It’s temporary. They’re just being butthurt.
Point taken. But the Yankees actually had spring training in ST PETE for decades before Steinbrenner bought the team (Google Babe Ruth and St Pete). And yeah, it wouldn’t make much difference anyway.
Moving the Yankees’ spring training facilities and low-A affiliate out of Tampa won’t do anything to decrease the Yankees’ fanbase in the region, let alone create new Rays fans — particularly those switching from the Yanks to the Rays. Even if it does, any effects of that won’t be felt for at least a generation.
A good number of baseball fans in Tampa Bay under the age of, say, 35 will have grown up with the Rays as their favorite team. It’s just that they make up a low percentage — maybe a plurality, if they’re lucky — of the overall baseball (and sports) loving population of the area. This is normal in any metro area whose growth has largely been dependent on the influx of out-of-towners.
Just quietly, the same thing will apply, maybe even to a greater degree, in any of the cities that MLB decides to expand to down the road.
Tampeño or Tampanian is the usual preferred demonym there.
Oh, also, Pete Fairbanks is a dipstick who should probably stop speaking and go feed his gopher.
I followed the Diamond Sports issue because it affects the Tigers. Here in Detroit I couldn’t get the games on tv for a couple of months because Bally and Xfinity couldn’t reach an agreement.
Sometimes I feel my advancing age. I am old enough to remember when MLB required Willie Mays to give up his job as a casino greeter because heavens, baseball can’t be involved with gambling. Here Marian Illitch wanted a casino license, basically a license to print money, and she had to swear up and down that she had nothing to do with running the baseball team, she just happened to be married to the owner…of course, a couple of years before she had the team p.r. director fired because he didn’t make her role in the media guide sufficiently prominent.
The Diamond outlet here was sponsored by Bally, the casino interest, and it’s now sponsored by Fan Duel, the on-line gambling site. Baseball sure lost its reluctance to be associated with gambling quickly.
I saw the $15 million for the Yankees and thought it a helpful figure to give context to what an actual market rate rent for a pro team to use a stadium should be. If this is the amount for a spring training facility, what would be a fair amount for a full-sized professional stadium?
Certainly, it makes the City of Oakland’s offer to the A’s seem pretty reasonable.
The Yankees receiving the money is the biggest joke of all, since Hillsborough county built and heavily renovated the former Legends FOR the Yankees and own it.
The Tarpons historic avg attendance is under 50,000 a season.
I guess each one of those fans must be spending, what, $300 at each FSL game for the Yankees to require that level of compensation?
The actual revenue loss to the Yankees organization (if the Tarpons play to no fans at all) is likely to be significantly less than $1m per year.
I think the main costs to the Yankees are related to not having full use of the facility, not from reduced revenue from the Tarpons. The Yankees use the Tampa facilities almost like a co-headquarters. Much of the organization works in Tampa rather than in the Bronx. There’s also the fact that the Yankees have a stronger market interest in Tampa than probably other club has in its spring training home, and they consider the Rays to be an on-field rival as well. The Yankees never would have allowed the Rays to play at Steinbrenner Field without getting paid off handsomely, and even then they probably only accepted it due to pressure from MLB.
And they had the Rays over a barrel, since they didn’t have a lot of other good options. This is almost certainly less a question of fair market value rent than about what Steinbrenner thought he could get away with demanding before Rob Manfred and the other 29 owners would say, “This is too greedy even for us.”
I read that the voters approved the bond deal to maybe build an NHL arena north of Atlanta. You may have noticed the league has not awarded a franchise to that market, yet.
This is not getting a lot of coverage so maybe it is less than it appears.
https://www.wsbradio.com/news/local/forsyth-county-voters-approve-tax-district-new-arena-that-hopes-bring-nhl-team-back/AY6REFKI3NAENC5ZLZ6RIAYKNE/?outputType=amp
I’m sure *THIS* Atlanta NHL team will never move to Canada.
Maybe the Salt Lake City Dead Coyotes can move to Atlanta/Forsyth once it has been proven again (Kansas City Scouts, Colorado Rockies, Cleveland Barons) that small markets can’t support NBA and NHL.
The Rays are now saying that the stadium deal is dead, according to their PR office, I mean the Tampa Bay Times. https://www.tampabay.com/sports/2024/11/16/rays-stadium-deal-bonds-vote-pinellas-st-petersburg-tropicana-field-steinbrenner/
This may just be the team trying to put pressure on the Pinellas Commission and/or trying to scare an electorate that rather emphatically voted for candidates who were publicly against the deal, or just John Romano scared that the Times won’t have any local sports to write about in the summer, but it probably does reflect exactly the Rays’ preferred messaging on the topic. Notably, one of the points raised is that the Rays could build the development in St. Pete without the stadium and take all the money while still moving the team out of market, and given the context, that should probably be taken as an open threat from the Rays to essentially rob the county and city blind (well, blinder than they already were).
You pretty much just wrote what I’ve been planning to on Monday: Four days before a county commission vote on stadium bonds, Sternberg suddenly says the team will move if the money isn’t approved now now now? Even if it’s not an entirely idle threat, the timing there can’t be coincidental.
I am a little curious as to why he went to Romano and not Topkin, who is his usual preferred mouthpiece. But he certainly got the same uncritical stenography from him.
“whether we lose an extra $25m or $45m a year for three years…”
Gee, that’s funny, if they lost $30m a year in revenue, that would mean they would only turn a $30-35m profit in the smaller stadium.
And it’s unlikely they would lose even $25m a year in revenue given that a sell out at the former Legends is almost certain to bring in more than the pro rated 11,000 attendance at the Trop would. I calculate a maximum loss of about $12m in ticket sales (at least due to capacity, if people don’t want to go watch the Rays at Legends for other reasons that is a different matter), no loss of broadcast revenues, and maybe $4-6m in concession revenues.
It is entirely possible that there will be no loss of ticket revenue at their new temp home at all, given that the experience at a small major league calibre park should be significantly better for fans (and we know how slimy Stu has always blamed the Trop for his business problems…) and could lead to increased ticket prices if demand is high enough in the new region.
But hey, if Stu wants to walk away from the stadium deal, I’m all for it. Now the powers that be just have to wrench control of the stadium lands away from him… something they never should have allowed in the first place.