Sorry that this has turned into Tampa Bay Rays week here, but stuff keeps happening. And last night, perhaps the most happeningest stuff happened, with the St. Petersburg city council meeting and 1) voting 4-3 to approve spending $23 million toward repair of the Tropicana Field roof; 2) voting 5-2 to put off selling $450 million in bonds for a new stadium and surrounding infrastructure; then 3) voting 7-0 to undo the vote to spend on fixing the roof, after Rays co-president Brian Auld declared “our agreement effectively died” with Tuesday’s county commission vote to delay issuing bonds and “I don’t believe we can make the economics around this arrangement work any more.”
A new council vote on the city bonds is now possible for January 9, assuming the county re-votes to approve its own bonds on Dceember 17. But even in the unlikely event that that happens, two new anti-stadium city councilmembers will have taken office by then, making city approval unlikely. Plus there’s increasing expectation that Rays owner Stu Sternberg will officially cancel the stadium plan anyway in the interim; Auld said that he didn’t even care about the roof repair vote, saying wasn’t confident repairs could be completed by 2026 he would “have more certainty” working out a settlement with the city instead. (Auld also apologized for “the tone” in which team execs’ letter before Tuesday’s county vote declaring the stadium deal “suspended” was received, saying it wasn’t meant to be a threat — whatever it was, it clearly backfired.)
This is crazytown, especially when you consider that this whole thing was set off by the four county commissioners who joined two prior stadium deal opponents in voting to delay the stadium bond sale in October, in order to be all respectful of the losses to Hurricane Milton and everything, apparently without considering that they might lose their pro-stadium majority on election day before their next meeting. As unlikely as it may have seemed at the time, it looks like unless Sternberg and his cronies can find a way to flip one county commissioner by December 17 — and threatening to move the team sure didn’t do the trick — everything is going back to square one now, with Sternberg shaking trees to see if anyone else wants to give him $1 billion for a stadium somewhere, while MLB has to go back to sitting on its hands waiting for this mess to be resolved before discussing expansion. Not to mention that without a repaired Trop, the Rays could be playing indefinitely in a minor-league stadium in Tampa, even as the Oakland A’s are playing indefinitely in a minor-league stadium in Sacramento. Cutting off your nose to spite your face comes at you fast.
Meanwhile, that wasn’t even the only big city council meeting about sports venues yesterday: In San Antonio, the city council held hearings on using tax money to help fund a potentially $4 billion redevelopment including a new Spurs arena. I didn’t watch the meeting, but fortunately University of Colorado Denver sports economist Geoff Propheter did and liveposted about it on Bluesky, so let’s just revisit some of his highlights:
Leading finance mechanism for the district will be a hotel tax and sales tax TIF that will span 3 mi from the district center. The zone can capture all of the 6% hotel tax and 6% sales tax. Holy sh*t that's a lot of money that can be captured. Doesn't mean they will use the full amount.
— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T17:02:39.800Z
Without evidence, the assistant city manager says that most people that went to a Bad Bunny concert at the Alamodome weren't from Bexar County. Did they survey every attendee and double check their addresses against IRS or DMV records?
— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T17:12:25.690Z
"locals bring visitors because of the authenticity"…I don't understand what this means.
— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T17:17:22.930Z
Showing potential funding sources…and as usual, tax expenditures aren't on the list. When you give tax breaks, you are spending money. We know the team and others will end up with tax breaks. Those should always be part of funding discussion.
— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T17:18:51.102Z
courage: how does more tourists lead to better homelessness solutions? better housing solutions? better paying jobs–not just low wage ushers or retail workers? How many residents will be able to attend a spurs game compared to today or stay at a hotel in the district? great questions.
— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T18:30:35.069Z
courage strikes me also as cautiously optimistic, which puts the council tally at 8-3 if a vote were held today is my guess. I'm assuming the mayor would support.
— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T18:33:16.645Z
and the special session is over. Overall thoughts: lots of ideas, nothing concrete, and a lot of silly reasoning. A sport entertainment district is not a novel idea despite some members believing so. Members seem to believe that diverted tax dollars to the project don't hurt existing services.
— Geoffrey Propheter (@gpropheter.bsky.social) 2024-11-21T18:38:41.620Z
After all that, do we still have the stamina for the week’s bullet points? Let’s try a couple, at least:
- Athletics owner John Fisher pulling out of his stadium deal with Oakland to instead move to Las Vegas (maybe) might have blown up his plans to get discounted land in Santa Clara for a San Jose Earthquakes practice facility as well, with the city board of supervisors slamming the brakes on the deal after retiring supervisor Joe Simitian said he’s “not convinced [the Earthquakes] would be a good-faith partner” and warned that the sweetheart land deal represented “essentially a $100 million giveaway to a private enterprise.”
- Speaking of Oakland, the city finance department issued a warning last Friday that the city is on the brink of bankruptcy and can’t count on money from the on-hold sale of the Oakland Coliseum to bail it out — then reversed course and quietly replaced that report on the city’s website with a new, less apocalyptic one.
- This week was so nuts that a piece of the Dallas Cowboys roof falling off barely even makes the small print. Team owner Jerry Jones doesn’t want a new stadium, at least, or else we know where this would be headed.
- And we haven’t even gotten to voters in Forsyth County, Georgia approving a TIF district to kick back tax revenues to pay for $225 million in bonds toward an NHL arena, assuming Forsyth County, which is 30 miles north of downtown Atlanta, can land an NHL team. We will revisit this if an Atlanta expansion team gets past the dreaming stage, or if this firehose of Rays stadium news ever stops, whichever comes first.
I am enjoying the whole situation in Tampa WAY more than I should.
I guess it is just nice to see some elected officials putting their constituents before the wealthy sports owners. And watching the sports owner get into a snit is a kind of icing on it.
Especially when the constituents have shown over the course of 3 decades they don’t care about the team
Hmmm. Maybe the owner should try not shitting on the city and being a greedy asshole.
They literally got hit with 2 hurricanes in a row and the first thing out of his mouth is a threat while they try and assess the damage?
F Stu.
Tbh I had always found the whole “MLB expansion is inevitable” talk to be pretty dubious well before the worst-case scenario befell the two most unstable franchises in the league. Even if both of those situations were to magically resolve themselves tomorrow (or even by the end of 2027), other owners will emerge — and indeed have emerged — claiming they need a stadium “solution” for their teams, which only pushes back the timelines for the expansion process even further.
Never mind that most of the cities being brought up as current expansion “front-runners” are more or less of the same profile as Tampa Bay and Miami (everyone’s punching bags for supposed lack of support) in terms of population history and trends, except they’re even smaller than those metro areas.* And in small markets like these, the introduction of a new team won’t happen without 1) a private investor or a conglomerate/PE fund willing to fork over a cool billion or more in expansion fees, and 2) a “state-of-the art” ballpark built mostly on the public dime.
I could easily be proven wrong here, but it feels like MLB has a hilariously inflated sense of how desirable its franchises are, not only for the ones that are yet to be born, but maybe even for the ones that currently exist.
* I know people assume that any new franchise in places like Charlotte and Nashville would automatically do better than the Rays and the Marlins, but they would, at least in the short- and medium-term, run into the exact same problems that those two teams have run into: these are all regions whose growths have been heavily dependent on the influx of out-of-towners who bring their existing hometown loyalties with them. On top of that, even the folks who were born and raised in those places might not necessarily switch their own allegiances en masse, especially if the first 5-10 years of those new teams’ existence look a lot like what the Rays’ earliest years did.
So the expansion talk seems to be coming from owners who lost money during Covid and just want a quick $150 million to make it up. The problem is that baseball’s financial model has collapsed for most teams. The revenue from local broadcast rights is worthless or soon will be. Any expansion teams would have equally worthless local rights, and be starting off in the hole of not having any fans or stadiums. I think this is why you’re seeing teams sold. The jig is up, baseball teams are never going to be worth this much again, and it’s not worth waiting for expansion for their $150 million checks
The broadcast right to MLB teams my be grossly inflated. But they are hardly worthless. It’s 81 episodes of hard to time-shift programming in the top 30 markets. Un-skippable content is exceedingly rare these days. It’s not “must see” TV, but it is valuable “might see” tv.
Tell that to the Twins, Rangers, Padres, D-backs….
You be able to sell a streaming package that nets a team 5-6 million, but none of them will get anything close to what they were receiving 5 years ago.
Worthless is pretty strong, but they’re worth quite a lot less now.
The real money-making proposition for local baseball rights was to create a RSN and then get that in the basic cable packages everywhere in your market, thereby collecting money from everyone with cable whether they ever watched a baseball game or not.
That’s all going away now and MLB owners will have to be satisfied with the much smaller pot of money that comes from people who actually want to watch the games.
Yeah, I don’t disagree with anything you said, Kei — but MLB has declared that once the Rays and A’s situations are settled, then it’s time to grab for some $2 billion expansion-fee checks. I don’t think it will be as easy as that, for all the reasons you mentioned, but clearly it’s what Rob Manfred has been counting on. (And all the more reason to enjoy the schadenfreude now that he’s got to be tearing his hair out over Sternberg’s last-second own goal.)
Baseball is just inherently hard to make work. It requires a purpose-built stadium (it doesn’t, but MLB insists it does) and has to be in a place where large numbers of people are willing and able to go 82+ times a year, including may week days.
The TV revenue is drying up and not likely to come back, especially if the big market teams refuse to share with the smaller markets.
All of the cities where that is possible have teams. Now MLB is scraping the bottom of the barrel with smaller markets and decentralized sprawling cities where the old model of urban ballparks does not apply.
Montreal would seem to be big enough, and it had investors really ready to try that split season thing, but that ship sailed (or sank, depending how you look at it) and the land they were going to use is not available now, as I understand it.
I was talking about this stuff with a friend who’s relatively business-savvy but doesn’t pay much attention to sports, and he immediately remarked on the possibility that maybe, just maybe, franchise valuation has been a medium- to long-term bubble. It’s harder to see that if you are in the sports media bubble, with wall-to-wall 24/7 coverage designed to absorb as much of your attention as possible. The only people I’ve seen buying into the idea of an inevitable 32-team MLB are committed fans who want the divisions to pencil out more easily.
I think we’ll continue to see minor-league contraction, as well, to try to shore up the major league teams. They’re already deploying the same shakedown tactics down to the single-A level, but it doesn’t get quite as much coverage.
The over valuation of sports franchises is probably related to number of billionaires increasing faster than the number of sports franchises.
^This.
Yeah. This is a new Gilded Age.
It’s awfully tempting to think so Ian.
However, I remember reading about Jerry Jones buying the Cowboys for, iirc, $190m in 1989 and thinking “a fool and his money”. There is no way to ever make that back.
As is generally known, the Cowboys had been losing $1m a month at one stage back then. And they were terrible (anyone remember the Dallas offense as run by Steve Pelleur or Gary Hogeboom? Not that I am blaming those two gentlemen alone for the state of the franchise, they had plenty of help…)
And yet here we are.
Jeff Vinik just sold about half of the Lightning for nearly $1Bn. A hockey team!
I still think “this has to stop, it simply can’t continue” on a regular basis. So far, I have been wrong every time – including on how much a banana duct taped to a wall is worth.
The Seattle Kraken ownership built a new arena (the roof had to stay due to historic value) They spent around $1B and they improved the Seattle Center park around the arena.
The city of Seattle told the owners they needed to build the arena on their own. I’m sure they got tax breaks.
Short story, Make the owner pay! Obviously, some cities can’t say no.
The Rays should leave the Tampa Bay area. Miami is just as bad.
The Kraken arena developers did not get significant tax breaks, thanks in large part to a referendum passed by Seattle voters saying that wasn’t allowed:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170906223834/https://deadspin.com/want-to-avoid-getting-screwed-on-arena-deals-look-to-s-1800657108/
Lesson: Try to live in a state that allows public referendums to restrict public subsidies. If New York had those, Kathy Hochul’s reign of terror would never have gotten off the drawing board.
Well Seattle has gone 15 years (and counting) without an NBA team. So it just comes down to if you want a team or not.
The Seattle referendum banning public subsidies for sports venues passed *after* the Sonics left, and the arena rebuild began soon thereafter. So it had nothing to do with Seattle being without an NBA franchise.
Clay Bennett has entered the chat
Not only did the local referendum regarding subsidies pass after the Sonics left, they also got an NHL team after the referendum passed.
So in all the bad/incompetent Tampa related ownership news (which is actually good news for taxpayers, obviously…) I thought this is worth a mention:
Following Jeff Vinik’s sale of a majority of the shares in the Lightning last month (which is a typically weird NHL deal in which he retains control over the team for the next three years, while the purchase price will be paid in full within a year… and thereafter he remains the alternate governor of the team – presumably with a small remaining interest), he has apparently taken $20m or thereabouts of the earnings and distributed it to team employees in disbursements of $50k each (which for some, obviously, is more than their annual earnings).
Now, Mr. Vinik is apparently going through a divorce… and while he bought the team with a notional value of $170m in 2010, he has just sold his share (or at least more than 50% of the team’s shares) at a valuation thought to be around $1.8Bn. So, he did ok.
While it isn’t likely he will notice the missing $20m, the fact of the matter is that he didn’t have to do this… he could have given team employees nothing, a framed picture of himself, a shitty watch, or whatever. Assuming these reports are true, this is something for a billionaire to be proud of, I think… and that’s not something I get to say very often.
And we’re sure he’s not just laundering campaign contributions?
Nope, I’m not sure of anything of the sort… but since he gave it to all employees (allegedly), at least it will in some cases go those who need it.
That is what it takes to make hockey work, especially in the southern US. The owner has to be competent and earn the good will of the populous.
Needless to say, Arizona has never had that.
It is unclear if Atlanta has that. It is curious that the league is not racing to award an expansion team to this Forsyth development.
Because, by all accounts, the owners expect to add more US teams and want to be in Atlanta, Houston and Phoenix, but they don’t want another Thrashers or Coyotes situation.
They were willing to roll the dice on Utah because they believe in Ryan Smith. Maybe they’re not so convinced that Atlanta has the right people.
I think it is fantastic that Auld apologized for “the tone in which our letter was received”… isn’t that, effectively, the Rays execs offering an apology from the city/county to themselves?
IF you are apologizing, aren’t you apologizing for something you did or said? Not for ‘the way someone else may have read’ what you said?
If the team continues on it’s current path, it may eclipse the Fisher/Kaval duo for sheer incompetence in negotiation.
I’m sorry if you got upset by what I said. But that’s your problem.
Eyes roll.
It definitely sounded like “well I’m sorry if you were offended by us being jerks” rather than “I’m sorry we were jerks.”
I mean all Stu had to do was shut his mouth and pony up a few million to cover the overage on new construction. The deal was so wildly lopsided that he could let all his bribed officials do their thing and begin screwing over the citizens for 30 Years before the ink was dry.
It’s like “The scorpion and the frog” – he just couldn’t help himself. He’s been nothing but a greedy, selfish bully for 10+ years. So even when the deal was ready to move to the final stages , he could only communicate via his usual means and immediately crap on his supporting officials and a region of people who are struggling to replace their home’s and belongings.
It’s a fitting epitaph for an garbage owner who always blamed the fans for his failure to generate any loyalty.
I mean, he did go immediately to “Give me my money or I’ll move, which went over predictably badly.” But I’m not so sure he could have bought his way out of this for a few million — once the two new members of the county commission were seated, he suddenly had a much worse calculus for getting four votes to approve the bonds.
What he probably needed to do was to anticipate the vote to delay the bonds in October, and reached out then — or right after that — to offer something to make sure the bonds got approved before the election. That he didn’t is just normal billionaire hubris.
Yeah – He could’ve been humble and reached out to support the area as they were trying to estimate the damage and repairs needed. But that kind of behavior would’ve been completely out of character.
The Cost overruns the team was looking at didn’t seem that overwhelming. I don’t know why they didn’t exhibit some good faith towards that part of the agreement, just bite their tongue and commit.
All he’s got is an insulting, greedy arrogant hammer in his toolbox so everything looks like a nail. From what I saw, he donated a piddly $1 million to the relief efforts and then went right back to the threats.
It just proves what all the opposition has said about the team, their loyalty, and the owners character was true
The thing that gets me is that apparently these insurmountable cost overruns were incurred because the bonds were delayed by what was, at that time, only a few weeks, when the deal didn’t actually require them to be issued for a few more months. So not only are the Rays claiming that they couldn’t afford the cost overruns that they agreed to pay and that were thoroughly predictable (because cost overruns are a near certainty in any large project), they’re saying they couldn’t even afford the deal as written. They’re either lying through their teeth or they’re announcing that they are thoroughly incompetent.
And ^this.
The Rays don’t have an MLB stadium to play in and the A’s do not either. One Stadium deal appears dead while its home stadium is not being repaired at this time exposed to the elements while the other…who knows. Time for that contraction word again. I can’t see MLB and the MLBPA tolerating playing in minor league ballparks for 3-4 years at the minimum. Expansion is not happening anytime soon. MLB is good at messing things up for the fans and messing up the game just for the extra dollar. Contract the A’s and Rays. Make a deal with the union. Start bidding out two new cities who will have MLB facilities ready within 5 years. Greed can now can kick in with expansion fees without having to go to 32 teams. Not optimal, but playing in minor league stadiums can’t be sustainable.
How does buying out the Rays and A’s owners, plus paying off the union for eliminating 80 jobs (plus all the Rays and A’s minor-league teams — they’re union now too), then trying to recoup that money via expansion fees work as “greed”?
The A’s and Rays both have viable major league stadiums (one needs about $60 million in work, but that’s not a crazy amount) if they want them. I tend to agree that expansion is kind of a dumb idea since you’d just be adding more teams in marginal cities with no hope of cable deals because LOLcable, but it’s no dumber than it was before the A’s and Rays messes.
I think you have fumblamentally misunderstood what we are in the business to do.
We are not in the business of being in the business of paying people not to play baseball in one of our host cities.
We are in the business of being in the business of having other people pay us to play baseball in their cities. That is our core complemency and is what we do almost better than just about anyone else. That I can think of.
There is no sense and no appetite for us to be paying members of our membership to no longer be in the memberhood. We do not do that and we should not do that.
There will be expansion once the situation for the two franchises we have with unacceptable standard level stadiums (or formerly stadiums) are resolved. And they will be resolved.
Sure, we may expand to smaller cities that can never really support our financial model. But that’s not our problem. That’s your problem as fans. We know that. You know that. And also local governments. It is their problem too.
And it’s not like we haven’t done that before. One guy who is dead now but still has a stadium named after him used to complain that we never should have gone past 24 teams.
Well, I think the point is how do you shake down 32 or 36 cities for subsidies when you are only at 24 teams? The math doesn’t work unless you have more players than you have chairs. It’s all about artificial scarcity and that is the way we work.
Playing in minor leagues stadiums is absolutely sustainable so long as someone else pays to make it sustainable. That is the key.
Spectrum/Bay News 9 had Topkin on and asked him where he thought the Rays would be playing in 2030, and his response was “the future of the Rays in this market is unlikely.” If Topkin is saying it, I think that’s probably what the team really thinks. Although that does raise a couple questions, 1) where does Stu suddenly think he can move to that isn’t Tampa Bay where he can get a stadium any sooner and/or cheaper for him than the Tampa Bay area? and 2) why would Topkin remain a loyal mouthpiece for them if they’ve told them they’re out the door? What is Stu’s play here? Does he think he has another viable market now? Is he trying to kill the Pinellas deal because he thinks that being in Tampa coupled with some well-placed threats will ignite interest in a Tampa ballpark that wasn’t there for the previous attempt? It’s baffling. What I think is most likely is that he thinks (or thought before his bluff was called) that this is an opportunity to reopen the deal to milk more money out of it.
The Rays have ZERO chance of getting a stadium in Tampa now. No way they cut the line to get a new stadium before the Bucs come back to the public funding teat and they won’t get the anything close to the deal they got with St Pete/Pinellas county.
Sounds like an open-air stadium to me once they figure out the costs for:
1) a drainage system, whether they use the existing turf or install sod
2) repair/replace/install/weather-proof the electrical systems/scoreboard/lights
The Rays are most likely gone. Expect them to be moved in a couple years. Orlando could probably throw their hat into it or use an expansion candidate for relocation like Nashville. The A’s isn’t over until it’s over. Utah is probably tripping all over themselves to try and snag a team.
Orlando is far and away the biggest metro area in the US without a minor league team, and nobody in town has batted a single eye about it. The demand just isn’t there for pro ball at any level.
The Rays (theoretically) moving from Tampa Bay to Orlando would do nothing to make the Rays more of a “regional” team in Florida — if anything, they would just be moving from one metro area with a high percentage of transplants to a smaller metro area with an even high percentage of transplants.