Tampa Bay Rays stadium news comes at you fast: When we last left off on Friday, team execs and government officials were in a standoff over who, if anyone, was going to pull the plug on the deal, even as the Rays’ two co-presidents (it’s going around) declared that the plan had “effectively died” and both the Pinellas County Commission and St. Petersburg city council showed no interest in moving ahead with selling bonds for a stadium, or even fixing the old one. Yesterday, county commission chair Kathleen Peters sent an open letter to the Rays presidents giving them until Sunday to “declare your intention regarding this Agreement and whether you intend to see it come to fruition”:
[Rays co-president Brian Auld] went on to complain to the Commissioner that the Rays’ revenue was down and that anticipated project costs going up were putting the project in jeopardy. This, again, on the day before the Commission met to vote on issuing the bonds. Therefore, the notion that it was the County that “killed the deal” is categorically false based on the Rays President’s own statements prior to the county’s action…
The November 19, 2024 letter approaches being an inelegantly stated notice of termination pursuant to Section 3.6(a)(ii) of the Agreement. The County is scheduled to move forward to consider legislatively adopting the supplemental bond resolution on December 17, 2024. The County can be in a position to offer its bonds for sale pursuant to the Agreement weeks (and potentially months) before the Rays’s deadline to meet its conditions precedent to such offering. As your November 19 letter makes several statements that are demonstrably false as reflected by the terms of the Agreement itself and as explained in this letter, and as President Auld made public comments in other settings that the Agreement is “dead”, that action by the Board on December 17 appears to be futile.
The Rays (StadCo.) must either indicate in writing that they intend to move forward under the Agreement as executed, or provide a clearer Notice of Termination pursuant to section 3.6(a)(ii) of the Agreement by no later than December 1, 2024.
If all this feels needlessly performative — who cares who killed the stadium deal so long as everyone agrees that it’s dead? — there’s likely more to it than just wanting the Rays to take the political heat. If you recall, county officials testified last week that if the city or county pulls the plug on the deal, Rays owner Stu Sternberg can still go ahead with taking possession of the land around Tropicana Field and redeveloping it, with or without a stadium; if it’s Sternberg who walks, then the rest of the development is canceled as well. (I’m still going through the contracts to try to find this clause — will post an update here if it turns up.) [SMALL UPDATE: If you want to play along at home by digging through the contract language, I’ve put a bunch of the documents here.)
Peters didn’t say what would happen if Rays leadership ignores her December 1 deadline, and it’s not clear she has much leverage beyond the threat to viciously subtweet (subskeet?) them if they don’t comply. Still, it’s pretty harsh wording from someone who as recently as last Tuesday was arguing that the stadium bonds should be approved because her sons love baseball, and probably a strong sign that the deal is unlikely to come back from the dead after the Rays execs’ nastygram. “Torching bridges” isn’t a legal term, though, so until one side or another agrees to formally terminate the plan, it’s going to continue to survive in a zombified state, neither alive nor dead. At least we’ll always have the vaportecture.
Still no word, meanwhile, on what the Rays’ fallback plans are for playing games beyond 2025 if St. Petersburg goes ahead with refusing to fix the Tropicana Field roof. MLB shuffled some home games around for next year to keep the Rays from having to play quite so many outdoors in the summer heat, with the result that the team will play 47 of its first 59 games at home. Maybe the schedule makers could arrange it so the Rays play all of 2026 and 2027 on an extended road trip? It’s been envisioned before.
“… until one side or another agrees to formally terminate the plan, it’s going to continue to survive in a zombified state…”
Yes. That is really the key… if neither party clearly withdraws from the agreement, some provisions within may continue to be binding on one or both parties… and that could get costly for a stadium deal that is already dead (to use the Rays’ own words).
Peters has (wisely) given the scumbag franchise a deadline by which they must make their intentions known in writing (this is still a valid agreement at this time: is you in or is you out?). If they choose not to answer, I would expect a supplemental letter giving them a short deadline extension with a suffix appended to the effect that a failure to respond in the affirmative by the extended deadline will and must be taken as a notice of cancellation by the Rays.
Speak now, or forever hold your piece.
Stunned-berg is obviously trying to get the city to formally cancel the deal based on his flunkies’ public statements. The city, equally obviously, would like the team to be the one to formally cancel. Whom the plug puller of record is could be worth billions of dollars.
It’s early days with very many developments/steps likely yet to come, but it seems clear that this is headed for the courts with the sleazeball owner/managing general partner hoping he can come away from this with a portable franchise and the profits from redeveloping the Trop lands. It is entirely possible that he never intended for this stadium to be built and only ever wanted to renegotiate the redevelopment rules/agreement. Who knows.
This is an important step for the county to take.
“Whom the plug puller of record is could be worth billions of dollars.”
Maybe? The legal language around all this stuff is so poorly worded that it’s hard to tell exactly who’s on the hook for what. But in the meantime, it’s in the interest of both sides to cover as much of their butts as possible.
“Non-response will be taken as an admission of pulling the plug” would an interesting gambit. I really need to make some contract lawyer friends who can explain what can and can’t fly in this kind of situation.
Deal documents are here, btw, if anyone wants to play hunt-the-out-clause themselves:
https://demause.net/st-pete-gas-plant-docs/
Thanks. Yes, it really only matters what the judge in the eventual court case on this believes to be relevant, no matter how smart the authors, reviewers or readers of the documents are.
Issuing a deadline for “in or out” to your partner in any deal is certainly justifiable, providing that deadline is clearly communicated and reasonable.
But who determines what is clear and reasonable???
Could the Rays claim they have ‘already’ irrevocably committed? And even if they can claim that successfully, do any of their recent statements in the media have an affect on that position?
I would put nothing past the Rays organization at this point, frankly.
I would think the “next” letter (if it comes) will be designed as a reasonable (yet forceful) attempt to obtain an answer from a partner who has given very much conflicting information… a reasonable step, in other words.
Lawyers, guns & money, again.
“…..dad get me out of this!”
Warren Zevon lives…..
We shall see what develops, but it is refreshing to see a municipality playing hardball. I suppose a major natural disaster actually can change some politicians’ minds. Too bad that’s what it takes.
Assuming the deal ends up dead, it’s sad it takes a hurricane or two to stop this kind of corporate welfare.
I agree, Warren Zevon’s music lives.
I’m still trying to understand the Rays’ and Sternberg’s end game here. Was this all just a ruse to get the land to develop and ditch the ballpark? Unlikely, as this deal was all but done and only got derailed due to a literal act of God. Did they just assume the deal would be dead after the change in votes on the county commission after the election, so they’re trying to burn it all down? I guess, but they’re risking walking away with nothing. Did the team president merely speak out of turn when he called the deal dead? You’d hope a business executive wouldn’t be that stupid and that formal statements would be vetted by their PR and legal teams, but you can’t rule anything out in our fun house environment of 2024.
I’m just perplexed as to what, exactly, they’re trying to accomplish. There’s no escape hatch with another city or site like Fisher had with Vegas when he backed out of the Howard Terminal deal. Sternberg has to know the other owners will be infuriated with him. They’re stuck playing as the Yankees’ tenant in a minor league park in perpetuity without a solution. I simply can’t see what the business plan is here, even if it is galaxy-brained.
The two likeliest stories to me:
1) Sternberg and Co. thought that declaring the deal dead (and/or threatening to move, as Sternberg did the weekend before in the St. Pete Times) would scare electeds into approving the bonds. If so, that backfired spectacularly.
2) Somewhere in the past couple of months Sternberg decided that the whole project is too rich for his blood and, much like John Fisher in Oakland, decided to pick a fight with city officials in order to back out of the deal. This could end up backfiring spectacularly too, much as it seems like it will for Fisher, but it all depends on what other cities Sternberg thinks he can talk into signing a $1B check.
#1 seems the most plausible. The thing about scenario #2 was that this deal was done. If those hurricanes don’t hit the region, Sternberg would be locked into this deal. It would seem remarkably feckless to throw away months of work on a last-minute adjustment all over a deus ex machina, especially when there’s literally nothing for an alternative. If another city was willing to be sweet-talked into handing over a stadium to the Rays, they’d have done so by now.
If this was truly a misfire, it belongs in an FoS HoF for fumbling the bag. (Is there one? If not, there should be one. I nominate John Bladen as one of the voters).
Thank you very much, but as someone who someday hopes to be a scumbag multibillionaire sports franchise owner (don’t hold your breath), I think I would be a poor choice…
Was Sternberg really locked into the deal if the hurricanes don’t hit?
I’m not convinced. He really does look to me like a guy who spent almost 20 years demanding a new stadium with a pony and then when he had nearly got one decided that that really wasn’t going to help and thought he could do better in some other way (like scooping up the redevelopment loot and then selling his share of the club for 10x what he paid for it). An important factor for me is that he did not have redevelopment rights after 2027 before this deal was signed.
We’ll likely never know what his master plan was (if he ever had one). Maybe he does rival Fisher for stupidity after all?
It was interesting to me to read that the Pinellas BCC had written a bond sale drop dead (maybe) date of March 31 2025 into the deal… which means that absolutely none of the delays or changes surrounding the damage to the Trop or anything else has had any impact on the viability of the deal. They were NOT committed to vote on the bond sale before then. Of course, they could have done so, but they did not have to.
Surely the Rays – who negotiated this very deal with the BCC and County – knew this. And decided to go public with their complaints (and ‘dead deal’ comments) in the media.
Was that stupidity or strategy?
I find myself wondering if the real goal all along wasn’t to have the county believe the Rays had cancelled the deal and be in a position to claim damages from the county for cancellation when they moved to quash it absent some form of formal communication from the Rays.
BCC chair Peters, thankfully, appears to have wondered something similar.
All indications are that the Rays execs were expecting to go ahead with the deal until they heard the county was delaying the bond sale:
https://www.tampabay.com/sports/2024/11/23/rays-stadium-deal-pinellas-county-commission-st-pete-city-council-hurricanes/
Why they pivoted to “Now that the bonds were delayed a month, the deal is too expensive so it’s off,” who the hell knows? Could be it was meant to be a threat to get the county commission in line, could be it was butt-covering when they realized the new commission members weren’t going to play nice, could be something else. But this feels less like seven-dimensional chess than like really bad, frantic damage control.
I completely agree it makes no sense. To walk away from the deal they work towards/around for nearly two decades when the finish line was in sight is foolhardy.
Maybe it’s just searching for a reason for something that has no reason… but there is no way that the “cost” increased that much within a month. Since the BCC could have waited until the end of March, the team had to have built in probable cost increases at least to that date.
So their stated reasons can not, in my view, be truthful or accurate.
I don’t know what the real reason is. However it can’t be what they say it is as that would be nonsensical.
Assuming they don’t come back to the table begging for even more money (and get it) their damage control effort has left them without an MLB stadium and without any prospect of getting one (in T-SP or elsewhere) before maybe 2030?
I would assume their deal to play at the former Legends could be extended, but at this point they only have a one year contract to play there and two more years to go in “Tampa”.
Doesn’t this take cutting off your nose to spite your face to an all time high?
Neil, Your humor and wit are much appreciated here in war weary St. Petersburg. Of interest is the Mason-Dixon poll of registered voters conducted last spring. The poll concludes with the prescient warning that any candidate who supports the terrible Rays deal will not be re-elected. In November, two new anti-stadium commissioners and two new anti stadium city councilmembers were elected. And while the old commissioners were steadfastly counting emails (mostly from Rays’ employees) the electorate had spoken. Perhaps it was the exploding manhole covers, non-functioning sewage treatment plants and boil water alerts; all of which were exacerbated by a 50 year old water/wastewater system which needs $5 billion to upgrade. Suddenly spending tax money on a baseball stadium doesn’t seem that necessary.
Thanks to the League of Women Voters of the St. Petersburg Area and the Suncoast Chapter of the Sierra Club for their indefatigable efforts to educate voters.