It’s been three whole days since we checked in on the Tampa Bay Rays stadium situation! Do you feel bereft? Do Rays execs and Tampa Bay–area elected officials feel bereft? If a press statement falls in a forest and there’s no one around to aggregate it, does it make a sound?
None of this, and more, will be answered in this week’s news roundup:
- The Tampa Bay Times sports desk has certainly been chiming in on the Rays situation, with columnist John Romano, who first reported on Rays owner Stu Sternberg’s threats to move the team if he didn’t get stadium bonds approved ASAP, declaring that what is needed is “a hero” or “a savior” or “a fairy-tale knight” to “step up and purchase a large hunk of the franchise and pay for a stadium, or at least provide a stadium financing plan that does not involve more than a half-billion in public dollars.” Why a half-billion? Who knows! Where does Romano think Sternberg will go if no buyer steps in? Dunno, though he predicts the team will “be on the move, at least temporarily, when 2026 rolls around and Tropicana is still not fixed and the Rays do not want to be stuck in an 11,000-seat spring training stadium.” (The number of cities that could have significantly larger stadiums ready to go by 2026 is zero, or maybe one if neither the Athletics nor San Francisco Giants have territorial rights to Oakland.) The most logical short-term solution is for Sternberg and local electeds to get together and agree to pay the $55 million it would cost to repair Tropicana Field for the short term, with Sternberg agreeing to extend his lease a few years in exchange; it would take a lot of pride-swallowing, especially on Sternberg’s part, so it probably won’t happen, but the alternative looks like it’ll be a whole lot of baseball seasons in minor-league parks somewhere.
- The group that wants to bring an MLB team to Orlando — formerly led by former Magic executive Pat Williams before his death this summer — also chimed in, saying that while they would never interfere in the business of St. Petersburg, if the Rays did want to move to Orlando, they’re confident that Orange County political leaders “can provide an attractive public/private partnership stadium financing structure that benefits all stakeholders involved.” The last time they brought this up, the “public” part involved $975 million in hotel tax money, one of the same revenue sources that St. Petersburg had been looking to use on its new Rays stadium. (Though it’s often said that Florida counties can spend this on tourism promotion and building things like stadiums and convention centers, it can also use some of it for zoos and beaches and river cleanup and even transportation and sewer infrastructure, something lots of Floridians would like to see counties do.) The Orange County Commission has passed on this idea in the past; we’ll see if it goes over any better with the Rays as a potential target.
- The Philadelphia city council voted 10-3 to approve creating a tax-kickback district for a new 76ers arena and a new “arena district” to manage neighborhood impacts, which are expected to be extensive. More arena votes are scheduled for the next council meeting on Tuesday.
- Cleveland and Cuyahoga County are each being asked for $20 million for Guardians and Cavaliers stadium and arena repairs, with another $30 million ask on the table right behind that. If there’s a small silver lining, it’s that this is money the city and county already agreed to spend, it’s just that the cigarette and alcohol taxes that were supposed to fund it are coming up short, so now taxpayers will have to dig into another public pocket.
- How are those super-pricey Buffalo Bills PSLs selling? Extremely poorly: Only 10% have sold so far, and the rate of purchases is slowing. If they don’t sell out, the Bills owners are on the hook for coming up with the money elsewhere, at least, so at least it won’t be an additional public disaster like the 1990s Oakland Raiders PSLs were.
- The Chicago Bears owners and Arlington Heights have finally agreed on a property tax valuation for the land the team wants to build a stadium on in that Chicago suburb, but also they say they still really want to build a stadium in Chicago, raising the question, as the Chicago Sun-Times puts it, of “whether the Bears’ latest announcement is [just] a push for leverage in stadium negotiations that have now stretched over three years.”
If the Rays move to Orlando, I want Disney to purchase the team, just for the novelty of Disney having owned both the Angels and the Rays. According to an LA Times article from 2/26/05, Disney sold the Angels for $183.5 million. Forbes last valued the team at $2.7 billion (before Ohtani left). The same article says Disney sold the Ducks for $75 million. Forbes last valued them at $925 million.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-feb-26-sp-ducks26-story.html
Every now and then, the few people in Orlando with enough money and clout to have their voices heard across town remind us that this is a city that has nursed a decades-long inferiority complex relative to the bigger, older, more-established cities in Florida and across the eastern seaboard. MLB might not be laughing at the Orlando Dreamers “plan” in the same way that FIFA laughed at Orlando’s host city “proposal” involving by far the worst stadium in its list of candidates, but they’re laughing all the same.
Expansion ain’t happening, so the only possible route toward landing on the MLB map would be via relocation. And the reality is that the conceit of a relocated Rays franchise in Orlando becoming more of a regional asset in Florida is absurd on its face. Tampa is as far from Orlando as New York City is from Philadelphia, as Chicago is from Milwaukee, as Sacramento is from Oakland. They’re two different markets with relatively little in common, one of which is that they both have a much higher percentage of transplants than any of the other cities I listed.
In the relocation scenario, the Rays would be moving just far enough away from the Tampa Bay region that any support for the team that exists there would immediately crater, if not vanish altogether. Meanwhile, the Rays in Orlando — which is the largest metro area in the US without even a *minor league* baseball team, a key fact that the Dreamers “brass” conveniently omitted, or maybe just completely forgot — would continue to be ignored on a region-wide scale (even if they keep putting on a winning product), and would be playing road games at home indefinitely as they did in their previous home.
Professional sports on the whole is (or at least should be) just a nice-to-have for cities that have teams. Nowhere is this idea represented more starkly than among the residents of Greater Orlando.
I am interested in knowing why you believe expansion “ain’t happening”?
It is certainly true that there are no “legitimate” good MLB markets left (if you ignore the possibility of a third team in NYC). However, there weren’t any when expansion to Miami and Tampa happened either – which nearly 3 decades of attendance has proven.
Expansion in any sport, it seems to me, is about finding some rich idiot willing to pay a shocking amount of money for a franchise, and then finding a host city stupid enough to commit nearly the same amount of money the franchise cost to build a stadium, operate it, provide services to it and charge the franchise owner for nothing while allowing him/her to keep all the stadium and associated revenues.
There may be a shortage of cities with significantly more than 3m people without a major sports team, but I see no evidence that there is a shortage of stupid rich people who think the sports franchise value bubble will never pop, or cities with incompetent management and elected officials.
Are you talking about Ryan Smith blowing $1,300,000,000 buying the Coyote that drowned in red ink and Salt Lake City that rewarded Smith
for his stupidity with a billion dollars of sales tax money?
The main reason why MLB expansion isn’t happening anytime soon is that the Rays and Athletics still do not have settled stadium situations and Organized Baseball can’t weaken those teams’ bargaining positions by closing off potential relocation markets.
That is their stated reason, Steve, yes. But I don’t think it is anything more than a self imposed rule (that could be waived at any time if they chose to do so).
Since the Rays and Athletics are set to play multiple seasons in minor league ballparks, I wonder if their negotiating positions could actually get any worse than they are right now, after two decades of MLB carefully guiding their ‘stadium situations’?
If you are the owner of either of those franchises, you share significant responsibility for the position they find themselves in… but at a minimum I think you want MLB to ‘stop helping’ asap.
I meant MLB expansion in the context of Orlando, but I’m also dubious to the idea that any expansion will happen at all, especially by the supposed date of Rob Manfred’s retirement (January 2029 as of now).
While it’s true that there might still be billionaires (or consortiums of billionaires or private equity firms) who think that asset bubble will never pop, things like the looming local TV revenue crisis in baseball makes it the most likely to pop first out of the “big four” leagues. The only way out might be if the league managed to reach some lucrative national TV deals with multiple networks, but we don’t know what that might look like yet, either — and that uncertainty alone might be enough to put off even the most eager potential buyers.
And as you said, there aren’t many (if any) cities left where the new expansion team wouldn’t turn out any different in their first 30 years than the Rays and the Marlins (and even the Dbacks, to a lesser degree) all have. Even if there were, we can probably put the combined costs of an expansion fee and a, say, 50/50 split of ballpark construction in the $1.5B to $2B range — maybe not insurmountable for someone like, I dunno, MBS, but still a significant financial undertaking for a venture with a pretty volatile revenue situation in the short- and medium-term.
Not to mention that teams other than the Rays and A’s are currently claiming stadium crises of their own (regardless if they’re actual crises or not), which they could choose to escalate at any time. That would only keep the league in a semi-permanent state of franchise instability and push back the expansion timeline even further; it can’t be easy playing whac-a-mole with 30 different holes in it.
Manfred can talk until he’s blue in the face about how badly he wants expansion — and I wouldn’t put it past him to stay in office past his stated retirement date to try and make it happen. It won’t be anything more than a dream until all of MLB’s existing macro-level problems, many of which either started or were exacerbated under Manfred’s own watch, are resolved to any meaningful degree.
The thing that seems off to me about expansion is how the orioles were just sold, the twins are for sale, reinsdorf seems to be listening to white sox offers. If expansion was imminent- wouldn’t they want to wait for that and pocket a couple hundred million? Or do they sense the bubble is about to burst and their teams will never be worth more then they are right now?
All good points, both of you.
There are significant headwinds in the offing, certainly. With respect to the ‘collapse’ of RSN rights in particular, there appears to be no easy or obvious replacement source of revenue. I think MLB direct streaming is coming (in market) and will replace a significant percentage of that revenue… but since the reason RSNs are collapsing is that they overpaid for the rights (in some cases by hundreds of percent), the revenue post RSN is still likely to be considerably lower even with a working direct streaming model for, say, 15 of the franchises.
As to the expansion fees… well, assuming the fee is around $1.5bn, that’s $50m per existing owner. Pretty much chump change if you believe your franchise is overvalued by 30% or more isn’t it?
So they don’t have to be expecting a collapse to want out now, just a correction of greater than $50-100m (assuming teams are added in pairs). For many/most teams, that represents a 5% drop in value or less.
A few years ago Manfred was suggesting over $2 billion for an expansion team. While it’s true there’s a finite number of these teams and rich guys love to waste money- that just seems like way too much. Maybe if you’re putting a franchise in Jersey City or Rancho Cucamonga- but there’s just not that many people in these small markets and there’s going to be practically nothing in local tv revenue.
https://www.forbes.com/lists/mlb-valuations/
Well, I would like to agree… but with the top 16 franchises now worth $2bn+, and the next half dozen or so worth in the $1.5bn range, why would the 30 current owners accept any less to expand the group?
Based on that quoted $2 billion figure, we can revise the combined expansion/construction cost up to the $3 billion range. That might be too rich for the blood of even the most blinkered prospective franchise founder (or founders).
The owners might be right to not accept any less than $2 billion. The real question is whether they can convince two different sets of suckers to join in.
Actually the RSN problem is mostly the making of Sinclair buying (over paying) for the fox sports RSNs and using debt for most of it. That Bally sport went under wasn’t a surprise really with so much debt loaded onto it. As a counter point I don’t see the nbc sports RSNs going under, or spectrum going under because of the 8.5 billion over 30 years to the dodgers
The problem is that no one wants to fill the space vacated by Diamond. The upfront costs are high and it’s pretty clear that for teams outside of NY or LA there’s just not enough viewers to justify it.
Huge markets don’t have broadcasters next year, this has kinda been known for awhile. No broadcaster is stepping up, cuz it’s kind of a bad deal for the broadcaster. The viewers just aren’t there.
Alamodome.
Oh man, even mother nature hates Stu Sternberg….
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/how-the-very-warm-temperature-of-the-gulf-of-mexico-might-lead-to-the-tampa
Discover magazine really doesn’t know the difference between St. Peterburg and Pinellas County, or between Tampa and St. Pete, huh?
(The rest of the article is fine, just marveling at the death of copy editing.)
To be fair, neither do like 90% of baseball fans, sports fans, and really just Americans in general. Their overall perception of Florida is basically that Pensacola is Tallahassee is Jacksonville is Orlando is Tampa is St Pete is Palm Beach is Miami. It’s really the only “big” state among the 50 that most people (outside of here, of course) are too lazy to break down into different regions, a la NYC and Upstate New York, NorCal and SoCal, and so on.