St. Pete to Rays: Actually, there’s no deadline for us to fix your stadium roof, read your damn lease

If you’re wondering what’s going on with repairs to the Tropicana Field roof, Tampa Bay Rays execs are waiting on the city of St. Petersburg to tell them when work will begin. Team co-president Matt Silverman wrote to city officials on December 30 declaring that a “partial 2026 season in Tropicana Field would present massive logistical and revenue challenge” and “it is therefore critical that the rebuild start in earnest as soon as possible.” City manager Rob Gerdes has now responded, and it looks like Rays management didn’t read their fine print too clearly:

We look forward to cooperating to attempt to achieve the mutual goal of making Tropicana Field suitable for Major League Baseball games by opening day of the 2026 season. However … the Use Agreement requires the City of St. Petersburg to diligently pursue repairs to Tropicana Field, but it does not establish a deadline for completing those repairs.

It’s true! According to the “force majeure” clause in the Rays’ use agreement, the city only needs to begin repairs within three months of damage that has made the building unplayable, which it has done. There’s no set date for it to finish, though — and the only consequence is that for any amount of time the Rays are homeless, their lease gets extended by an equal amount of time, which is surely no skin off the nose of St. Petersburg.

It’s kind of hilarious that Rays owner Stu Sternberg is falling victim to sloppy wording of a stadium agreement, which is usually city lawyers’ signature move. (To be fair, Sternberg didn’t hire the lawyers who wrote up this use agreement, former Rays owner Vince Naimoli did; still, you’d think he and his execs would have at least read it.) With Sternberg and the city still at loggerheads over whether the Rays owner will accept the offer of $1 billion in public money for a new stadium or demand even more, we’ll likely see more of this brinksmanship in the coming weeks and months and … years? There’s nothing stopping the city from dragging its heels for years, honestly. It’ll almost certainly be resolved before then by either negotiations or lawsuit, but it’s still fun to watch in the meantime.

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15 comments on “St. Pete to Rays: Actually, there’s no deadline for us to fix your stadium roof, read your damn lease

  1. There is one aspect of this I find perplexing, Neil. You may have dealt with it earlier and I just missed it.

    The team has for quite some time had a good and interesting team and yet hasn’t drawn well. I read often that a significant part of the problem was location, that the stadium is hard to get to for most people in the area. I don’t know if this is true. Maybe it is. Certainly, that was raised as a problem.

    And now they’re going to drop hundreds of millions of public dollars on a stadium that is right next to the current one, exactly the same location. Have they decided that the location issue no longer is a problem?

    1. Part of it is that they would happily build it anywhere as long as the deal was a sweetheart one, with free money and cheap land to develop to boot. The other part is that the location argument has always been a red herring. Yes, it is fairly difficult for people to get to St. Pete from Tampa, but it’s also fairly difficult to get to Tampa from Pinellas County. It’s difficult to get from anywhere to anywhere in the Tampa Bay area. This is why the Ybor City proposal, which would have been right in the apparent middle of Tampa, was still going to be one of the smallest parks in MLB. There has never really been a good location for a MLB ballpark anywhere in Florida. The idea that Tampa or anywhere else would have been a panacea for attendance was always somewhere between wishful thinking and an outright lie. What makes Tampa Bay valuable to MLB isn’t potential attendance, it’s the size of the media market. And what makes the Tampa Bay area valuable to Sternberg is whatever he can con out of whichever balkanized local jurisdiction that is willing to be conned.

      But honestly, I think the location issue would be significantly lessened if the Rays made any real attempt to excite the market. Sure, the team has been decent and often actually competitive, but it still doesn’t capture attention. And a big part of that is that the team only begrudgingly ever improves the experience at Tropicana Field. St Pete actually had to threaten them with fines to fix the electronic billboard outside the park by I-275, which had been visibly malfunctioning for months, and their solution was to cover the screen up with a banner. They intentionally keep the place unpleasant, with dim lighting and dull paint, they constantly talk in the media about it being unpleasant, but worst of all they don’t spend money on the on-field product. Just being competitive isn’t enough to be marketable, especially in a market full of transplants from other MLB cities. Getting into the postseason or winning a pennant usually doesn’t boost attendance significantly until the next season, and neither boosts attendance as much as a World Series win. What does boost attendance is excitement around particular players, but the Rays don’t hold onto any of their emerging fan favorites for long. At best, they pick one mildly engaging personality to keep around as the face of the club and ship the rest off in exchange for cheap young players. And of course their last One Great Star chosen to be the face of the team was none other than Wander Franco. So even with the team regularly in the postseason hunt, it still manages to fail to be interesting. People just don’t want to make the drive to watch a team of mostly unknowns that you can’t get invested in because they won’t be around in a year or two, no matter how well they play.

      1. Well said.

        Sternberg didn’t buy the team to operate them in Tampa (or St. Pete). He thought he could wangle his way out of the lease and move somewhere. Then he found out he couldn’t move to NY or NJ or anywhere near where he wanted to move.

        So he complained about the location and the fan base while selling off every playing asset he could (turning huge profits every year along the way).

        Now he has finally got the deal he said he wanted and it’s pretty clear he doesn’t want it and would like to leave. But where to? There’s nowhere available that would be significantly better than Tampa and he knows it.

        Poor, poor Sternberg… l’ Jamais Contente

  2. So the city of st peterburg has leverage. They can keep the rays in a 10,000 seat stadium for years or the rays can sign a city friendly deal to start the new stadium now or the rays move. The rays moving saves the city the most money.

    1. Indeed. This is a tremendous development for the city & county. I would love to see the repairs done cost effectively and very slowly. Let’s see how the Rays feel about three full seasons at the former Legends.

      You would think at some point they would realize they are the only ones who stand to lose if the current agreement for a new facility isn’t consumated. They aren’t going to get a better deal elsewhere, and they may be running out the clock on themselves by failing to agree to proceed under the present agreement.

      Can these guys possibly be this stupid?

      1. If you’re committing 4 billion for 10 miles of light rail, at a time when people are fleeing Texas, what’s another 1 billion? /s

  3. Last I heard, the “impasse” wasn’t that great a hurdle.

    Correct me if I am wrong, but the Rays have a few (mainly financial) stipulations they need to meet in order to finalize the agreement, after which the bond sale can be scheduled.

    Once those prerequisites are met, the parties to the agreement are bound to carry out that agreement, aren’t they?

    I know the bond sale was to be scheduled by March 31st of this year. Do the Rays have a fixed deadline to meet the requirements outlined above? Surely it would have to be before March 31?

    What I am hoping, of course, is that the Rays will either deliberately or accidentally fail to complete their portion of the agreement, allowing the city and county to abandon it without having to turn over development rights (or the financial windfall resulting from…) to the Rays.

    It seems very clear from the team that they do not wish to pursue this. So… they should tell their partners that and begin looking elsewhere. Yet they have not done that, and appear to want the city and or county to back out (for obvious reasons), or agree to increase the public funding for bizarre and utterly unsupported reasons.

    As standoffs go, this one has to be among the dumbest.

  4. Nobody will go to the new ballpark anymore than they went to the old one in that terrible area in St Petersburg. The ballpark should be placed in North Tampa or on the water where the attendance would be better like it is for the Lightning and the football team

    1. There is no good location for MLB anywhere in Florida. When you play nearly every day of the week, you need high density and good transportation, but Tampa Bay is all mid-density sprawl and has appalling transportation.

  5. The location is fine. Attendance is poor because the facility is garbage. It’s depressing.
    They would do better with a state of the art facility but I’m not sure TB residents will ever develop a following comparable to other cities. So much of the TB area population is loyal to teams from their city of origin.
    I’ve lived here 3 yrs and I know people who are fans of most MLB teams. Never met a Rays fan

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