I don’t usually like to do posts that are just stacks of social media posts, but the Bluesky commentariat did such a good job with the latest twist in the Tampa Bay Rays stadium situation that I should at least let them start things off. Here’s what my feed looked like this morning:
Ooo boy. Sternberg is being sandbagged by the owners.
— J.C. Bradbury (@jcbradbury.bsky.social) 2025-03-10T01:41:49.123Z
Long story short: Joe Molloy, a Tampa-born former middle school gym teacher whose main claim to fame is having been married for a decade to George Steinbrenner’s daughter and running the New York Yankees during Steinbrenner’s suspension for hiring a known gambler to dig up dirt on Dave Winfield (the ’90s were quite the time), told the Tampa Bay Times that he is “leading a group of prominent Tampa Bay-based investors who are interested in acquiring the Tampa Bay Rays,” though he won’t name who any of them are. And if he buys the team, he wants to go ahead with the proposed stadium plan in St. Petersburg that current owner Stu Sternberg is getting cold feet about.
And it gets better, according to @evandrellich.bsky.social MLB isn't simply watching this all play out, there is pressure on Sternberg to sell to investors committed to the TB area. Interesting that MLB is going to great lengths to keep a team here while showing no such loyalty to Oakland.
If true — and Dreilich is a consummate baseball insider, so if owners are leaking stuff to him, it’s because they damn well want it leaked — this is huge news, especially the threat to twist Sternberg’s arm by threatening to yank his revenue-sharing checks. This is the kind of offer-you-can’t-refuse that MLB resorts to when it really wants somebody out of the cabal, so it would seem to indicate that the other owners think the Rays should grab their billion-dollar subsidy offer while they can, and if this Rays owner won’t do it, it’s time to find someone who will.
It seems that MLB plans to go with the current deal in St. Pete's. The message being sent to Sternberg is that this can be done the easy way, or the hard way.
— J.C. Bradbury (@jcbradbury.bsky.social) 2025-03-10T14:00:47.057Z
And FYI here's reporting from 2023 about a group considering a purchase of the team; one of the people involved in that effort is also the subject of today's rumors: www.forbes.com/sites/mikeoz…
(San Francisco 49ers owners the DeBartolo family are reportedly involved as well.)
The obvious tea-leaf reading here is that the rest of MLB is antsy to move forward with expansion and doesn’t want one owner’s indecisiveness about stadium plans hold things up. Why MLB didn’t do all this with John Fisher and the Oakland A’s is indeed a great question — instead, they put him on their executive committee! There’s no accounting for taste among billionaires, apparently, or maybe Fisher just brings better chocolate upside-down cakes to the owners meetings.
The ball, it would seem, is now in Sternberg’s court, and the, uh, serve clock is ticking: Either he or new owners needs to accept St. Pete’s offer by the end of March, or else the new stadium plans turn back into a pumpkin. (It’s possible St. Pete officials can extend that deadline, but we’ll cross that hypothetical when we come to it.) This is a breaking news story — further updates as Bluesky provides.
I think the Oakland to LV situation was meant to serve as an object lesson to recalcitrant municipalities that don’t agree to fork over sufficient stadium cash expeditiously enough for MLB’s liking. If Oakland can lose their team, so can you.
They were willing to take the hit of trading down in media markets this one time to make their point.
But Tampa is another thing altogether. Throwing that huge deal in the trash over relative pennies would be a bad look all around.
Plus of course Fisher does have a competing offer, sucky as it may be. Whereas Sternberg seems to want to keep shopping around (Greensborontreal?), which would step on MLB’s expansion bidding wars something awful.
The reason MLB didn’t do this with the A’s can be summed up in three words “San Francisco Giants”. The giants have done everything in their power to make the A’s lives miserable (San Jose was the A’s territory originally and the A’s offered this to the giants when they attempted to get funding for a stadium in San Jose in the 80’s, but when the A’s wanted to try to get a stadium in San Jose the giants were not so forthcoming). I have no concrete evidence, but I’d be willing to bet that when Schott and Hoffman sold the team the giants helped stear things toward Fisher and away from anyone with money who could kep the team in Oakland (i.e. Lacob). Btw, Fisher’s parents were part of the investment group which got to buy the giants when MLB strong armed Bob Lurie into selling to a local ownership group instead of selling to a Tampa Bay ownership group.
Fisher owned the A’s for almost 20 years before announcing he was moving them. If the Giants plotted that out back in 2005, that’s one hell of a long game.
The A’s have wanted to move to San Jose for probably about 20 years, but the Giants have denied the A’s the opportunity (and IIRC said they would sue if the A’s tried to move to Santa Clara County). So yes it has been a long game, but the giants wet dream is for the A’s to leave the San Francisco Bay Area completely and fisher finally obliged them.
I imagine there are a few reasons why Sternberg has gotten bullied while Fisher was allowed to skate: 1) Fisher had another market willing to pay public dollars towards a ballpark, 2) MLB has nakedly wanted to get into Vegas for gambling purposes. When they first announced they intended to expand, they openly courted Vegas billionaire types like Steve Wynn and Phil Ruffin; after they passed, the A’s became an easy target, 3) MLB has had a borderline pathological hatred for Oakland going back decades, when Manfred’s old boss Bud Selig said it was a “mistake” for Finley to have moved to Oakland from KC, to Bud’s “blue ribbon” commission wasting 2 years of everyone’s time just to say that San Jose remained Giants territory, 4) the A’s left a metro area with a team already there, whereas they’d only have a terrible club in Miami for the entire state of Florida if the Rays left for anywhere besides Orlando, 5) the A’s situation might have made them think twice about burning bridges and letting a franchise be homeless before breaking ground on a new stadium. Because that situation seems extremely dicey still, and they’d rather not repeat that.
All of this is dumb guy logic, but that’s what we’re dealing with in MLB.
The main reason MLB wants to remain in the Tampa Bay region is because it’s the 11th largest TV market in the United States. Baseball can now tell potential TV providers is that they have the 25 markets covered.
And Tampa, for all its well-documented attendance issues, has been a baseball hotbed for decades. Countless big leaguers from Fred McGriff to Gary Sheffield to Wade Boggs to Pete Alonso are from there. There is seemingly a Tampa-based team in the LLWS every other year. By every objective measure, it *should* be a successful MLB market.
Florida is lock, stock, and barrel a baseball state. Tampa Bay and Miami (which also has a massive supply of baseball talent at the prep level) are lock, stock, barrel what people would otherwise refer to as “baseball towns.”
It’s just that people think being a baseball town, to the extent that such a concept even matters, is entirely contingent on selling out every MLB game in your market. Places like Florida are perfect examples of how a shared love for a game doesn’t necessarily have to translate into any real love for the “home teams” — much like it is in the NFL, where the Florida-based teams are routinely panned for “having no fans,” but the league as a whole still counts players from Florida very thick among its ranks.
While Florida is a baseball state is it an MLB-regular season/own team state. Its been mentioned many times that Florida has a lot of transplants who have pre-existing loyalties. Then you have the spring training/minor league factor. People develop loyalty to the teams that hold spring training in their area. Also, you can go to spring training games and see MLB players for a fraction of the cost of a regular season game and then you have the Florida State League during the season. So you can get your baseball-fix a lot cheaper then regular season Marlins/Rays games
Good points all around. I guess it makes sense that just because the sport is big out there doesn’t necessarily translate to support for the pro club. IIRC, the Rays actually do pretty well in TV ratings, their issue has just been attendance. (Which is a similar issue with the NFL, except mediocre attendance for 8 games/year is a lot more tolerable than for 81). That might be due to the Trop’s location, or it could be an indicator of passive interest – it’s easier to have baseball on the tube in the background than to schlep to the ballpark, especially when there are cheaper options with spring training, the Citrus League, and the gaggle of college baseball teams out there.
I’ve known a couple of MLB employees who are convinced that a ballpark in downtown Tampa or Ybor would get solid attendance. Guess we’ll never find out though.
Tampa sports fans often do point to the Lightning’s success in a downtown Tampa arena as a “proof of concept” for the Rays franchise being a similarly good draw on Tampa’s side of the bay. Of course, they leave out that it took the Lightning becoming a consistently good team — and the minor detail that the Bolts themselves used to spend years giving out boat loads of free/comp tickets to the community — for that success story to actually happen.
Think of markets like these as gardens that need to be watered consistently. Absent any steady rain, it’s gonna take some time, effort, and care for all those plants to grow.
TV markets mean very little given the collapse of linear broadcasting. Not to mention that baseball is heading toward an inevitable lockout at Xmas 2026.
So long as MLB is still allowing teams to sell and collect revenue from their individual streaming rights, TV markets matter a ton. And a lockout may not be seen as a negative by prospective owners, if they think it’ll lead to lower payroll costs in the long run. (It almost certainly won’t, but baseball owners always seem to think it will.)
It is due to the Trop’s location. It is well documented that the Trop has the lowest population, within a 30 minute commute, of all MLB’s stadium locations, in addition to very low corporate ticket sales(for the same reason). Additionally, anyone in Tampa that wishes to go to a Rays game in St. Pete must cross 1 of 3 bridges over Tampa Bay, which are all natural choke points for traffic. This has been Sternburgs problem all along, as this stadium issue has persisted for what feels like an eternity (at least 17 years). There is a lot of confidence that if they were located in Tampa, the attendance would drastically increase. Everybody will get a weird taste of that in the immediate future as the Rays will play in the Yankees Spring Training facility which is squarely located in the middle of Tampa. Even w/ the significantly decreases capacity (10k I think) and the tremendously increased cost of the tickets, I am certain Tampa will show up for these games, even in the brutal sun and relentless rain. Time will tell. FWIW, I side w/ the ownership in this debacle. Several years ago, the local St Pete politicians prevented Rays ownership from even looking outside of the county for a solution. This was a major hamstring for baseball and the overall region. While I want them to stay in Tampa Bay above all, I fear an inferior “new/modern” stadium that is in the same darn place with same darn problems. I always said I would be a season ticket holder the moment they moved to Tampa and there are probably 15-20k people just like me, not to mention the all the corporations that would do the same
Isn’t part of the reason Manfred et. al. didn’t really care about abandoning Oakland that the Bay Area has another team, one that very much resents having to share the market?
It might not have been the #1 factor, but it’s not a negligible one, either. Even in the event that the franchise does move to Vegas… if we’re talking about potential expansion markets, well, there’s still plenty more of those where they came from.
(I’m still deeply skeptical that either thing will come to pass within the next five years, if ever — but we’ll operate here under the assumption that they’ll happen.)
It’s a good point, Andrew.
I would only add that the “Oakland” situation did not begin with Fisher.
He has managed the effort to extract stadium money about as poorly as any primate could (and this was a team once owned by Charlie Finley…), but there is history prior to his ‘arrival’ as the money man behind the Lou Wolff fronted ownership. As I recall, that so called partnership had more to do with Selig than the Giants…
The Haas family (1981-1995) tried quite hard to get a stadium built. I have looked for but not found much in the way of detail on any “hard” proposals made by either side (and it’s worth noting that the current stadium was not yet 30yrs old by the time their ownership tenure ended). The Haas’ increased spending on payroll significantly (at one stage, the A’s had a higher payroll than the Yankees during their ownership term).
Not only did they fail to get a deal done (and, again, I have no info on what they were offering nor what Oakland was expected to provide towards same), the city effectively ruined the stadium for baseball with the construction of Mt. Davis in the mid 90s. For the money they spent on that nightmarish structure, they could have built a standalone football (or baseball) stadium in the empty portion of the coliseum lands…. but no, Mt. Davis it was.
So while I think it is sad that MLB has allowed Fisher to drag the A’s out of Oakland and stick them in a minor league park indefinitely, I do understand that there is significantly more history there than there is with the Rays.
If Lacob really wanted to own the A’s, he should have been in contact with MLB years ago about that. I am not saying he wasn’t, just that if he did meet with them, apparently it didn’t go well.
The St Pete subsidy is huge and needs to be taken advantage of by somebody. It sets the bar for all expansion cities, “don’t waste your time bidding unless you’re giving the team $1 billion worth of subsidies”
“Comes-a-time”, as the man said.
Tampetersburg has coughed up one hell of a pile of money (of course, so did Oakland, in the end) for a new ballpark.
Stunnedberg has basically gotten everything he asked for, and now like a petulant four year old is turning his nose up at HIS OWN deal.
I think even the other 25-27 money grubbing pricks in the MLB owners club (there are a couple of exceptions…) realize that not seeing this deal through to it’s end will be a significant impediment to future extortion plays… and they do not want that.
The other side of it is that perhaps the reason for Stu-Pid’s reluctance is that he physically can’t raise the money (either from within his existing and long suffering investment pool – and banks – or by adding external investors as well). He is among the least well capitalized MLB owners. And his existing partners mostly despise him.
Either or both would be a perfect reason to lean on him.
It’s time.
The funding gap at end of the A’s-Oakland negotiation was like $40 million or so. We don’t know what the gap is in Tampa. The other issue is that the Rays has never drawn well even when they are playing well. I don’t understand why after years of saying that the location was the problem they want them to build a stadium right next to the current one.
Tampa has offered nothing, so the gap there is going to be a good bit larger than $40 million.
Stu wanted a stadium in the location he kept saying sucked because it came with $1 billion. Whether he eventually decided that $1 billion wasn’t enough to make up for that or just wants extra money on top to soothe his butthurt over being considered less important than hurricane victims or is playing 4D chess in his own mind is left as an exercise for the reader.
OK I meant St Pete. Now he only came back to St Pete after a lot of other options failed. None of us know if or how the numbers changed since the deal was done. You posted an article stating that costs of everything are going to go up with Trump tariffs, so we don’t know if the deal got more expensive or the banks are more reluctant to lend to him.
Sternberg started complaining that the deal was too expensive in December, well before Trump applied his tariffs. It’s certainly possible that Stu or the banks were reading tea leaves and anticipating that there would be tariffs and that they would affect construction costs, but 1) nobody in the construction industry has been reporting that that was happening that early and 2) doing anything based on what Trump says he’s going to do is a fool’s game. (Project 2025 has been very consistent, but Trump’s tariffs are a him thing, not a Project 2025 thing.)
We also don’t know if the costs have actually gone up, nor if so whether the reason for that is that Sternberg and partners are not able to access credit at a preferred rate as they assumed/expected they might.
You can pretty much always borrow money if you have money. All that changes is the cost to do so based on the perceived risk – which probably went up considerably as a result of the hammering the existing stadium took from recent hurricanes, and the team’s desire to rebuild in place (despite being on record as hating the location). That increased cost is not the city or county’s burden to bear, it belongs to the Rays themselves.
This is not one of the more well funded ownership groups in the league. That matters.
One thing I don’t see is what Molloy’s group is willing to pay (if they’re that far along in the process, and not just opportunistically inserting themselves into the press cycle). All the rumblings we have seen about teams changing hands during the past year, including Fisher’s thus far abortive fundraising attempts, have been in the neighborhood of a $2 billion valuation.
That suggests to me that MLB, a judicially sanctioned cartel, has decided to set that as the new price floor for entry. And that’s probably an important secondary factor in putting the hard squeeze on Sternberg vs. anointing Fisher to the executive committee (whatever the hell it does, probably just execute digestion of expensive, wet lunches). Fisher has committed to hold the line on that $2 billion price floor, until the bitter end.
All the hopeful rumors about Lacob and his pals indicated they were looking for a value investment much like the Warriors have been, and thus they weren’t willing to offer anywhere near $2 billion for the A’s. I don’t see anything that would have changed that calculus, if anything the situation has only gotten worse.
“the great thing about a principle is that you can always sacrifice it to expediency”.
I agree they would like to impose a “floor” of $2bn for expansion franchises. I don’t know that they would maintain that for an owner willing to buy into an existing (and non-expansion) franchise and keep it in it’s current location.
One of the reasons Wolff & Fisher were able to buy the A’s for $180m in 2005 is that it was considered a ‘distressed’ asset, lacking a new stadium etc. They said they wanted to keep the A’s in Oakland (although within 4 years or so, Wolff himself would be saying “there is no Oakland option”).
Forbes valued both the A’s and the Rays at $1.2-1.4Bn recently. I would expect if Molloy & his group were willing to pay somewhere in that range and put $700m toward the stadium deal, they will be the Rays new owners.
And since Sternberg is just the managing partner (I believe he still controls 48% directly, with Silverman owning an additional share), they may not have to come up with the full sale price. They could simply replace Sternberg in the existing ownership group so long as all parties are happy with that.
If the Orioles and Twins with all their history and tradition not getting to $2 billion despite their history and tradition and good stadium situations, I think it would be hard to get to $2 billion for an expansion team.
When you calculate- $2 billion expansion fee plus $700-$1 billion in stadium costs- wouldn’t one of these rich guys be much better off buying 1)multiple UEFA champions league teams 2) an existing MLB team and have $700+ million to go crazy in free agency 3) use 5% of it to set up a slush fund for your favorite college athletic department. Sit courtside, help the football coach in the transfer portal, get a swanky suite for 3-4 playoff games as your school makes a run. Have buildings and children named after you
Teams 13 (Seattle – $2.2Bn) thru 18 (Baltimore – $1.8Bn) are valued roughly at the ‘suggested’ expansion price in the latest Forbes rankings.
It is not unreasonable to expect that level of payment for a newly issued franchise.
Whether they have any suitors for teams in Nashville, Carolina, Austin or Montreal at that price, who can say. But they can justify asking just by showing the Forbes valuations.
The Pirates, Cleveland and Minnesota are all in the $1.3-1.5bn range… so it is really not an unreasonable ask.
All these values have been heavily curved by a couple of really rich idiots overpaying for franchises (in all three major sports, as it happens), but that is the market now. If you want in, you pay it.
If the maximum bid received was, say, $1.2Bn (the price of the lowly A’s…), it would be very interesting to listen in on the owner’s club discussions about same.
The problem — well, one big problem — with team valuations is that when there are so few items on the market, it’s really easy to drive a speculative bubble with “sure you should spend $2 billion on a team that just sold for $1 billion a few years ago, it’s a great investment, teams are doubling in value in just a few years!”
I’m sure there’s a name for this logical fallacy, but until it’s as easy to grow more MLB teams as it is to grow more tulip bulbs, there’s no real time limit on how long the bubble can last.
Rich people are overpaying for NFL and NBA teams because there are national media rights deals and a salary cap that make those teams profitable. MLB is losing a media partner next season and the expansion cities will get very little for their local rights.
If potential owners think they can get a good ROI on $2 billion plus stadium costs, by all means they can try. They’d have to sell a lot of hotdogs and beer to make it work.
Absolutely true, Gentlemen.
I said exactly the same thing as you just did when Jerry Jones spent almost $200m on the Cowboys and Texas Stadium in the late 1980s.
A fool and his money….
Harris just spent $6bn on an NFL team. Yes, NFL teams make money (and quite a bit more than MLB teams), but the Commanders have averaged $130-160m in profit over the last three years (2021-2023 seasons). With the exception of the Cowboys & Rams, the top NFL teams tend to generate $100-160m in net operating income each year
The top MLB teams tend to generate $50-60m annually.
That said, neither income stream justifies the valuations (as you noted above) the teams change hands for.
This is a great question. Especially since both the Angels and Nationals were taken off the market after being put up for sale in recent years, allegedly because the offers coming in were below the $2 billion mark that MLB wanted. The Twins and White Sox are also muddling through their sale processes, so it’s not like a wannabe MLB owner is short on options if they wanted in these days.
For whatever its worth there were rumors the Angels bids were above $3 billion. They were taken off the market after the legal mess surrounding the aborted sale of the stadium land. It seems that MLB was trying to push the owner out but once the legal situation settled it was done.
Interesting – I’d heard some prospective buyers were trying to bargain the price way down because they were factoring in the ~$1-2 billion it’ll cost to build a new ballpark in Southern California after the stadium deal fell apart. There was a very real risk back then as well that the city of Anaheim was going to sell that land to Disney instead, figuring it’d make the city way more money (they were probably correct) and leaving the Angels homeless.
As for the Nats, I’ve no idea why there weren’t takers. They’ve got a newer ballpark and seem to have a pretty good local following in a large DMA.
At the time the warriors were sold in 2010 it was the highest price ever paid for an nba team by a large margin ($485M IIRC). Several things happened to increase the value of the warriors, Steph Curry went super nova, the warriors hit big time in the 2010 and especially 2012 drafts and the national media rights deals have exploded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.
At the time the Warriors were sold golden state was not a well run business. The owner was better known to stiffing vendors than producing a winning team
The two sales that forever broke the valuation of pro franchises were the Dodgers in 2012 and Clippers in 2014, both which were north of $2 billion. The Dodgers were a mess under Frank McCourt but sold for double the price of the Cubs in 2009 ($850 million), which was then the record. There was *some* justification for that at least, as they were knee-deep in TV negotiations at the time and would eventually sign an $8.5 billion deal with Time Warner a year later. The Dodgers were a legacy brand and everyone knew the range they could fetch in a local broadcast contract; remember, it was McCourt trying to sell their TV rights in a lowball deal to get upfront cash to pay off his messy divorce that triggered MLB forcing him to sell. The final bid “overpaid” by a few hundred million, but still justifiable from a business perspective.
But the Clippers really broke everyone’s brains. They sold for 10 times(!) the price of the Nets, who were the biggest NBA sale ever just 4 years prior. This despite the Clippers being a historically godawful team as a clear second fiddle in LA without an arena of their own. Even though the NBA inked that record $24 billion TV deal later that year, it still didn’t make much sense. Ballmer just really wanted to be an owner.
Those two sales were when team valuations really started to decouple from their actual earning potential. Now, it’s become a self-perpetuating thing: the only reason you can justify such a high price tag is in the assumption someone will pay more than the previous owner did when they sell. There’s no freaking way the Clippers will earn enough in Ballmer’s lifetime for him to come out ahead in that purchase, especially factoring in what he forked over to build the Intuit Dome. That’s especially true for Josh Harris and the Commanders ($6 billion), the Waltons and the Broncos ($4.65 billion), or Ryan Smith and the Coyotes ($1 billion). It’s the definition of a bubble.
MLB can taste the expansion cash, and the bar has been set for stadium subsidies, more or less (and it won’t get better with the Trumpcession and collapsing media revenues)… so they know it’s time for Sternberg to either step up or step aside.
Now the question is what expansion cities can meet the new $1 billion standard?
Maybe the state of Tennessee? state of North Carolina?
I don’t see the politics really working in Portland. Maybe in Salt Lake but they’ve been handing out too much subsidy cash lately.
Will the Las Vegas A’s demand more from Carson city?
It does seem like the $1 billion number is so out control that they can only be handled at the state level
You’re right about Utah. Notably, their legislative session ended last week and they still couldn’t come up with a funding mechanism for the $900 million they promised for a ballpark. Salt Lake County is tapped out for subsidies, they’re still paying off the new state prison, and a statewide levy is a nonstarter politically.
I think a recurring theme regarding MLBs future expansion will be cities tapped out when it comes to stadium subsidies. The bungling owners in Oakland and Tampa really messed up the time table. By the time they get around to it, cities have already paid for new/renovated NFL stadiums (Nashville, Charlotte), an NHL arena reno (Salt lake), and giving up Vegas as an expansion candidate to placate Fisher.
My tally for expansion cities that probably can deliver a subsidy in todays climate- Portland (small one, very small), Raleigh (state legislators want to go to ballgames, big, maybe close to $1 billion), Austin (small from city/travis county, if ownership is connected in state government could be pretty big).
That’s it. A Nashville expansion team will have to go hat in hand to the state government, maybe that works but Tennessee is a large state and other metro areas would want something in returns for giving $1 billion to Nashville.
I think you’re spot-on. The sales tax levy in SLC that went to the arena renovation was originally slated for the ballpark. The NHL bid wasn’t supposed to come until 2027 at the earliest, by which point they figured the new arena/sports district Ryan Smith wanted would be at The Point development in Draper that just broke ground and could be funded by a TIF and Salt Lake County monies. The players behind Big League Utah were extremely well-connected, the ballpark would include redevloping the state fairgrounds, and it all seemed like a done deal.
But then the Coyotes opened up and Utah had to show they were willing to pay right now for a hockey-specific arena. Legislative beat reporters said that when the Governor and Speaker of the state house spoke to MLB, they couldn’t get a straight answer as to when expansion bidding would even start, much less when Utah could expect a club to start play. It turned into a “bird in the hand versus two in the bush” situation, so the sales tax went to the arena and they committed to keeping the NBA/NHL in downtown. Local politicians also had to commit to a TIF in downtown to renovate the Salt Palace Convention Center to win support from other local stakeholders, taking another funding source away. The timelines just didn’t line up, and now Big League Utah is left standing after the music stopped.
MLB really screwed this up by not only delaying expansion, but also not applying any pressure on Fisher and Sternberg to get their shit together. The A’s could have had, at minimum, a new ballpark under construction in the Coliseum parking lot by now if they told Fisher he needed a stadium deal by 2021 or had to sell the team. The Rays aren’t too different either. But Manfred tried having it both ways: getting new digs lined up for two of his most poorly-run franchises without offending any owners. Besides losing out on stadium money, the collapse of local RSNs will probably also depress demand.
Selig was a bastard who notoriously rigged ownership bids to ensure only his buddies would get in the club, but he also forced out Marge Schott, took over the Expos so that John Henry could take over the Red Sox from the Yawkey family, and forced Frank McCourt to sell the Dodgers when he was about to handcuff them to a generationally bad broadcasting deal. When there was money on the line, he didn’t suffer idiots messing with the bag. No way he would’ve allowed Frick and Frack to drag out their stadium sagas like this with billions in expansion fees at stake.
IMO the sweet spot for teams looking for public money is a state that doesn’t have another team in the same league, even better if it’s a state that has few or no top-tier pro sports franchises. That makes it easier to shake down politicians at both state and local levels.
States that have multiple teams, especially in the same league, are far more reluctant to give free public money to one team but not the others.
Rays just announced they can’t move forward with the stadium project.
Nashville here you go!
Tennessee vs North Carolina vs ___________ ??? Which “bank” will the owners rob next?
The Rays web page indicates the Rays are not going forward with the new stadium:
https://www.mlb.com/rays/news/rays-announce-they-won-t-move-ahead-with-new-ballpark