And to think today looked like a slow day at first:
“After careful deliberation, we have concluded we cannot move forward with the new ballpark and development project at this moment. A series of events beginning in October that no one could have anticipated led to this difficult decision. … We continue to focus on finding a ballpark solution that serves the best interests of our region, Major League Baseball and our organization.”
That’s Tampa Bay Rays owner Stu Sternberg, in an official statement released at noon today, sticking a fork in the St. Petersburg stadium plan that he himself negotiated last year. Sternberg faced a March 31 deadline to file paperwork to accept the deal — which came with approximately $1 billion in cash, tax breaks, and free land — but apparently decided he was ready to bail now.
As for why he’s bailing, that remains anybody’s guess. Some leading theories:
- It’s the delays. This is the official company line from the Rays: Things just got so much more expensive in the two months it took the city council and county commission decided whether to approve stadium funding following last October’s Hurricane Milton that the St. Pete deal no longer made financial sense. Except of course that the original deal never required the city and county to approve stadium bonds before this April, so if Sternberg only wanted to build this stadium if he could get started in fall 2024, why didn’t he put that in the term sheet?
- The St. Petersburg location sucks. Ever since the St. Petersburg stadium plan was announced, people have been asking, “Wait, the Rays are really going to build a stadium right next door to the one everybody hates because it’s impossible for people from much of the region to get to?” Initially, it looked like Sternberg was willing to overlook the accessibility problems in order to get his $1 billion — Tampa, on the more populous, well-off side of the bay, doesn’t have nearly that kind of ability to raise public funds — but maybe he is using the delays to back out of a deal he didn’t realize was dumb at the time but does now?
- Trump tariffs and construction costs. New U.S. tariffs on foreign steel are set to drive construction costs higher, so maybe Sternberg is getting cold feet for that reason.
- MLB has pressured Sternberg into selling the team and stepping aside. MLB owners made clear earlier this week that they wanted Sternberg to take the damn St. Pete stadium deal or else sell the team to someone who’d consider it, so that they can check off the Rays situation and resolved and move ahead with expansion plans without worrying that Sternberg would want to use a prospective expansion city as leverage with Tampa Bay. There’s no way a team sale could have taken place by the end of this month, so maybe Sternberg agreed to back out of the stadium deal now in anticipation of a sale process. Or maybe Sternberg decided to give his fellow owners the finger and say if he wants to play footsie with, say, Charlotte or Nashville, he’s damn well gonna! So hard to say unless you’re Evan Dreilich. (If you are Evan Dreilich, feel free to remark on this in the comments, or on Bluesky, or wherever.)
Is everyone now freaking out? Here’s what we have so far from local officials:
- In a statement, St. Pete Mayor Ken Welch called Sternberg’s decision “a major disappointment” and said “if in the coming months a new owner, who demonstrates a commitment to honoring their agreements and our community priorities, emerges — we will consider a partnership to keep baseball in St. Pete.”
- In another statement, MLB said, “Commissioner Manfred understands the disappointment of the St. Petersburg community from today’s announcement, but he will continue to work with elected officials, community leaders, and Rays officials to secure the club’s future in the Tampa Bay region.”
- City council chair Copley Gerdes said, “I continue to believe St. Petersburg is a major league city and both with baseball and hopefully continued with baseball, but no matter what, I think it’s a major league city,” and “I’m hopeful that the relationship with MLB and the Rays continues to move forward.”
- City council member Richie Floyd said, “It’s frustrating that we’ve had so much time wasted by unwilling partners, clearly. I think we’re in a good position as a city to still redevelop the area around Tropicana Field and come out ahead of where we would have been.”
If nothing else, since it was Sternberg who called a halt to the deal and not St. Pete, the city gets back full development rights to the Tropicana Field property whenever the Rays’ lease expires. (I think that’s now following the 2028 season, assuming the Trop is back in game shape by 2026, but at this point that may be up to the lawyers to hash out for sure.) And if nothing else, the city and county now have back that $1 billion to spend however they want, and none of it has to be on a $1.3 billion baseball stadium for a team whose owner doesn’t really want to play in it anyway.
As for the Rays’ future, here’s a CBS Sports story running down all the possible scenarios, though it does leave out “Elon Musk buys Rays, makes them first team on Mars.” Plus it includes the possibility of the Rays moving across the bay to Tampa, and as Marc Normandin noted yesterday at Baseball Prospectus, “If Sternberg truly doesn’t have the resources to handle a more expensive version of a new St. Pete stadium, then one in Tampa is right out.”
This is a breaking news story, which is journalese for “I need to hit ‘publish’ now, but there are more things I’d still like to research.” Watch this space for further updates, either in this news item or in tomorrow’s Friday roundup. In the meantime, stock up on popcorn, it looks like Rays Stadium Survivor has been renewed for an umpteenth season.
Like Fisher, this ownership group doesn’t have the cash on hand needed to build something. Trump tariffs and possible recession makes it worse.
I’m also thinking MLBs tv situation has an effect here. By canceling the ESPN deal Manfred can’t really be inspiring much confidence that he can get an alternate streaming platform to pay big money.
The Rays’ current TV deal has a bunch of years left to run. And Sternberg started getting cold feet way before the ESPN deal blew up so, no, I don’t think the facts fit the theory there.
Exactly. Unlike the idiots in my home state of Nevada, at least the Floridians made Sternberg prove he had the financing in place before the public money kicks in. In Nevada, all Fisher had to do is submit a piece of paper saying he has the money (we all know he doesn’t). Furthermore, without grifting MLB with revenue share Sternberg doesn’t have the cash flow to pull this off himself. St. Pete just isn’t a baseball market and never really was one.
Without revenue sharing the Rays wouldn’t exist. You can’t sustain a major league team on the their crappy attendance.
That being said, I don’t think Sternberg got to being partner at Goldman Sachs by being an idiot who doesn’t think ahead. He probably got an opportunity either on the Tampa side, Orlando, or Montreal (where he really wants to be) and sabotaged the deal in St Pete so that he could go to one of those places
Without revenue sharing no major-league teams would exist except maybe the Yankees, Mets, Dodgers, and Cubs. Even in pre-TV days, home teams shared a cut of their ticket sales with the visiting team, on the grounds that no one will go to see games if you don’t have an opponent.
If Sternberg got an opportunity from any of those places, he would have started playing St Pete off against that city the moment it landed at his desk. And at any rate, he might have had similar problems trying to finance his own end of that potential deal the way he apparently did with this one — arguably even more so, since all three of those cities are even hotter real estate commodities now than St Pete.
Have to disagree with you on Montreal, Aqib. As much as I would love to see the Expos return, Montreal is one location where he would generate less local revenue than in TSP.
I’m not sure why he ever enertained the notion of a split market (probably because he thought he could take in an impressive infusion of cash from Bronfman without giving up his Managing General Partner role… which assumes Mr. Bronfman just fell off a turnip truck… I doubt that was ever a likely outcome), but it certainly wasn’t because Montreal would be a cash machine for the Ex-Rays.
It seemed to be so that he could build a stadium in Tampa Bay with no roof by playing in Canada during the rainy season … in a whole other stadium he would have to build.
It may be time to check Stu for the telltale signs of a turnip-truck fall.
OK you and I could go back and forth all day on the merits of Montreal vs Tampa. You can point to the Expos struggles, the falling Canadian dollar, the lack of government funding for a ball park, etc. I would then counter with how its added over a million people since the Expos left, how well the Expos drew in their heyday, how the economy there is stronger, how the real estate market is better making mixed use development more lucrative, blah blah blah.
The bottom line is Sternberg himself has been thinking about Montreal for a long time: https://www.tsn.ca/report-rays-owner-discussed-move-to-montreal-1.116444
This was before the split-city plan came up.
As far as being managing partner or not, he’s done a good job on the baseball side. They consistently field good teams despite the payroll limitations. So if he sells a stake to Stephen Bronfman that doesn’t mean he will give up control of the baseball side
Aqib: a quick search on Baseball Reference would tell you that the vaunted 1994 Expos finished only 11th in the NL in attendance (when the league had 14 teams). In fact, you would have to go back to 1983 — over 40 years ago, and about 20 years before the team’s eventual demise — for the last time they finished in the top half of the NL’s attendance rankings.
The Expos at this point are kinda like the Hartford Whalers. They’re more valuable and received positively as a defunct brand than they ever were as a living, breathing pro sports franchise.
Kei – A couple of things:
1) Like I said before: our perceptions and analysis don’t matter. Sternberg has spoken positively about the market off-the-record and he publicly tried to do the split-season thing
2) A lot of the problems the Expos had related to the location and crapiness of the stadium. Obviously a new team would involve a new stadium. Also, the expanded playoffs make a big difference. The Expos only made the playoffs once in their history. In the current format they would have had several more appearances. Heck even the second Wild Card would have gotten them into the postseason in 1996.
3) The problems that plagued Hartford in the 90s still plague Hartford: low population, stagnant economy, and people in CT identify more with New York or Boston than CT.
But again #1 is the biggest factor. If Sternberg thinks its a good idea he is going to try and pursue it. Just like no one but him thought the split season made sense but he tried it anyway. Whether MLB lets him is another story.
Is Sternberg truly high on MTL as a baseball market, so much so that he thought even a shared-custody arrangement spanning two countries would work out on that side?
Or was that just a desperate ploy to elicit a response from someone, anyone, within the Tampa Bay region — which, to be fair, did actually work in the form of a ~$1 billion subsidy, the same one that he just walked away from?
If nothing else, the fact that St Pete and Pinellas were willing to hand over that much money to the Rays in the first place is, in itself, a good enough explanation for why MLB seems eager to keep the franchise there.
It seems like a lot of time and money to spend if he is just trying to get leverage. He could have just tried to play 20 games there scattered during the season.
We’re obviously all just speculating but putting that together with the quotes in the article I posted (that was from a New York paper) he may think that he can make more money in Montreal then he can in St Pete. Or if could be something else. Maybe banks aren’t willing to lend him money for the development there because of the economy or it turns out getting insurance will be harder because insurance companies are dropping Florida etc. I just think something happened behind the scenes that makes this deal not as good as something else. Now it could be a completely different city that reached out to him. It will be fun to find out.
The Trop area might actually get redeveloped faster without the Rays since the deadlines for building things like affordable housing stretched on forever in the agreement that Stu just bailed on. Also, thought I saw somewhere that the current use agreement was amended a while back to eliminate the Rays’ right to 50% of redevelopment profits; I hope that‘s true.
Been to the area around the Trop a number of times. It’s nowhere near as bad as people portray to be — and realistically, an urban village-type development always felt like a far better fit for that part of town than a ballpark-centric one, and would have been a more-than-acceptable trade off for the city of St Pete in the long run.
The Rays lose their 50% share of redevelopment rights once their lease expires. It gets automatically extended for each year they can’t play at the Trop, but if St. Pete fixes the roof and lets the Rays play there 2026-2028, then the city gets full development rights back on the parcel.
City council chair Copley Gerdes may be one of the few people who believes St. Petersburg is a major-league city.
Nice city. Downtown is nice. It’s not a bad place at all. That doesn’t make it a major-league city. And now that we’ve had almost 30 years of proof that people won’t go to games on the Pinellas side in any kind of big numbers reliably, it’s hard to call the claim anything more than hyperbole.
I’m a Hillsborough guy, so I’ll always think they’ve been on the wrong side of the Bay. But as you reference, if he can’t afford to do this in St. Pete, he surely can’t afford to do this in Tampa. It’s possible no one can.
And as a Rays fan, I really don’t care anymore.
Agreed…To call anything major league, you have to be talking about the Bay Area as a whole.. Tampa by itself isn’t any bigger population wise than St Pete. And until the area gets decent public transit (not happening in the life of the next stadium, if ever), then it’s not.b
Personally, I think that tampa is on the wrong side of the bay. Seriously. Tampa is a collection of traffic in the way of getting to anywhere cool.
The only place worth living in the tampa bay area is St. Pete.
No lies detected.
It’s only because I grew up there and haven’t had to live there in decades that I have any romanticism left.
Have to think that’s the end of any realistic possibility of a new MLB ballpark in St. Petersburg. What are the realistic options?
Tampa or Orlando if either puts enough public money on the table for an MLB ballpark with a roof.
North Carolina or Tennessee, again if either place gives away enough public money to billionaires.
Is there some place where an MLB owner could get a combo casino/ballpark, like what the Dallas Mavericks owners are dreaming of for their team? Other than southern Nevada, of course. Heh.
If the state of Tennessee put up the money, I wonder if they would require a team be named Tennessee _________? If the mayor of Nashville is to be believed, Nashville will not provide the funding.
Could MLB use the game in Bristol, 200+ miles from Nashville as some kind of tie in to bringing a team here? I don’t know how large a Nashville team’s tv territory would be. I assume all of Tennessee, North Alabama? Southern Kentucky?
Davidson County (where Nashville is located) is set to drop an unholy amount of money on a new stadium for the Titans, spent $37 million for the Nashville MLS stadium, and dropped like $90 million on a AAA ballpark less than a decade ago. The city and county are fully tapped out in providing funds for a new stadium.
Nashville is a pretty small market, I think around 30th or so. Memphis and Knoxville are the other major population centers that are clear on the opposite ends of the state, and without getting too much in the weeds are VERY different culturally and demographically from Nashville. (Memphis is also solidly a Cardinals town). Plus, like most of the rest of the Deep South, you’ve got generations of baseball fans who grew up rooting for the Braves because they were the only MLB team in the region.
Tldr; if public money is gonna be used for a Music City MLB team, it’ll have to come from the state. And no matter how you slice it, there are way fewer people and a much smaller TV market in Nashville compared to the Tampa Bay region.
I am one of those Braves’ fans in Middle Tennessee. I could 100% get behind an AL team in Nashville if we do get a team.
Orlando is as far from Tampa as Philly is from NYC, as Milwaukee is from Chicago, as Sacramento is from the Bay Area, as Austin is from San Antonio, and so on. These are not the same markets in spite of what people outside of Florida think, and Rays fandom in the Tampa Bay region would not carry over to Orlando if that move were to ever happen (I personally don’t think there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that it will).
The last time anything resembling an Orlando MLB “group” made a presentation to a board of local government, its spokeperson — Pat Williams, god rest his soul — closed out his remarks by breaking into a song.
In the grander scheme, given the numbers that have been slapped on the costs (and subsidies) of the would-be ballpark projects in Tampa Bay and Las Vegas, MLB might eventually come to find that there aren’t enough cities and/or ownership groups that are willing to pony up the expansion fee *and* pay for whatever their portion of the brand spanking new ballpark would be.
Orlando still has the “Florida problem”, that the upper class people who claim residency in a city, spend very little time their in the summer cuz the weather sucks so hard and they have other homes.
I don’t know how Orlando would be any better of a place for the Rays than Tampa. It’s a smaller DMA, the traffic isn’t any better, and there are still plenty of other things to pull away people’s attention and dollars.
The best solution remains to drain the bay and build the stadium there, but unfortunately the climate seems to be moving in the opposite direction.
Yeah that was more to say that any talk about the Rays becoming more of the “MLB team of Central Florida” by moving to Orlando is just rank fantasy, and that they would only be swapping out one flimsy, transient market for an even more flimsy and transient one in a hypothetical move up I-4.
Orlando is basically an extreme version of Tampa Bay as a “baseball town,” in that it’s an area that also produces a good amount of baseball talent (Logan Gilbert being the most prominent one of late) but has shown a cold shoulder toward the idea of supporting a pro baseball franchise. Hell, we haven’t even had a *minor league* team since 2003.
The interest and enthusiasm levels for pro ball here are so low that even the most cynical and superficial attempt to astroturf supposed “support” for a potential MLB team would likely fall flat on its face.
I always point this out when people suggest that a stadium in Tampa could pull fans from Orlando. If a stadium in Downtown St. Pete can’t draw people from Wesley Chapel, there’s no way that Ybor City is going to draw people from Maitland. And average Disney/Universal tourists have no particular interest in leaving Baby Vegas to drive four hours both ways to see a Wednesday night game against the Orioles in the middle of their vacation. They might go for the Yankees and Red Sox, but the Rays already have no trouble getting Yankees and Red Sox fans to show up.
And the opposite is also true. Tampeños rarely go to Orlando except for the parks. It’s at least a two-hour drive. Anyone trying to get back to Tampa after a night game would be getting home around midnight. The markets are physically and culturally very much divided. And the local media is divided as well, aside from a little overlap along the fairly sparsely populated Lake Wales Ridge, and whatever gambling company’s name is currently attached to the Sunshine Network.
Tourists at Disney, Universal, Sea World etc. don’t even want to drive into downtown Orlando after a full day at the attractions. And on the flipside, nobody living north and east of downtown Orlando is excited about an after-work drive to the attractions (almost all of them in the southwest corner of Orange County), aside from maybe Disney Adults — you can forget about a drive all the way down to Tampa.
What most people in America conceive as “Florida” — including, it has to be said, more than a few folks on here — is really about six or seven different Floridas. And Tampa Bay and Orlando are their whole separate, altogether different blocs of Florida.
This has to be one of the most baffling stadium episodes in recent history. If I can offer a theory: Sternberg was planning on selling the team all along, albeit after the new stadium was built in order to goose the price. Maybe he determined that he’d make more money selling now before sinking $700 million of his own money into the stadium, and used Hurricane Milton as an excuse to either wring more concessions (and lower his personal investment) or barring that, use it to cash out and walk away.
I think between Sternberg and Fisher, there’s a lesson to be learned that if an owner is an overly cautious and tight-wadded cheapskate when running their team, they’ll act the same when it comes to building a stadium. If they’re unwilling to spend an extra $20 million to bolster a playoff team for a World Series run, they sure as hell can’t be trusted to drop 9 figures of their own money on a major real estate investment.
The problem Sternberg, or Fisher for that matter, will have when he wants to sell the team is that any prospective buyer is going to be just as reluctant to commit hundreds of millions toward a new supersized hunk of concrete. Of course that’s why the real scam is to fleece taxpayers for the cost of a new palace and then sell the team after it has been built.
Yes and no. Large-scale construction projects are stupidly expensive these days. I think for a certain class of legacy owner, they don’t have the dough to build a stadium on their own anymore. But there are deep-pocketed owners who’ve shown they can provide the capital necessary to build fancy new venues if push comes to shove: the Warriors, Rams, and Clippers all come to mind. That’s why these deals all include fat development rights. It’s a big cost upfront, but if you believe the real estate adjacent to the stadium is going to be worth a lot then you’ll make a killing down the road. So the stadiums, by themselves, probably don’t justify their cost anymore. I doubt the Chase Center hosts enough concerts and sells enough luxury suites to cover whatever Joe Lacob paid to build it. But the land it sits on, and the developments he gets to tap into in the Mission District? Now that’s worth a pretty penny. And Lacob has more than enough cash on hand to absorb the cost and wait it out.
The issue with Fisher and Sternberg is that they *technically* have the money, but would have to gamble literally their entire fortune on their ballpark and development. They’re not the types to do that, and they’d probably be better off just sinking that money in boring ol’ investments than in a complicated real estate development. They wanted to have it both ways: get credit for “putting in their own money” and all the positive press that brings without actually exposing themselves to real risk if their projects don’t pan out. Fisher’s whole hangup with Howard Terminal was that he wanted to do commercial development concurrently with the ballpark being built – instead of the ballpark first, then gradually building out the rest of the infrastructure in West Oakland like a normal project like this would entail. But that would’ve required him to wait over a decade before he could sell the team at its maximal value and recoup what he spent. Vegas will be much quicker.
For Sternberg, it was probably a similar realization. He’d sink $700 million, then have to sit tight for quite a while before the rest of his development surrounding Trop 2.0 would realize its full value. If you’re a billionaire a few times over that’s not a big deal – giving up $700 million to get $1.2 billion is the cost of doing business for fine return on investment. But if you’re not as capitalized and you’re already risk-averse, you won’t go through with it.
All true, but aloso the Warriors, Clippers, and Rams were all building stadiums in ginormous markets, and in a state where referendum laws make it very difficult to get large sports subsidies approved just by flipping a few key council members.
It is very possible that there is no solution in Tampa Bay that would turn a decent profit for Sternberg, at least not without subsidies on an even more massive scale than St. Pete was proposing — and that the same would be true in Nashville, etc. In which case, why are we even talking about a new stadium, if it would cost more than it’s worth? You bought the Rays, find a way to be okay with owning the Rays — if you would rather own a team in a big city, sell the Rays and find a way to buy the White Sox.
Also very true. There should’ve been a reckoning over the insane inflation of mega-projects like these ages ago, but years of near-zero interest rates and taxpayer handouts to close the gap have kicked that can well down the road. (Which, nope, can’t think of any other policy problems that are similar!)
It’s just wild that everyone has taken these price tags at face value. Like, nobody in government ever asks “why the hell does this thing need to be $2 billion?” If a project is too expensive to be profitable, then lower the cost. But there’s always another sucker willing to put up the money and not ask the questions.
Fisher also isn’t a developer/entrepreneur like Kroenke, or like former Padres owner John Moores. For those guys, building out the surrounding development is their real business. Fisher’s “business” is playing around with his share of the clothing company his parents built.
The fundamental flaw with the Howard Terminal plan was Fisher himself. The idea was similar to the Petco Park development in San Diego. Moores’ company still owns and profits from downtown development around Petco Park even though he sold the team years ago to finance his divorce. But Fisher was always going to be uncomfortable with that entrepreneurial concept; he’s not the kind of guy (as you alluded) to borrow $500 million now and hope to make back twice that much with a successful real estate development. Fisher is the kind of guy who plays with relatively small pieces of his fat inheritance while never investing enough to make himself nervous about the risk.
Also an excellent point. Ballmer and Lacob are also venture capitalists, which very much has a “eff it, just get the damned deal done” mentality that can be its detriment but also gets past obstacles. (Such as Ballmer buying The Forum to end MSG’s lawsuit, or Lacob moving the arena plan from the original Piers 30-32 site and paying off Salesforce and UCSF to stave off community complaints).
Fisher and Sternberg? They don’t have the inclination or the wealth to muscle a project past initial obstacles. They’re the exact opposite, requiring a tediously detailed plan after months of government negotiations that gets derailed at the drop of a hat.
Apparently the Rays have not actually sent a termination letter to the City yet. Their social media post says they can’t do the deal “at this moment”. So is this another attempted shakedown?
If so, Mayor Welch says it’s not going to work. I think he’s right.
If they don’t send a letter by March 31, the deal expires anyway, so that would be a pretty dumb gambit (in a long series of them, to be fair).
The next absurd step of this saga would be if Lakeland got involved with building a stadium between Tampa and Orlando.
Somehow, moving the Rays into Joker Marchant would be the most Sternberg ending possible…
I just want to give Steve props for using “Tampeños,” which I love due in no small part to the angst it provokes in a certain percentage of the populace. :)
To hell with Stu and every idiot public official who coddled and groveled to ram this wretched project through. They fully deserve to look like the corrupt, incompetent dolts that they are. The city was seriously impacted by TWO hurricanes and *still* these clods acted like the most important piece of business was jamming a luxury stadium complex onto the public debt sheet.
They’re really befuddled that a greedy Wall Street creep was dishonest and untrustworthy?
It’ll be amazing if they aren’t jeered and pelted with tomatoes at every public appearance.
So, what happens now with the Trop roof replacement? Does it make financial sense for St Pete to spend $60 million + on something with a 3-year lifespan on a team that won’t be staying in the county?
To clear the legal slate, does the city negotiate an early lease termination with the Rays? One that absolves the city of its requirement to rebuild and let’s the Rays negotiate with whatever locale foolish enough to provide the team with a more lucrative deal than St Pete did?
I BELIEVE they are contractually obligated to make the repairs.
But there’s always a deal to be made, yeah? We won’t fix it, you play at Steinbrenner for a year and then go wherever you like.
They’re not contractually obligated to make the repairs on any particular timetable:
https://www.fieldofschemes.com/2025/01/23/22317/st-pete-to-rays-actually-theres-no-deadline-for-us-to-fix-your-stadium-roof-read-your-damn-lease/
However, the longer they take to fix the roof, the longer the Rays’ lease is extended, and the longer before the city gets full development rights back. So it’s probably worth it to pay to fix the roof for 2026 and at least get that clock running again.
Neil: Is the lease extension automatic and binding on both parties?
I understood it was more of a city/county option, whereby they could require the team to extend by a year for every year they do not play at the stadium, but might not be contractually obligated to do so.
It’s a force majeure clause: If the stadium isn’t playable for a season, the lease automatically rolls over for another year.
https://www.fieldofschemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Stadium-Agreement.pdf
(Not searchable, I’m afraid, but it’s Section 16.03.)
Thanks.
That is one of my main questions too, Steve.
Unless the city and county think they can make a go of it with an annual bowl game and a few wrestling events, the Trop has no legitimate use.
I think it unlikely that they will renege on the repairs, though. We don’t know what MLB’s long term plans for this franchise are. As much as Sternberg has backed himself into a corner, so has MLB with it’s endless hand wringing about the state of the facility etc etc.
I guess they could just let him stay at the former Legends across the bay, but that seems unlikely for a bunch of reasons (it would be a perfectly fine home for the team long term with a small expansion, say 3-5,000 seats, but it’s other tenant/co owner and the weather will create some problems…)
Anyone else smelling a Loria-Expos swap/swindle in the offing?
MLB buys the franchise from Sternberg at a fee already agreed, Sternberg gets either the cash (around $600m for his 48% you would expect) free of encumbrance and disappears into the night, or first dibs to an expansion franchise elsewhere (but he pays the full price…).
Meanwhile, MLB then can conduct a sale to a local buyer who either wants back in on the new stadium deal (probably absent the redevelopment rights, or at least this becomes a negotiating opportunity for the city) or comes up with another stadium plan quickly.
If the Trop ISN’T going to be repaired, the Rays would need to play at the former Legends for several seasons… I don’t see that as a huge blow – though 3-5,000 more seats added temporarily somehow would be nice – but it would give the city the opportunity to completely redo the site (and save $400m in redevelopment rights plus $60m on a new roof for just three years of use…).
Either way, I congratulate the St. Pete and Hillsborough officials on waiting out cheapskate Stu. You did it.
Don’t shed a tear for the exRays owner (soon to be) though, as Managing Gen Partner he has been raking in $40-70m in annual operating profits that, for the most part, he hasn’t shared with his co-owners and certainly hasn’t spent on players.
And he’s been doing this for two decades.
The problem with a swap like that is that other teams are for sale right now. Would artificially increasing the price of the Rays affect the Twins price? The White Sox?
It wouldn’t necessarily affect any other sale, Al. Any sort of ‘quid pro quo’ sale brokered by MLB would by definition be a non-market transaction.
That said, I’ve no doubt that there would be no real ‘discount’ involved. The Rays are pegged by Forbes (!) at $1.2bn. I would expect a sale price for Sternberg’s share to be at least $700-800m (valuing the franchise as a whole at $1.6-1.7Bn in situ).
If a prospective buyer is acquiring the entirety of the team (ie: all minority partners bought out as well, which I would doubt will happen but who knows…) they might pay less than that given the stadium situation, or they might be convinced to pay more as the Rays are about to become ‘portable’ (as ever, with MLB consent…)
The Expos sale from Loria to MLB to, eventually, Lerner was complex. Loria got about twice what the Expos would have been worth as a portable franchise with nowhere obvious to move to – no suitable stadium in DC at the time they moved) but this was very much conditional on him overpaying for the Marlins… which freed up John Henry and his group to buy the Red Sox.
Even though Forbes – as ever – used these transactions to reset all MLB franchise values, one can make the argument that none of them were actual market transactions as they each contained conditions that would not be involved in a simpler (or expansion) transaction.
And that’s where I wonder if fellow MLB owners would be okay with this. The Red Sox are a crown jewel franchise that had gone listless under the Yawkey family trust. Facilitating their sale to a well-capitalized owner who knew what he was doing had everyone on board because a rising tide lifts all boats. It’s why no owners objected when Selig forced Frank McCourt to sell the Dodgers after seizing control of their finances, or the National League blocking the sale and move of the Giants to Tampa. But MLB has never shown that kind of heavy-handed involvement for their middle to lower market teams. Marc Normandin has coined it “Wilpon territory,” where an owner is given a ton of leash until they f-ck with the bag as the kids say. I don’t know if the Rays would qualify as a “big enough” team, or Tampa a valuable enough marker, to merit that kind of intervention. Everyone can see how the league and fellow owners stand to make money when teams in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco are successful; can you really say that for Tampa? Maybe they really value the $1 billion handout to keep the stadium subsidy gravy train going? That might be the biggest motivator.
The other selling point back when Selig took over the Expos was they had the possibility of contraction. It didn’t happen obviously, but the Expos sale was definitely pitched that way to owners at the time – even then-GM Omar Minaya was convinced the league would fold the team, which is why he gave up the farm for a Bartolo Colon rental. So even if MLB couldn’t find a market and ballpark for the Expos, they could’ve (theoretically) contracted the club and the owners would’ve still come out ahead. It’d have been the equivalent of a studio canceling a bunch of finished movies for the tax writeoff. Contraction is off the table this time though, meaning owners would have to be confident that MLB can sell this team for a profit at some juncture.
For what it’s worth, I considered the ‘withdrawal’ of the Expos franchise (it’s actual purchase and multi year ownership by MLB) to be a form of contraction.
There is no practical difference between a league buying back it’s team (or revoking the franchise, as Bettman and Daly were flying to Phoenix to effect when Jerry Moyes put the Coyotes into bankruptcy) and reissuing a new franchise elsewhere and contraction/expansion.
As I recall, MLB spent precisely no time looking for a local owner who could afford to run the Expos. That said, they had been for sale for quite some time and only Loria had been interested in buying out Brochu (who’s ownership share was effectively gifted to him by the former owner, Charles Bronfman).
There are, of course, a whole range of legal issues relating to an effective simultaneous contraction of an indebted franchise and the issuance of a replacement… but typically a league would want to clear any outstanding debts before contracting a franchise (in the example, the Coyotes) to make the issuance of it’s replacement smoother. Doing so makes the PA challenges to contraction moot as well.
re: Bartolo Colon… sure, but the Expos had a history of doing that as well (see: Langston, Mark)
A non market sale that values the Rays at $1.7 billion when the Pohlad family is only getting $1.5 billion would definitely ruffle some feathers.
Why?
There is no “generic” value of an MLB team beyond what MLB will ask for it’s next expansion franchise.
If baseball stadiums–or just about any sportingvenues–were such great investments the billionaire class would be tripping over themselves to get in the game. Spoiler alert…its not and never will be. I’m a sports fan through and through but the stadium grift needs to end. Tampa and St Pete would be far better off putting funding towards solving the transit problems that have only worsened in the last handful of years.
What do you think of renovating the Trop with a permanent roof for about half the cost of a new stadium?
Or spending local funding on transit to bring fans to the games?
What value would the team bring to the city and county by changing their name to “St. Pete Rays”?
1) If I got a horse, what do I need with a Ford?
2) That’s an interesting idea, and might indeed be more cost-effective than building a whole new stadium, but I’m not sure buses could get across the bridges any faster than cars.
3) None at all.
The TBTimes now says that the Rays have been pushing a scheme to renovate the Trop (cost est. $600 million, one-third each City, County, & team) and extend the use agreement for another 10 years. (!)
Yeah, that’s a bizarre one. Though of course extending the lease would also mean extending their 50% share of development rights, so maybe he’s hoping to kick the can far enough that there’s a new council?
2) There is an estimate that a new roof and upgrades could be done for $700 million. The downside would be a larger space to air condition and maintain, the upside would be 48,000 seats for big events instead of 35,000 and a lower cost. A former pro ball player told me the new stadium would be much better, but the team has no interest in paying for it. The Rays need to give up their development rights and pay their own way.
Costs are probably rising due to the Trump tariffs. Interest rates may rise. We seem to be in the first months of a recession that may cool any development interest in the Gas Plant property for a while. The city could build housing, a grocery store and municipal office building while waiting for the market to pick up. Construction costs go down during a recession.
Transit may not be faster but it beats a long bumper to bumper ride on our congested roads. Investment in transit would fund a public purpose more than rebuilding a stadium.
3) Businesses pay 10’s of millions for naming rights for a stadium, it seemed like the team name would have some value. The city got a ridiculous concession, the Rays would wear a St. Petersburg Rays uniform for one game a year.
4) I’ve supported the team by buying tickets. As much as I’ve enjoyed the games I’ll be ok if the Rays leave.
Where is that $700m figure from? That seems like a lot, depending on what’s meant by “upgrades.”
Having had a couple of day to digest this news…
I believe Mr. Normandin is right when he says the team would not be able to build a stadium in Tampa as cost effectively as they could in St Pete, and would not get anything like the public subsidy they have from their existing location.
I wonder, though, if they are thinking that having to spend ‘their share’ of the cost at the trop site (assuming they can raise $700-900m…) is a bad bet compared to building in Tampa itself?
They would still be giving away the share of redevelopment rights that they were (foolishly) awarded in the original suncoast dome agreement, but as a cost saving measure (and if they really believe their lies fan-gold on the other side/end of the bay), would it make sense?
It’s still hard to see how it could work, even if they built a stripped down (!) $650m open air stadium on land provided by the city of Tampa (if you can find a suitable plot that isn’t miles from anything).
It seems more likely that Sternberg has just decided to call time on his Rays LP ownership, take his (say, 3200%) return on investment and move on.
From the Salt Lake Tribune March 9th
Months after a Salt Lake City sales tax hike was approved to funnel $900 million to Utah Jazz owner Ryan Smith’s downtown sports, entertainment, culture and convention district, a new proposal could send another $900 million to the area.
Under SB26, which was approved by lawmakers Friday and now awaits the governor’s signature, legislators created a pathway for tax revenue from the district to fund a billion-dollar upgrade of the Salt Palace Convention Center.
What?
Pour another billion dollars of taxpayer money into billionaire Ryan Smith’s playpen. Salt Lake City isn’t a city 400 miles to the southwest where millions of visitors from around the world come for entertainment. Renovating the Delta Center to accommodate NHL hockey, then demolishing half of the Salt Palace for a duplication of the Gateway and the spend a billion dollars renovating the Salt Palace isn’t going to turn South Temple into Las Vegas Boulevard.
The so-called sports and entertainment district is a fancy name for a bottomless rathole.