Back in March when Tampa Bay Rays owner Stu Sternberg officially backed out of the stadium deal he’d negotiated with St. Petersburg, one theory was that it was because MLB was pressuring him to sell the team to new local ownership that hadn’t burned its bridges with local government and would be willing to accept a $1 billion stadium check. At the time, Rays co-president Matt Silverman stated: “The team’s not for sale.”
Today, the team is officially for sale:
The Tampa Bay Rays are in advanced talks to sell the team to a group led by Jacksonville, Fla., developer Patrick Zalupski. The deal values the team at roughly $1.7 billion, according to multiple sources who asked not to be named because the details are private…
The Rays released a statement confirming that the team has “commenced exclusive discussions” to sell.
Jacksonville isn’t exactly local local, and Zalupski isn’t the kind of mega-billionaire who can buy a major league sports team with his spare change — his entire net worth from his construction company with a 4,300-member Facebook group for people to complain about it is only $1.4 billion — but he’s just the lead investor, with others including Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp and Akron RubberDucks owner Ken Babby. The reported $1.7 billion sale price would be $450 million more than Forbes’ latest value estimate for the Rays and about the same as the Baltimore Orioles were sold for last year, so it looks like Sternberg’s stadium fiasco has still left him in place to walk away from the team with a nice windfall.
As for what this would mean for the Rays’ future home, that’s anyone’s guess. St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch said in March that he’d be willing to reopen stadium talks with “a new owner who demonstrates a commitment to honoring their agreements and our community priorities,” but it’s unclear whether that means the same $1 billion deal would be on the table, or whether the city council and county commission would necessarily be on board with it. St. Pete is currently spending $22.5 million to replace the Rays stadium’s hurricane-shredded roof, with hopes the team can move back in for the start of the 2026 season; at that point, the team’s lease will resume with three years to run, meaning the Rays will have until the end of 2028 to figure out where to play — though realistically, they’ll likely need to extend the lease since getting the team sold and a new stadium approved and built by 2029 is pretty unlikely at this point.
And all this still doesn’t answer the question: Would Zalupski & Co. still want a new $1.3 billion stadium in central St. Pete, even with that $1 billion subsidy? Not like they have many other options on the table, but they could try to restart talks with Tampa, or LOLOrlando, or even just stay put at a repaired Tropicana Field and stop telling fans what a terrible place it is to watch a game. Any new ownership group can take its time to figure all this out — except, of course, that MLB will be breathing down its neck to make a decision fast so the league can start fielding expansion team offers, which officials have said they won’t do until the Rays and Port Ruppert Athletics have resolved their stadium issues. It’s been a long three months without Rays stadium drama, I’m so glad this is getting renewed for another season.
And the local women’s pro soccer team – the Sun – just announced that it wants to build a soccer-only stadium in Ybor City. On a site that the Rays were looking at but couldn’t come up with the financing for. The guy that’s developing the property signed on to the Sun’s statement… which didn’t include any information on how they plan to get the money for it, or how much they plan on asking the City and County to chip in. But it did include vaportecture!
The prospective buyer is rare even among the exceedingly rare billionaire cohort in that he made much of his money doing business in the state of Florida. The fact that his company does business in the Tampa Bay region means he’s already far more involved in that community than Stu Sternberg has ever been — and indeed, most owners of Florida-based sports teams have ever been with theirs.
If nothing else, at least one local government body in Tampa Bay has already shown that it’s willing to keep the Rays in the region at a significant cost to itself (aka the public). Not at all difficult to see why MLB would be so eager to keep a team there.
Also, LOL at that Mike Bianchi write-up. I’ve lived in Orlando for most of the last 30 years, and he’s been a personification of its small-man complex basically the entire time.
This is town that’s forever comparing itself to the larger and/or more historically relevant cities in Florida and across the Southeast, and views itself far more through the lens of what it *doesn’t* have than what it actually does. It’s still very much an adolescent place, both in its outlook and its growth patterns (just one Fortune 500 headquarter to Tampa Bay’s and Jacksonville’s four, to name one example).
If Orlando ever evolves past that reality — and it’s admittedly a big “if,” based on my observations over the years — maybe it can have a valid reason for feeling aggrieved when nobody else agrees that it’s too “big time” to be relegated to minor league status indefinitely. We’re just nowhere near that point yet.
I would half-jokingly suggest that the Rays play in EverBank Stadium, but I wouldn’t want my joke to be a curse. Still, I wonder if there have been some talks about trying to shoehorn in a baseball field in EverBank, even when it’s under construction to become The Stadium Of The Future(TM).
Maybe the Savannah Bananas will play a game or two there once that stadium gets rebuilt — it’s only about a two-hour drive from their “home” city.
Well, Jacksonville (Fla) is about a third of the way from Tampa to Greensboro as the crow/buzzard flies… just sayin’.
The proposed owner is a Ron Desantis crony and appointee to the Board of Regents, which has been involved in dismantling higher education in the state.
To quote Henry Jones, Sr., “Our situation has not improved.”