Work is finally starting in earnest on repairing Tropicana Field’s roof, with completion set for December, and field repairs to follow so the Tampa Bay Rays can move back in next April. At the same time, the St. Petersburg city council is preparing for a vote tomorrow to formally terminate the new stadium deal that was agreed to last summer before Hurricane Milton shredded the Trop roof and eventually led to the unraveling of the deal, after first local officials decided maybe a new stadium shouldn’t be the first priority after a devastating hurricane and then team officials got mad that they weren’t a priority. There’s now a new Rays owner (almost) in place, and everyone can resume their positions from a few years ago to kick around new (or old) ideas for a stadium location, not to mention how to pay for one.
None of which should be remarkable — stadium campaigns hit the reset button all the time — except for where we were just a couple of years ago: Rays co-president Brian Auld warning ominously, “To be comfortably playing on opening day in 2028, in a new ballpark, we’ve got to have most of these details ironed out by this time next year.” That time next year came and went, and now that time the year after that has come and gone, and there are no details at all about anything, and the Rays’ lease is still set to expire soon. (Albeit at the start of 2029 rather than 2028, after being automatically extended for a year by the hurricane damage and resulting repair time.)
And yet, everyone concerned, including the Rays ownership, whoever it is at this exact moment, is acting like there’s all the time in the world to go back to the drawing board on a new stadium plan. An expiring lease, it turns out, is only an urgent crisis if team ownership wants it to be, in order to turn up the heat on local lawmakers to approve a deal ASAP; when it’s team officials that want to take their time, leases can always be renewed or extended. This is what, back in the very first edition of Field of Schemes, we dubbed the Two-Minute Warning — noting such examples as Houston Astros owner Drayton McLain setting a series of “final” deadlines that kept being reset as negotiations took longer than he expected, as well as Wayne County executive Michael Duggan declaring a deadline that he said was set by the team, but which turned out to have been Duggan’s suggestion all along.
Tl;dr: Pretty much all deadlines are fake, don’t take them seriously. It’ll be nice if the Tampa Bay news media learns that lesson from this whole Rays fiasco, but learning lessons doesn’t seem to be news outlets’ strong point.
It’s especially difficult for journalists to accept notion that deadlines – the foundational truth of their lives – are of no import.
Perhaps the best thing the new “managing general partner” (I am assuming the consortium is buying out Sternberg’s shares and not all the other partners) could do is agree on a lease extension for a couple of years while other sites are reviewed and a stadium plan is agreed.
It would allow the county to recoup some of the money it just spent on repairs while also giving new ownership a chance to erase the memory of a disinterested owner who was only ever involved because he thought he could move the team to NY/NJ and become a mini Steinbrenner. Now he is a tenant in a stadium named after Big Stein… and with a publicly funded statue of same out front. Draw your own conclusions on that one.
Can we all just go back to making fun of John Fisher now please?
There should be a lease extension only if the team agrees to pay a fair amount, ie, millions. Otherwise there’s other uses of this property for the taxpayers.
The team should learn from Oakland and the Coyotes, negotiate from strength when you have none and you play in a crappy building for a few years (and then move to a smaller market).
This is in reference to possible new stadium sites, at present there are 3, what would I believe work the best would be the Hillsborough College site across from ray jay. You have 3 major roads including I 275 nearby for getting to and from games, if the BUCS are not playing a game at the same time, you can utilize their parking lot(s) or you can also use parking at the college if necessary.
OK cool. How are you gonna pay for a stadium at each of those sites?