Baseball’s winter meetings are on this week in Orlando, which means lots of opportunities for reporters to hobnob with team execs and fill column inches with whatever comes out of their mouths. So you probably could have predicted that Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times, who has made an art form of this or at least a job description, would be on hand, in this case giving Rays co-owner Ken Babby 13 full paragraphs to explain that the ownership group’s plans for a new stadium by 2029 are making progress, even if not in any particularly definable way:
“We are exploring sites. We are meeting with architects. We are meeting with public officials,” Babby told the Tampa Bay Times at Major League Baseball’s winter meetings. “We are conducting a lot of analysis on how you go about building a development in a ballpark that meet the criteria that we talked about (including a plot of at least 100 acres). We’re visiting a lot of other parks, a lot of other stadiums, understanding what’s possible with different structures.”…
“We discussed what we thought a construct of a public-private partnership could look like. And have really enjoyed our conversations with folks both in the city and the county, both sides of the bay. We’ve been really focused on building those relationships.”…
“We believe that to build a state-of-the-art development, it’s going to require at least that kind of acreage [that the Atlanta Braves got for their Battery project] and it’s also going to require a great public-private partnership. We’re going to do our part. We’re not out there looking for anything that’s unfair or unjust. We want to build something that is truly a win for the community. And that’s building a district, building a community, driving jobs, creating billions of dollars of economic impact.”
That’s a lot of positivity — building relationships! a win for the community! — but no details at all, beyond that the Rays owners are considering sites throughout the Tampa Bay area (which we knew) and are “fully focused on opening a new ballpark in April of 2029” but know that’s “an ambitious timeline.” Even the requirement that any stadium site come with enough space for a Battery-style development came with a hedge: “While it’s not the only site and dynamic that we love, it’s certainly been a wonderful blueprint.”
All of which is fine and to be expected: When a friendly reporter sticks a microphone in front of you and presses record, it’s a team owner’s job to natter on about how much momentum their proposed stadium project has, even if it doesn’t have a site or any money identified to pay for it. It’s a bigger question whether Topkin is doing his job by letting Babby say all this stuff unchallenged — the only other quotes in the story are from MLB commissioner Rob Manfred — but now that the Times is letting other reporters actually report the news, it’s a bit less egregious.
The bigger problem here is letting team owners set the news agenda in the first place. Yes, the Rays’ lease at Tropicana Field runs out after the 2028 season (originally 2027, but it got automatically extended after a hurricane blew the roof off and sent the Rays to a minor-league stadium in Tampa for a year), but as we’ve seen before, leases can be extended — and in fact, St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch has already expressed an interest in doing so for the Rays, saying “the bones of the Trop are super strong, so once we get the electronics and the roof done, the Rays could be there for a decade.” So there’s no real urgency here, especially when it’s not at all clear that a new stadium itself would do much for the Rays’ finances — a new stadium with a pile of public subsidies might, but then the problem you’re solving isn’t so much “Where can the Rays play?” as “How can the Rays owners increase their profits via taxpayer money?” For that, you might want to talk to some taxpayers, or at least some of their elected representatives, but none of those seemed to be hanging around the baseball Winter Meetings, so you’ll just have to guess what they think of all this, sorry!
MLB allowed the Expos situation to twist in the wind for a full decade before bringing any closure to it, and has allowed the Athletics situation to twist in the wind for even longer while more chapters get written into that saga. What’s another year or two or more of the Rays’ forever search for their next forever (until they decide otherwise) home?
For better or worse, baseball clearly still sees patience as a virtue at a time when even the word itself is becoming something of an insult.
When baseball holds winter meetings in Cleveland or Minnesota (places with actual MLB franchises) I’ll start believing they are serious about the game rather than just taking an opportunity for a warm weather vacation on someone else’s dime.
There are plenty of serious issues facing the game (at least the MLB version of it) that these clowns need to be addressing rather than working on their (shitty) handicaps on a $400/rd course.
I worked for a consumer electronics vendor that sold into Walmart. I was told that twice a year they bring their entire buying team into a huge convention center to work out a 1:1 ratio planogram for their sections. The summer one was in Dallas, and the winter one was in Kansas City. By design. No $400/rd golf for them!