Category: Tampa Bay Rays

Friday roundup: How real is the threat of a Royals or Chiefs move to Kansas, and other pressing questions

access_time personNeil deMause

Happy zeroth anniversary of that time we decided to all die of bird flu! It’s a fitting way to go out, honestly.

While we’re still here, though, there’s plenty of other stuff to keep getting wrong in the meantime:

  • A company affiliated with the Kansas City Royals has bought the mortgage to a potential stadium site in Kansas’s Johnson County, and … guys, you know that buying the mortgage isn’t anything like buying the land, it just means the property owner makes their payments to you instead of to the original mortgage issuer, right? Sure, if the property owner defaults, you get the land, but that’s a slim thread on which to hang a potential stadium plan — unless of course you’re just looking for easy ways to get “Royals” and “Kansas” into a headline to throw a scare into Missouri, in which case, nice outside-the-box thinking there.
  • Speaking of moving to Kansas, two economists have looked at that state’s STAR tax diversion deal and determined that there’s no way the state can build even one stadium, let alone two, without cannibalizing existing revenue. “A majority of Kansas lawmakers disagree,” reports the Kansas City Beacon, meaning “whether STAR bonds can support one or two teams depends on who you ask” — if you ask people who know what they’re talking about, you get one answer, if you ask people just grandstanding on behalf of the edifice complex you get another, whoda thunk it!
  • Over in Missouri, meanwhile, a group of Republican senators are refusing to consider Chiefs and Royals stadium funding unless the state approves new tax cuts, while Democrats are objecting to spending billions on stadiums when the state is only providing $25 million to tornado relief. “It’s not coming together just swimmingly as of right now,” summed up state Sen. Lincoln Hough.
  • At least one Missouri legislator is still on board: Republican Sen. Mike Cierpiot said spending on stadiums is worth it because “we’re not giving this money to billionaires. We’re giving it to the stadiums, which is owned by the county.” That’s not how stadium ownership works, unfortunately — owning stadiums just costs you property taxes, what’s important is to own the revenue streams from them, and here those would be controlled by the team owners — and isn’t how number agreement works either, this really isn’t going swimmingly.
  • Over on the other side of Missouri, meanwhile, a state audit has found that the Dome at America’s Center — that’s the former home of the St. Louis Rams, not a missile shield program — needs $155 million in maintenance over the next decade, and while that’s not all that much all things considered, the dome is losing money just hosting St. Louis Battlehawks UFL games and the occasional concert, so, you guessed it, the St. Louis Regional Convention and Sports Complex Authority is considering asking for state money. If they can find a way to increase that maintenance price to $500 million, they could qualify for funding under Gov. Mike Kehoe’s everybody-gets-a-stadium plan, I bet diamond-encrusted cupholders would go a long way toward meeting that requirement.
  • And to answer your question, yes, there was some news this week that was not in Missouri or Kansas! Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis vowed not to provide any state money for a Tampa Bay Rays stadium — except for “roads and exits,” of course, gotta have roads and exits. And stairs and ramps are really exits of a kind, right? Not that any local governments are really proposing a new stadium for the Rays at this time, so DeSantis is unlikely to get called on his promise, but it’ll be interesting to see what happens if he’s in office long enough that he does.
  • This New York Times op-ed is getting a lot of likes for its headline (“Sports Stadiums Are Monuments to the Poverty of Our Ambitions”), but fewer seem to be reading down to the part that argues that “cities build stadiums in part because it’s so hard to build almost anything else,” which is presented without evidence and isn’t really historically true, but it’s of the moment because something something Ezra Klein.
  • Does everyone who plays at the don’t-call-us-Sacramento Athletics‘ ad hoc stadium still hate it? You betcha! Sports Illustrated speculates that John Fisher could consider relocating the team again, perhaps to Salt Lake City, but notes that then he wouldn’t be able to get sweet Northern California TV money, and … remind me what size TV market his intended destination of Las Vegas is again? Hmm.
  • And finally, this week in one-sentence media criticism:

Why investigate the public financing of a billion-dollar stadium when you can post pictures of Trisha and Garth with hardhats and shovels?

— J.C. Bradbury (@jcbradbury.bsky.social) 2025-05-30T12:31:50.461Z

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Friday roundup: Ohio senate leader says damn the analysts’ warnings, full speed ahead on Browns’ $1.2B subsidy

access_time personNeil deMause

Nothing like a week that starts out with a plan for a $1.147 billion stadium subsidy deal and ends with it somewhere well north of $2 billion. But the Washington Commanders horror show wasn’t the only news of the week, so let’s dive in and see what else has been going down:

  • How are Ohio state legislative leaders taking the news that two different state budget analysts have said that the numbers on a proposed $1.2 billion Cleveland Browns stadium subsidy look terrible? “When the Browns put forward those numbers, they’re not putting forward numbers that they grabbed out of a hat. They’ve hired professionals on their side, too,” retorted state senate president Rob McColley. Professional economists on one side, professional clowns on the other, the truth must lie somewhere in the middle! McColley added that senators are “going to make sure that those numbers add up” and will include a “fail-safe” to ensure the state gets its money back, can’t wait to see how that goes.
  • Meanwhile, Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne has asked the state legislature for $350 million to renovate the Browns’ current stadium instead, calling it a “better, and less expensive option,” which is both true and a perfect example of the anchoring cognitive bias. Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb has already offered $240 million in city money toward renovations; this now makes three different official plans for giving upwards of half a billion dollars to Browns owner Jimmy Haslam and none for not giving him any.
  • Here’s a handy chart of where D.C. councilmembers stand on the proposed Commanders stadium deal, with the current tally being four yes, four no, three undecided, and one did not answer. There’s also a special election to fill the Ward 8 seat left vacant by the expulsion of councilmember Trayon White for bribery charges, which is expected to be won by none other than Trayon White, but that’s not till July 15 and the stadium deal has to be voted on by then (quelle coincidence!) so it won’t count, meaning Commanders owner Josh Harris and Mayor Muriel Bowser need to collect three more yes votes from the four remaining swing votes; staffers in those offices might want to take their phones off the hook for the next 11 weeks, because the full-court press lobbying campaign is doubtless going to be brutal.
  • Concessionaire Aramark is reportedly in “talks” with (Your City Name Here) Athletics owner John Fisher about investing $100 million in a Las Vegas stadium project and another $100 million in the team, if by invest you mean pre-paying concession fees that Fisher would get anyway.
  • New soccer stadiums may sound like a great idea to boost team revenues and revitalize cities, writes Aaron Timms in the Guardian, but they often don’t work out that way, leaving fans unhappy at sterile new buildings and teams struggling to repay construction costs. Unless you’re in the U.S., where it’s cities that are on the hook for much of the costs and struggling to repay them: “Stadium-led revitalization is the myth that will survive the apocalypse. New stadiums, as a vast body of academic literature shows, bring few of the economic benefits that developers, team owners, and local politicians promise. Whatever stimulus they offer to economic activity in their immediate vicinity is invariably offset by a corresponding depression in spending and investment in other areas of the same city.”
  • The people who want to bring an MLB team to Orlando say they have close to $1.5 billion lined up to buy a team, which sounds impressive until you realize MLB wants $2 billion for expansion franchises and somebody would have to build a new stadium in Orlando too, but “Orlando rich people happy to pay $1.5 billion toward a team and stadium worth double that” didn’t look as good atop the press release.
  • How’s the economic boom in Green Bay from hosting the NFL draft going? “Sales were down maybe 50%,” Cold Stone Creamery Green Bay owner Amin Elhalw said. “Gradually the closer we got to the draft, the sales were decreasing, the percentage.” Local businesses blamed draft traffic and road closures for keeping away regular customers, funny how that happens.
  • The developer of the Ybor City site in Tampa where Rays owner Stu Sternberg was at one point considering building a stadium (until it turned out nobody wanted to pay to build it for him) now says there’s no room for one, “unless the Rays can build a very tiny stadium.” Turns out building apartments and shopping pencils out better, funny how that happens.
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Friday roundup: Bengals reno plan called “PR stunt,” plus the return of the Rays two-stadium plan

access_time personNeil deMause

Thanks to everyone who generously donated (and in some cases more than generously, you know who you are) to the Field of Schemes spring supporter drive — I have a whole lot of fridge magnets to send out! But first, there’s a weekly news roundup to get to:

  • That Hamilton County agreement to spend $80.5 million on Cincinnati Bengals stadium upgrades and repairs in exchange for no lease agreement at all turns out to be not so popular with the Hamilton County Commission, where commissioner Alicia “hugging the zero down” Reece called it “a PR stunt” because there’s no new lease while commission president Denise Driehaus countered (?) that “No one at that meeting ever said this was related to the final lease.” The county commission only has three members and the third, Stephanie Summerow Dumas, didn’t show up to yesterday’s meeting, so it’s hard to say what this means for the stadium proposal’s ultimate fate.
  • Hey, what if the Tampa Bay Rays built two stadiums, asks Tampa Bay Times opinion editor Graham Brink, one outdoors and one a refurbished Tropicana Field? Would that be cheaper or better? Probably not? Too bad, I already wrote the op-ed, and anyway this is just “back of the napkin” stuff. (Or envelope, which actually has two distinct sides. NAPKINS GOT BACKS!)
  • WAMU-FM reports that “a source familiar with [Washington Commanders stadium] talks” says funding “will likely involve the city borrowing against new tax revenues expected to be generated by any new development,” i.e., tax increment financing. The station cites a 2020 study claiming that D.C. has turned a profit on average on TIF districts — on first look it appears that the study’s authors guesstimated that development would still happen in the districts without the TIF but would take longer, which is probably a reasonable assumption but could create huge swings in the revenue numbers depending on what you mean by “longer.” I have emails out to a couple of TIF experts, I’ll update here if they have anything instructive to add.*
  • Former Cleveland Plain Dealer editorial director Brent Larkin says the Cleveland Browns stadium plans should be submitted to a public referendum, arguing that Ohio voters usually approve sports subsidy referendums anyway, so where’s the harm? Oh, and also it would be “a wildly generous gift to billionaire professional sports team owners at the same time those same elected officials are cutting aid to schools, food banks, libraries and programs for poor kids.” But anyway, it’ll probably win, so let the voters feel like they’re having a say, that’s democracy!
  • St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch has issued a proposal for redeveloping the waterfront that would include demolishing Al Lang Stadium, the old spring training ballpark that is currently home to the Tampa Bay Rowdies USL team. City councilmembers don’t sound too enthused about this, but also Welch’s managing director of city development said the Rowdies owners are “involved and they’re aware” of the plan, so maybe there’s a new soccer stadium proposal in the works? Worth keeping an eye on, if nothing else.
  • A group of downtown Kansas City businesses put up a giant sign with a giant QR code asking that a Royals stadium be built downtown. Chair of the Downtown Council of Kansas City: Gibb Kerr, managing director of the K.C. office of Cushman and Wakefield, a major developer, who surely would not be in position to profit from a downtown stadium, the Kansas City Star would certainly tell us if it were.
  • Work has begun at the proposed Las Vegas A’s stadium site on making it even flatter, this is what passes for progress these days.
  • Los Angeles Dodgers ticket prices are going up, and so is their payroll, and Forbes “contributor” Dan Schlossberg (author of “41 books and more than 25,000 articles about baseball”) concludes that the payroll must be driving up the ticket prices — sorry, Dan, that’s not how it works, there’s a book you might want to read if you have time between writing them.
  • Economist Joe Cortright has done his own analysis of the Portland baseball stadium income tax diversion proposal that I estimated could leave Oregon taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in the hole and determined that the total hole would be more than $600 million.
  • I was on WOSU’s “All Sides with Amy Juravich” on Wednesday to discuss the Browns and Bengals situations, and you can listen to it here. For those who are wondering: Yes, Andy Zimbalist and I did run into each other on the Zoom call as my segment ended and his began, and no, there were no punches thrown.
  • You can buy a piece of the shredded Tropicana Field roof at Tampa Bay Rays games for $15, with the money going to a Rays charity, and doesn’t the city own the roof remnants, shouldn’t the money be going to the general fund? Anyway, if anyone in the Tampa area has been looking for a National Hairball Awareness Day present for me, hint, hint!

*UPDATE: Eight minutes after I hit publish on this post, sports economist and tax expert Geoffrey Propheter replied to my question about the D.C. TIF study. Propheter said it “falls short of academic standards for economic policy analysis” because it doesn’t try to analyze how tax revenue from TIF developments compares to comparable plots of land, but rather just compares actual developments to hypothetical ones that would (according to the study’s assumptions) see different kinds of development take place. He concludes: “I don’t understand how anyone would use this study to justify a TIF for a Commanders stadium.”

And while I was writing the above, Greg LeRoy of Good Jobs First (disclosure: I’m doing some paid work for them, not on the subject of stadiums or TIFs) chimed in to note that D.C. TIF districts like the one for Gallery Place have had to be expanded to siphon off sales taxes from other nearby neighborhoods in order to break even.

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Friday roundup: Bucs want “major renovation,” won’t say yet who’d pay for it

access_time personNeil deMause

Today’s main event will be the liveblog of day two of the sports economics conference at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, which tons of presentations on stadiums and stadium-adjacent topics, but first here’s the regular Friday weekly news r0undup, written entirely on Thursday! If anyone’s roof blew off this morning, it’ll just have to wait till Monday.

  • Tampa Bay Buccaneers owner Joel Glazer wants a “major renovation” of his stadium once the Bucs’ lease expires in 2028, funded by, uh: “We’re going through a phase right now where we’re assessing the stadium and what might be needed. And I know [Hillsborough County and the Tampa Sports Authority are] assessing the stadium and what might be needed, and once both of us are done with our assessments, then we come together and go talk about it, work through things.” Asked last summer about Bucs stadium funding, Tampa city spokesperson Adam Smith said team execs “haven’t approached the city about anything like that” and “we don’t expect them to”; either that was code for “paying for this is the county’s problem” or Smith really believes in the power of positive thinking.
  • Unlike the [Sacramento] Athletics, the Tampa Bay Rays have managed to sell out their 10,000-seat minor-league stadium in their opening series, even at prices running more than $100 for every seat that comes with an actual seat. Tampa Bay Times columnist John Romano blames this on the Rays needing to make up for “a potential loss of revenue from ticket sales, concessions, luxury boxes and the associated costs of relocating for a year,” not the desire to capitalize on artificial ticket scarcity. It’ll be interesting to see if those high prices hold up once the Florida summer heat hits — for what it’s worth, there are still plenty of seats available for next week’s series against the Angels.
  • Speaking of the Rays, the clock officially ran out on their St. Petersburg stadium deal on Tuesday, and now owner Stu Sternberg is free to shop around for another city that wants to give him a billion dollars. Anyone? You in the back? You were just stretching your arms? I see.
  • Cincinnati Bengals VP Katie Blackburn was asked what’s up with the team’s lease that’s set to expire in 2026, and replied, “We could, I guess, go wherever we wanted after this year if we didn’t pick the up option up. So, you know, we’ll see.” NFL move-threat stan Mike Florio of NBC Sports called this “a powerful, loaded comment“; one might also argue that it’s exactly the kind of vague non-threat threat that you issue when you don’t actually want anyone noting that no cities have newer stadiums ready to offer. Potato, potahto!
  • The Jacksonville Jaguars need a place to play for two years while the city of Jacksonville is paying for stadium upgrades, so they’re asking Orlando to play them to play there, cool, cool.
  • A Massachusetts judge ruled that the demolition and reconstruction of White Stadium for the Boston Legacy F.C. can move forward, though opponents say they’ll continue to fight against it. (Boston Legacy, btw, is the new name for the much-derided BOS Nation F.C. women’s soccer team, presumably meant to honor the easiest way to get into Northeastern.)
  • Chicago Bears president Kevin Warren says the team is now focused on building a stadium in Arlington Heights, except for the portion of its focus that is on the Chicago lakefront. More news as actual news comes in, not just attempts at leverage plays.
  • Los Angeles elected officials are finally starting to get steamed about how the 2028 Olympics are being planned in a city that is recovering from disastrous fires, though so far it seems to be mostly about where the sailing competition will be held. If history is any guide, the real outrage won’t come until the Games actually begin.
  • Wondering how the affordable housing promises attached to the Brooklyn Nets arena are going? Does “Empire State Development (ESD), the gubernatorially controlled authority that oversees/shepherds the project, says it might enforce the $2,000 a month penalties for each unbuilt apartment, though that process may be fraught” answer that question? If you’re wondering why ESD only “might” enforce the penalty clause that was designed to make sure developers actually build what they promised, ESD VP Arden Sokolow says that if the state fined them, “you wouldn’t be getting any housing there,” whereas this way … oh, would you look at the time, we’ll have to cut off questions there!
  • Former Anaheim mayor and illegal helicopter registrant Harry Sidhu was sentenced to jail time for deleting emails to hide them from an FBI investigation into soliciting bribes related to a proposed Los Angeles Angels stadium deal — if you had “two months in federal prison plus a $55,000 fine” in the betting pool, you’re a winner!
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Friday roundup: Angels owner could be skimping on stadium repairs, St. Pete may send Rays owner a bill for their wasted stadium time

access_time personNeil deMause

Hey, did you hear the one about the time that then-New York governor and now-New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo gave two of Elon Musk’s cousins $750 million in public money to open a solar-panel factory that ended up not making any solar panels but just re-sold another company’s solar panels for twice as much per watt as the national average? Me neither until recently — consider it bonus topical content.

Meanwhile, back in the now:

  • Anaheim city officials have no idea how much maintenance work is needed at city-owned Angel Stadium because the Los Angeles Angels‘ lease doesn’t require them to tell the city about repair needs, but it could be “hundreds of millions of dollars” worth, according to state auditors. They suggested either asking Angels owner Arte Moreno if the city can do occasional inspections or maybe seeking a court order. It’s important because Moreno is on the hook for certain maintenance costs, while others would fall on the city; the Angels owner recently said, “I’m not going to put $200 or $300 million into a stadium that a city owns without any of their participation. Maybe we’ll get a new mayor and council that wants us to stay,” which is not exactly a commitment to live up to his lease obligations.
  • Pinellas County is considering sending Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg a bill for county time and money spent on the St. Petersburg stadium deal Sternberg ultimately backed out of, and St. Pete Mayor Ken Welch said the idea “has merit” and he may do the same. “Yeah, why not?” remarked county commission chair Brian Scott, who was previously for the stadium deal. “When we find out what that is, we’ll send them an invoice.”
  • Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine still wants to raise sports gambling taxes to raise $600 million toward a Cleveland Browns stadium (and more toward other future stadiums), but the state legislature still prefers its omni-TIF idea to do the same, and DeWine hasn’t said he’ll veto the legislature’s plan. As for the idea of just not giving Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam $600 million to move from one part of the state to another, no one (besides state house Democrats, but who cares about them) seems to be interested in that, way to go, Ohio.
  • Bexar County, the city of San Antonio, and the Spurs owners have signed a nonbinding agreement not to use county property taxes to fund a new $1.5 billion basketball arena, instead relying on hotel and car rental taxes, which, uh, was the plan all along? Could this nonbinding agreement just be a way to get headlines like “Bexar County agrees not to use property taxes to fund new Spurs arena”? Surely elected officials would not be that cynical!
  • Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman says he has “multiple [stadium] opportunities on both sides of the state line,” because of course he does, he wants to be a savvy negotiator, after all.
  • The USL is expanding to compete directly with MLS and adopting promotion and relegation even, and you know what that means: lots of new stadiums! Modesto, California gets one, and Rogers, Arkansas gets one, and Albany, New York gets one, and by “gets one” I mean of course “gets to help pay for one,” that’s just the price of doing business in a world where there are now two leagues that could be forced to compete for the right to play in markets, hmm.
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Friday roundup: Oregon considers upping MLB expansion stadium ante to $800m, baseball owners twirl mustaches in glee

access_time personNeil deMause

This week’s vibes.

  • An Oregon state senator has introduced a bill to increase the state’s spending on a possible Portland MLB stadium from $150 million to $800 million, provided Portland gets an expansion team whenever MLB next expands. The source would still be funneling player income taxes to pay off stadium bonds, yet another Casino Night–style funding scheme that is both risky and not really free money, for reasons we’ve covered here before. (The increased figure would rely on rising player payrolls since the initial $150 million plan was approved more than 20 years ago.) The $800 million figure is apparently meant to compete with Utah’s proposed $900 million in property tax kickbacks for an MLB stadium in Salt Lake City; expansion city bidding war, activated!
  • Denver’s NWSL franchise is planning to build a 14,500-seat stadium, and “the ownership group is paying for the stadium in its entirety,” according to the Denver Post. Also according to the Denver Post, four paragraphs later, a tax increment financing district is already in place on the team’s proposed stadium site, meaning the team would recoup property taxes worth some number that the Denver Post didn’t deign to mention. The city would also be on the hook for buying $24 million worth of land for the stadium project, but Denver Mayor Mike Johnston says “the city would always own that public space and that could come back to us for repurposing in 50 years from now if the stadium were to move,” so really it’s an investment, see?
  • Will the Tampa Bay Rays draw more fans this season, despite playing in an 11,000-seat minor-league stadium, thanks to now being on the side of the bay where more people with more money live? Doesn’t look like it, based on the fact that opening day is one week away and hasn’t sold out yet. It doesn’t help that Rays management raised average ticket prices by 30% in response to the smaller capacity, which could complicate efforts to use the 2025 season to answer the age-old question, “Is it St. Petersburg, or is it just Florida?“
  • Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne says the financing plan for a new Cleveland Browns stadium would require average ticket prices to rise to $800 over 30 years in order for the math to work, while a Browns spokesperson says this isn’t true, and nobody’s showing their math, that’s no fun! (Yes, this website is predicated on the notion that math is fun. I’m sorry if you’re learning about this late.)
  • A Massachusetts judge heard arguments this week in a lawsuit charging that a new stadium for BOS Nation F.C. (soon to be renamed, finally) violates a state law requiring a two-thirds supermajority of the state legislature to approve any new uses of land taken for conservation purposes. The Boston mayor’s office insists that tearing down a public school stadium and rebuilding it as a pro women’s soccer stadium that public school students would still get to play in is really the same use — cue the Ship of Theseus debates!
  • The Eugene Emeralds are absolutely, positively moving out of Eugene after 70 years, uh, just as soon as they find somewhere else offering to build them a new stadium. Until then, they’ll still be playing in Eugene. But they’re gonna leave, just you watch! Don’t call their bluff, voters who rejected giving them $15 million last May!
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Rays execs proposed staying until 2038 if taxpayers spent $400m to upgrade Trop, got shot down

access_time personNeil deMause

On Friday afternoon, news broke — or Tampa Bay Rays co-president Matt Silverman declared, which isn’t quite the same thing — that Rays management had proposed an alternative deal to building a new $1.3 billion stadium with $1 billion in public money: instead spending $600 million, $400 million of it from the city and the county, to upgrade their current home of Tropicana Field. As part of the deal, the Rays would agree to a 10-year lease extension that would keep the team at the stadium through 2038.

“It is one of many possibilities that has been discussed with the city and the county since the hurricanes,” Rays president Matt Silverman said Friday. “We are open to any and all avenues that results in the Rays thriving here in Tampa Bay for years and for decades.”

It’s kind of weird for Silverman to only publicly mention it now, when his boss, Rays owner Stu Sternberg, has officially stuck a fork in St. Peterburg stadium plans and been met by Mayor Ken Welch sticking a fork in his willingness to work with Sternberg. But setting aside for the moment whether Silverman is sincere or just trying to save some public face with a “well, we tried,” would this have been a good deal for St. Pete? And why did city and county officials reject it?

On the first question, spending $400 million in public money is a lot better than spending $1 billion, obviously. But we also have to keep in mind the length of the lease: If the Rays could demand a new stadium again in 2038, that’s a cost of $40 million per year of the team’s commitment to play in St. Pete, whereas the new stadium would have been $33 million per year. There is some benefit to kicking the can further down the road.

Plus, there are a couple of other potential reasons Welch in particular may have been unenthused about Sternberg’s offer:

  • Welch could have his heart set on a wider redevelopment of the Gas Plant District. All indications are that the bit about this project that truly excites the mayor is redeveloping the site of an old African American neighborhood that was demolished in the 1980s to make way for the dome. Just gussying up the Trop, even at a lesser price tag, might not have seemed worth it.
  • A lease extension would come with other pitfalls. If Sternberg’s renovation plan would have included a simple extension of the lease as-is, then he would have retained 50% of the stadium site’s development rights for another 10 years, whereas allowing the lease to expire in 2028 will mean the city can reclaim those then. That’s a significant amount of value, and handing it over to Sternberg along with $400 million would start adding up to a pile of money. It’s worth noting that Welch said on Thursday, “We need to get the termination [letter], if they’re going in that direction, to make sure that all the boxes are checked there. And we’ll talk with the council and with the community about the paths forward.”

St. Pete Chamber of Commerce CEO Chris Steinocher did express mild enthusiasm for the plan, saying, “I do believe those conversations will happen as everybody calms down” and “At some point, we can open the door to when and how a plan like this might work.” Steinocher doesn’t get a vote on the city council or county commission, though, and since the old stadium deal was decided last July both of those legislative bodies have gotten new members who are not so enthused about giving Sternberg a pile of public cash. There’s a whole lot of jockeying for leverage to come, it’s clear, so expect lots more gambits like these in the coming weeks and months — unless MLB really decides to throw a bomb into the proceedings by telling Sternberg to sell the team if he knows what’s good for him.

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Friday roundup: Rays, Coyotes, A’s fiascos keep on fiascoing

access_time personNeil deMause

All kinds of news of the week to cover this morning, and I already lost a couple of hours getting up early to yell at my senator’s window about this fiasco. Let’s start with the Tampa Bay Rays‘ own fiasco, and then work backwards:

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Sternberg says Rays “cannot move forward” with St. Pete stadium plan, all bets are off for what happens next

access_time personNeil deMause

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.

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MLB to Sternberg: If you won’t take St. Pete’s $1B Rays stadium subsidy, we’ll find someone who will

access_time personNeil deMause

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.

— DRaysBay (@draysbay.bsky.social) 2025-03-10T13:23:35.745Z

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…

— DRaysBay (@draysbay.bsky.social) 2025-03-10T13:58:33.649Z

(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.

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