Category: Tampa Bay Rays

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.

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.

If you were going to place a bet on which elected official would be most likely to play hardball with the local sports team owner, you almost certainly would not have chosen St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch. This is a guy who on his election in 2022 promptly offered Tampa Bay Rays owner Stu Sternberg $600 million despite Sternberg being out of stadium alternatives, then worked that up to a cool billion. If anything, Welch fit the mold of the get-things-done-no-matter-the-cost mayor, which is a great way to get things done at tremendous cost.

And yet, there Welch was yesterday, in his state of the city address, telling Sternberg that while he’d like to go ahead with the stadium deal they negotiated last summer, if the Rays owner can’t live up to his end of things, there’s a door with his butt’s name on it:

“We will not pursue the deal at any cost,” Welch told those assembled at the Palladium theater. “The greatness and future of St. Pete does not depend solely on this deal, and I am confident that we have given this endeavor our very best effort. It’s an effort and a process we can all be proud of.”…

Asked if Welch would consider new terms with the Rays, he said it was a “painstaking process” to get to the agreements in hand. For the Rays to now say the deal doesn’t make sense, “I think it would undermine any efforts moving forward,” Welch said.

Before anyone gets too excited, Welch is still committed to his billion-dollar stadium subsidy plan, if Sternberg chooses to accept it. (And he didn’t entirely rule out giving the Rays some kind of sweetener on top of the existing deal.) But Sternberg has been hemming and hawing on that — mostly recently mumbling, “We have to make a decision,” yeah, no duh — seemingly in hopes of extracting even more money from taxpayers. And Welch’s response yesterday was, at least: Cool, cool, walk away and then we get back full development rights to the stadium land, that works for us.

Is it possible that Welch is just reading the room, realizing that his city council is never going to approve more stadium cash for a team owner who’s being a dick about it, and deciding to get out in front of things by drawing a hard line at “one billion dollars, and not a penny more”? Absolutely. But that’s still more backbone than he’s shown before, and if nothing else is an indication that political pressure can get politicians to move, at least a little.

What happens next is entirely in Sternberg’s hands. Sports economist and Simpsons meme master J.C. Bradbury declared yesterday that “This deal is cooked, unless Sternberg is willing to crawl back through the supplicants door”; I’m less sure of that, unless Sternberg hates eating crow so much that he’d pass up a billion-dollar check in order to save face. It does mean he’ll have to back down and agree to swallow the “significantly higher costs” he says he now faces thanks to delays in stadium construction — delays initially caused by a hurricane, and now being extended entirely because Sternberg himself hasn’t been willing to sign the paperwork. I know a lot of people believe that the Rays owner secretly wants to walk away from the deal he himself spent the better part of a decade extracting from local officials, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense — or at least, would be incredibly short-sighted, but I suppose we’ve gotten plenty of reminders recently that sports team owners aren’t immune to that.

Tampa Bay Rays owner Stu Sternberg has opened his mouth again, this time to admit that the ball’s in his court to decide whether to commit to his end of a proposed stadium deal by March 31, or else the city of St. Petersburg can walk away from it. And he will absolutely make that decision, which is his, by means of something, he just doesn’t know what yet:

“We’ll decide how we want to proceed at that point, well before that point,” said Sternberg, who on Monday attended Suncoast Tiger Bay’s State of the Bay event at the Vinoy Golf Club. “We have to make a decision, so we’ll have something by then.”

Asked what would help drive that decision, Sternberg said he didn’t know. “I’ll make sure our organization does what’s necessary to meet whatever conditions we need to meet,” he said.

Well, that’s clear as Lena Blackburne rubbing mud! St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch said at the same event that he has met with Sternberg and that there’s “another issue that we need to work through,” but told reporters they would have to ask Sternberg what it was; Sternberg, in turn, deflected all questions, including how much more money he wants to receive from the city in compensation for the “significantly higher costs” he says he faces thanks to the start of the stadium work being delayed until the April deadline that he himself agreed to last July.

If that last sentence doesn’t make a lot of sense to you, there is a fuckton here that makes no sense. The two most reasonable explanations for Sternberg’s continued foot-dragging are:

1. The Rays owner wants to back out of the deal, but if he declares that he’s backing out, then he doesn’t get to keep development rights to the Tropicana Field land, so he’s hoping the city will back out first.
2. The Rays owner wants to go ahead with the deal, but also wants to sweeten the pot for himself if possible, and keeping St. Pete officials on tenterhooks until March is his only leverage to get additional city money.

Neither of these is what you would call a good plan: The first would require city officials to score a phenomenal own goal by failing to realize they could just run out the clock; the second would require them to ladle on more public cash out of fear the Rays owner will walk away from the $1 billion already approved. If I had to put my money on one or the other, Door #2 seems the most likely: Sternberg’s I know we need to make a decision but I just can’t deciiiiiiiide pairs best with the international hand gesture for moar money pleeze, and Welch’s indication that he’s open to “working through” issues other than “take the deal we gave you, already” suggests that Sternberg might be able to get it.

Either way, it’s some dicey gamesmanship — to make this whole gambit worth his while, Sternberg will have to end up with more additional public cash than he’s losing by twiddling his thumbs until March and delaying a stadium opening by another couple of months. You can’t get if you don’t ask, though, and Sternberg probably figures he stumbled into his first billion-dollar public check despite having no leverage, maybe lightning will strike twice? He, and we, may have to wait until the final seconds before the clock runs out on March 31 to find out.