The Extra 2% (33 page)

Sternberg’s disdain for Henry and the Red Sox soared in the 2006–2007 off-season. The Red Sox beat out multiple competitors that winter for the negotiating rights to Japanese star pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka. The figures were mind-boggling: $51.1 million to the Seibu Lions just to grant Dice-K his freedom, plus a six-year, $52 million contract for him to play for the Sox. No way could the Rays afford to pay nine figures for any player, let alone one who’d never appeared in a major league game.

Meanwhile, no owner expressed more conflicting feelings about revenue disparity in baseball than Henry. While owner of the low-budget Florida Marlins, Henry stumped for more cash to flow his way so his small-revenue team could keep pace with the competition. After controlling the Marlins for three years, Henry won ownership of the Red Sox, landing in Boston after MLB engineered an elaborate plan that granted the Marlins to Montreal Expos owner Jeffrey Loria, made the Expos wards of the league until a lucrative franchise sale (to a Washington, D.C., group two years later), and awarded the Red Sox to Henry and his partners—despite other bidders offering more money. Once in control of one of baseball’s glamour franchises, Henry suddenly developed mixed feelings about how to parcel out team revenue. A salary cap, he said, would be great for competitive balance in baseball, because hey, why should the Yankees get to spend so much more than everyone else? Henry’s feelings on revenue-sharing were even more confusing.

“People seem to think I am opposed to revenue-sharing, but that has never been the case,” he told NESN’s Tom Caron in a 2009 interview, one of many public statements Henry made on the issue. “What I have said is there have to be limits when it comes to transferring assets, and there have to be incentives for all clubs to invest in their teams.” Caron asked Henry about the Rays’ 2008 run to the AL pennant, their win over the Red Sox, and whether it was good for baseball to have smaller-revenue teams rise up and knock off the big guys. Henry graciously praised the Rays’ front office for their efforts: “Tampa Bay’s turnaround was due to an excellent management team now running the club from top to bottom.”

But after watching the Rays knock off a Red Sox team trying to defend its crown with a payroll three times smaller than Boston’s, a tiny fraction of the total fan base, and a tinier fraction of the media exposure and history, guided by an owner who’d reaped the benefits of baseball’s annual redistribution, with a chunk of that money coming right out of his own pockets, Henry couldn’t resist a subtle, little dig. “It was also,” he said, “a triumph of revenue-sharing.”

For decades, the baseball world had watched the Yankees dominate the game. Other AL East teams had their time, wedging out periods where they triumphed over big, bad New York. Then, for the better part of fifteen years, the Red Sox became part of baseball royalty too. The two teams dominated the East, exchanging barbs, riling up fan bases, and bringing daily manna to columnists craving the latest controversies. All the while, Tampa Bay remained buried in the cellar.

Through meticulous planning, skillful player development, uncanny patience, and, yes, some high draft picks and shared revenue, the Rays threw off their last-place shackles and gunned down the two toughest behemoths of the sport. After years of irrelevance, they’d stirred up some good old-fashioned resentment from their once-bullying big brothers. New rivalries had begun, and the other guys wanted to beat their ass. On the field (if not off it), David had felled the Goliaths.

If Warren Buffett targeted baseball teams instead of energy conglomerates, railroads, and soft-drink giants, he would have loved the Tampa Bay Devil Rays circa October 2005. For a skilled value investor, buying the team with the lowest franchise value and second-lowest revenues, in a sport where rapid growth was nearly assured, would have seemed a dream come true. Depressed assets were everywhere, including eight seasons of miserable baseball and a departing owner who had turned the community against him. But the biggest strike against the new owners was a stadium that was woefully outdated from the day they took over. It was obsolete the first time a home crowd craned their necks to watch a pitch and squinted their eyes to follow a pop-up’s trajectory against the vast, white roof. Snatching up Tropicana Field wasn’t buying low. It was free-falling into the Mariana Trench.

By the time Stuart Sternberg and Matt Silverman wrested control of the D-Rays from Vince Naimoli after the 2005 season,
the giant white-domed monstrosity the team called home had become the most depressing pro sports venue in America. Paint was peeling off the walls. Bathrooms had fallen into disrepair. Concessions were a sorry lot, in-stadium attractions even sorrier. The lighting was dingy, the atmosphere funereal. But Sternberg and Silverman viewed the stadium the same way Andrew Friedman regarded a talented but flawed player. In the new regime’s eyes, both offered potential.

“The stadium is not a hindrance to creating a successful business,” Silverman said in a 2006 interview. “We’re confident that once the marketplace latches on to our team and the players, Tropicana Field will be full of energy and excitement. It’s a great place to watch a game. The empty seats are opportunities for us.”

More than just a business opportunity, the D-Rays saw the Trop as a unique ballpark with unusual structural traits that could give the team a decisive on-field advantage.

“We already have great speed, and the turf creates an advantage there,” Silverman gushed. “The white roof is something that our opponents may have trouble getting used to. When we get over 20,000 people here, it’s extremely loud. We’re urging people to come out and be the tenth man. The more people that come, the more that can have an impact on the outcome of the game.”

Silverman had some cause for optimism. Attendance would surge 20% in 2006, the new group’s first season. It would edge up 1% in 2007, then rocket 31% in 2008 as the Rays won the AL East. A better ball club (mostly) and better marketing would hike the number of butts in Tropicana Field seats from 1.1 million (14,000 a game) in the last year under Vince Naimoli to 1.8 million (more than 22,000 a game) the year the Rays won the pennant.

More fans, more
enthusiastic
fans, and the Trop’s unique layout all fed into the Rays’ growing home-field edge (predicted by Silverman). There was probably some luck involved too. But the numbers were dramatic. In 2008 and ’09, the first two seasons in which the franchise had ever contended for anything but fourth place, the Rays went 109-53 at home and just 72-90 on the road.

After Tampa Bay swept the Red Sox in an August 2009 series,
Boston Globe
columnist Adam Kilgore made the feeling of opposing teams and fans clear. “Forgive the Red Sox if they were tempted to board their charter last night still wearing their uniforms, while the cowbells still rang in their ears and the fluorescent lights still stung their eyes. Forgive them if they ran from this place screaming. Forgive them for doing anything to leave behind Tropicana Field as fast as they could.… It is a baseball diamond trapped inside a demented theme park, where catwalks hang and cowbells clang. Playing here feels weird for invaders. It feels like home for the Rays.”

It may have felt like home when times were good, but the stadium dubbed “the Pit” by Joe Maddon soon stopped looking like an opportunity and reverted to being a handicap. Attendance ticked up just 3% in 2009, a decent showing during tough economic times, but still a disappointment given the positive year-after effect that typically comes with winning a pennant. The economy and the fallback in the Rays’ performance were also, of course, contributing factors to 2009’s disappointing attendance. But the Rays failed to see a boost in 2010 too: the Rays ranked twenty-second in MLB in attendance, averaging just 23,000 fans a game. Despite winning their second AL East title in three years, the Rays’ attendance finished slightly
lower
than in 2009.

Even the little quirks that drove opponents batty started backfiring. In an August 2010 series against the Minnesota Twins, the Rays averaged barely 18,000 fans for the first three games of the series. They drew 29,000 for game four, thanks to a special kids’ camp promotion. But that game ended in absurdity when a ninth-inning Jason Kubel infield pop-up struck a catwalk high above the field, landed near the pitcher’s mound, and cost the Rays the game.

“It’s probably the perfect commercial advertisement for a reason to have a new ballpark,” Maddon said afterward. “There’s no better reason than that. I know it works both ways, but to lose a game in a pennant situation like that because of a roof truly indicates why there’s a crying need for a new ballpark in this area, regardless of where they put it. It just needs to be a real baseball field where, if
you lose the pennant by one game and look back at a game like that because the roof got in the way, we’d be very upset. So, again, there’s no better reason than that.”

In just four and a half years, the Trop went from an untapped commodity in ownership’s eyes to the same old Pit, a stadium that couldn’t draw fans even in a 96-win season, a building the manager would just as soon have burned to the ground. For a team that sees opportunity in everything, Tropicana Field is the one problem the Rays can’t seem to fix.

The Howard Frankland Bridge, three miles long, is all that stands between Pinellas and Hillsborough counties and their anchor cities of St. Petersburg and Tampa. But for many residents on both sides of the bridge, that span might as well be 300 miles. St. Pete tends to get slighted when the two cities are compared. More provincial Tampanians gaze across the bay and see a town they imagine as overrun with retirees, and the area immediately around the Trop as a hive of crime and poverty. Both stereotypes are exaggerated: St. Petersburg’s population base has grown progressively younger since a surge in retirees peaked in the 1970s, and urban revitalization has transformed the city center. But stereotypes die hard, especially when paired with other, larger inconveniences. The perceptions of residents outside St. Pete, combined with quirky geography and a woeful lack of infrastructure, turned Tropicana Field into an island within a peninsula that nobody wanted to drive to.

At the behest of St. Pete mayor Rick Baker, a group of local businessmen formed A Baseball Community Inc. (usually called the ABC Coalition) to study the viability of Tropicana Field as a major league ballpark. ABC found many of the usual deficits you’d expect in an aging sports facility, including a lack of state-of-the-art amenities, lucrative club lounges, and luxury suites. There were also many drawbacks specific to the Trop, including seats improperly oriented to the field, no natural light, poor sight lines from many seats, and those pesky catwalks that drive Joe Maddon nuts. But
even if the Rays razed the Trop and built a palatial new home on the same site, they would still face the biggest problem of all—a terrible location.

Google Maps claims that it takes twenty minutes to drive the eighteen miles from Tampa’s western edge to Tropicana Field, located in the southern portion of St. Pete. It just never works out that way. The Howard Frankland Bridge is the most-traveled route over the bay, and it’s often packed. Congestion can slow the rest of the drive down I-275, the only major route from Tampa’s main corridor to St. Pete, then choke the downtown exits leading to the stadium. Doubling Google’s estimate is usually a good starting point.

And that’s only for Tampanians who happen to live within spitting distance of the bridge. Fan out to population centers east of Tampa—Hillsborough County’s fast-growing Brandon, for example—and you could be looking at two-plus hours, coming and going, to see a Rays game on a weeknight. Northern bedroom communities face similar hair-pulling commutes. Greater Orlando’s 2 million–plus residents are theoretically within range, with a ninety-minute jaunt from its southwestern suburbs to the ballpark on paper—but that trip is an exercise in vehicular masochism for those who dare chance it during rush hour.