Authors: Jonah Keri
The greater Tampa Bay region is often regarded as a small market by MLB standards. But the population analytics website
DemographicsNow.com
defines it as one of the fifteen largest in the country, with 3.25 million residents. Despite those healthy numbers, suburban sprawl and the Trop’s unfortunate location paint a grim picture. Only 19% of Tampa Bay residents live within a thirty-minute drive of the Trop—by far the smallest percentage of any MLB market. Seattle, with roughly the same population base, counts two and a half times as many residents in a half-hour driving radius. Every market smaller than Tampa Bay counts at least half its residents within thirty minutes of the ballpark. The Denver area includes 800,000 fewer inhabitants than Tampa Bay, yet more than 1.9 million Denverites can make the thirty-minute-or-less drive to Coors Field versus just over 600,000 in Tampa–St. Pete–Clearwater.
“It all boils down to the worst-kept secret in Tampa Bay sports,” wrote Noah Pransky, a reporter for Tampa’s WTSP Radio who covers the Rays and other local sports franchises and their stadium issues in his blog, Shadow of the Stadium. “Tropicana Field was built on the wrong side of the bay.”
If Sternberg could move to a new ballpark in Tampa tomorrow, the Rays would instantly become far more profitable, and have the cash flow they need to retain more top talent and expand the razor-thin margin of error for competing against the Yankees and Red Sox. But he can’t, for many reasons. He can start by thanking Vince Naimoli. The Rays’ former owner signed a thirty-year lease (technically a use agreement) before the team played its first game at the Trop in 1998. Forget skipping over to Tampa or another locale—the Rays are contractually obligated to stare at catwalks and a giant white roof in remote downtown St. Pete through the 2027 season.
Agreements can always be broken, so long as both parties consent. But reaching that point has been a long, excruciating process in other cities’ stadium debates—especially for taxpayers.
Led by late owner Carl Pohlad, the Twins spent more than a decade haranguing the public into building them a new ballpark to replace the Metrodome, which was just thirteen years old when Pohlad started his campaign of pleas and threats. Local government stood strong at first, angering both Pohlad and Major League Baseball. What began as veiled whispers of dissatisfaction metastasized into threats of relocation, even contraction. Pohlad launched his career in the banking business by foreclosing on family farms during the Great Depression. After becoming one of the richest men in America, he ran the Twins on a shoestring budget, racking up revenue-sharing money despite a personal net worth that dwarfed those of all other MLB owners. When lobbying for a new stadium, he had no qualms about crying poor and shaking down local residents and politicians. Hand over $350 million in tax money to boost the owner’s already fat profit margins, Pohlad’s surrogates in Minnesota and on Park Avenue warned, or kiss your beloved Twins good-bye.
“Let’s just concentrate on getting this done so we don’t have to consider the alternative,” Bud Selig said in an interview about the Twins’ stadium impasse. He was speaking during Game 1 of the 2005 World Series, with not a Twin in sight.
In May 2006, the state legislature finally caved. Hennepin County would spend $390 million on the Twins’ new ballpark, counting the cost overruns that inevitably occur during construction to give taxpayers one last kick in the nuts. The Twins kicked in $130 million—just one quarter of the total.
The Florida Marlins also needed more than a decade to strong-arm local politicians into building them a new stadium. At least they had a decent excuse. When Wayne Huizenga sold the Marlins to John Henry in 1998, Huizenga retained most of the revenue streams coming from the stadium. Thus, even if the Marlins had boosted their lousy attendance, the team wouldn’t have derived much benefit. On the other hand, the lease was getting ready to expire, and the Marlins could have tried to renegotiate the lease. Instead, they tried to land that coveted public handout. After several attempts, though, Henry gave up his quest to get a new publicly financed ballpark. He transferred ownership to Jeffrey Loria in the shady MLB ménage à trois that gifted the Red Sox to Henry and the Marlins to Loria.
The methods Loria and his stepson David Samson employed in their own stadium gambit amounted to a giant con. They launched big publicity campaigns, calling out a number of potential sites for their new palace. They argued that a new stadium would bring enormous economic benefits to the area—a fact resoundingly debunked by many economists who note, among other things, that sports stadiums don’t pump new money into the economy; they merely divert money from other points of sale. The Marlins’ owners also got the poor-mouthing act down pat:
we’re barely breaking even
, the deceitful duo pleaded to every public official within earshot.
This was, of course, a bald-faced lie. Despite playing in the seventh-largest metropolitan area in the country, the Marlins were blessed by MLB’s deeply flawed revenue-sharing system with an
orgy of cash. Deadspin and the Associated Press released leaked financial statements from the Marlins, Rays, and other teams in August 2010. The documents show the Marlins raking in more than $90 million in revenue-sharing for 2008 and 2009 combined. They perennially spend less on player salaries than nearly any other team in baseball. Even after accounting for all its other expenses and liabilities, the franchise makes big money—more than $29 million in net income in 2008 alone. And that’s just the income we know about, let alone the annual appreciation in franchise value enjoyed by the Marlins, like most other teams.
The best way to build public support for a new stadium deal—other than threats—is simple (in theory, if not practice): win. That’s just what the Marlins did when they knocked off the Yankees in the 2003 World Series. Soon after, the team, the city of Miami, and Miami-Dade County announced plans to fund a new ballpark. First, Miami proposed a baseball-only stadium for the Marlins at the site of the Orange Bowl. A few months later, Miami-Dade County commissioners agreed to contribute funding for the new stadium, which would cost roughly $435 million when combined with an adjacent parking complex. But in May 2005, the Florida legislature rejected a $60 million sales-tax rebate that would have helped pay for the stadium.
That setback, combined with the rising projected cost of stadium construction, prompted Loria and Samson to step up their shakedown. When their grandiose plans didn’t inspire anyone who mattered, they brought out the big gun: extortion.
“There are no more deadlines,” Samson warned. “No more fake deadlines. No more real deadlines. We need a place to play after 2010, and we don’t have one. Baseball is no longer assured of staying in [south] Florida.”
Loria and Samson made aggressive overtures toward San Antonio and other markets, vowing to move the Marlins if they didn’t get what they wanted. The flirtation with San Antonio was at once amusing, maddening, and hollow: Loria had earlier (and ironically, as it turned out) played a role in MLB commandeering the one market
capable of being more than a stalking horse for a struggling club like the Marlins—the Expos’ eventual new home in Washington, D.C. But the region’s feckless politicians, lousy poker players all, failed to read the Marlins’ bluff. Apparently unaware of the many cases of MLB owners duping politicians into bankrolling new stadiums—and Loria’s own past unscrupulous dealings in baseball—city and county leaders never demanded that the Marlins open their books. After years of browbeating, Loria and Samson finally convinced the city, county, and state to believe their lies, and the Marlins got their stadium approved.
“New stadiums are great for team owners so long as they’re not the ones building them,” said
Field of Schemes
’ Neil deMause. “The whole model is to socialize the cost and privatize the profit.”
The thing is, stadiums are not
net
revenue-positive. They’re boondoggles that don’t work. The reason teams make money off them is because cities pay most of the bill and teams collect most of the profits. St. Pete would be better off just writing Stu Sternberg a check for $100 million than building the Rays a new stadium: it’s much cheaper that way.
The Marlins gained final approval for their stadium deal in December 2007, just a few weeks after the Rays made their own initial proposal. Sternberg sought to build Rays Ballpark on the site of Progress Energy Park (formerly Al Lang Field), a small spring training stadium sitting on a nine-acre downtown lot abutting the bay. If all had gone according to plan, the Rays would have played in the new park on opening day 2012. The design was ambitious and unprecedented. Resembling a huge sailboat, the stadium could be covered by retractable fabric, which a pulley system would be able to open or close in eight minutes. Sternberg pledged one third of the estimated $450 million construction cost. The Rays sought another $60 million from the same thirty-year state sales-tax rebate that benefited the Marlins. Most ambitiously, the plan called for Tropicana Field to be redeveloped into a major mixed-used complex that would include apartments, condos, offices, and hotel and retail space. The Rays claimed that the sale of the Trop’s redevelopment
rights, combined with new property taxes, could generate $800 million in new revenue for the city.
The plan failed for several reasons. Downtown residents spoke out against the idea of a huge, multi-year construction project in their backyard, not to mention 35,000 fans streaming into the park and back out onto the streets eighty-one times every year. Environmental factors also posed a challenge. The Rays originally envisioned filling in two and a half acres of Tampa Bay. They slashed that number twice—which still wasn’t enough to satisfy critics. The Rays also misread the community’s interest in paying for a new stadium. Having already watched the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers saddle Hillsborough County with a hefty financial burden—and seeing the honeymoon period peter out for the Bucs and Raymond James Stadium—the Rays were unlikely to get the kind of sweetheart deal from the community that the Marlins had received. Indeed, a similar situation had unfolded in Seattle, where, after funding new buildings for the NFL’s Seahawks and MLB’s Mariners, the city was unwilling to bend over for the owners of the NBA’s SuperSonics.
The biggest problem was the plan’s timing. The Twins, Marlins, and other teams had shown that it often takes more than ten years merely to get a plan approved, sometimes fifteen or more to go from the germ of an idea to throwing out the first pitch. The Rays thought the Marlins had created a precedent for their own deal, but in reality there was no way that was going to happen. The Marlins’ stadium was just one part of a gigantic, citywide endeavor that dwarfed even the Rays’ ambitious proposal. It was an impossibly unlikely outcome at an impossible time, the kind of windfall that happens once in a lifetime. Florida’s housing market was cratering, and Tampa–St. Pete would prove to be one of the regions hardest hit by the recession, with unemployment topping 13% in adjacent areas. To bypass the usual ten years of jousting would have been improbable. But introducing the idea as thousands of locals lost their jobs and their homes proved disastrous. The plan made it to a St. Petersburg city council vote, with the city agreeing to draw up language
for an approval referendum in November 2008. But opposition had grown too intense, and the waterfront site had inherent, perhaps insoluble problems. Less than three weeks after clearing that first hurdle, the Rays suspended the waterfront plan indefinitely. The next spring, they abandoned it entirely.
“I wonder just the way the political climate is now, if there would still be opposition even if all the Rays asked for were road investments and infrastructure [as part of a stadium plan],”
St. Petersburg Times
columnist Marc Topkin said in a 2009 interview. “I really think there would be. They closed five elementary schools and two middle schools in Pinellas County this week. So, you can’t come back the next day with a headline of ‘Rays Want X Amount of Millions for Their New Stadium.’ They’re going to have to weather this out.”
Not much has changed since. The Tampa Bay region continues to struggle with sky-high unemployment and sluggish growth even as GDP results have picked up nationwide. The economy has taken its toll on fans of other local teams too. The Buccaneers failed to sell out their first preseason game in 2010, marking the first time since the stadium opened fourteen years earlier that the NFL had to black out a game for that reason. Meanwhile, St. Pete’s city council took what looked like a hard-line stand against the Rays’ going anywhere. “We absolutely feel good about our position,” said St. Petersburg mayor Bill Foster. “We all know that there are seventeen years remaining on their agreement to hold major league baseball games at [Tropicana Field]. I promise I will uphold my end of the deal. I expect them to do the same.”
Foster had every right to draw a line in the sand. The stadium lease explicitly prohibits the Rays from even talking to cities outside St. Pete.
With the waterfront site dead, the Rays stayed quiet and let the ABC Coalition prepare its final report. The group’s conclusions surprised nobody who’d been paying attention. Tropicana Field is a dump. The Rays need a new stadium with a retractable roof, better sight lines, and more of the modern “amenities” if they are going to
generate the necessary revenues. Oh, and they need to get the hell out of St. Pete. In many ways, this was a curious set of conclusions. Leaked documents had shown that the Rays are generating a profit (albeit a small one) while also competing and winning in the toughest division in baseball.
The group also posited that the Rays could generate nearly $300 million in local economic impact for the region, not including intangible benefits such as raising Tampa Bay’s national profile. Though such claims had been roundly debunked in other cities by virtually every independent study, the ABC’s report still softened St. Pete government’s stance considerably. St. Pete officials trusted ABC’s findings above past studies by economists contradicting such claims, and they had no desire to see the team bolt. Foster eventually agreed to at least consider relocation … as long as the new site was in greater St. Petersburg and the city could annex that territory into its own purview if needed.