Tampa Bay Rays trying to pull usual scam for new stadium in place no one wants to go

By now just about everybody is smart to the publicly-funded stadium rip-off. Groups threaten to go away, native and state politicians buckle, residents pour their tax cash into a brand new stadium, and solely the staff proprietor and their high-ranking staff see the advantages. And generations of taxpayers find yourself asking why are we paying for this? As increasingly individuals stand as much as this rip-off, groups attempt to discover increasingly methods to do it behind closed doorways the place they don’t get a say.

The Tampa Bay Rays have been on a stadium sojourn for nearly their complete existence. Their attendance has principally at all times sucked, and so they seemingly have been searching for a brand new resolution since proper after their enlargement season. Many prospects in Tampa had been put forth, after which the Rays had been the tremendous geniuses who floated the thought of splitting the season between Tampa and Montreal, the place they might maintain two cities hostage to pay for 2 separate stadiums.

That appears to have, fortunately, fallen on the scrap heap, and god is aware of the precedent which may have set for anybody else. The Rays are again to attempting to repair the place they’re, which implies they’re back to a familiar playbook.

Because the above story says, although the quilt story is that Rays proprietor Stu Sternberg will kick in some $500 million, with the shell sport of overruns and TIFs and different developments, it’s arduous to know what the general public will probably be requested to kick in themselves. And naturally, the general public gained’t be getting something again besides the prospect to look at baseball in a barely good place (although presumably without an actual seat) or to lease and store in obscenely costly locations which are additionally owned by Sternberg. MLB groups aren’t simply groups anymore, they’re actual property rackets.

To provide the Cliffs Notes model of why these by no means work for municipalities: new stadiums don’t create a bunch of latest, long-standing jobs. They don’t lure any extra vacationers than a metropolis already will get (and the Rays are extremely depending on visiting followers already), and all of the revenues return to the staff and proprietor after varied tax breaks for them go into it. This one can be no completely different.

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There’s no there there

The other problem with this whole project is that it’s in the same location as The Trop, and it’s a location that the Tampa area has already roundly rejected. The Trop is extremely hard to get to and get back from, with basically only one bridge leading to the stadium. This only seeks to redevelop The Trop, not move it to somewhere people actually want to take the time to travel to. It’s still going to be across a bridge that will be way too crowded. There are only 258,000 people in St. Pete. They need Tampa residents to come across, and they just don’t.

Certainly, they can’t complain about the product. The Rays are consistently good and consistently produce stars through their system. Perhaps whatever fans are willing to make the trip are put off by knowing that it’s only a short amount of time before those stars are flogged for middle schoolers because it’s time to pay them more than a pittance. But Sternberg has used the low attendance as an excuse for that, and the cycle feeds itself. Perhaps that’s why he has such a hard-on for the redevelopment around the park, knowing that a stadium in St. Petersburg is always going to be a loser.

And it’s not as if there aren’t fans. The Rays actually rank center of the pack relating to TV rankings. Their rankings are about on par with the Brewers, besides the Brewers double them up in common attendance. Whereas The Trop could appear to be a storage on TV or really feel like that once you’re in it, if that storage had been extra central, extra individuals would go to look at staff, which the Rays often are.

Possibly a brand new Rays stadium will get them a curiosity bump in attendance for a few years, like their enlargement 12 months after they averaged 30,000 or after they first received good across the 2008 World Sequence journey after they averaged 22,000. However clearly that hasn’t caught, even with good groups. Possibly it’s the fixed discuss of relocation. No matter it’s, Rays followers have made it clear they don’t actually need to go to St. Pete. And but, they’re going to be requested to pay for a stadium they’ve already stated they don’t need to go to. Identical because it ever was.