Why Tampa wasn’t the real option for rays

I don’t live in St. Petersburg, I don’t cover Pinellas County, and I don’t follow the sport. I’m probably the last guy to write about dramas on the Tampa Bay Rays. But I lived in Tampa and worked long enough to understand why I didn’t think the stadium here was a real option.

Tampa may be a bigger market for stadiums, but we had no money, land or votes. Otherwise, the idea is golden.

The Rays announced this month that the team will not move forward with a $1.3 billion stadium and redevelopment project in downtown St. Petersburg, causing a major blow to years of effort to ensure the long-term future of baseball in Tampa Bay. The announcement comes after consecutive hurricanes and local elections changed contract dynamics and brought Tampa back into the spotlight as a potential default site.

Baseball isn’t about me, but I supported the stadium contract. This is primarily due to the promise to change the huge chunks of St. Pete’s urban core. And I always thought chatting about Tampa was a distraction. Exploring every site throughout the region made business sense, but Tampa’s affair oversold what Hillsboro had to offer, unnecessarily testing Ray’s relationship in Pinellas. More importantly, the focus on Tampa is ignoring some basic facts and history that make numbers even more difficult. Here are three examples.

There are no teams to maintain. Tampa had no rays from the start, so the whole “keep the ray” pitch never actually landed on Tampa. Tampa residents have always linked the game with the hassle of having to run teams in St. Petersburg and Howard Frankland.

When it comes to professional baseball, Tampa has a deeper, richer connection with the New York Yankees, who are training in the spring here. Getting a team is a positive thing for Tampa, but the thing that wasn’t playing baseball here was laundry.

Other citizen priorities. Rays supporters have identified several potential stadium sites in Tampa. However, some were too isolated, others were poor use of valuable urban spaces in Tampa’s burgeoning downtown neighborhoods. Ongoing developments in Ybor City, the Channel District and West Tampa waterfront should have portrayed telegraphs over the years that the city hadn’t waited for baseball. Thirty years after being an opinion writer for Tampa’s Times, I’ve heard from a booster on many big ideas from local boosters to rescuing the old Gandhi Bridge and turning aircraft carriers into tourist attractions, from hosting the Olympics. No one in Tampa has ever called me to a meeting about the rays.

Bucks hangover. It’s hard to exaggerate how bad the 1996 contract to build a new soccer stadium for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers left behind by taxpayers in Hillsboro. The stadium, which opened in 1998, costs $168 million to build and was fully built with public funds funded by a half-cent sales tax in Hillsboro. The transaction has a very toxic legacy, and last year, 30 years after voters first approved the tax, the county explicitly avoided the referendum to renew collections, including the word “stadium.” Bucs’ trading clouds any effort to commit taxes for baseball, complicating the already narrow path to public-private stadium trading.

These are not reasons for Tampa’s involvement, but only the political and economic background that shapes the debate with Rays. Much of Tampa’s attention is also being consumed by other priorities in other parts of the town. This is from more people’s demands for more housing and storm drains to the ambitious plans at Tampa International Airport and the University of South Florida Football Program stadium.

Can something happen? of course. Leicester City won the Premier League in 2016, but Tampa’s size and proximity to St. Pete are not the most relevant indicators in the stadium debate. These transactions involve many moving parts, such as money, location, timing, and political will.

You don’t just drop a chess piece, but a stadium comes in. The stars must match, and there are many reasons why they are not in Tampa.