I don’t live in St. Petersburg, never covered Pinellas County and I don’t follow sports. I’m probably the last guy who should be writing about the drama with the Tampa Bay Rays. But I’ve lived and worked in Tampa long enough to realize why a stadium here never seemed a genuine option.
Tampa might be a bigger market for a stadium, but we never had the money, the land or the votes. Otherwise, the idea’s golden.
The Rays announced this month the team would not move forward with a $1.3-billion stadium and redevelopment project in downtown St. Petersburg, dealing a huge blow to the years-long effort to secure baseball’s long-term future in Tampa Bay. The announcement came after back-to-back hurricanes and local elections changed the dynamics of the agreement, putting Tampa in the spotlight again as a potential default site.
Baseball’s not my thing, but I supported the stadium deal, largely for its promise to transform a huge chunk of St. Pete’s urban core. And I always thought the chatter about Tampa was a distraction. It made business sense to explore any site across the region, but the Tampa flirtation oversold what Hillsborough had to offer and needlessly tested the Ray’s relationships in Pinellas. More important, the focus on Tampa ignored some basic facts and history that made the numbers even harder to crunch. Here are three examples.
No team to keep. The whole pitch about “keeping the Rays” never really landed in Tampa because Tampa never had the Rays to begin with. Tampa residents always associated the team with St. Petersburg, and the hassle of having to drive across the Howard Frankland for games.
When it comes to professional baseball, Tampa has a deeper and richer connection with the New York Yankees, who play spring training here, have a global identity and whose owners, the Steinbrenner family, have given generously to Tampa causes for generations. Getting the team would be a plus for Tampa, but not having baseball here was a wash.
Other civic priorities. Rays supporters identified several potential stadium sites in Tampa. But some were too isolated, and others were poor uses of precious urban space in Tampa’s fast-growing downtown neighborhoods. The ongoing development of Ybor City, the channel district and the West Tampa waterfront should have telegraphed for years that the city wasn’t waiting on baseball. In 30 years as an opinion writer for the Times in Tampa, I’ve heard from local boosters on scores of big ideas, from saving the old Gandy Bridge and hosting the Olympics to turning a mothballed aircraft carrier into a tourist attraction. Nobody from Tampa has ever called me for a meeting about the Rays.
The Bucs hangover. It’s hard to overstate how bad a taste the 1996 deal to build a new football stadium for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers left on Hillsborough taxpayers. Opened in 1998, the stadium, which cost $168 million to construct, was built entirely with public money funded by a half-cent sales tax in Hillsborough. That deal has such a poisonous legacy that last year, three decades after voters first approved the tax, the county expressly avoided including the word “stadium” in a referendum to renew the levy. The Bucs deal would cloud any effort to commit tax money for baseball, complicating an already narrow path to any public-private stadium deal.
Spend your days with Hayes
Subscribe to our free Stephinitely newsletter
Columnist Stephanie Hayes will share thoughts, feelings and funny business with you every Monday.
Loading...
You’re all signed up!
Want more of our free, weekly newsletters in your inbox? Let’s get started.
Explore all your options
These aren’t reasons against Tampa getting involved, merely the political and economic backdrop that would shape any discussion with the Rays. Much of Tampa’s attention also is being consumed with other priorities in other parts of town, from public demands for more housing and better storm drains to ambitious plans for Tampa International Airport and a stadium for the University of South Florida football program.
Could anything happen? Sure. Leicester City won the Premier League in 2016. But Tampa’s size and proximity to St. Pete are not the most relevant metrics in the stadium debate. These deals involving many moving parts – money, location, timing, political will.
You don’t simply drop a chess piece and, poof, a stadium appears. The stars have to align, and there are many reasons why they haven’t in Tampa.