MLB Notes: Rays Need Solutions After Can-Am Deal Quashed

It’s now official. The Tampa Bay Rays have been locked out by Major League Baseball.

Locked out of Canada, that is.

Their proposal to split a regular season schedule between their home stadium in St. Petersburg (Tropicana Field) and Montreal didn’t seem all that logical, unless you looked at it from the perspective that there are a lot of folks in Canada who go to Florida when the weather gets cold.

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But their ownership no doubt saw this as the most viable way of keeping the team in the Tampa Bay area. They also contends that Commissioner Rob Manfred was inclined to agree. That did not turn out to be the case.

And the city of St. Petersburg had something to say about this too, since their lease with the team (which runs through 2027) does not permit such a thing.

There is a part of me that empathizes with management. You will always hear baseball people say that the best marketing you can possibly do for a team is to create a winner.

Rays Have Had Success With a Low Payroll

Well, over the last fifteen seasons, this franchise, which has consistently had one of the lowest payrolls in the game, and operating in a ballpark that is almost universally regarded as the worst in baseball, has made the playoffs seven times, with two World Series appearances.

This season they are listed at +1350 (and you’ll see similar prices as you look at various sportsbooks) to win the World Series.

So they are a top-level team. And to do what they’ve done, under the circumstances, makes them one of the more outstanding organizations in MLB for more than a decade and a half.

Yet, as teams (in non-pandemic seasons) have routinely drawn over two million fans, the Rays have never gotten there. Their best attendance figure ever was 1,864,999,and most of the time they haven’t come close to that.

So they have something of a beef.

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But is the solution a half-and-half move to Montreal, which lost its team to Washington because it couldn’t survive north of the border?

There were skeptics. Oh, were there skeptics. And you know, they had justification for feeling that way, because what this ultimately boiled down to was a rather transparent attempt to squeeze public money out of both areas to build new open-air stadiums. And for good reason, a lot of people happen to be opposed to that.

As it is, the Rays’ ownership will probably use this as an opportunity to put the wheels in motion for either (1) a new publicly-funded stadium, preferably on the other side of the Howard Franklin Bridge (i.e., Tampa), or (2) a move to a new market entirely. Who knows – maybe Montreal, if they build a stadium.

Maybe St.Petersburg is too inconvenient for Tampa people to get to. Maybe the market itself isn’t responsive in general. Florida is the home for many teams in spring training, so it seemed to be a good place for baseball. In Miami, it would have appeared that with all of the Latins, particularly Cubans (not unlike the Tampa Bay area), a major league team would have been a slam dunk. And with a new stadium plunked down in the middle of Little Havana, even better.

But that has never been the case.

There is the argument that the Tampa Bay market is not very big. Well, can I offer a humble suggestion?

It might take some maneuvering, as well as some diplomacy with the city of St. Petersburg.

Why not move around… a little?

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Florida Expansion an Option for the Rays

There are some sizable cities in Florida, as well as some others that are rapidly growing.

The Rays already play a few games in Orlando. Why not expand that, with a few games in Jacksonville, a few in Tallahassee, a few in Fort Myers, a few in the St. Lucie-Jupiter area (one of those that is rapidly growing). What the hell – they could play the Yankees at Steinbrenner Field, right across the bay in Tampa.

They’ve all got ballparks, and even though they may not normally be big enough to accommodate MLB games, they could charge a premium price.

Then you connect the dots. They could plant a flag in every market of consequence outside of the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Palm Beach area. They could declare themselves “Florida’s Team.” And if they can achieve success at “owning” the place, they have suddenly gone from being in a small market to controlling one of the biggest markets in the country.

How could MLB balk at something like that?

Or does it make too much sense to possibly get anybody’s approval?

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