Rays should not be playing half season in Montreal
Pushing two-city model is nothing but a bargaining tool
Let us pretend that you are a baseball fan in the Tampa Bay region.
I know, I know, it’s asking a lot. There are years of evidence that such a thing is vanishingly rare. The white rhino of sports fans. But for the sake of argument, play along. You decide to invest in your baseball fandom. You buy a pair of season tickets. Not the super-premium kind, and not the nosebleeds, but good seats, in the 200 level. Through April, May and June, these tickets would cost about US$6,000. Not cheap at all but, hey, you love baseball. The crack of the bat, the pop of the leather, the thump of the trash can when the Astros are in town. It’s all so romantic. Money well spent.
And then, come July, the team leaves. It decamps for a city that is 2,400 kilometres away, and across an international border. Your team is now a 22-hour drive away, maybe a bit less if you have an exceptionally large bladder. For the rest of the season, the months during which the baseball season gets interesting, you can only watch on TV, for your team is not the Tampa Bay Rays any longer, but the Tamontreal Rayspos. Or the Montampa Exprays.
How are you feeling about that $6,000 investment now? I suspect you would be feeling like you might as well have flushed it down the toilet.
And yet this is still the scheme to which the Rays ownership and Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred claim to be committed. On Thursday, after an owners’ meeting in Florida, Manfred said he was “100 per cent convinced” that the Tampa-Montreal plan was the best way to keep baseball in Tampa.
Per the Tampa Bay Times, he also gave some wondrously vague quotes about support for the plan. “People continue to believe that the two-city alternative they’re exploring is viable,” Manfred said. And also: “There is significant receptivity among our group, and excitement in some quarters about the possibility.”
You know your plan is aces when you have significant receptivity with certain people and in some quarters.
The plan is, of course, ridiculous in many ways. After several years in which the Rays have been unable to find the right combination of site and funding for a new stadium in Tampa
St. Petersburg, it somehow imagines that it will be easier to build two of them in two cities. Stadium proposals are always pitched as worthy public investments because of the consumer spending they bring to local bars and restaurants, but each of these would only be doing so for 41 nights a year. Why would local authorities in either place see that as a good use of money?
The questions abound. Why would any player want to play for a franchise in which he had to have two homes in two countries over the course of a season? Why would anyone want to work at the ballpark in either city when it would only be a three-month job? Which city would get the all-important playoff dates? Who would plan the parade?
For now, Manfred and Rays principal owner Stuart Sternberg are content to wave all this away. No one else is saying much, although Toronto Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro did his colleagues a favour by telling the Times that he was “supportive” of the Rays exploring the twocity plan. In a world in which this might actually happen, that makes sense: the Jays suddenly having a new geographic rival would be good for business. His position is not unlike the support offered by potential partners in Montreal: if the Rays want to play in Florida during Montreal’s lousy-weather months, and then come to Quebec for the good part of the season, sure, sounds great! But this is like when a little kid tells you she wants to grow up and be Taylor Swift and also an astronaut and a unicorn. That’s nice, sweetie. Dream big, little one.
What no one wants to admit is that this is an insanely bad idea for the fans in Tampa-St. Pete, such as they are. The Rays already have awful attendance — second-worst in MLB — and tepid local support. Last season, they won 96 games and made the playoffs for the first time in six seasons and their average attendance from a year earlier went up by 293 fans. That is a three-digit number. I did not forget a zero. This is the fan base that is suddenly going to embrace a spring-only team, one that maybe comes back for the playoffs if they’re lucky? It is absurd. But at least it would give Youppi some work.
Not surprisingly, St. Petersburg, which has the Rays locked into a lease at Tropicana Field through 2027, has been cool to this nonsense, probably because they see it for what it is: a scheme to get that city to allow the Rays to wriggle out of its commitment to the Trop so the team can then play Tampa and Montreal against one another to find out which city is willing to offer it a sweeter stadium deal.
It’s the only way in which any of this makes sense. The two-city idea is a mirage, a non-starter, and a transparent negotiating tactic. The baseball executives going along with this charade only look more foolish the longer they do it.