Rays make a $1.3 billion bet that baseball will work in St. Pete, after all

ST. PETERSBURG — So the team with no money is staying in the city with no fans.

It makes perfect sense once you stop laughing. The Rays and St. Pete are made for each other in the same way that nerds and wallflowers inevitably hook up in Hollywood.

When the St. Pete City Council voted 5-3 on Thursday to approve a $1.3 billion stadium deal as part of a massive $6.5 billion redevelopment of the Tropicana Field site, it was the culmination of a 20-year journey filled with arguments, disappointments, flirtations, frustrations, and lots and lots of doubt.

And for those who insist it’s folly to build a new ballpark in the shadow of an underperforming stadium, you are overlooking the obvious clues that are at the heart of every romance. Yes, the Rays preferred Tampa. So did Major League Baseball and a good portion of bay area fans.

But Tampa already has the Bucs. And the Lightning. And the airport, Busch Gardens, the zoo, the aquarium and USF. Tampa did not necessarily need baseball and was never going to provide enough public money to make a stadium fiscally attractive to the Rays.

St. Pete, on the other hand, had 80-some acres adjacent to downtown that needed the kind of big-time developer the Rays could attract. The city had a county commission that has been banking tourism dollars for this very purpose and is expected to give its own approval on July 30. Almost as important, St. Pete still harbors the resentment of every younger sibling wanting to make its mark.

As it turns out, St. Pete and the Rays were right for each other. You could almost go so far as to say they needed each other.

It just took the dalliance with Tampa, and the outrageousness of the Montreal sister city plan, for both sides to realize it.

“When we were pursuing the sister city concept, I was out there saying St. Petersburg will never have a fulltime Major League Baseball team,” Rays president Brian Auld said. “Today, that was proven wrong.

“There’s a couple of things that represents. No. 1, you have to be open-minded and willing to change your mind. And, No. 2, markets change. Cities change. Communities change. All of that is happening here.”

The same disadvantages that have hampered attendance at Tropicana Field since 1998 — population, demographics, a dearth of mass transit — still exist today. The difference is the emergence of new advantages — a thriving restaurant/bar scene, massive condo projects and the redevelopment plan that could turn the surrounding area into a destination site — that could potentially change the equation for St. Pete.

“I had two children who went to school in Nashville. We looked at it in 2006-07 and I saw the city that was there (and) then I saw what it was by 2010 and 2014,” Rays owner Stuart Sternberg said. “I’ve been to Austin. (Team president) Matt Silverman got married in Austin. I was there previous to that and I saw what happened in Austin. I’ve seen what happened in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. These things can happen. There needs to be a spark, there needs to be a catalyst.

“It was clear to me 3, 4, 5 years ago that St. Pete had crossed over the Rubicon. There’s nothing but blue skies now and I felt our commitment here and investment here, along with Hines and the ballpark, would really help move that forward and we would have an amazing city to live in, play in and work in.”

While the story has been rapidly building toward this conclusion since Ken Welch took office as mayor in 2022, it was a long way from obvious a decade ago. The Rays first proposed a ballpark on the St. Pete waterfront. They longed for a shot at the Albert Whitted Airport site. They looked into the riverfront in Tampa, as well as Ybor City.

As the use agreement that tied them to Tropicana Field until 2027 began to wind down, there was increased grumbling that Sternberg could simply cash out by selling the team to buyers interested in moving the team to Nashville or Portland or somewhere eager to pay billions to join MLB’s exclusive club.

“We’re fortunate that the city grew in a way that made this possible,” said Silverman. “Stu is an options trader and doesn’t make (rash) decisions. Time is your friend. If we had to make a decision 10 years ago it would have been different. But the fact is we had the time to kind of play this forward in a way that the solution eventually changed for us.”

Meanwhile, there was a similar dynamic on the city side. It took several different mayoral administrations before Welch, who grew up in the Historic Gas Plant District and understood the resentment of Black families who never experienced the economic growth that baseball was supposed to provide when the Trop was initially approved in 1986, could bridge the divide.

The baseball stadium will dominate the headlines and sound bites in the coming days, but the resurrection of a discarded neighborhood is where the goosebumps are found.

“The stadium is the sexy part of this for a lot of folks,” Welch said. “But what this means in terms of honoring those (1986) promises is a huge part of this, along with the economic growth. You know, there’s been no office space created here for a long time. This is a major transformative deal far beyond baseball but the beautiful thing is baseball will be the engine that drives all of this. It’s the anchor that Hines said they had to have for this kind of project.

“There’s a real synergy here. Everyone is working together, and it’s a beautiful thing.”

Will the stadium propel the Rays into the upper echelon of MLB revenue producers? Probably not. Will attendance crack the two million mark for the first time since the inaugural season? That remains to be seen.

This is not the usual story of suites filled with corporate bigwigs and a payroll the size of a small nation. The Rays have been one of the most successful franchises in the game while operating on a minuscule budget, and any growth is likely to be incremental. And St. Pete has unfairly been ridiculed for attendance problems that have more to do with a market’s milieu than its passion for a baseball team.

So, no, you don’t have to agree with this renewal of vows. You don’t even have to understand it.

But the Rays and St. Pete have decided to stick it out together, and here’s hoping their love affair will last.

John Romano can be reached at jromano@tampabay.com. Follow @romano_tbtimes.

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