Tampa Bay Rays: Leaving Florida? Think Caribbean, not Canada
By Bill Felber
The Tampa Bay Rays are talking about playing half their games in Montreal…but Caribbean cities may be better sites
Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg is floating the idea of playing half his team’s games in Montreal. He may be looking in the wrong direction.
Beyond question, the Rays suffer from a lack of community support. With just 1.18 million paying fans, Tampa ranked ahead of only the Miami Marlins in attendance in 2019…and that was despite fielding a 96-win team.
They have unfailingly finished 29th or 30th in attendance since 2011, notwithstanding that they have produced five 90-win seasons during that time.
Almost everybody in and around Tampa Bay blames the Rays’ situation on their home field, Tropicana Field. It’s a domed structure built in the mid-1980s in the hope of landing an established major league team, probably either the Giants or White Sox.
That didn’t happen, but when MLB considered expansion in 1998 the Trop made Tampa plausible home for a new team. Thus were born the team then called the Devil Rays.
Today the Trop is almost universally panned. For starters, it was constructed in downtown St. Petersburg, away from the region’s population base. Since it is fully indoor –no retractable roof – there isn’t a blade of grass in it, conveying a sense of artificiality. Finally, parking is – to be kind – a challenge.
Due to those problems, the Trop is one of the worst revenue producers among major league ballparks. Forbes estimated that in 2019 it produced just $119 million in revenue for the Rays, the second-lowest figure in MLB and less than half the league-wide average.
Rays management spent much of the past few years trying to work out an arrangement for construction of a new facility in the suburbs, but that plan collapsed last year. When it did, Sternberg began floating the idea of playing half the team’s games in Montreal.
The Tampa Bay Rays cannot move due to a contract with the stadium binding them to Tampa for another eight seasons.
Splitting home games may make sense…but why look north when there are so many more inviting options to the south. Unlike Canada, the Caribbean-Latin region is already a baseball hotbed, producing close to one in five major leaguers today.
Granted, some of the potential Caribbean locations might pose challenges, but why not road test them for consideration as homes to a future round of expansion? The downside does exist, but the upside could be substantial.