Tampa to Montreal? Sacre Bleu!!!

Just so my friends in Tampa - St. Pete understand that this is not just conjecture by a bunch so slide-rule toting SABR-metricians, here is a local story from ABC News. Not that you should believe everything you hear from them, but.......where there's smoke?



from ABC Action News:

http://www.abcactionnews.com/news/rays-targeted-by-montreal





from Seamheads.com

Tampa to Montreal? Trotting Out the Same Old Tired Narrative | Seamheads.com:

What an insult to the people of the Tampa-St. Pete area. How low have you sunk when you are worse than Montreal? Well, let’s look at the numbers. Attendance in Tampa is the worst of any major league city and has never been above 2 million for any season other than their inaugural season when 2.5 million came to see the Rays lose 99 games in 1998.  But there are still about 19,000 people who will come out to see the Rays play on average. Montreal in its best years could draw more than 20,000, but they never topped 30,000 and in their final seven seasons when the team was buffeted by the same winds of change as have begun now in Tampa, they barely managed 10,000 a year.

In his interview on the subject Steinberg actually spoke lovingly about Stade Olympic where the roof crashed down on the field and halted play for more than a month while the mess was cleaned up and the place was declared fit for baseball again. MLB is at least true to their mantra and is demanding that Montreal commit to a new stadium before any serious talk is made about another team in Canada.

My guess is that this is just the first ante in the poker game between Steinberg and the mayor of St. Petersburg–who will not let the Rays out of their contract to play at Tropicana Field, which is owned by his city. The ante will be upped when a more realistic alternative location for the Rays is found in the next round of betting. It might be Charlotte, the 23rd largest metropolitan area in the US (Tampa-St. Pete is 18th) with a population of 2.3 million. Charlotte has hosted an NBA team successfully twice and with Michael Jordan as the principal owner of the team they have bee relatively successful. They are just an example of a large city that does not rob from an exiting MLB team’s TV market area and has many of the attributes for success.

'via Blog this'



My guess is this is typical war-games tactics from the MLB playbook to help an existing owner wrangle concessions from local politicians.St. Petersburg has experience in these type of affairs, but they were on the Montreal end of the proceedings. Now they are on the other side.



Seems like they are going to get it AGAIN, and good and hard.



That's what happens when you put things in the hands of politicians and oligarchs.