The Tampa Bay Rays will not be a two-city team.
On Thursday, Major League Baseball rejected the team’s ridiculous “sister city” concept. The Rays wanted to have two homes: one in Florida, presumably in Tampa, and another in Montreal. That’s because the Rays play in a converted hockey rink, Tropicana Field, in St. Petersburg, Florida, and their lease expires in 2027.
It’s good that MLB said no to this one. The Rays wanted two new stadiums in two cities to accommodate an MLB team that doesn’t have a massive following. The Rays are a notoriously cheap franchise. Their $70,836,327 payroll last season ranked 26th among 30 MLB teams. Does anyone think that a team that refuses to shell out for top-tier free agents is somehow going to pay for this endeavor? The Rays want taxpayers to help fund a new stadium for them in Florida, after all.
Taxpayer-funded stadiums are a bad enough deal already. They’re often funded through regressive means such as a county sales tax or a car rental tax. They take money from working people and fund something that benefits millionaires and billionaires. Study after study shows these stadiums don’t provide enough economic benefit to justify their existence.
Just imagine how much worse that would be if instead of playing half of a team’s games at their home facility, that number decreases to one-quarter of the games. That’s even less work for the underpaid stadium workers.
It also never made sense because the Rays aren’t a historically great franchise. They’ve never won a World Series. They won the American League East last year but lost the American League Division Series against the Boston Red Sox, a team that was tied for second place in the American League East standings in the regular season. The best the Rays have done is make it to the World Series and lose twice: once in 2008 and again in the coronavirus-shortened 2020 season.
Plus, the last time there was an MLB team in Montreal that didn’t spend money, it went poorly. It’s the reason the Montreal Expos (1969 to 2004) are now the Washington Nationals. People lacked interest in a second-rate franchise in Montreal, so they didn’t show up to games. If they couldn’t support their own city’s team, then how would Montreal feel about sharing a team with an American city?
If the Rays want to relocate, they should go to Tampa — and they should pay for the stadium themselves. They can invest their own money, get a naming rights deal for the stadium, offer personal seat licenses, and find tenants for the stadium when they’re not using it if they want to bring down the cost.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts. He is also a freelance writer who has been published in USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other outlets.
