Gothamite

26 minutes ago, AstroBull21 said:

To be fair, the Tampa Bay Times is behind a paywall now (as of a few months ago) after a few articles, so alot of locals have given up on their sites unless they're a subscriber already.

Maybe.  But that’s from their YouTube feed, which is free. 

As is this.

This is absolutely amazing.

2 hours ago, MattMill said:

Second year doing it. Last year, I want to say 12-20 squads with less games. This year maybe 2-3 times that with much games with those identities. It was easy to miss last year.

Third year, actually. 

Quote

Minor League Baseball’s Copa de la Diversion program has grown from just four teams in 2017 to 33 last year to 72 this season (2019).

As an aside, those uniforms were designed because they were planning a home-and-home series with the Brewers.  But Milwaukee decided not to host their game after all, leaving Minnesota the road team in their own stadium.

1 hour ago, the admiral said:

they don't make any money, which in turn is largely because they don't have a nice and accessible building.

Well, that is what they say, but it is far from certain.

I suspect we may never know, since I think relocation outside of the Tampa Bay area is somewhat more likely than relocation within it. 

We know that NFL teams have their entire payroll completely covered by shared revenues.  Obviously, MLB revenues vary more than the NFL, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if MLB clubs were in a similar position.  All but maybe the very highest spending team or two. 

That’s before the first ticket is sold.  No major-league sports team loses money.  Ever.  Not even the bad ones or the poorly-supported ones.

Yeah - the city doesn’t care whether the team makes money (which, make no mistake, they definitely do).  Just so long as they keep making the rent payments. 

St. Petersburg has a vested interest in keeping the Rays within its borders.  From the city’s perspective, letting them move to Tampa is almost as bad as seeing them go to Montreal.  

Owners are loath to involve themselves in another owner’s business, so I can see staying out of the way as long as possible. But moving out of San Francisco would have impacted their business, and I don’t see any reason why they should have voted to do so.

So in the end, it really doesn’t matter how close he came to a deal with anyone Tampa Bay.  The vote was likely a non-starter all along.

FWIW, I don’t think the AL would have let the White Sox move out of Chicago either.  Was only a couple decades earlier that they scuttled the Sox-to-Milwaukee deal because they saw what happened when the other league abandoned a major American city.  They were not going to make that mistake themselves. 

The Tampa Bay Times has a long take on this, worth reading. 

https://www.tampabay.com/sports/rays/2019/06/22/the-rays-montreal-plan-a-peek-behind-the-curtain/

Good photos too, including this one:

In this file photo, Jim Anderson, St. Petersburg Times pressroom superintendent, holds up a copy of an Aug. 8, 1992 edition of the St. Petersburg Times that commemorates a deal that would have moved the San Francisco Giants to the Tampa Bay area. [Associated Press]

15 hours ago, AustinFomBoston said:

Was The Rays attendance even that much better during 08 when they made the World Series? Did they even sell out any of their home games? 

A little bit, not much.  Nor did they get a significant attendance boost the year after, which often happens.

The attendance was maybe a little less bad during their amazing run, but it sure as hell didn't even begin to approach "good".

27 minutes ago, marlinfan said:

The Marlins are more popular than the Yankees in Miami.

Interestingly enough, after the Rays had won the AL pennant they still weren’t more popular than the Yankees in the Tampa Bay area.  Nor were they more popular than the Red Sox; one of the best teams in baseball was the third-favorite team among baseball fans in its own town.

And yet after the first fire sale they won a second world championship.  Really finding it hard to be too sympathetic about that one. 

I know it sucks to lose your favorite player.  But fans of all teams lose their favorite players all the time, and they don’t get two world championships out of it.  Only, what, four other teams have been able to repeat in the years since?

3 hours ago, SFGiants58 said:

 

Would you be saying that if the Marlins had competent ownership and didn’t perform the first fire sale?

For all the bitching about the first file sale, they went back to and won a second World Series.  Hard to feel too sorry for them. 

9 minutes ago, SFGiants58 said:

The team only exists because of Vince Naimoli’s lawsuit. Either face a $3.5 billion anti-trust lawsuit or give some cheap doofus an expansion team. Also, after blue-balling the market for so long, an expansion team was a half-decent way to save face. Now, we see that the people who doubted the market during the 1980s/90s were right. As I’ve said before, MLB teams, St. Pete politicians/civil servants, and Tampa Bay Area owners killed regular season MLB baseball in the market even before a team could take the field.

 

That’s the impression I got, anyway.

I get that people were turned off by ownership, but in any other market winning a lot and going to a World Series would put hard feelings aside. 

I can’t think of another market so indifferent to its team.  So indifferent that its own players have to call it out. 

2 hours ago, GDAWG said:

Huh.....Tampa spent most of the 80's trying to lure Major League Baseball to their city.  They finally get one in 1998 and two decades later, that team wants out. 

In retrospect, not a good expansion choice. They’re a distant third favorite in their own market. 

The telling thing here is that MLB is saying baseball in Tampa Bay can't work out even with a new stadium.  Yikes.

4 hours ago, zigbazah said:

I don't like the white outline on the Tigers' road jersey.

Same with the Yankees.  Pointless, unnecessary trim that only clutters and ruins a great design.  

4 hours ago, LMU said:

It's all about the TV contract.

 

The issue again is that he's only sticking his toe in enough to get the media rights money without actually committing to either the region the stadium is in nor the region they're named after.  They're the only Big 4 franchise that won't sell a shirt with a city/state/region on it.  That's pretty pathetic.

For at least the last ten years, Oakland has been using just the name “Raiders” on most merchandise. 

I’m not, either.  There are only so many AA teams to go around, and I don’t know how New Orleans is going to lure one without new facilities. 

1 hour ago, pmoehrin said:

I don't get it. I could understand if using the LA name actually made a difference to the bottom line. But as far as I can tell, in every case where its been tried, it doesn't.

Arte Mareno said that it did.

He said that corporate partners and sponsors weren’t willing to pay as much to an “Anaheim” team as they are to a “Los Angeles” team.   We have no way of proving or disproving that, but neither do we have any reason not to take him at his word. 

Again, this is why teams do it. 

2 hours ago, SFGiants58 said:

Brooklyn, Oakland, and the New Jersey Devils beg to differ.

Nobody is seriously suggesting that Brooklyn isn’t a part of New York City,  But Brooklyn by itself is larger than all save three cities in the country, and the name “Brooklyn” sells  all across the city and across the country.  You can’t seriously suggest that “Anaheim” does the same.  After all, no Eurotrash poseur ever named their kid “Anaheim”.  

(If you wanna play East Coast/West Coast rivalry, come on.  Let’s get nuts.) 

Similarly, nobody seriously thinks that northern New Jersey isn’t a part of the New York metroplex.  There’s very little of New Jersey that isn’t a satellite city, of either NYC or Philadelphia.   But even so, New Jersey has eight million people from which to draw.  Eight million people to fill with local pride. Anaheim has what, four hundred thousand?

The Bay Area is a unique situation, with three cities in close orbit.  But Anaheim is no Oakland in its relationship to its neighbor.   Either of them.

Nobody’s arguing that using the name of a smaller entity can’t work for a baseball team.  Only that it doesn’t always work for a baseball team, and it was dragging down the Angels.  There needs to be a significant amount of cultural cache behind the name, that just isn’t there in this particular case.

Which is not a bad thing.  Not every city can be Los Angeles.  Not every city should be Los Angeles.  (Really, not every city should be Los Angeles.)  The state needs Fresnos and Bakersfields and Davises and San Berdoos too.  They’re all wonderful, they all bring something.  If the Angels move to El Segundo or Torrence or Pasadena or Monrovia or Thousand Oaks, they should still be the Los Angeles Angels.

FWIW, and just to get back to the original topic, I hope the Angels don’t move out of Anaheim.  I like them in Anaheim, it fits their relationship to the Dodgers. Can’t think of a better place for them anywhere in the whole Southland.