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MLB Stadium Saga: Oakland/Tampa Bay/Southside


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26 minutes ago, SFGiants58 said:

 

One was plenty, two was just overexposure.

 

Under good ownership, a team could thrive in Florida. However, both teams have had shoddy ownership. The Marlins have had to deal with off-field problems with their owners and the scams that Loria pulled to get their current stadium built. The Rays moved into a horrendous stadium in a less-than-ideal location with the Tampa Bay Area (St. Petersburg) which has hampered their ability to be competitive. 

 

If anything, have a team in either Miami or Tampa and use that other 1990's expansion slot on a D.C. team. That way, there may be a small chance of the Expos sticking around in Montreal.

Well expanding to two markets that are four hours apart within a five-year span probably wasn't the greatest of ideas to begin with.

 

We've been over the Rays' location issues many times.  They would do so much better with attendance by being in Tampa than the St. Petersburg outpost.  They also need a more fan-inspiring building.  They've tried their best to spruce up that place (and it's really not as bad a place to watch a game as folks make it out to be...it's just so totally different a baseball-watching experience than we're used to.  They do need a building with a roof, but they also need some natural sunlight and color/brightness.

 

As for the Marlin, they didn't help their initial cause by playing an hour away from Miami (traffic really stinks in South Florida).  They really didn't help their cause by playing in a football stadium for 20 years.  Then having fire sales after their World Series runs, than the fire sale halfway through their first season in an actual baseball stadium, and having Loria annually piss off their fans has probably chased off their fans.  They need an owner that'll show short- and long-term commitments to being and staying competitive.  They could use a face like Jeter being part of their ownership group.  He would excite that fan base.

 

I don't get why folks see Montreal as this answer.  Blame whomever you want, but that fan base quit on baseball.  They would show up for Opening Day and the series against Toronto, and when you only have two games a season...sure, sell out a Spring Training game....but they don't care about baseball 81 times a year.

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13 hours ago, goalieboy82 said:

and the next thing that MLB should do if there is a team in Las Vegas is to reinstate Pete Rose.  

 

The two things have nothing to do with one another.  

 

Even if MLB instituted official betting lines and in-seat gambling opportunities, that won't change the fact that Rose broke the rules in place at the time.  And worse yet, Rose lied and lied and lied for decades, to the point where we can't even believe we know the truth now. Did he deliberately throw games?  I don't know.  And neither do you. Not to mention that Rose spent all that time slandering the honest people whose only fault was to tell the truth about him.

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8 hours ago, HedleyLamarr said:

I don't get why folks see Montreal as this answer.  Blame whomever you want, but that fan base quit on baseball.  They would show up for Opening Day and the series against Toronto, and when you only have two games a season...sure, sell out a Spring Training game....but they don't care about baseball 81 times a year.

 

Still better than the fans in Tampa Bay, who didn't care about baseball even when their club was in first place the entire year.  Even when their club went to the World Series.  Put that team in any other baseball city, and they'd be at the top of the attendance charts.  But in Tampa Bay, barely a blip. 

 

Make all the excuses you want, but the Tampa Bay fan base gave up on baseball.  If they were ever interested in the first place.   

 

Really not sure that's your best argument, there. 

 

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29 minutes ago, Gothamite said:

 

Still better than the fans in Tampa Bay, who didn't care about baseball even when their club was in first place the entire year.  Even when their club went to the World Series.  Put that team in any other baseball city, and they'd be at the top of the attendance charts.  But in Tampa Bay, barely a blip. 

 

Make all the excuses you want, but the Tampa Bay fan base gave up on baseball.  If they were ever interested in the first place.   

 

Really not sure that's your best argument, there. 

 

Montreal would have killed to see 16,000 come to every game.

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26 minutes ago, HedleyLamarr said:

Montreal would have killed to see 16,000 come to every game.

 

Montreal would also have killed for a 97-win season. 

 

Besides, different times.  You can't compare eras to eras, only how a team performs in relation to its contemporaries.  And the Rays have always performed terribly, even when the team was among the best in baseball. 

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5 minutes ago, Gothamite said:

 

Montreal would also have killed for a 97-win season. 

 

Besides, different times.  You can't compare eras to eras, only how a team performs in relation to its contemporaries.  And the Rays have always performed terribly, even when the team was among the best in baseball. 

Rays went to the World Series in 2007, Montreal's last season was 2004.  And the Expos churned out a cool 9,300 fans that season.

 

Montreal had back-to-back winning seasons in 2002 and 2003 and got 22,000 to come out....combined.  Montreal was not a good market then, and they aren't a good market now. Give them two games a year to host the lone Canadian team and a chance to relive their baseball days, they can handle that.  79 more?  Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

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It would have been hard to avoid expanding to TB.  Weren't they all but promised a team after all the Giants thing fizzled out after they had already built a park?  Or White Sox - I forget which team used them and discarded them first.  

 

The Rays attendance problems can be traced back to whenever that park was designed.  The location, design, limited technology of the era (no practical retractability option), all contributed to the mess they're in now, and are to some degree an influence on the fans' apathy.

 

In a perfect world, there's no team there.  They'd hit the undo button.  The best they can do now is try and figure some way out of that lease, then pack them up and move them to some other market.  There's obviously not many (if any) major-league caliber markets left, and I haven't yet seen any evidence that MTL is one.

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I'm not sure there is another market. Portland seems to have passed it by, quite happily choosing soccer over baseball. Vegas? I dunno. Wrong sport for a tourism town. It's one thing to say you'll get fans of other teams to fly out for eight Sunday afternoon games a year, but 81 mostly-weeknights is another thing altogether. 

 

The only thing keeping the Rays in town is the lack of an obvious place to move to. But that may be enough. 

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Montreal was a good basketball market ruined by a lot of different factors: poor ownership after Bronfman sold the team (especially the Loria era), the Blue Jays screwing the Expos on TV rights just as the Expos were starting to get really good in the '80s, the '94 strike, stinginess by the local business community in Montreal, etc. The fans didn't "quit" on baseball until the MLB made it abundantly clear that baseball was quitting on them.

 

Bringing up the Expos' average attendance in 2004 is unfair without considering the context. By that time, the Expos were owned by the league, had narrowly dodged contraction two years earlier, and were playing a significant portion of their "home" schedule in an 18,000-seat ballpark in San Juan. They had failed to get consistent bilingual TV and radio coverage over the previous few seasons. One year, the only way fans could follow their team was to listen to French-language radio broadcasts streaming live on Expos.com. And this was back in 2000, when an estimated 34% of Internet users were still stuck on slow dial-up connections! Things had become so petty that IIRC, even the signs around Montreal directing people to Olympic Stadium were taken down while the Expos were still playing there. Bottom line: fans are not going to show up to support a franchise that spends all its time and energy on creating reasons to move out of town. It's the same reason why Qualcomm Stadium was a ghost town for the Chargers' last few years in San Diego.

 

Speaking of attendance, the Expos drew over 2 million fans four times (1979, 1980, 1982, 1983). The Rays have only managed that feat once, in their inaugural season. So if Montreal isn't a major-league caliber baseball market, what does that say about Tampa Bay?

 

Things have changed dramatically since 2004, though. The current mayor of Montreal, Denis Coderre, has been vocal in his support for bringing the MLB back. There's a group of investors in place that meets the MLB's conditions to own a franchise. There's a large grassroots movement to bring baseball back to Montreal, headed by former Expo Warren Cromartie. Despite being a :censored:hole, Olympic Stadium is packed every year for the annual Spring Training games. And Manfred has continuously voiced his support for the Montreal market, which is incredible considering how hard Selig tried to crush any hope for baseball in Montreal.

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7 minutes ago, Lights Out said:

Montreal was a good basketball market ruined by a lot of different factors: poor ownership after Bronfman sold the team (especially the Loria era), the Blue Jays screwing the Expos on TV rights just as the Expos were starting to get really good in the '80s, the '94 strike, stinginess by the local business community in Montreal, etc. The fans didn't "quit" on baseball until the MLB made it abundantly clear that baseball was quitting on them.

 

Don't forget the PQ's rise to power, Bill 101, and the failed Quebec Independence referendum as factors in the Expos' downfall. While there are many Francophone Expos fans, the decline in the Anglophone population did not help matters. 

 

1 hour ago, BringBackTheVet said:

It would have been hard to avoid expanding to TB.  Weren't they all but promised a team after all the Giants thing fizzled out after they had already built a park?  Or White Sox - I forget which team used them and discarded them first.  

 

Both the White Sox and Mariners nearly moved to Tampa Bay, until the White Sox got their stadium and Nintendo bought the Mariners. The Giants' then-owner, Bob Lurie, was in the process of selling the team to a Tampa Bay ownership group (led by Vince Naimoli, the first primary owner of the Rays) until San Francisco officials pressured the league into blocking the sale.

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Yeah, baseball was kinda checkmated into giving Tampa Bay a team after St. Pete built the dome on spec and had the rug pulled out from under them on three relocation attempts. Between the awful stadium and the nature of the market, it's still a terrible place for a team, but they didn't have much of a choice. Keep screwing with them and eventually they're probably taking you to court over the antitrust exemption.

 

I think expanding to Miami was still the right thing to do in 1993 because eventually you couldn't not expand to Miami, and South Florida isn't really the heart of spring training country (I think the southernmost spring training site was Jupiter until they built this new West Palm complex) the way Central Florida is, so there wasn't that issue of redundancy.

 

I don't see a lot of places for the Rays to go. Las Vegas would be a terrible idea, San Antonio and Austin wouldn't get by the Texas teams without some sort of onerous MASNesque deal, Raleigh will give you all the transplant problems of Tampa with a smaller population, and Montreal has demographic problems that can't be overcome. All I can come up with are Vancouver, or going way off the board with Omaha and trying to create an Oklahoma City Thunder situation with twice the home dates and twice the seats. Like we've said, baseball asks the most of its markets.

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2 hours ago, Lights Out said:

Things have changed dramatically since 2004, though. The current mayor of Montreal, Denis Coderre, has been vocal in his support for bringing the MLB back. There's a group of investors in place that meets the MLB's conditions to own a franchise. There's a large grassroots movement to bring baseball back to Montreal, headed by former Expo Warren Cromartie. Despite being a :censored:hole, Olympic Stadium is packed every year for the annual Spring Training games. And Manfred has continuously voiced his support for the Montreal market, which is incredible considering how hard Selig tried to crush any hope for baseball in Montreal.

It's easy to sell out two games when you get the lone Canadian team involved and call it "Expos Nostalgia Weekend".  It's easy for a politician to say "I'd love for baseball to come back" because that's extra money coming to town.  It's easy for the Commissioner to say he'd like to see a city get a team because he doesn't want to alienate any North American market from watching and investing in his product.

 

Montreal's problem is that there's 79 other games they would have to sell.  Montreal's problem is that the government hasn't "walked the walk" when it comes to getting finances involved to get baseball back, both locally and federally.  Montreal's problem is that MLB knows Montreal will always be one of the runts when it comes to eating at the MLB Food Bowl.

 

Their last four seasons had attendances of 7000, 9000, 12000, and 9000.  And two of those seasons were winning seasons.  You would think that if the TV deal stunk, that would give you even more incentive to go catch more games in person, especially if the team is competitive.  But, the fans didn't show up.

 

Montreal is not a good baseball market.  Dispute that as much as you'd like.  Fans didn't show up.  Tampa Bay may be drawing flies, but that's nearly double what Montreal drew.  If you're willing to say that Montreal wasn't given a fair shake, you have to also admit that the Rays have never been in an ideal attendance situation, either.  Can't just pick-and-choose when you use the martyr defense.

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2 hours ago, the admiral said:

Yeah, baseball was kinda checkmated into giving Tampa Bay a team after St. Pete built the dome on spec and had the rug pulled out from under them on three relocation attempts. Between the awful stadium and the nature of the market, it's still a terrible place for a team, but they didn't have much of a choice. Keep screwing with them and eventually they're probably taking you to court over the antitrust exemption.

 

I think expanding to Miami was still the right thing to do in 1993 because eventually you couldn't not expand to Miami, and South Florida isn't really the heart of spring training country (I think the southernmost spring training site was Jupiter until they built this new West Palm complex) the way Central Florida is, so there wasn't that issue of redundancy.

 

I don't see a lot of places for the Rays to go. Las Vegas would be a terrible idea, San Antonio and Austin wouldn't get by the Texas teams without some sort of onerous MASNesque deal, Raleigh will give you all the transplant problems of Tampa with a smaller population, and Montreal has demographic problems that can't be overcome. All I can come up with are Vancouver, or going way off the board with Omaha and trying to create an Oklahoma City Thunder situation with twice the home dates and twice the seats. Like we've said, baseball asks the most of its markets.

 

It's way out of the box, and there's obvious (probably insurmountable) hurdles to overcome, but a north NJ team could be successful, even despite the presence of the NYY and Mets.

 

It might take a generation, but parents can take their kids to MLB games without having to go into the city, and those kids could grow up to be NJ fans despite their parents being Yankees or Mets fans.  Who knows - a "NJ" branded team could even steal some south NJ fans from the Phillies, though that's less likely.

 

All things being equal (which they never are), that might be the best market for a new team.  

 

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27 minutes ago, HedleyLamarr said:

Montreal is not a good baseball market.  Dispute that as much as you'd like.  Fans didn't show up.  Tampa Bay may be drawing flies, but that's nearly double what Montreal drew.  If you're willing to say that Montreal wasn't given a fair shake, you have to also admit that the Rays have never been in an ideal attendance situation, either.  Can't just pick-and-choose when you use the martyr defense.

 

Montreal was drawing poorly for a terrible team that was in the process of moving.   Tampa Bay was drawing poorly with the best young team in baseball winning a pennant and which was guaranteed to stick around for decades. Hardly analogous. 

 

As for New Jersey, I don't see it.  Where would you put them?  The Devils and Red Bulls struggle, and  the latter with one of the best clubs in its sport.  I agree that metro NYC could definitely support another team, but it would have to be a part of area with sterling public transportation, enough corporate sponsors and a baked-in cultural identity more marketable than New Jersey's. 

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1 minute ago, LMU said:

The problem with Montréal that hasn't been mentioned is that Olympic Stadium is a pit and a pain to get to.

Unlike Tropicana Field?

 

It is 23 miles from downtown Tampa to Tropicana Field.  At the best of times, it's a 25-30 minute drive, and that's assuming you go straight from work to the game.  If you're going home to pick up the wife and kids then going to the game, you're dealing with rush hour traffic to get home, then you're getting right back in that traffic in the 'burbs, going through Tampa again, then dealing with traffic leaving Tampa for St. Pete, and are lucky as hell if you see the first pitch.  The few times I've been there, it's taken us 1.5 hours to go from Clearwater to inside the stadium.  Or, two hours from Kissimmee to Tropicana Field.

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