Noah Pransky

The Rays are in New York, home of team owner Stu Sternberg, which often means attendance questions.  And sure enough, we got them. “I’m a little shocked, I’m a little surprised,” Sternberg said, according to the Times’ Marc Topkin. Sternberg added he expected the Rays to sell out a potential Oct. 2 wild-card game, and “he was ‘pretty certain’ any subsequent playoff games at Tropicana Field also would sell out,” despite another season of falling attendance that ranked the league’s worst.  Without getting into specifics, Sternberg said there…

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A crowd of 17,830 saw an absolute thriller Monday afternoon at Tropicana Field, the final home game (we think) of the regular season. That brought the Rays’ season total up to 1,510,300 and their per-game average down to 18,646, the lowest since 2007.  That will once again place the team last in the MLB attendance standings, despite all the ugliness in Miami. Everyone has an excuse: the dome, The Bridge, the mayor, etc.  But there’s also a preponderance of evidence all the…

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As predicted, there was plenty of Trop- and Rays-bashing last night as fewer than 15,000 fans took in the nationally-televised Rays/Rangers game with huge playoff implications. But who would have thought the Tampa Bay Times editorial board would have fired off its second Mayor Foster-bashing editorial in two weeks? This situation is not sustainable. But for nearly four years, St. Petersburg Mayor Bill Foster has ignored the obvious.  Now he has brokwn off talks with the Rays about letting the franchise look for…

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The morass at Downtown Tampa’s Channelside Bay Plaza appears to be coming to an end, as the Port of Tampa has come to an agreement to buy the struggling retail center for $5.75 million. Lightning owner Jeff Vinik appears to be the frontrunner to now buy and rehab the plaza, but Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn – a member of the Port’s board of directors – said the property will go out for bids since so many tax dollars will be at…

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Sunday morning’s Tampa Bay Times featured another editorial attacking Mayor Bill Foster’s handling of the Stadium Saga; specifically, his memo criticizing MLB Commissioner Bud Selig for interfering with negotiations between the city and the Rays: St. Petersburg Mayor Bill Foster wants to blame baseball commissioner Bud Selig for his own failures. Selig is hardly a sympathetic character, but he’s not the reason stadium negotiations between the city and the Tampa Bay Rays are stalled. The reason is Foster’s lack of leadership and poor negotiating skills, and…

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Predictably, the Times headline this morning, “Mayor: Talks going badly,” created a lot of other headlines today… even though the mayor never actually said talks were going badly. However, councilmembers were telling the Tampa Tribune that’s exactly what’s going on: the Rays are refusing to compensate St. Pete for leaving Tropicana Field early: “Their premise is they shouldn’t have to pay us anything,” (council chair Karl Nurse) said. “I can’t imagine how they can say, ‘We owe you nothing. Goodbye.’ And I can’t imagine the…

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Some simplistic thoughts following this week’s private Stu Sternberg & Matt Silverman chat with local business leaders: Everyone seems to acknowledge MLB’s problem with Tampa Bay is that the Rays are sucking a lot of money out of the revenue sharing system.  In fact, Tampa business leader Chuck Sykes even confirmed to the Tampa Bay Times that was the key takeaway from Sternberg/Silverman. So MLB teams such as the Red Sox, Yankees, and Dodgers are upset they have to pool together some of their enormous…

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