The Rays are facing an uphill battle to keep their franchise relevant in a market that may not truly be a big-league market, writes former MLBTR scribe Howard Megdal in a piece for USA Today. While ownership bet big on 2014 with an $80MM payroll that was seen as a lot for the Rays, that figure ranked just 25th in the Majors this season. The increasing payrolls around the game create a shrinking pathway for the Rays, Megdal writes, and with a stadium that conjures up memories of what the fan experience was like in the 1980s (plus the rejection of a prototype for an innovative new stadium), there appears to be little sign of things improving. The team has an exciting crop of young pitching that features the likes of Chris Archer, Alex Cobb, Drew Smyly, Jake Odorizzi, Jeremy Hellickson and a returning Matt Moore (in 2015), but Megdal wonders how long the team will be able to hold onto that group. Those who don’t sign extensions, after all, will see their price tags soar in arbitration at an ever-increasing rate, and offense is only getting more expensive. As such, the Rays’ lack of revenue — the team drew just 1.446MM fans this season — is a significant concern.
Here’s more on the Rays…
- The Rays’ biggest needs heading into the offseason appear to be a power bat and a reliable reliever to deepen the back end of manager Joe Maddon’s bullpen, but Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times wonders if the Rays already have those pieces in the form of Wil Myers and Grant Balfour. Myers had a self-described “nightmare” of a season, but he’s looking forward to an offseason to rebuild his health and a clean slate in 2015. Meanwhile, Balfour has altered his mechanics and feels he’s found a groove in the season’s final month (three runs and a 12-to-2 K/BB ratio over his past 11 frames). Given his $7MM salary next season, a return to form for Balfour is crucial for the Rays, whose payroll will reportedly decline significantly.
- After a scary looking knee injury on an attempt to avoid a tag at home plate, Yunel Escobar received good news, writes MLB.com’s Bill Chastain. An MRI showed no structural damage in his knee, and while he won’t play for the remainder of the season, he should be fine going forward. Manager Joe Maddon notes to Chastain that Escobar’s play picked up once the rumors of him being traded to the Athletics in August dissipated. Maddon called “Oakland-gate” a “tough moment” for Escobar, noting that he didn’t fully understand the situation. It may just be a coincidence, but Escobar did hit .301/.378/.479 with three of his seven homers this season from Aug. 27 on.
I think what the Rays do is incredible but it’s a very tough road when you don’t draw. Ideally, MLB would try to be creative in making sure lower revenue teams can stay afloat, if for no other reason than MLB should be seen as a national game. I don’t see an easy answer for them. You can’t always go back to the taxpayer for stadiums (especially in Florida where the Marlin’s example isn’t the best) and you can’t find a way to create 3 million fans where only 1.5 million want to show up.
The Rays should start looking for a new home. That warehouse they play in is not going to cut it and a new stadium in that market is a risky proposition.
The problem with relocating to a different city or even state is that you further diminish the possibility of developing a stable baseball fan base in Florida. Is that really what you want to do? Maybe you have no choice, and MLB will become a little like hockey, in that there are many communities that will not support it because of lack of interest or socio-economic issues
You have to know when to cut bait. Even the NFL moved out of LA.
Is that really what I want to do? I won’t lose sleep over the lack of stability of professional baseball in Florida. The Rays have been a consistently good team for a long time now and the fans won’t show up. They can’t even sell out playoff games. Time to move on.
Oh whoops you already made the exact argument I made xD
It happens. I’m sure it was a good argument.
Florida will still have the Marlins, who play in a much bigger market. If the Rays don’t have stable fan base and revenue stream by now what hope do they have of surviving another rebuilding phase in Tampa?
the Marlins are 27th in MLB, in a spanking new gift from the taxpayers stadium. Maybe you are right
Florida has two baseball teams that are loaded with talent and they just don’t care. The Rays couldn’t even sell out a playoff game. I may have some contentious feelings toward the franchise as a Sox fan, but they need to go somewhere they’ll have fans.
One thing you have to remember about the Florida market is that there is an overwhelming amount of the population what are not native Floridians. Much of the population are people who retire there or relocate there once they have been successful in life. Much of the population has a baseball team they route for but it’s the Boston Red Sox, New York Yankees, etc. the team the grew up routing for. That’s why Florida will always have trouble getting fans for their professional teams. Moving to another city (Charlotte or Nashville) makes a ton of sense.
right, there are no ny or boston transplants in charlotte.
It’s difficult to establish ANY professional sport in Florida. It’s basically a college football state. The NBA struggles in Florida. Even the NFL doesn’t kill it in Florida. Sometimes you just have to come to the realization that that state just isn’t going to work.
Also have to think of where the college teams are located in relation to the pro teams. Florida and FSU are located in the North middle and Panhandle, where the locals actually live. Orlando, Tampa, Miami are where the retirees and snow birds live.
Add in the fact that you can spend so much more time outdoors doing other things. I’ve always thought that is what keeps the Padres from building a larger fan base. People in Florida and extreme southern California would rather be outdoors doing instead of watching.
Florida is the 3rd largest state, by population, and growing. Moving a team out of the tampa area is foolish. Their tv revenues are pretty high.
Dead wrong. Rays tv ratings are up, but they locked into a deal five or six years ago before the broadcasting rights fees skyrocketed. The Rays take in roughly $20 million a season while other teams are collecting hundreds of millions a season. Their tv broadcast deal is killing the team’s revenues and they’re locked into their deal until at least the end of the 2016 season.
The Montreal R’eh!s
I know their pre-season tickets were impressive, but a new Montreal team is very, very unlikely. They’d need a new stadium and there is simply no chance under any circumstances that Montreal would ever help finance another stadium. The Big O is one of the biggest disasters in stadium history.
I mostly suggested it for the joke xD
What markets do you think would actual work? New Orleans? Oklahoma City? Las Vegas? Maybe like… somewhere in NC or Tennessee?
OKC or Nashville would be my pics. No to New Orleans. Las Vegas is interesting as a family option for Sin City, but who knows?
Nashville would be the least disruptive to the divisional structure if nothing else. I guess the Indians could become an AL East team if they had to.
The time zone change would be annoying. That’s a problem the East shouldn’t have to deal with… Let’s just put them in Brooklyn.
Well if we shift the Indians over then there’s no timezone issue wherever we put the Rays
I don’t think the timezone change will really be an issue only being an hour difference.
There isn’t any timezone change anyway xD But in principle you should be able to partition divisions in such a way that there’s no geographic overlap. Otheriwse you wind up with Atlanta being in the NL West again.
I was referring to a potential Nashville team. I think the Indians would be less than thrilled being asked to move the the AL East
For some reason I thought Nashville was in the eastern time zone. All those states down there sort of blend together in my New England mind.
Half of TN is EST and the other half is central time zone, Nashville is right on the boarder so it can be a little confusing.
So it is. My mistake.
Could you imagine the inflated stats in Vegas? LOL
I totally agree with the idea of the Rays moving to OKC. I see a lot of parallels between the Thunder and the Rays. The fan base when from underwhelming for the sonics, to a massive fan movement (granted they are loaded with talent too). Imagining living in the OKC area. A budding are financially and massive influxes of revenue entering the city and finally a couple pro teams to add into the mix make that a very sexy place to compete.
Side idea: its kinda lame, but that is my sense of humor, and i did just think about it so i might regret posting this but they should change their name to lightning so its like the thunder and lightning hahaaha. I’m a riot
As much as I’d love to see major league baseball in NOLA, with college football and Saints football, there isn’t room for another professional team. The Z’s, Miami’s AAA team, does well, but they really play in the suburbs and once football cranks up, the crowds are sparse. The Superdome isn’t a good venue for baseball, so that’s out. A new stadium would have to be built, and that’s not going to happen.
The Rays need to move. There are plenty of places on the East coast that would likely be better than Tampa such as Charlotte, New Orleans, or Nashville. None of these would likely catapult them into the top payrolls but may be able to support a payroll that is more competitive.
Maybe not into the top 5 of payrolls, but if they get the right ownership group I think that those mentioned cities could produce respectable payrolls.
I don’t disagree that they need to move but I don’t blame ownership for the low payroll. The team simply doesn’t have the revenue streams available that nearly everybody else has. The cable deal is small time and the stadium is a dump. It’s extremely hard to pump money into the team when those two things are working against you.
They can move to Jacksonville which is actually not only the largest city in Florida but also the South, granted they have a much smaller metropolitan area.
I would have figured Atlanta to be the largest city in the south… But honestly, I just don’t see another city in FL getting a team. They seem to be all about the football and nothing else.
Nashville might be a good place. San Antonio and Portland are deserving but it would mean another division realignment.
Jacksonville (city) is larger than Atlanta (city). But the Atlanta metro area (5 million) is much larger than the Jacksonville metro area (1.4 million).
Atlanta has a larger downtown but more people live in Jacksonville city limits. Atlanta does have a larger metropolitan area however which just means it as more suburbs.
Forget Jacksonville. They’ve done a terrible job supporting the Jaguars. They’re a college sports town. If you can’t sell out NFL games 10 times a year, what do you think would happen with 81 baseball games a year?
Rays have needed bats for a long time now. It’s good to see that they have lots of good pitchers to trade for what is needed.
Sorry, until they get a real stadium and fans in the Tampa-St. Pete area turn out for the games, they will struggle. Over 4M people in this MSA, so there IS a large enough fan base to support the team. The team has put together competitive teams with a good manager and a solid farm system. But $80M payroll is not going to cut it in today’s game, and Maddon and the crew will not be able to work their magic forever. So, is it really the stadium, or have the fans in the area failed to embrace this team? If it is the stadium, build an new one. If it is the latter, the sooner they find a new home the better.
They should come to Philly.
The Phillies, Pirates, Orioles and Nationals all say no thanks.
Time to move the Rays to Montreal, a city that actually wants a team.
As I said in an earlier post, it could happen. If it hadn’t been for the strike in ’94, or if the Expos had just had better ownership at the time, they’d still be there, playing in a beautiful new park, and the Tampa Bay Rays would be the team known as the Washington Nationals.
San Antonio or Charlotte for me. But yeah, the Rays need out. They’ve had a great run that they extended with some smart decisions, but I think they’re a couple years max from being a really bad team. They need a bigger better market.
San Antonio? The Astros play in a bigger market than that and they have very low revenue and attendance.
San Antonio though a semi small market at the moment is actually not a bad idea as an emerging market. With the Eagle Shale there is projection for a large boom in business in the area, though considered small market media wise the city is top 10 in population and would represent south and central Texas, and San Antonio’s single professional sports team is highly supported by the local fan base much more so then in the Houston market.
The Astros don’t draw because they have been horrible for the last 6 years. Before that, they weren’t doing so bad. The only team I’m aware of that has been able to consistently draw fans while losing most of the games year in and year out are the Cubs.
The stadium issues make whatever the city of Montreal wants a moot point. Unless the team is going to pay for 100% of the cost of a new stadium, it would never happen and the Big O is not an option. The CFL won’t even regularly play there.
Well, the idea of a major corporation jumping in with a large investment because they see the huge cash cow of a sports team they could own all broadcast rights to is hardly without precedent in Canada.
Let’s say Bell did this – Montreal would make a lot more sense geographically than the other options mentioned.
Those other options actually have cities that want a team. I’m sure Montreal would be receptive to it, but they wouldn’t pony up any money.
A move by Bell after Rogers has shored up the NHL for the next decade would actually be a wise business move.
I’m rather amused by this. How soon we forget that Montreal had a team and drew less fans than the Rays do. And don’t blame it all on the stadium. I’ve never heard a single baseball fan say, “I’d go to a lot more games if they built a new ballpark.” I’ve only heard owners say that.
There was a lot more to it than Olympic Stadium. The Expos didn’t have a full slate of games on television — their cable deal only covered about half a season and was French only. They had no English language radio deal at all. Add in the legendary post-strike fire sale of 1995 and the team was effectively killed by ownership. The stadium issue was way down the list of things that killed the Expos.
In the Rays case, a new stadium in downtown Tampa compared to Tropicana Field in St. Pete would almost certainly draw more fans.
Within a 30 minute drive, DT Tampa has about 50% more people, 60% more households with income >$75k, 30% more employers with >10 employees, 50% more money spent on entertainment and had 15% more people attend Rays games, even though the two locations are 30 minutes apart.
I have no doubt that the Rays would draw more in a new stadium in DT Tampa compared to the Trop. The question is how many more fans.
San Juan Rays
We keep saying it’s gonna happen but it never does.
Bud Selig crippled the Rays went he wouldn’t go to bat with ownership to try and force the stadium issue. While he had no problem bringing his voice and gravitas to the Marlins attempt at gaining a new stadium, it puzzles why he let the Rays hang in the breeze.