Why It's Time to Relocate the Tampa Bay Rays

Major League Baseball is dead in Tampa Bay.  If you don’t believe me, check out Tampa’s attendance figures this year, or the past fourteen years for that matter.  On September 23 with Tampa Bay only 3.5 games out of a playoff spot, the Rays drew 18,985 fans to Tropicana Field for a Sunday afternoon game.  The previous two games, on Friday and Saturday night, both drew less than 16,000 fans.  The Rays are thirteen games over .500 this year, but have the worst overall attendance in the American League.

In the past five seasons, Tampa has posted five consecutive winning records, three seasons with 90-plus victories, three playoff berths and one World Series appearance.  In addition to team success, the Rays also have plenty of star players who are worth the price of admission at Tropicana.  Evan Longoria is one of the best third basemen in baseball, David Price is a perennial Cy Young candidate and 23-year-old pitcher Matt Moore looks poised to become a Cy Young candidate himself.  Despite all this, the Rays have not averaged more than 23,000 fans per game since 1998 and have been in the bottom three in American League attendance in eleven of their fifteen seasons.

One of the most often-cited reasons for the empty seats in Tropicana Field is Tropicana Field itself, a terrible indoor stadium with fake grass and an atmosphere which rivals any large mall in America.  Commissioner Bud Selig publicly stated in April that Tampa Bay needs a new stadium in order to remain competitive, but Selig and many other baseball people fail to realize that a new stadium itself will only bring a temporary attendance spike.  The teams with the three newest stadiums in baseball, the Nationals, Mets and Marlins, sit 10^th, 11^th, and 12^th, respectively, in National League attendance in 2012.  The new stadium attendance spike will not be sustained without a good on-field product and a devoted fan base.  It is the latter, and not the former, which is missing in Tampa Bay.

Tropicana Field is just a convenient excuse which masks the real problem in Tampa Bay- a disinterested, apathetic fan base, particularly when one considers the kind of support that similarly successful clubs have received while playing in horrible indoor stadiums, as depicted by the following chart:

The Rays cannot justify their poor attendance with the excuse of having been a bad expansion franchise that took a decade to become competitive.  Back in the mid-1990s, Seattle was enjoying its first sustained success in the Majors, having posted a losing record in each of their first fourteen seasons in the A.L. between 1977 and 1990.  Seattle didn’t make its first appearance in the post-season until 1995, a full eighteen years after first entering the league.   Up to 1999, the Mariners also played their home games in the Kingdome, a venue much worse than Tropicana Field.  Despite these challenges, the Mariners finished in the top five in A.L. attendance between 1996 and 1998 and averaged better than 32,000 fans during those years.

Another popular excuse for Tampa Bay’s poor attendance is the presence of five spring training stadiums of other Major League clubs less than sixty minutes away from Tropicana Field.  Four of those stadiums also host teams in the Single-A Florida State League, which plays a 140 game schedule during the summer.  This, however, is just another convenient excuse for an apathetic fan base in Tampa Bay.  In MLB’s other spring training circuit, the Cactus League in Arizona, there are nine spring training complexes of opposing Major League clubs within a forty-five minute drive from Chase Field, home of Tampa Bay’s expansion cousins, the Arizona Diamondbacks.  The Diamondbacks have averaged more than 25,000 fans per game for every single season since 1998, despite only one playoff appearance in the last four years.  This season, with a record barely above .500 and no hope of making the playoffs, Arizona has drawn nearly half a million more fans than the Rays and is averaging 7,429 more fans per game than Tampa Bay.

It’s not as if the Rays are pricing themselves out of their local market.  According to the MLB Fan Cost Index released by Team Marketing Report this year, Tampa has the sixth-cheapest average ticket price in the league at $19.83, more than $7 cheaper than the average price of a MLB ticket.  The Rays are also the only team in Major League Baseball which does not charge for parking at its stadium.

With cheap tickets, free parking, and a competitive ball club with superstar players, fans in Tampa Bay should be flocking to Tropicana Field to watch the Rays play.  But they are not, and have not been for over fourteen years.  Instead of acknowledging that Tampa is a lost market for Major League Baseball, Bud Selig has once again decided that the magic solution is to slap a new stadium together and hope that fans decide to start watching baseball in a lousy baseball market.  Major League Baseball has failed in Tampa Bay and rather than trying to con another local government into financing a playground for millionaires, MLB should focus on moving the Rays to an appreciative baseball market which the club so richly deserves.

Where do you think MLB should move the Rays?  Feel free to leave your comments below.

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