Originally Posted by alnorth
The Rays main problem is probably the location of the ballpark. It is in St. Petersburg, which is a pain in the ass for anyone in Tampa to get to, and St. Petersburg isn't anywhere close to big enough to support the team, itself. At first I didn't buy the argument, thinking "come on, if its in the area, how hard could it be to drive?"
Go ahead and look up St. Petersburg on a map, see where that is in relation to Tampa, and you'll understand. Go ahead, if you don't know the geography, take a look right now and come back to this thread. The location is utterly horrid.
Ok fair enough, the location is bad, so just build a ballpark in Tampa, right? The Rays have tried for a long time. They can't get support from the community to build the ballpark, and the Rays are tied down on a long lease in their boat anchor of a dome stadium in St. Pete. The mayor of St. Pete has vowed never to release the Rays from the lease, not even blinking when the threat of losing the team came up.
So, baseball has a couple options. They can either pay whatever money is required to buy out the Rays legal obligation in St. Pete and then give it another go in Tampa, helping the Rays figure out how to finance a park in a location where its reasonable for Tampa residents to drive to, or they can buy out the lease and move them to Jersey, where a bunch of rich people are willing to buy out the New York Yankee/Mets territorial rights and build a stadium themself, because no one is going to finance a stadium in Tampa. Theoretically, you can imagine the team could succeed in Tampa, but no one wants to make that bet.
If the people in the Tampa area are not willing to let the team escape from the Trop and build a great baseball stadium in Tampa, then MLB needs to rescue that team. They have completely and utterly proven that you cant get people to drive to a dome in St. Pete with a winning ballclub that does well for years.
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