Today (Monday), I got back from spending the past several days in the St. Petersburg, Fla., area.
While there I explored various art and museum venues in the Tampa Bay area.
I also managed to go by several professional sports arenas, one of which was the Tropicana dome where the Tampa Bay Devil Rays play. Baseball fans know the Rays are members of the American League Eastern Division and were in the World Series in 2008.
This was not my first trip to the Tampa Bay area, as I was here back in 1990, when my son was a gold medalist in track and field participating in the AAU Junior Olympic Games.
One of the highlights of that trip, besides the gold medal, was the opening ceremony for athletes in all the Junior Olympic sports.
In 1990, what is now called Tropicana Field was then call the Sun Dome. The AAU event was the first one hosted in the facility.
I remember at the time that the city of St. Petersburg had gotten together $120 million dollars to build an indoor stadium for a major professional baseball team. The team they were trying to lureto the Bay area were the Giants from San Francisco, who then played in Candlestick Park, probably one of the worst playing venues in the country. Always windy, and cold more often than not, the Giants wanted a new place to play, but the city of San Francisco was determined not to put any city money into new digs there.
The Giants’ owners told the St. Pete people that they were coming, made plans to move, and would have done so had not the Florida Marlins owner Wayne Huizenga interceded to block the deal. There had to be a vote by all the league owners to allow the move and Huizenga lobbied to stop the Giants. Reportedly, Huizenga wanted the Marlins to be the sole major league ball team in the state and was successful as the league owners voted not to allow the move. Huizenga, also the owner of Blockbuster Video, then saw the Bayarea boycott his outlet stores in retaliation from his blocking the Giants from coming.
So for several years, the Sun Dome was relatively unused until major league expansion came in the mid-’90s and they introduced the Devil Rays as their team. It cost the city $70 million more to make renovations needed to bring in the Rays, making the city’s investment over $190,000,000. In ’96, the Tropicana Company came up with a sizable sum to rename the stadium to Tropicana Field and the Rays have had some pretty good teams since, especially of late.
For all the Rays’ success, though, they have done all that well at the gate. The Rays have had some of the lowest attendance figures of the majors even in good years. If you have ever seen the map of the Bay area, it is not hard to understand.
St. Petersburg is in the most inaccessible land in the Bay area. Tampa is by far the largest metro area around but it is a couple hours drive for most folks.
Tampa Bay is a very big bay and most of the living creatures within 30 miles of St. Pete are fish.
As luck would have it, the Rays hosted the Yankees in a three-game series while I was there. All three games were sold out as I quickly found out. The Rays won the last game and the first game and lost the Saturday game on a 9th inning Yankee home run.
As of Monday, the Rays trailed the Yanks by one game in the east.
What I found most interesting was that there are probably more Yankee fans living in the Bay area than there are Rays fans. First of all, the Yankees play their spring ball in Tampa as they have for several years.Steinbrenner Stadium is right across the street from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers football stadium. You can buy Yankee gear all over Tampa as well as the other towns. In addition, there is an extremely large contingent of retirees living in the Tampa area who came there from the northeast U.S. who were Yankee fans their whole lives. Anyone who watched the Yankee/ Ray series on TV might have noticed the large numbers of families in the stands who wore jerseys from both teams.
The newspaper rumors were flying that the Raysmay up and move to Tampa or another area more in the population center.
Tampa itself has eight times more residents than St. Petersburg. Although the Tropicana Field isn’t very old and has been significantly upgraded, there are problems with the design. There are a series of catwalk rings on the roof that get hit with fly balls on a regular basis. Saturday, Rays batter Matt Joyce hit the C ring on a high fly ball, with the umps ruling it a home run. There have been other balls hitting lower rings that are called ground rule doubles. The Rays would love to play in a normal stadium with more fans to cheer them on.
So, it looks like as far as St. Petersburg is concerned, the old quote from the “Field Of Dreams” movie, “If you build it they will come” hasn’t rung true in their situation. They built it, the team didn’t come, although another team came later. They built it, but fans haven’t been particularly coming and the entire team along with their small fan base may well be going.
The town fathers of St.
Pete who pushed the stadium drive in the ’80s and the renovation in the ’90s were probably pushing more for what they wanted personally than what made sense financially.
The probably soon-to-bevacated Tropicana Field will be a real big expensive stadium with no revenues to retire what bonds that were sold to build it. It is a cool building though.
Also in the sports news was Tampa Bays’ signing of Oklahoma Sooner lineman Derek McCoy who was taken number 3 in the overall draft. (Oklahoma had four drafted in the first round.) While driving across Tampa, I took the Leroy Selmon Crossover Freeway, named for the former Oklahoma Sooner lineman and All-Pro NFL player. Selmon was from Sallisaw, Okla., not far from Fort Smith. He and his brothers were big (I meanREALLY big) lineman for OU and they were all really nice people as well.
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John McGee is the art teacher at Pea Ridge elementary schools, coaches elementary track and writes a regular sports column for The TIMES. He can be contacted through The Times at [email protected].
Sports, Pages 10 on 08/04/2010