Tampa to Montreal? Trotting Out the Same Old Tired Narrative

It’s almost comical, the idea of moving the Tampa Bay Rays to Montreal, but a lot of people have been talking about it with a straight face .

MLB has fewer new plot lines than Hollywood and the one where the Commissioner’s Office comes in all Snidely Whiplash and threatens to move the team unless a new stadium is built has certainly been around the block a few times. The concept does not gain much in credibility when MLB is bringing back its most recently spurned lover–Montreal–in a new leading man capacity. Montreal–home to the Expos, paraded about for more than a decade as unfit parents in some Dickensian drama–is all different now. It seems that moving their team to Washington, DC a decade ago was all just a big mistake.

And we in Washington, DC understand the fickleness of MLB about as well as anyone, having been left at the altar not once but twice. In the remake of this very bad movie there are some key roles to fill and sure enough there is Stuart Steinberg, the owner of the Tampa Bay team talking about what a lovely town Montreal is and how absolutely wonderful it would be to relocate his team there. Oh the fond memories he has of that very same city. You can almost hear Steinberg saying to the camera, “do you want me to stand here for my lines or over there?”

What an insult to the people of the Tampa-St. Pete area. How low have you sunk when you are worse than Montreal? Well, let’s look at the numbers. Attendance in Tampa is the worst of any major league city and has never been above 2 million for any season other than their inaugural season when 2.5 million came to see the Rays lose 99 games in 1998.  But there are still about 19,000 people who will come out to see the Rays play on average. Montreal in its best years could draw more than 20,000, but they never topped 30,000 and in their final seven seasons when the team was buffeted by the same winds of change as have begun now in Tampa, they barely managed 10,000 a year.

In his interview on the subject Steinberg actually spoke lovingly about Stade Olympic where the roof crashed down on the field and halted play for more than a month while the mess was cleaned up and the place was declared fit for baseball again. MLB is at least true to their mantra and is demanding that Montreal commit to a new stadium before any serious talk is made about another team in Canada.

My guess is that this is just the first ante in the poker game between Steinberg and the mayor of St. Petersburg–who will not let the Rays out of their contract to play at Tropicana Field, which is owned by his city. The ante will be upped when a more realistic alternative location for the Rays is found in the next round of betting. It might be Charlotte, the 23rd largest metropolitan area in the US (Tampa-St. Pete is 18th) with a population of 2.3 million. Charlotte has hosted an NBA team successfully twice and with Michael Jordan as the principal owner of the team they have bee relatively successful. They are just an example of a large city that does not rob from an exiting MLB team’s TV market area and has many of the attributes for success.

Personally I am all for baseball moving to Montreal and I loved every old Expos fan I ran into at RFK back in the first few years after baseball came back to DC. The Montreal fans made the pilgrimage to DC with remarkable dedication to their old team and when I was in Burlington, Vermont for a minor league game in 2007, I encountered even more Expos fans who bent my ear not a little about the injustice done their fair city.

My vision is somewhat different than the one MLB floats every few years when a city needs a new stadium. I don’t want to see any city lose baseball and quite to the contrary want to see baseball expand past their current 30 teams. Yes that makes me a hopeless optimist who will be called naive by almost everyone. Well, take your best shot because I don’t really care.

I want to see baseball with four divisions of eight teams apiece. Such a creation would mean that both the National and American Leagues each have sixteen teams and we finally would arrive back at eight-team leagues again for the first time since my days as a boy growing up in South Georgia. Each division champion would be the equivalent of the memorable teams we grew up watching in baseball’s hey day when the regular season winner stood atop of a field of eight teams. The World Series would really mean something again when each champion came from an eight team aggregation and would fight it out from there for the championship.

Having grown up without a major league team, I do not wish such a loss upon anyone. So keep baseball in Tampa and find two new teams, one for Montreal and another for Charlotte or Portland or somewhere that makes economic and demographic sense.  Only when major league baseball has more home locations can it hope to outdraw football and that is my even more unrealistic vision: baseball is king once again.

There is a way forward toward that vision and it does not begin by playing the people of Tampa-St. Pete off against those in Montreal. It’s a very tired narrative and MLB needs some new writers. I am available. Will work for World Series tickets.