Stadium for Rent: Tampa Bay's Quest for Major League Baseball

by Bob Andelman

This is the true, complicated story of the decades-long battle to bring a baseball team to Florida's West Coast.

Back in print for the first time in two decades, Bob Andelman's detailed investigation has been enhanced with hundreds of political cartoons and photos that illustrate the community's sometimes brutal campaign, as well as an all-new introduction by best-selling sportswriter Peter Golenbock and an afterword by award-winning Tampa Bay Times sports columnist Gary Shelton. Plus, interviews with original Tampa Bay Devil Rays franchise owner Vincent J. Naimoli and the man to whom he sold managing interest in the team, Stuart Sternberg.

No baseball, business, or community development bookshelf should be without this unique story.

PRAISE FOR STADIUM FOR RENT (First Edition)

“Journalist Bob Andelman tells in painful detail how close (Tampa Bay) came to winning... Recommended for serious sports collection.” – Morey Berger, Library Journal

“Andelman points a finger not at the bay area’s civic leaders but at the panjandrums of baseball. He provides an impeccably researched play-by-play of every inning of this high-stakes game in which the home team has been shut out... The story is compelling, and in Andelman’s hands, it’s masterfully organized and written.” – Tom Chase, The Literary Baseball Magazine

“A phenomenal read. The guy did his research... I became so engrossed, I couldn’t put it down.. a superb job on how he put it together.” – Erica Stuart, associate producer, 60 Minutes, CBS-TV

“Andelman put it in perspective.” – Tom McEwen, “The Morning After,” Tampa Tribune

“Andelman tells the bittersweet, folly-filled tale of Tampa Bay’s courtship of a major league franchise—the Florida White Sox, perhaps, or the St. Petersburg Marlins. St. Petersburg, in particular, just couldn’t take no for an answer and built a beautiful stadium, despite a lack of encouragement from Major League Baseball. As it was probably always destined to do, the franchise went to Miami, and St. Petersburg’s stadium is the elaborate home to tractor-pulls.” – John Mort, Booklist

“A work that could cause an iceberg to boil. It has everything but a happy ending, rattling off the aggravation we’ve endured here in the clinical manner of an autopsy.” – Joe Henderson, Tampa Tribune

"Awesome." – Tedd Webb, 970 WFLA Radio

“In Stadium For Rent, Bob Andelman details St. Petersburg's journey from stalking horse to major league market with great skill and attention to detail. It's impossible to fully grasp the impact of the worst-to-first AL pennant winners of 2008 without learning how they came into existence.” – Jonah Keri, author of The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First

“A home run... If you think there was a lot of public game-playing (if you’ll pardon the pun) going on while the City of St.

Genres: Baseball

232 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1993

About the author

Bob Andelman is the host and producer of Mr. Media® Interviews. He is also the author or co-author of 15 books, including The Wawa Way with Howard Stoeckel, Building Atlanta with Herman J. Russell, Fans Not Customers with Vernon W. Hill, founder of Commerce Bank and Metro Bank UK, Mind Over Business with Ken Baum, The Consulate with Thomas R. Stutler, The Profiler with Pat Brown, Built From Scratch with the founders of The Home Depot, The Profit Zone with Adrian Slywotzky, Mean Business with Albert J. Dunlap, and Will Eisner: A Spirited Life. He is a member in good standing of the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) and Society of Professional Journalists).

Reviews

[John Dickhaus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stadium for Rent: Tampa Bay's Quest for Major League Baseball investigates how boosters in Tampa Bay lobbied for decades to bring Major League Baseball to the people of Tampa Bay. Written by author, podcaster, and Rays fan, Bob Andelman, this 400 page non-fiction bestseller first published in 1993 details the efforts of various ownership groups to secure baseball for Tampa Bay through acquisition and expansion. The book also delves into the politics that led to the development, financing, and later construction of the Florida Suncoast Dome. Simply put, Andelman takes readers on a decades long journey through the eyes of the key players who made baseball happen in Tampa Bay. Among these key players, are names that are familiar to Rays fans who have been with the franchise since the beginning: St. Petersburg Times publisher Jack Lake, potential team owner Frank Morsani, former St. Petersburg City Manager Rick Dodge, and Devil Rays eventual owner Vince Naimoli.


Over the course of Andleman's book, the reader learns what a stalking horse the threat of bringing baseball to St. Petersburg was throughout the 1980s and early 1990s in the eyes of other MLB owners. These years saw ownership groups (primarily led by Morsani) attempt to lure the following teams to St. Petersburg: the Minnesota Twins, the Texas Rangers, the Oakland A's, the Chicago White Sox, the Seattle Mariners, and the San Francisco Giants. These efforts, as well as a failed bid at landing an expansion National League franchise in the late 1980s are explored in detail through the eyes of the movers behind each deal.

The first effort to land land St. Petesrburg an MLB team occurred when Morsani was encouraged by the Tampa Bay Baseball Group to put together an ownership group aimed at getting the Minnesota Twins to move to the Tampa Bay area in 1983. This was before the concept of what would become Tropicana Field had even been drawn out. In fact, this Morsani led ownership group envisioned building a baseball stadium in the parking lot of Tampa Stadium (where the present Raymond James Stadium sits). The threat of the Twins moving was eventually alleviated when Twins owner Calvin Griffith (the man who moved the Washington Senators to Minnesota) sold the team to Minneapolis banker Carl Pohlad who kept the team based in Minneapolis.

After the Twins rejection, two camps developed to try and bring baseball to Tampa. There was the Tampa group, led by Morsani, who first wanted to secure a team before construction of a stadium. Proposed stadium sites in Tampa included the Tampa Stadium parking lot, and what was then Al Lopez field. The St. Petersburg faction, led by Jack Lake, Rick Dodge, and the Tampa Bay Baseball Group employed the "build it and they will come" strategy. They first sought to build a stadium with the hope that it would attract a team. Proposed sites for a St. Petersburg based stadium should seem familiar to Rays fans. They included the Toytown landfill, Derby Lane, the Gateway Mall area, and the current site of Tropicana Field, the "Gasplant Neighborhood".

During the days of competition between St. Petersburg and Tampa over securing a big-league ball team, it was common for the areas major newspapers, the St. Petersburg Times and the Tampa Tribune to exchange scathing editorials over where a team should ultimately be located. Behind the scenes, the divided effort was hindering the viability of securing a team in the eyes of baseball, with the commissioner of baseball privately writing letters to both groups asking them to undertake a united effort.

Tampa's bid to secure baseball was finally ended when the City of St. Petersburg's City Council voted 6-3 to approve the 130 million (249 million in 2018 dollars) construction cost of the Florida Suncoast Dome through general revenue bonds. No referendum was ever held on the financing of the Suncoast Dome because city leaders acknowledged that if put before the taxpayers, a referendum would never pass. The more things change . . .

The next several years saw Morsani-led ownership groups attempt to entice more teams to move to the area. Among these efforts was an effort to secure the moves of the Texas Rangers and Oakland A's. In the case of the Oakland A's, Morsani and A's ownership actually had a deal in place and A's ownership encouraged Morsani to call a press conference for the next day to announce the sale of the A's to Morsani. The next day, the Mayor of Oakland announced a new lease for the A's to continue playing at the Coliseum, and A's ownership denied a deal as ever being in place.

Reading this book, it is impossible to not view Frank Morsani in a sympathetic light. He was one of the earliest proponents of baseball in Tampa Bay and spend countless dollars of his own money on lobbying efforts at the private and public level to bring a team to Tampa Bay. Over the course of his involvement with baseball in Tampa Bay, Morsani saw his efforts to secure the Chicago White Sox go up in flames in 1988 when, despite having an agreement in principle for the sale of the White Sox, the Chicago legislature violated their own deadline and voted at the 11th hour to construct a new stadium for the White Sox, keeping them in Chicago. This was seen by residents of Tampa Bay as cronyism at its finest. Aside: a secondary reason for the White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf seeking to leave Chicago, not only involved stadium politics, but the fact that White Sox games were only broadcast to 34% of all Chicago area residents. Even in the 1980s, television ratings were the gold standard to help determine a metro area's viability for professional sports.

The White Sox kerfuffle gave way to what would become a kerfuffle over an effort to secure a National League expansion franchise for Tampa Bay in the early 1990s. Tampa Bay was thought of by the powers-that-be in baseball to be a favorite to secure an expansion franchise after so many efforts at enticing existing teams to move to St. Petersburg had failed. During the NL expansion frenzy of the late-1980s, ownership groups from Tampa Bay (a Morsani bid, and a separate bid from St. Petesrburg Cardinals owners Stephen Porter and Joel Schur), Washington D.C., Miami (led by Blockbuster executive Wayne Huizenga), Denver, and Orlando (led by Orlando Magic owner Richard DeVos) courted the National League for the shot at expansion. A series of lawsuits over business loans made by Morsani sunk his expansion effort, and instead, the Porter/Schur group was made a finalist in the effort on behalf of Tampa Bay. Porter and Schur's bid was ultimately rejected various reasons. Among the primary reasons involved the fact that both Porter and Schur were aloof owners reluctantly in the Tampa Bay area; and the difficult of the partnership to find additional investors who would help pay the expansion fees for a team. Ultimately, expansion resulted in the creation of the Florida Marlins and Colorado Rockies.

After the failed expansion bid, an effort to get entice the Seattle Mariners to move to St. Petersburg was ultimately rejected when M's owner, Jeff Smulyan reneged on a memorandum of understanding in favor of selling Seattle's baseball team to Nintendo of America.

After all of these efforts, perhaps the closest St. Petersburg ever got to securing the commitment of a team to move to Tampa Bay was that of the San Francisco Giants. Ever since their arrival in San Francisco in 1958, the Giants were identifying ways to stop playing their home games at Candlestick Park. As the decades wore on, Giants owner Bob Lurie engaged in four separate referendums in San Francisco and San Jose aimed at obtaining taxpayer approval to build a new stadium for the Giants (including proposals that had Lurie picking up most of the bill or renovating Candlestick Park). All failed. After the final failure, on August 6, 1992. Lurie signed an agreement in principal with a Tampa Bay ownership group led by Naimoli to sell the Giants. This sale was announced at dual press conferences to the public the following week.

After the announcement, businesses and municipalities in the San Francisco area filed a bevy lawsuits aimed at keeping the Giants in San Francisco. The power of CBS's lobbying to baseball was persuasive in the fact that they shed light to MLB's owners of the cost of abandoning the 5th largest television market in favor of Tampa Bay's 13th largest mark. Marlin's owner Wayne Huizenga was also persuasive in lobbying owners to vote "no" on the sale alleging that the new Tampa Bay ball club would cut into his television market, which was one of the reasons he went through the expansion process. Again, St. Peterburg was made a fool.

"The idea that baseball might allow a franchise to leave the No.5 television market in the country, San Francisco, for the No. 13 market, Tampa Bay, was pure idiocy to CBS. The introduction of CBS executive . . . Larry Baer to the behind-the-scenes machinations of the San Francisco bid left no doubt from where the real power and influence of this deal came . . . Baseball was warned that a bonehead move of the Giants out of San Francisco could cause the '94 broadcast offer to be in the neighborhood of $500-million, or 50 percent less than the old deal. That's power."

-Bob Andleman

After the San Francisco rejection, the opening salvo of lawsuits flew across the bow of MLB. First, Morsani sued MLB for 100 million dollars on the legal theories of tortious interference with contractual relations and violations of U.S. anti-trust law. Naimoli's lawsuit based on anti-trust violations asked courts for the cool sum of 3.5 billion dollars in damages. Finally, the City of St. Petersburg filed against MLB asking for the court to invalidate the City's earlier agreement to indemnify MLB in the event that the City never secured an expansion franchise. These lawsuits bled over into the halls of Congress, where for the first time in decades, Congress began to examine the status of baseball's sacrosanct anti-trust exemption. To make all the legal liability go away, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays were born on March 9, 1995.

After the announcement, businesses and municipalities in the San Francisco area filed a bevy lawsuits aimed at keeping the Giants in San Francisco. The power of CBS's lobbying to baseball was persuasive in the fact that they shed light to MLB's owners of the cost of abandoning the 5th largest television market in favor of Tampa Bay's 13th largest mark. Marlin's owner Wayne Huizenga was also persuasive in lobbying owners to vote "no" on the sale alleging that the new Tampa Bay ball club would cut into his television market, which was one of the reasons he went through the expansion process. Again, St. Peterburg was made a fool.

"The idea that baseball might allow a franchise to leave the No.5 television market in the country, San Francisco, for the No. 13 market, Tampa Bay, was pure idiocy to CBS. The introduction of CBS executive . . . Larry Baer to the behind-the-scenes machinations of the San Francisco bid left no doubt from where the real power and influence of this deal came . . . Baseball was warned that a bonehead move of the Giants out of San Francisco could cause the '94 broadcast offer to be in the neighborhood of $500-million, or 50 percent less than the old deal. That's power."

-Bob Andleman

After the San Francisco rejection, the opening salvo of lawsuits flew across the bow of MLB. First, Morsani sued MLB for 100 million dollars on the legal theories of tortious interference with contractual relations and violations of U.S. anti-trust law. Naimoli's lawsuit based on anti-trust violations asked courts for the cool sum of 3.5 billion dollars in damages. Finally, the City of St. Petersburg filed against MLB asking for the court to invalidate the City's earlier agreement to indemnify MLB in the event that the City never secured an expansion franchise. These lawsuits bled over into the halls of Congress, where for the first time in decades, Congress began to examine the status of baseball's sacrosanct anti-trust exemption. To make all the legal liability go away, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays were born on March 9, 1995.

After the announcement, businesses and municipalities in the San Francisco area filed a bevy lawsuits aimed at keeping the Giants in San Francisco. The power of CBS's lobbying to baseball was persuasive in the fact that they shed light to MLB's owners of the cost of abandoning the 5th largest television market in favor of Tampa Bay's 13th largest mark. Marlin's owner Wayne Huizenga was also persuasive in lobbying owners to vote "no" on the sale alleging that the new Tampa Bay ball club would cut into his television market, which was one of the reasons he went through the expansion process. Again, St. Peterburg was made a fool.

After the San Francisco rejection, the opening salvo of lawsuits flew across the bow of MLB. First, Morsani sued MLB for 100 million dollars on the legal theories of tortious interference with contractual relations and violations of U.S. anti-trust law. Naimoli's lawsuit based on anti-trust violations asked courts for the cool sum of 3.5 billion dollars in damages. Finally, the City of St. Petersburg filed against MLB asking for the court to invalidate the City's earlier agreement to indemnify MLB in the event that the City never secured an expansion franchise. These lawsuits bled over into the halls of Congress, where for the first time in decades, Congress began to examine the status of baseball's sacrosanct anti-trust exemption. To make all the legal liability go away, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays were born on March 9, 1995.

We know the rest of the history without Andleman having to spoon-feed it to us. The Devil Rays go through their expansion woes. The Naimoli group becomes extremely disliked by the community and is sold to Stu Sternberg who takes the franchise from zero to hero. Years elapse, but the stadium question remains at the back of residents' minds.

So where do we go from here as a baseball franchise? As Andleman details in extreme detail throughout his book, local municipalities have been playing the baseball game since baseball became a professional endeavor. "The more things change, the more things stay the same." Local governments have always been reluctant to shell out taxpayer money for millionaires. Andleman makes this clear when detailing the lack of referendums put before St. Petersburg residents ahead of financing the Suncoast Dome, and the four failures Lurie experienced in San Francisco. Baseball is reluctant to abandon television markets that make millionaire owners even more wealthy as demonstrated by Naimoli's failed effort to move the Giants, and the White Sox's eagerness to abandon Chicago due to lack of television viewership.

If you are a Rays fan, read this book. It paints a picture for fans of the moving parts that brought baseball to the people of Tampa Bay in the eyes and words of the government officials and business executives who made baseball happen here. It also serves as a lesson for fans in the form of "those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it." At the conclusion of Andleman's tale of baseball creation, I personally was left with feelings of gratefulness to those who played the stadium game before us in the present, as well as a feeling of hopefulness that we can weather the stadium storm, again. Play ball!

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-researched look at Tampa Bay/St. Petersburg seemingly never-ending quest to land a major league baseball team either by expansion or relocation. There are a lot of names to follow and even more twists and turns. The political cartoons are fun to understand the feelings of the people.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book and well written. I’d love for a new updated edition!