The Political Whore

The now-rejected watefront ballpark; will St. Pete-Pinellas also be rejected?

And the other shoe drops. It was predictable after the outburst earlier this week from Tampa Bay Rays President Matt Silverman about poor attendance at the Phillies series that it was just setting the table for a St. Petersburg departure. Now, comes confirmation that it is very actively being considered.

The A Baseball Community, studying everything from new sites for a Rays stadium to how to boost ticket sales, now confirms that three of the five geographic areas it is analyzing are in Hillsborough County. The three are in Westshore, downtown Tampa and east of the city at/near the Florida State Fairgrounds. Those sites join mid-Pinellas County (the Feather Sound/Carillon area) and downtown St. Petersburg on the list of five regions under study.

The St. Petersburg Times reported: Read the rest of this entry »

In a report submitted to the A Baseball Community task force that is working on a site and funding for a new MLB ballpark, the Tampa Bay Rays have ID’d their Top 7 sites and the pro’s and con’s of each.

The sites include:

1. Al Lang Stadium at Progress Energy Field (in downtown St. Pete)
2. Carillon Town Center, just south of Feather Sound in mid-Pinellas
3. Derby Lane race track on Gandy Boulevard
4. St. Pete-Clearwater International Airport/Airco Golf Course
5. Sod Farm, a 122-acre tract in the Gateway area slated for redevelopment
6. Toytown, the former landfill slated for redevelopment at I-275 and Roosevelt Blvd.
7. Tropicana Field

The location at the No. 1 position is sure to enrage downtown St. Petersburg activists who fought against an earlier proposal to build a ballpark at the Progress Energy-sponsored location. POWW was formed to fight against the plan, and having won that initial battle, now is gathering signatures for a November referendum that would prohibit using the location for anything but a park.

Now before anyone gets too far off the chain, here are the caveats from Rays VP for ballpark building Michael Kalt in today’s TBO.com:

“We’re not prepared to say that one site is preferable to the other,” said Michael Kalt, Rays vice president for development and business affairs. “The sites themselves are just sites that have been mentioned in the public, and we don’t necessarily think it’s an exhaustive list.”

You can download Part 1 and Part 2 of the report, in .pdf format (Adobe Acrobat).