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The Rays' New Game Plan

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: December 2, 2007

Stuart L. Sternberg is not the first businessman to come to St. Petersburg and see the potential of the city's gorgeous waterfront, but he may just be the most ambitious.

The owner of the Tampa Bay Rays baseball club is proposing a $1 billion plan to build a waterfront baseball stadium while converting the current 85-acre site of Tropicana Field into a massive retail, entertainment and residential development.

How big is this project? Consider the nearly 100-acres that the Rays would redevelop in these two projects represents one-fifth of the city's downtown.

In the last month, the Rays have unveiled a new team logo, name and uniforms. Now, they have made public their plans for an extreme makeover that will change the nature of downtown St. Petersburg.

Sternberg, Rays President Matt Silverman and Michael Kalt, the senior vice president of development and business affairs, sat down with the Tribune's editorial board this week to discuss the financial, logistical and climate feasibility of their grand plan.

- Vickie Chachere

Q: So what kind of reaction are you getting on your new logo? Rays, is that meant to mean the sunshine?

Sternberg: It's really about the sun and reaching out, and it's a good tie in to a number of questions that came up ... Why the sun and here they are playing indoors?

...Something we had looked at before we had even bought the team was the idea of developing a new ballpark. At the time we had some ideas ... We hinted around at it a little bit.

Because one of the questions that was asked was about Tropicana Field, and we said we intend to fix it up and spruce it up, but we just don't anticipate it would be our home for 20 years. ... As we got into the building and the infrastructure of the building, we could see it wasn't built like the Pentagon, let's just say. ... The building was designed 22 years ago and has been up close to 20 years and looking down the road it's going to be prohibitively expensive to maintain.

... This isn't about just putting up a building for us to play our 80 games in and get out of there. It's something that is going to allow us to stay anchored in this region and create something that really becomes an attraction ... that can become a retail and economic hub for generations to come. ... It creates a night life where none existed before. ... This is really a jolt to get that done.

Q: Are you saying when you bought the team, this was your plan?

Sternberg: We did a lot of due diligence. If not for this parcel of land and if not for the opportunity to go forward and provide for a new ball field - that could be done in a unique financial way - I don't believe we would have done the purchase of this team. This was a huge, huge part of the value that we saw. ... If there had been a stadium there that was very playable, and was a nice place that attracted people as opposed to keeping them away, it wouldn't have been necessary, and we would have been fine in going forward with it. But we recognized very early on this building wasn't going to allow us to be able to run our organization, the baseball team, in the way we saw fit for 20, 30, 40 years.

Kalt: It was much more about what we want as a concept and the things we can't do. You can't block the water, you can't overwhelm the waterfront, you can't put some behemoth on the site. It's got to be intimate. We really wanted something that was a glorified spring training ballpark, something that evoked the feeling about what is great about baseball in Florida.

At the same time, we wanted something that was going to activate the downtown, and be pedestrian friendly, that was going to be integrated in its surrounding, that maximizes public open space which we recognize is a major public issue and a major point of sensitivity on the waterfront in St. Pete. We really wanted to create something that was iconic, something that for the first time gave us an opportunity as a franchise to identify ourselves, and in doing so really identified us with the city and the region we play in so the growth and the future health of the region is really tied in with our growth.

Q: Tell us more about parking?

Kalt: When you talk about how you activate downtown, you can't expect to put people in parking spaces right next to the ball park and at the same time expect that you are going to get economic development out of it. We've thought about this long and hard. We certainly don't want people being dissuaded from coming to the ballpark because they can't find a place to park, and I guarantee we are not going to build this thing unless we are hyper confident that people are going to be able to park and park efficiently.

Q: What is the outer limit of your expectation of how far somebody should have to walk?

Kalt: Ten, 15 minutes max. And that's roughly what someone who is parking at the edge of the Trop site or in one of the lots, it's roughly what it takes. ... One of the advantages of being at the end of a cycle of downtown ballparks is this issue has come up in every single city where they have proposed building a ballpark downtown, whether it's San Diego or Cleveland or Houston or Pittsburgh and people immediately have that reaction of, "Where are people going to park?"

Q: Have you talked to the Florida Marlins? They always lead the league in rain delays.

Sternberg: That's why we have a rain cover.

Silverman: We want to make sure there is that same certainty of play for fans who are driving, whether it's 15 minutes or an hour, they are driving to the game and they are making a commitment. We want to make sure they know the game is going to get played, and it's going to get played in a timely manner. This ballpark addresses those concerns, but it doesn't have the oppressive feel of some of the other retractable roof stadiums that are out there, like Houston and Arizona, where you need a much bigger footprint because you have a giant roof sliding on and off.

Q: What about the heat?

Kalt: We are looking at misting systems. The roof itself will help cool down the ballpark because when you have it deployed during the day, it can keep the heat off the concrete of the ballpark. ... What we would probably do during the hottest days - you still need to keep it open long enough to grow the grass - but if you had a 7 o'clock game in the middle of July we would probably keep the roof deployed when it was sunny out and then roll the roof back.

... We have a climate consultant who is on board who has been looking at this. ... The breeze usually comes in from the east, so you have a natural wind effect, and as anyone knows, it's as much the humidity as it is the heat down here.

Q: There are some retractable roof stadiums that are air conditioned.

Kalt: The problem when you do that is you have to create a volume that the roof goes over. When you do that you are left with enormous amount of structure that starts blocking off the water, it's blocking off the views to the north.

Q: Let's talk about the sales tax rebate.

Silverman: The state sales tax rebate would potentially net $30 million bondable proceeds that would go to the $450 million costs, so it's less than 10 percent of the total costs. So it would be something that would certainly help.

Sternberg: It will be meaningful for us. ... It's important for us to have it, (but) it's not going to stop this project. ... It's going to make us do things; we're going to have to cut corners in some respects to get where we need to. We've got new parks going in here. We've got new technologies going into it. Amenities - while it's not going to be the Ritz-Carlton, we think it will be fan-friendly and things people like and obviously it will get compromised a bit. But we are going forward with this whether the money is there or not. But we need the money, I don't know how to say it another way.

Q: What would you say for a fan who has been around for 10, 12 years and suffered through 100-loss seasons, if they were to say, "Why don't you just keep your $150 million, no matter where you play and bring in someone like Johan Santana, a big free agent to help you put a winning team on the field?

Sternberg: We feel we are going to have a winning team on the field. ... The easiest thing to be done is just throw some money at it and get another player or two, but those are short-term fixes, and unfortunately, when you do that, you have a hangover a day or two or a year or two later.

Q: But are you a baseball team owner or a developer?

Sternberg: I'm a baseball owner.

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