Stadium is legitimate concern for Rays

The new baseball season begins next Tuesday for the Tampa Bay Rays, but tickets remain for Opening Day against the Baltimore Orioles. I was about to refer to it as the "highly anticipated" new season, but with the Rays admitting that about 2,000 tickets remain unsold for the first game, how anticipated can it really be?

Let me say up front - no one has a responsibility to buy tickets to watch the Rays or anything else. The Tampa Bay area has 13 percent unemployment, and for many people professional sports are a luxury they can't afford. Then again, people didn't exactly flock to Tropicana Field when times were good, either.

So there was interesting timing to the visit to The Tampa Tribune editorial board Tuesday afternoon by members of the ABC Stadium Coalition. That's the group of business and civic leaders who have spent many months exploring options for a modern ballpark to replace the Trop.

With all the stuff going on with the economy and everything else, they're delivering some bad-tasting medicine. The Trop has to be replaced, and two of the three preferred sites are in Tampa. You may want to cover your ears now to protect against the screams of weary taxpayers screaming, "NO MORE! NOT ONE MORE DIME!"

I love baseball, and I believe the Rays are an enormous benefit to the area, but I don't blame anyone planning to fight to the death against one more publicly financed stadium. I think there are ways to get it built without dipping into the pockets of Hillsborough County taxpayers - of which I am one. We're already paying for RayJay and the Forum.

Enough already.

The Trop is the wrong stadium in the wrong place, though. The Rays can't generate enough money from it to survive. We don't have time or space here to list all the things wrong with the Trop, but here's one number to chew on: 615,722.

That's the population located within a 30-minute drive of the Trop. That's only 19 percent of the people living in this area.

You could double that number by building a stadium a few miles up the road in Carillon, still in Pinellas County, and it would still be the lowest figure in baseball. Maybe that helps explain why the Rays' TV ratings are strong but their attendance ranked 23rd out of 30 teams last season - and that was coming off a World Series appearance.

A 30-minute drive is the standard used to plan these things. Tampa Bay has almost twice the population of Milwaukee, for instance, but 68 percent of people there are within a half-hour of Miller Park and the Brewers drew more than 3 million fans in each of the past two seasons. Coincidence?

So we need leaders to, you know, lead. Find the best location, work with the Rays to figure out how to pay for it, and realize the team is for the entire area.

You don't build it because it will generate a thousand jobs in the food and service industry. Frankly, to me it's a myth that stadiums generate that much spinoff money anyway. Modern stadiums are basically entertainment centers, filled with all the food and drink options anyone could want.

So just be honest. You build it because enough people decide we're better off with baseball and a new stadium is what it costs to keep the team.

The ABC people said it will take six years at least before a new stadium could be ready. I think it's closer to 10 years - a decade that could go either way.

There can either be haggling, threats, and the sniping back and forth across the bay that marks so many of the things we do here. Or people could stop talking about working together and actually do so as they tackle a massively complex project.

The leaders could even get together next week at Tropicana Field and discuss it.

I hear plenty of space is available.