Rays mum, but teams have broken stadium contracts before

Losing the Tampa Bay Rays to another community, like Tampa, would deal a blow to the status of St. Petersburg.

But could Mayor Rick Baker, who has vowed to fight any such move in court, really do anything to stop it?

It might depend on which side plays hardball.

Stadium use and lease agreements, such as the one the Rays signed through 2027 for the city's Tropicana Field, often contain tough language requiring a team to stay put. But in reality, these ironclad agreements aren't always so ironclad.

Lawyers representing major league sports teams have overturned agreements by arguing a stadium is substandard or a team can't achieve financial success. Seattle learned this a year ago in a nasty fight with the owner of the SuperSonics of the National Basketball Association.

Experts the Tribune interviewed hadn't studied the Rays' agreement and wouldn't give an opinion about whether a court would let the team out of it.

What's more, the Rays have said nothing to indicate they would even consider leaving St. Petersburg.

But the team has made its hopes for a new stadium crystal clear. And fueling talk of a move is a Pinellas committee, the ABC Coalition, that suggested Hillsborough sites are superior in a presentation last week based on criteria including fans' drive time.

If the Rays want to leave St. Petersburg, breaking the agreement with the city could be a matter of paying damages and finding a sympathetic judge.

"It seems like in a sports context, there is no airtight lease," said Michael McCann, a law professor at Vermont Law School and a contributor to Sports Illustrated. "Courts seem to come up with a damages value, and I think municipalities know that."

The ABC Coalition, a nonprofit group evaluating stadium options, settled on five potential locations: downtown St. Petersburg, the mid-Pinellas area just over the Howard Frankland Bridge, downtown Tampa, Tampa's West Shore area near Raymond James Stadium, and the Florida State Fairgrounds.

The ABC Coalition has no formal power. But Baker announced its creation, as a group scouring Pinellas for sites, so the Hillsborough expansion has caused some grumbling.

Sean Lux, who is on the ABC Coalition subcommittee that studied the five potential stadium sites, said the group decided from the beginning to look at the entire Bay area - not just St. Petersburg.

Lux's subcommittee found the Hillsborough sites generally were easier to get to, showed better long-term population growth prospects and reported higher household incomes than downtown St. Petersburg.

"I'm not saying that downtown St. Pete is not viable. I'm just saying it's not as good," said Lux, a visiting instructor at the University of South Florida's Center for Entrepreneurship.

That doesn't sit well with Baker.

In late June, after the three Hillsborough sites were revealed, he told The Tampa Tribune the city would consider all its options to enforce its agreement with the Rays, including litigation. Under the stadium agreement, the team will play at Tropicana Field through 2027.

"Our expectation and intention is that the Rays will continue to play in St. Petersburg," Baker said at the time. "I think it's a pretty clear position."

If the team wanted to leave the Trop, though, it could be hard to stop. The SuperSonics provide a recent precedent.

Before the 2007-08 NBA season, the SuperSonics had three years left on a 15-year agreement for use of KeyArena in downtown Seattle. But the relationship between the city, which owns the stadium, and team owner Clay Bennett had grown "dysfunctional," said Seattle attorney Brad Keller, who represented Bennett's ownership group.

Among other problems, Bennett claimed the city was trying to force him to sell the SuperSonics to another ownership group led by Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer, Keller said.

Bennett began pushing for a new arena that could cost a half-billion dollars, much of it provided by the state of Washington. When that effort failed, he began exploring a move to his native Oklahoma City and that city's Ford Center, which had opened in 2002.

Seattle leaders weren't eager to see the team abandon KeyArena and sued to keep the team in town.

"The city's position was a deal is a deal," Keller said. "It's black and white."

Things grew so heated in the Emerald City that Keller began using an off-duty police officer to guard his home and office, he said.

The two sides settled the lawsuit out of court last summer. Bennett agreed to pay the city $45 million to get out of his contract, and he could be forced to pay another $30 million if Seattle can't land another NBA team in five years.

Even if a government inserts strong language in its stadium contracts, courts decide whether a team must stick to it, Keller said. In his case, he challenged the SuperSonics' contract, in part, by arguing KeyArena needed more luxury suites and more robust food and merchandise sales for the team to make money.

Stadium agreements can also work in a government's favor, said Matt Mitten, a law professor at Marquette University in Milwaukee and director of the National Sports Law Institute.

A few years ago, Mitten noted, Major League Baseball planned to reduce its number of teams, and the Minnesota Twins were on the hit list.

The stadium commission that ran the Metrodome in Minneapolis was able to block the league from killing off the Twins by arguing the contraction would violate the commission's stadium agreement with the team, Mitten said.

In another case, when Mitten was representing Harris County, Texas, he failed in an effort to force the Houston Oilers to fulfill their contract to play in the Astrodome. The National Football League team eventually left for Nashville. Mitten advises governments to include in their stadium contracts specific monetary penalties for breaking the agreements.

For its part, the Rays' ownership is mum on its next move.

The Rays haven't investigated breaking the stadium agreement, Michael Kalt, the team executive overseeing the stadium issue, said this week.

Major League Baseball hasn't indicated whether it would approve a move, though Commissioner Bud Selig, like the Rays, wants a new stadium here. He reiterated this month that the team can't make enough money at Tropicana Field, a 19-year-old domed stadium opened in 1990.

Officials in Tampa and Hillsborough County have shown no public interest in luring the team away.

Any talk about a move out of St. Petersburg is speculation in the view of St. Petersburg City Attorney John Wolfe.

Wolf calls the contract between the city and the team more than just a building lease with rent payments. It requires the team to provide professional baseball to the city.

"We expect the Rays will honor their contract," Wolfe said.

"We expect that if the city and the Rays agree to a new stadium, it would be in St. Petersburg."