The Extra 2% (4 page)

The city’s baseball history wasn’t always so glum. St. Pete had plenty of happy baseball memories dating back a lifetime before Major League Baseball ever arrived.

In 1902, the St. Petersburg Saints started play as a semipro team. The Saints eventually evolved into a minor league team, before folding in 1928. Another minor league club called the Saints emerged nearly two decades later. That team would later become the St. Petersburg Cardinals, and eventually the St. Petersburg Devil Rays, going through five different major league affiliations. St. Pete gained greater recognition as the birthplace of spring training in Florida. Starting in 1914 and spanning ninety-four years, the city played host to eight spring training teams. Babe Ruth played there. Bob Gibson pitched there. Casey Stengel managed there. Still, the city’s baseball track record was far from perfect; St. Pete had suffered through its share of minor league attendance problems. It would take a while for the city to pop up on Major League Baseball’s radar as a viable candidate for relocation or expansion.

Jack Lake was one of the first civic leaders to push for a big league team in the Tampa Bay region. By the late 1960s, the longtime publisher of the
St. Petersburg Times
was using his influence to
rally local businessmen, politicians, and other influence peddlers to the cause. Those lobbying efforts eventually gained momentum. In 1977, Florida’s legislature formed the Pinellas Sports Authority—named after St. Petersburg–encompassing Pinellas County—which the state hoped would play a leading role in attracting Major League Baseball to the area. Three years later, the St. Petersburg Chamber of Commerce formed a dedicated baseball committee. In 1982, the city offered a stadium site to the sports authority for $1 a year in rent, the first of many major concessions that local government would grant along the way. The next year, St. Pete’s city council approved the new stadium project.

The ensuing two-year period marked a tumultuous time for St. Petersburg’s stadium efforts. First, the county withdrew its support in 1984. The city and Pinellas Sports Authority countered with a lawsuit the next year and eventually prevailed. A public hearing followed, exposing passions on both sides. Stadium backers didn’t want to see two decades of lobbying and goodwill wasted, even if they hadn’t yet locked down a baseball team to actually play there. Local residents didn’t want their tax dollars funneled into a new ballpark, a stance other cities would have done well to follow, given the billions of dollars in taxpayer money thrown into baseball team owners’ pockets during the stadium-building boom that would soon follow. But against opponents’ protests, the city council voted to proceed with the stadium project anyway. On November 22, 1986, St. Pete staged what it called “the World’s Largest Groundbreaking.”

As the stadium took shape, a handful of MLB owners began offering their support. Philadelphia Phillies owner Bill Giles was one of the first to speak out on St. Petersburg’s behalf. Giles was a member of the National League expansion committee, and he had plenty of local knowledge—the Phillies had played their spring training games in nearby Clearwater since 1947. When St. Pete applied for expansion, Giles aimed to learn more about the city’s credentials.

Giles took a group of Phillies personnel and outfielder Von
Hayes to St. Pete’s new dome to see how the roof would play in a live baseball game. A Phillies coach hit a towering pop-fly to left field. Hayes looked up at the white, Teflon-coated fiberglass roof, squinted, then covered his head and scampered away. St. Pete officials looked on in horror—one pop-up and the whole deal was about to be blown. A few seconds later, Hayes started laughing. The dome’s roof was made of the same material as the roof in Minnesota’s Metrodome, and Hayes could see the ball just fine. Score one for the Philadelphia pranksters.

Giles and Mets owner Fred Wilpon also led a contingent of MLB executives who flew in to survey the market. The owners toured the new dome, explored the surrounding downtown area—by then seeing redevelopment—and surveyed the local traffic patterns, including the oft-lamented Howard Frankland Bridge. The three-mile bridge over Tampa Bay heightened the rivalry between the twin cities; the
Tampa Tribune
ran an editorial showing an island in the middle of Tampa Bay, near the bridge, as the ideal place for an expansion baseball team to play.

Giles weighed those and other factors and still came away impressed, reporting his findings to the rest of the committee. Putting a team in downtown St. Pete would tap into a large metropolitan area that could also draw from the twin city of Tampa, communities like Bradenton to the south, and even the greater Orlando area less than two hours away.

Still, St. Pete residents remained skeptical of MLB’s interest. They didn’t want to become that guy who gets all the compliments from female friends, before being deemed too nice to date. Indeed, when the White Sox began exploring a move south, they laid the flattery on thick.

“Florida is the last virgin franchise area in the country,” Mike McClure, White Sox VP for marketing, said at the time. “It is the greatest opportunity in baseball since Walter O’Malley took the Dodgers west to Los Angeles.”

Were McClure, Jerry Reinsdorf, and other White Sox execs being sincere in their at times over-the-top praise for St. Pete? Or
were they using the threat of a move as a weapon they could wield against reluctant politicians who balked at building them a new stadium on the public dime?

It was a little of both.

“Reinsdorf initially [didn’t want] to come to Florida,” said Rick Dodge, St. Petersburg’s longtime city administrator and one of the leading forces behind the city’s drive to build the stadium and attract a team. “He owned the Bulls, he was really a Chicago guy. But even after Illinois passed legislation to build the new stadium, everything got delayed and nothing happened. He went from someone who was casually interested to, the further we got into this, the more he saw a potential market.

“There was never a misunderstanding,” Dodge mused. “We were always the alternative if they couldn’t get the deal done. But it’s just like romancing someone. At some point you fall in love and you don’t even know it.”

Despite the White Sox letdown, St. Pete pushed ahead with stadium construction, and the Florida Suncoast Dome opened in the spring of 1990. The plan called for the stadium to host various sporting events, concerts, and other shows until a baseball team could be drawn to the area. At that point, the city would retrofit the Dome to meet the baseball-specific needs and requests of the team’s owners. The Dome lured various musicians, Davis Cup tennis, arena football, and NBA exhibition games. The stadium would later find more use when its first anchor tenant, the NHL’s Tampa Bay Lightning, took up residence in 1993.

Still, attracting a baseball team remained St. Pete’s top priority for the stadium. And as Major League Baseball’s 1991 expansion process evolved, St. Petersburg looked like one of the top candidates.

You could forgive Dodge for feeling like Charlie Brown, looking out at Lucy holding the football and wondering if this would finally be the time he’d get to kick. Again and again, baseball owners and other insiders had assured Dodge and other city officials that their time would come. They’d done so every time a team approached St.
Pete, only to back out when the owners either got the huge local public subsidy they’d been seeking all along or simply got cold feet.

The Minnesota Twins, Texas Rangers, Seattle Mariners, and Oakland A’s all made overtures to St. Pete. Even the venerable Detroit Tigers secretly sent a delegation to Florida. Texas and Seattle would secure lucrative new stadium deals after first flirting with St. Pete. Detroit got its own new park, though the Tigers used less public saber-rattling to make it happen. Talks with Twins ownership progressed further, before the team opted to stay in Minnesota; state lawmakers would eventually fold and build a shiny new park for the Twins, though long after the team had mulled moving to St. Pete. Only the A’s stadium situation remains in limbo to this day, with the team vying to move to San Jose and the Bay-sharing San Francisco Giants exercising nebulous territorial rights to block the move—some two decades after exploring a move to St. Pete.

St. Petersburg had become a stalking horse. The A’s and Twins had failed to parlay the threat of a St. Pete move into a new stadium deal, at least directly. But several other teams leveraged local panic over a possible Florida move to get the favorable stadium deals they wanted. Best of all, team owners didn’t have to make many threats themselves. The Commissioner’s Office could make the threats for the owners while they remained above the fray, the downtrodden businessmen who just wanted to make an honest buck. To Major League Baseball and its owners, the message was obvious: Tampa Bay offered much more value as an exploitable, untapped market than it ever could as the home of a major league team.

“Bud Selig has been especially adept at playing the move threat card,” said Neil deMause, author of the book
Field of Schemes
, which examines the large subsidies handed to MLB owners for new stadiums and the elaborate economic benefit projections that teams trot out to hoodwink the public, local governments, and themselves. (DeMause is proprietor of a blog of the same name as his book.) “He did it for years for the Marlins, and for the A’s, in particular. I think he must have a boilerplate speech somewhere in his
desk drawers that says, ‘There’s certainly no keeping the [put name of team here] in this city without a new stadium.’ ”

Baseball’s stadium extortion game touched every team at some point, in some way—not just the sport’s lesser lights. Several of MLB’s sacred cows threatened to move to Tampa Bay, and Tampa Bay aggressively courted them all. Other teams invoked Washington, D.C., or Portland, Oregon, or Charlotte, North Carolina, or San Antonio to scare local governments into cutting a giant check. For a while, George Steinbrenner even made noise about moving the Yankees to New Jersey, a location still technically in the same metro market but worlds apart for many longtime Bronx Bomber fans. For all the pageantry and history the game offers on the field, off the field the business of baseball includes shady backroom deals, ruthless money grabs, and harsh threats. No matter who you root for.

Having failed to poach an existing team, St. Pete looked to baseball’s first round of expansion since the 1970s as its best bet. The city lined up three potential ownership groups for its bid, per MLB instructions. There was a clear favorite, though: the group headed by car dealer Frank Morsani. The Morsani delegation had represented the city in its early attempts to bring an existing team to St. Pete and in the process built a great deal of local goodwill. Final say on the matter would fall to the league, however, not the city.

As Dodge and company would discover yet again, sitting at the mercy of the Lords of the Realm was a bad place to be. To St. Pete’s great surprise and disappointment, MLB chose the Porter group, fronted by Washington attorney Stephen Porter and financially backed by Wisconsin’s Kohl family, founders of the Kohl’s department store chain. There were several reasons for MLB’s decision. The league liked the wealth and influence that came with the Porter group, including the backing of Wisconsin senator Herb Kohl. There were also whispers that Morsani was somehow linked to the Mob, a charge that lacked evidence but might have colored baseball’s choice.

“So we go to New York with the [Porter] group and meet with MLB,” said Rick Mussett, St. Pete’s longtime senior development administrator who worked alongside Dodge in the city’s efforts to land a team. “And they just balked at the expansion fee, which was $95 million. Our mayor at the time, Bob Ulrich, had a famous quote about it, or at least famous here locally. He said they had deep pockets and short arms.”

Opinions vary as to why the Porter group opted not to bid. Some contend that the Kohl family wasn’t enthusiastic about ponying up the cash. Meanwhile, another late bidder emerged, eager to bring baseball to Florida: Blockbuster Entertainment CEO Wayne Huizenga. Huizenga wanted a co-tenant to play in South Florida’s Joe Robbie Stadium with his Miami Dolphins. He lacked the Morsani group’s long track record with MLB, but the league was impressed nonetheless.

St. Pete conspiracy theorists contend that MLB may have wanted an easy excuse to grant Huizenga a team despite his eleventh-hour interest. Choosing the Porter group—which lacked the resolve the other two Tampa Bay would-be bidders had—to represent the Florida Gulf Coast effort made the league’s decision easier. The Huizenga-owned Florida Marlins and the fledgling Colorado Rockies nabbed the league’s two expansion teams. Major League Baseball had locked out St. Petersburg at the last minute yet again.

For Morsani, this was the last straw. Bitter about MLB’s broken promises and having been pushed aside in the expansion process, he sued the league. Years earlier, when Morsani appeared close to reeling in the Twins, MLB had stepped forward with a vow: wait your turn, and we’ll reward you with the first available expansion team. Now, not only had the league passed on St. Pete as an expansion team, but it hadn’t even given Morsani’s group a chance to bid, choosing the Porter group to represent the city’s interests instead. Morsani’s creditors, already breathing down his neck, pushed Morsani to take the matter to court to try to recoup his losses. Slowing sales at his auto dealerships had taken a big bite from his personal
fortune. Multiple futile attempts to bring a team to St. Pete had stripped away the rest of his cash, forcing him to file for bankruptcy. Morsani would eventually settle his case with MLB out of court.

For all the setbacks St. Pete suffered, when fresh opportunities came calling, local baseball boosters couldn’t resist trying again. Pigheaded, slightly delusional, crazy … they were all of those things. In 1992, another of baseball’s storied franchises came calling, this time the San Francisco Giants. Why the hell not, thought St. Petersburg’s backers. In for a penny, in for another round of masochism. Besides, the city had already made contact with Giants owner Bob Lurie three years earlier. In a men’s room. Dodge couldn’t resist reaching out to Lurie—metaphorically at least.