“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked Mike in Ernest Hemingway’s famous 1926 novel “The Sun Also Rises.”
“Two ways,” Mike responded. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
The “suddenly” part of St. Pete Mayor Ken Welch’s moral bankruptcy came when the Tampa Bay Rays announced on Thursday their intent to withdraw from a $1.3 billion project to construct a new ballpark adjacent to Tropicana Field. Thus the City/Rays courtship ended with Colosseumoitus Interruptus. No love child in the form of shiny new taxpayer funded stadium resulted from the tryst.
DRaysBay reported that the Rays withdrew not only from the stadium agreement, but from the entire redevelopment project involving the 86 acre site. The Rays’ official termination letter must arrive no later than March 31 in order for the Rays to officially kill the deal.
Even without such a letter, Ken Welch’s burst pipe dream is now a fait accompli, an outcome that some observers predicted already months ago when Rays team owner Stu Sternberg claimed that cost overruns and minor post-hurricane delays in county commission approval of funds for the stadium were scuppering the deal.
“Sternberg took the deal in July 2024 because time was running out and he thought it was the best deal he could get at that time,” one former elected official with knowledge of the matter told The Guardian on condition of anonymity. “But I don’t think he loved the deal because from the moment he got it, his people have been working to unravel it.”
“Maybe he thought he could get a better deal, or that selling it without a stadium deal is a better deal for him,” the prominent former elected official continued. “Who knows? But those cost overruns claimed by the Rays in just three months are not real.”
Notably, the Rays never showed the City any proof of the cost overruns they alleged, even after being asked to do so.
“You’re going to hear that this isn’t because of Mayor Welch, this is because of the Rays, it had nothing to do with the mayor, he’s been a great mayor,” the former elected official said. “Your going to hear all that shit” as part of the effort to “rehabilitate” Ken Welch in the public’s eye, the former elected official said.
“The county and St. Pete have spent millions of dollars, enormous amounts of staff time to be in a worse position than we were three years ago,” County Commissioner Vince Nowicki told The Guardian. “The Ken Welch administration unraveled the previous deal arrived at by former Mayor Kriseman in order to go down this path.”
A path which has now come to its end. In his official statement on (t)his folly turned flaming fiasco, Welch also acknowledged the “countless hours spent” in order to arrive at nothing.
“We continue to focus on finding a ballpark solution that serves the best interests of our region, Major League Baseball, and our organization,” the Rays said in a statement posted on X. The use of the word “region” is a clear hint that having MLB is St. Pete isn’t a priority for team owner Sternberg. Nor is it priority for MLB, as their own statement shows.
“Major League Baseball remains committed to finding a permanent home for the Club in the Tampa Bay region for their fans and the local community,” MLB said in a statement on the day the Rays made their announcement.
“Commissioner Manfred understands the disappointment of the St. Petersburg community from today’s announcement,” the statement continued, “but he will continue to work with elected officials, community leaders, and Rays officials to secure the club’s future in the Tampa Bay region” (underlining and bold-facing added).
The Rays are likely to stay in the Tampa Bay region, due it being a top-20 US population center and the lucrative television revenue that comes with it. But that doesn’t mean they will stay in St. Pete, especially given that the Rays are solidly in the bottom 10% of teams in terms of ticket sales this century. And that trend is likely to continue if the team stays in St. Pete.
It remains to be seen if banners for the city’s “Baseball Forever St. Pete” effort will remain hanging in Tropicana Field when the Rays return to play there in 2026 or 2027. Notably, the website for that effort is down and has no recorded entry in Archive.org since December 3rd, 2024.
There will undoubtedly be more shoes to drop, and The Guardian is currently engaged in an effort to cherchez les chaussures (follow the shoes), so to speak.
Ove the last nine years, The Guardian has reported on how enthusiasm for Baseball Forever never materialized from the effort’s very inception, how an error-laden third-party financial projection relied on by the city was developed by a “senior analyst” with less than 5 years work experience and a degree in Political Science and Art History. We also showed that the Hines/Rays proposal didn’t meet a requirement in the City’s RFP (Request for Proposal) — and that the City never formally waived the requirement before Welch selected the Hines/Rays proposal as the winning proposal in January, 2023.
See all of our reporting on the corrupt stadium saga here, and we aren’t only ones calling it a “stadium saga.”
“We will have more questions than answers as the Stadium Saga continues,” the DRaysBay’s article mentioned above ended with. “The Tampa Bay Rays stadium situation is an unmitigated disaster,” is how the most recent Outkick.Com article on the topic began.
It does look like Mayor Ken Welch will badly need that rehabilitation mentioned by a former elected official. Whether that rehab comes in the form of tongue baths from shill media and others, or shock therapy and lithium for Krazy Ken at the Florida State Hospital for Psychopathic Political Putzes remains to be seen.
As always….the Guardian reports and the readers decide. Please like our Facebook page to find out when we publish new stories.
