Take It From Dick Vitale: The Rays Look Silly With This Tampa-Montreal Thing

Nothing describes the insanity of the proposed "Tampa-Montreal Rays" more than this tweet from the franchise's biggest fan.

OK, this guy was its biggest fan.

To paraphrase Dickie V himself, "This is awful, baby."

Then again, when you're the Rays, and you join the Miami Marlins at the bottom of the Forbes listfor most valuable Major League teams at $1 billion, and you have one of the worst stadiums in baseball history, and your average attendance at home games of 14,546 is nearly half that of other Major League franchises despite a pretty good product, you consider desperate things.

But there is desperate, and then there is this.

Rays principal owner Stu Sternberg moved closer Tuesday to turning rumor into fact during a news conference in St. Petersburg, Fla., where he said the best way to help the Rays' situation in the Tampa Bay area is to have them split home games with a city in another country.

Surely Sternberg is joking, bluffing or something.

"I don't see it happening in St. Petersburg and would be hard pressed to see it working in Tampa from what I know," Sternberg told reporters, alluding to the Rays' inability during their 21-year existence to find support for a new ballpark around the Tampa Bay area as a way to solve many of their woes. "This is not a staged exit. This is about Tampa Bay keeping its hometown team and Montreal having one, too. I believe strongly in the sister-city concept. We're asking for open minds."

My mind is open . . .  It still sounds crazy.

Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred added to this silliness last week when he announced the Rays have "broad permission to explore what's available."

In case you didn't know, Montreal already had a Major League team. It was called the Expos, and they lasted from 1969 through 2004.

The same Montreal that the Rays view as their salvation as a franchise is the same Montreal that drew even fewer fans to Major League games during its Expos days than the Rays do now. In fact, attendance was so bad for the Expos that baseball officials tried to whack them along with the Minnesota Twins in November 2001.

The vote was 28-2to get rid of both franchises. Only the Expos and the Twins rejected the move, andonly a lawsuit by stadium officials in Minnesota and the kicking and screaming of the Major League Baseball Players Association kept it from happening.

So the Expos returned to Montreal in 2002, but the fans didn't.

Does this sound familiar? The Expos had a brutal stadium situation, and they were one of baseball's least valuable franchises. Their turnstiles also were rusty from little use. With the approval of Major League Baseball, they opted for one of those "sister-city" deals in 2003. They played 22 of their 81 home games in Puerto Rico, and it wasn't terrible at the start.

The Expos tried the Montreal-Puerto Rico thing again in 2004, and they watched the crowds in both cities drop as much as their team in the National League standings. Then they were off to Washington D.C. the next season along the way to becoming the Nationals.

Source: Forbes.com

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