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Turns out one of the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team's biggest fans is from another sport — hockey.
That would be Jeff Vinik, owner of the Tampa Bay Lightning in the NHL, who also moonlights as lead developer on a project primed to reshape a 42-acre swath of downtown Tampa. Vinik's grand plan requires a significant company to move its headquarters to town, and to do that, he says, keeping the Rays in the area is imperative.
If the Rays move, says Vinik, “the first thing people will say to me is you can't even keep your baseball team here. I'm not going to move my company here.”
Vinik was one-third of a rare joint public appearance Feb. 29, when he was joined on a panel with Rays principal owner Stuart Sternberg and Tampa Bay Buccaneers Co-Chairman Bryan Glazer. The event was held at the Poynter Institute in downtown St. Petersburg, a nonprofit journalism education facility that owns the Tampa Bay Times.
The sports executives chatted among each other and stood for a few group pictures before the event. They talked about everything from media access to players to stadium financing to athletes they admired as kids. (Glazer grew up a Miami Dolphins fan and loved Mercury Morris, and later Dan Marino; Sternberg idolized Sandy Koufax so much he named his son Sanford, and Vinik's favorite was Mickey Mantle.)
Other highlights include:
Glazer's biggest challenge with the Bucs is competing with the ease and comfort of watching a football game at home. That's why the Bucs, he says, have moved toward a model of making a game an experience. “You can't download a live sporting event,” says Glazer.
The issue of public vs. private financing was one of the main topics, wrapped around the nearly decade-long debate about where the next home for the Rays will be. “There is no way we can self-finance a stadium,” says Sternberg.
Vinik, too, says private financing is a nonstarter. “If you look at the financial models, if you want to privately finance 100% a new ballpark or arena, the economics aren't going to work,” Vinik says. “You can't finance the whole thing privately and then run the business. It's just not financially feasible.”
Sternberg delivered the laugh line of the night with his description of how the have and have-not nature of baseball's salary structure impacts competitive balance on the field. “We're the one sport that doesn't have a cap,” says Sternberg, with Glazer to his right and Vinik to his left. “I refer to our team as a large intestine. What comes in sort of goes right out.”
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