Only a couple hours after Major League Baseball killed the Tampa Bay Rays’ kooky, controversial plan to split their home schedule with the city of Montreal, my phone rang last week.
It was the great Pat Williams on the other end.
“Mikey boy, now’s our chance,” Williams said. “Now’s our chance to bring baseball to Orlando.”
Williams, the co-founder of the Orlando Magic and the man who helped blaze the trail to bring big-time professional sports to Central Florida, had this crazy dream in the mid-1980s that Orlando could become an NBA city. And here he is four decades later at age 81 still wondrously following his dreams; dreams of luring the Rays 90 miles east to Orlando.
It’s been more than two years since Williams called his own news conference and explained to the assembled media how Orlando should go about pursuing the Rays. Williams even unveiled a new team logo and a new team name, the Orlando Dreamers — a tribute to ambitious idealists such as Walt Disney, Arnold Palmer and astronaut John Young who made their wildest dreams come true right here in Central Florida.
Shortly after Williams’ news conference, the global pandemic hit, Orlando’s tourism economy went into the tank and local politicians had much more important things to do than pursue a baseball team. But with our economy finally getting up off the mat and the tourist development tax (TDT) hopefully making the slow climb to pre-pandemic levels, Williams believes Orlando must act now if we are ever going to attract a Major League Baseball team.
Why? Because Rays owner Stuart Sternberg is desperate. He’s been trying to get a new stadium built in Tampa Bay for years without any luck. He then came up with this crackpot “sister city” proposal in which the Rays would become like the many snowbirds that inhabit St. Pete. His plan was to play the first half of the season (before it gets too hot and rainy) in a new open-air stadium in Tampa Bay and then migrate north in the summer months to play the second half of the season in a new open-air stadium in Montreal.
Major League Baseball had no choice but to finally put Sternberg’s idea out of its misery last week. The plan never made any sense. First and foremost, the powerful Major League Baseball Players Association would never sign off on its members having to leave their families halfway through the season and relocate 1,500 miles away to another country for three months. Secondly, it’s hard enough to get a new stadium built in one city, let alone two — even though open-air stadiums are much cheaper to build than the retractable-roof coliseums that are all the rage today.
At any rate, when Major League Baseball killed the “sister city” plan, Sternberg called it “devastating” and “flat-out deflating.”
“This was something that we just completely pushed our chips in on here for the sister city,” Sternberg said. “It was a bold concept, but it was something that we thought would’ve been incredibly rewarding for baseball, for the players and for the fans in both areas. Again, those were our thoughts. Now going forward, we’re going to regroup and see where things are, and we’ll consider a number of things, I’m sure, as time goes by.”
This is where Orlando comes in, Williams says. The Rays’ lease at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg expires after the 2027 season and city officials have already designated the 86 acres where the Trop sits as part of a midtown redevelopment plan.
“Unless they can get another stadium built in the Tampa Bay area — and they’ve been trying to get that done for 15 years — the Rays are going to have no place to play six years from April 1st,” Williams says. “The clocks is ticking on them over there and it’s ticking on us over here if we want a baseball team.”
The question is, do we?
Do we want a baseball team?
Do our politicians have the desire to make a run at the Rays?
At the very least, I would hope Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer, Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings and other governmental leaders and tourism officials get together and investigate whether it’s feasible to lure the Rays to Orlando.
In 20 years, when the Champa Bay Rays have just won yet another World Series, let’s not longingly wonder what might have been had our local leaders made a concerted effort to bring baseball to Orlando. Remember last year after the Tampa Bay Buccaneers won the Super Bowl when respected WFTV-Channel 9 news anchor Greg Warmoth retold the story in this column about how Orlando blew its chances of getting the Bucs.
“There is no doubt in my mind that the Bucs would have come to Orlando if (former Orange County mayor) Linda Chapin and our politicians had been more aggressive in pursuing them in 1995,” said Warmoth, who was then a TV sports anchor in town covering the Bucs’ disenchantment with Tampa Bay and their flirtation with Orlando.
Similar to the Rays, the Bucs and their then-new owner Malcolm Glazer desperately wanted a new stadium, which Tampa Bay originally wasn’t willing to build them. Chapin admitted she was put off by Glazer pitting Orlando against Tampa Bay in the race to build the Bucs a new stadium.
“I recall the Bucs simply wanting to use us as a mechanism for what they wanted in Tampa,” Chapin told me last year, recalling her long-ago meeting with Bucs officials. “It [the meeting] was in part a courtesy call and an attempt to see if there was real interest in moving the Bucs here to play in a new football stadium. I did not give them any encouragement.”
Williams believes the approach by our city leaders of today should be the complete opposite of Chapin’s standoffish approach more than a quarter-century ago. Orlando, after all, is the biggest TV market in America without an MLB team and we are growing faster than any of the other cities (Nashville, Portland, Las Vegas, etc.) who hope to have a baseball team someday.
“This is our best chance to get baseball — and maybe our last chance,” Williams says.
If we want to play ball, we need to throw out our first pitch to the Tampa Bay Rays right now.
