Nashville’s minor league stadium is far from dated and yes the baseball team plays in a on campus stadium. There are plenty of options that are in place to build a new stadium there with multiple municipalities welcoming it.

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2018
#ExtendLafleur
10 More Wins

Be that as it may, they're not going to move the team to Nashville or Charlotte when Orlando has a stadium two hours down the road with no tenant.

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Speaking of minor league things in TN, Knoxville (about 2.5 hours east of Nashville) has the Cubs AA team the Smokies. For Cubs and Chicago fans it is cool because they have Chicago style dogs and pizza and lots of Cubs stuff. I got to see Ben Brown start a game there. I do not waste much time with minor league games, but everyone once in a while I get to one. Seeing Mark Prior warm up in front of me down the left line for the Louisville Bats was interesting (Riggleman in the dugout and Billy Hamilton in center.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

Do they have a bunch of rich people with too much time on their hands to file lawsuits so the great skyline of Tampa Bay doesn't get ruined by having a building visible from a boat in the water?

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

In Tampa Bay, the advocacy groups sue you to make you slap up hideous buildings everywhere. It's called Friends of the Hooters.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

Back in U of I days we drove over to Danville for a single-A game. Can't remember whose team it was but I do recall it was great fun. Maybe 50 cent hot dogs and 25 cent beers.

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"I honestly don't see a good bet on the board here."

Their AAA affiliate at Durham has a great AAA stadium which seats 10000, but is unsuitable for MLB. No room to expand things like locker rooms and training facilities to major league, no place to really improve the lighting for night games to major league standards, and the nearby hotel is an aloft. Visiting teams would have to stay 30 minutes away at the Umstead, which is a true luxury hotel on the campus of the company SAS.

Charlotte is a better option for amenities because the football stadium is nearby. But the baseball stadium itself is not that great.

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"When people want their version of the truth, they go find it, no matter how baseless their beliefs." -- Ken Rosenthal

They should look at South/Southwest. Nashville's like Houston or Jacksonville in that the city limits go on quite a bit, esp to the north. Putting an 81 game facility with 7 PM first pitch across the river from downtown seems like a recipe for
impossible traffic across the bridges to get to the games on weeknights. They've already built up the interstates and by-passes south of the metro area. That converted SR now I-840 running south of Nashville is always a ghost-town. Good place to test out the top speed on your car.

Nashville had a $9 billion light-rail/ express bus-lines (like they have in Boston) proposal that looked like it might pass as part of the effort to get Amazon to expand in Nashville. Then the mayor lady at the time got busted cheating with her bodyguard and spending taxpayer dollars (Fani Willis style) on trips and luxury hotels and meals and clothes for herself and her bodyguard beau; since she was the main proponent of the light-rail plan it got shit-canned.

The Smokies are moving into a new stadium in Downtown Knoxville for the 2025 season. I doubt it is of major league standard, but if it can be upgraded one option might be to leave the Smokies out at their old stadium for one last year and have the Rays play at the new stadium.

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"When people want their version of the truth, they go find it, no matter how baseless their beliefs." -- Ken Rosenthal

There are like 49.5 baseball stadiums within reasonable driving distance of Tampa, they're not moving to fucking Knoxville.

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I wasn’t saying they were or should. I was just commenting that it is a Chicago friendly place….

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Hawaii (fuck) You

Most of the spring training sites in Florida are shitty. The ones that do not belong to their divisional rivals the Yankees and Red Sox.

I agree that they will probably end up in Dunedin or Tampa. I was just pointing out that Knoxville has an extra vacant ballpark.

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"When people want their version of the truth, they go find it, no matter how baseless their beliefs." -- Ken Rosenthal

I feel like every month since the hurricane, the Rays say "that's it, we're not building the new stadium" and then say that they are again, but they did it again today and people seem to think they mean it this time:

https://www.tampabay.com/news/st-peters ... -deadline/

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My guy tells me MLB will force a sale.

I'm not trying to make a joke, but wasn't the stadium insured? Surely there would be a large payout coming their way to use to build a new stadium or repair the existing one.

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The Court will accord substantial deference to the government's immigration policies, particularly those that implicate matters of national security.

Yeah, I think the city is using the insurance money to pay for the new roof and electrical repairs.

Frankly, I was never impressed with the new stadium renderings:



Seems like the prompt was "build an MLB park with as few seats as possible"

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Its the Rays. Is that going to be a problem?

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Very nice warehouse.

I think owner made the right decision. I think the owner will sell. I think the owner is smart. Get the hell out of Tampa Bay baseball with your head above water. Literally the sport has nothing going for it but the summer season and certain areas aren't conducive to it. Going to the warehouse just isn't appealing.

It's why my homeowner's insurance is skyrocketing. Paying for man's hubris of building anything in Florida.

You live in Florida?

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

The guy is starting to give me the Dan Snyder vibe of just being a complete jagoff. Not sure if this impacts insurance or not, but I had heard the roof was well beyond the "replace date"....would not surprise me the Rays would have chose to skip that piece of maintenance.

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Yep. The roof had a 25-year lifespan but was 34 years old. I think it would have been the city's responsibility to replace it, but they never did, probably because the Rays have essentially been a lame-duck tenant for the past 15 years: it's an ironclad lease through '27 and then it was a foregone conclusion that they'd be in a new park or relocate for '28. So the city probably just figured it'd be better to just ride out the old roof past its useful life and hope that a category 5 hurricane never struck it in the meantime. They almost got away with it, too!

As for Sternberg, he's not at the Snyder level yet, but he does seem to be facing the same fate. The Rays before his ownership were a clown show of has-beens and never-weres who lost 100 games every year, and then Sternberg's hires basically turned them into the east-coast A's, with all the good and bad that that entails. He's been able to run a successful little budget operation for a while now, the opposite of Snyder, but the guy just cannot get a new stadium built. I remember they were going to build the one on the waterfront that had like a canvas roof over the stands. That fizzled out. I think they tried to build downtown by whatever we're calling the Ice Palace this year and got nowhere. They tried to move half the home games to Montreal and that didn't accomplish anything either. And now this half-baked strip mall concept right next to the current stadium that they claim is too hard to get to failed too. So it's probably time for him to go and maybe the Rays as well.

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Rob Manfred is hell bent on keeping the Rays in Florida for a similar reason that Gary Bettman was hell bent on keeping the Coyotes in Phoenix: TV market. Stories are starting to leak that although Manfred cannot force a sale, he can and will make life very difficult on Stu and coerce him to sell. There are two interested owners groups, one with Joe Molloy (who was a longtime Yankee minority owner who was the control person when George Steinbrenner was suspended) and one with Barry Larkin that wants to build in Orlando. And Manfred probably has a sufficient number of owners to block a relocation, as they want to save Nashville for the massive expansion entry fee.

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"When people want their version of the truth, they go find it, no matter how baseless their beliefs." -- Ken Rosenthal

I'm kinda ready to see what Orlando can do. Getting all the Tampa-St. Pete towns to work together on something seems impossible.

TV market was a consideration for Bettman's Phoenix obsession, but the biggest was that he didn't want the league to walk out on a new publicly funded arena in 2009 (or 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013) and risk turning off the taxpayer-money faucet for future teams, followed closely by making sure that the league had the right to choose its members. Then there were various alignment and territory concerns over Hamilton and Quebec City. For all the market-size concerns, they were oddly fine with pulling the plug in favor of Winnipeg, which came a few minutes away from happening.

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