Tampa’s subsidies for the Rays are colossally stupid
Timothy P. Carney
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The Tampa Bay Rays have been eliminated from the baseball playoffs after two losses at home. Not only was the Rays’ offense moribund, but so was their attendance.
Tropicana Field’s stands were largely empty in the Rays’ two playoff games — attendance averaged 20,000. It was the worst attendance for a playoff game, basically ever. This is in a season in which attendance is generally up.
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Yet somehow, the politicians of the Tampa area have decided the Rays need a brand-new stadium. Despite the Rays being a for-profit company, and despite baseball teams having long-established means for monetizing their product (such as requiring tickets, plus selling beer and peanuts), the government officials are going to pay for it with public funds.
Pinellas County and the City of St. Petersburg have each offered to front $300 million to subsidize a new stadium despite the total lack of evidence that the people of St. Petersburg find the Rays’ presence to be a public good.
Subsidizing sports stadiums basically never pays off. As I wrote last year, “Economists John C. Bradbury, Dennis Coates, and Brad Humphreys went through 130 studies over 30 years and concluded: ‘The large subsidies commonly devoted to constructing professional sports venues are not justified as worthwhile public investments.'”
“A city or county does not see net economic growth from subsidizing stadiums. This is one of the most consistent findings in economics.”
Such subsidies are especially pointless in a town that evidently doesn’t love the team.
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A larger baseball argument is that Florida really shouldn’t have its own baseball teams. Florida is famous for hosting spring training, including preseason games, which provide a leisurely version of the great game. Also, people in Florida have plenty of other warm-weather activities to attend besides baseball games. As a result, neither the Tampa Bay Rays nor the Miami Marlins, despite multiple seasons of the Rays being good and interesting, have a real fan base.
The Miami Marlins opened a new government-subsidized stadium last decade, and it has proved a mistake. They sold out only two games all season in their first year in the new stadium, and attendance steadily dropped over the course of the decade. In the two years before the pandemic, the Marlins didn’t even sell 1 million tickets (over 81 games combined) — and this was the 7th and 8th season in their new stadium.