Vince, we have to talk. It's just not working out. The honeymoon was great, but that was seven years ago. It's time to, y'know, have the discussion. Divorce, Vince. What do they call it? Irreconcilable differences? That about sums it up. This relationship is simply beyond repair. You've tried, it's true. You're committed. But Vince, you're stubborn and you're controlling and you have this way of putting your foot in your mouth and, well, you have a temper. And the kids aren't all that happy with you. If you really loved all this, like you say you do, you'd walk away and make room for someone new.
Vincent J. Naimoli, 67, managing general partner of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, the man who pushed St. Petersburg's long and frustrating quest for Major League Baseball over the top, has, by most any measure, made a colossal mess of it. His team is nearing the end of its seventh consecutive losing campaign, although it was enlivened by a midseason hot streak that gave local fans a taste of what it could be like to back a winning baseball club. After years of steady decline, crowds at Tropicana Field increased slightly this year, up about 3,000 per game to 16,648 (as of Aug. 21, when the team surpassed last year's total attendance). But the Rays still drew the lowest numbers in the American League.
"Leadership starts at the top," says J.P. Peterson, sports anchor for WFLA-Ch. 8. "The team will never go anywhere as long as Vince is in there. He's holding the team hostage."
In April, Forbes magazine called the Devil Rays, "the most horrific baseball franchise of the modern era." Two years earlier, the business journal found that the team was losing value, saying it was "the worst-managed organization in baseball."
The Devil Rays, although peppered with young talent at a few key positions, operate on the lowest payroll in the majors, a paltry $23 million compared to the league average of around $70 million.
In September, the Rays' highest paid (and consistently best) player, Aubrey Huff, publicly complained about the padlock on ownership's wallet. His comments earned him a big cheer from the home crowd during the next game. Late in the season, when the New York Mets dumped manager Art Howe, the rabid NYC media hailed Rays skipper Lou Piniella as the man to take over. Piniella professed embarrassment over the attention, but used the opportunity to chide the Rays' front office to goose the payroll. "I'd like to see the organization get after it a little more," Piniella told the St. Petersburg Times. "It's nice to talk about the future all the time, but I'm 61 years old and I'd like an opportunity to win again."
Naimoli countered the Big Apple's courtship by saying that, by golly, Lou's under contract. (It runs through 2006.) And he said he'd raise payroll to over $30 million. (Pundits maintain it will take at least that much to keep the existing sub-.500 team intact.)
"Lou is getting frustrated to the point, I believe, that he may be fed up with the Devil Rays' approach to spending money," says Ken Rosenthal, senior baseball writer for The Sporting News. "Lou desperately wants to win. If he departs, fed up with the whole situation, that would be the most damning thing on Naimoli yet."
The Naimoli regime didn't just recently go bad. The owner's tenure has been fraught with tough times, close calls and controversy. There was the great contraction scare of '02, when it was widely speculated that the Rays would be dissolved. There was the big bankruptcy rumor of '01, when word circulated that the Rays would not be able to finish the season. There was the Hawaiian shirt moment that same year, when Naimoli held a press conference dressed aloha-style and said he was off to catch some rays while someone else ran the Rays. He quickly crept back into power, though, and less than a year later was fully in charge.
Naimoli, who owns about 16 percent of the team, reportedly has an ironclad contract that keeps him in control. The commissioner could remove him in "the best interests of baseball," but such a drastic ploy has been reserved for hopeless disasters like former Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott. This year, the Rays' other general partners, long said to be at loggerheads with Naimoli, sold their stakes to New York financier Stuart Sternberg, who now owns 48 percent of the Devil Rays. Insiders strongly contend that it was a move orchestrated by Major League Baseball. Sternberg is Naimoli's heir apparent (both declined to comment for this story), but no timetable has been set for his move into the big office.
Well, a timetable should be set. The sooner the better.
How about … now?
If we lived in New York or Philly, Boston or Chicago, the media would be calling for Vince Naimoli's scalp about once a week. By comparison, our local sports pages and talking heads have been relatively easy on him. Yes, they've criticized his ham-handed style, his constant Nixonian denials about bad news in the face of overwhelming evidence, his poor fiscal management and tight-fistedness, his inability to put a good product on the field, and other blunders. But of the two dailies, only The Tampa Tribune has called for his ouster, and that was in an editorial three years ago. The St. Petersburg Times, maybe the one institution with the clout to topple Naimoli, has not pushed the issue. Ch. 8's Peterson — whose mentor was the late, pull-no-punches Chris Thomas — says he has issued a number of on-air editorials with a Vince-has-gotta-go theme, but often feels like a "lone voice. I'm a little surprised that the other media aren't beating the drum."
Tom McEwen, the retired sports editor/columnist of The Tampa Tribune, demurred on the issue of whether Naimoli should fall on his sword. However, he did muse, "I don't know why the daily papers haven't jumped on this stuff a little more. You've got to remind people of it."
Times sports columnist Gary Shelton wrote as the 2002 season drew to a close: "The truth — and I'm as much to blame as anyone — is this: The media have wrapped the Rays in a snuggle blanket and placed them on fluffy pillows in a glass case. No one has demanded heads. Or, for that matter, hearts."
Similarly, St. Petersburg's business honchos and politicos are mostly cautious on the Naimoli issue. Widespread scuttlebutt says that nearly all of the town's power elite has written off the Rays' managing partner. "If I had a dime for every person from the business community who's told me they were insulted by Vince Naimoli, or he yelled at board members for not supporting the team, I'd be a very rich man," Peterson says. "He's poisoned the waters in the local business community."
It's tough to find someone who will say it on the record, though. As a rule, only small-business folks are willing to call it straight. "He's the Hugh Culverhouse of baseball," says Mark Ferguson, owner of Ferg's Sports Bar, which sits in the shadow of Tropicana Field. Culverhouse, the late, longtime owner of the Tampa Bay Bucs, was a renowned miser.
"The stink on the franchise comes from all the enemies that Vince has acquired," says Dick Dailey, a St. Petersburg media consultant who did some work for the Devil Rays in the days before the club took to the field. "He's systematically pissed off everyone in town."
Others have taken the high road. David Fischer was mayor of St. Pete when MLB awarded the city an expansion franchise. While "somewhat disappointed" in the Rays' performance, he says. "Vince went out and got the team. I'm not ready to write him off."
City Councilman James Bennett, a big Rays fan, has considerable criticism for the team's failings on the field, in community relations and customer service, but adds, "I'm not going to completely point the finger at Vince."
Perhaps the Devil Rays' biggest foe at this point is apathy. "I think the real disappointment is that not a lot of people seem to care," McEwen says. "Whether it's the people in the media, or the fans that don't go. They don't go and they don't care. When the Bucs did badly, people got angry at their team. Baseball has not yet become part of [the community's] being."
The team, its fans, its could-be fans and the local business community desperately need new energy, a renewed sense of hope. Can Naimoli deliver it? That would seem, well, hopeless.
The good news is that it shouldn't take a miracle to shake off the ennui. One need look no further than the Tampa Bay Lightning. For years, the hockey team limped along as losers playing a winter sport in the tropics. Then came this year's playoff run and Bolt-mania. The St. Pete Times Forum stayed packed and crazed. The team won the Stanley Cup and paraded through downtown Tampa.
The Lightning earned a legion of converts, many of them newcomers to the game, who were hungry for more. (That this season is in jeopardy because of an owners' lockout is another story for another time.) All that passion came to pass within a matter of weeks. It's no stretch to suggest that the same sort of lightning could strike for the Rays.
The community got a little taste of it in late June. After the club returned from a long road trip on a 25-7 tear that included a 12-game winning streak, Tropicana Field drew crowds pushing 30,000 for two games with the Florida Marlins.
With the Rays surprisingly in the hunt for a wild-card playoff spot — they were 38-37 at the end of June — Naimoli didn't heed Piniella's pleas to add a couple of strong hitters via trades. That would've required increasing payroll. By the July 31 trading deadline, the team was 49-54 and effectively out of the chase.
A Devil Rays' regime change makes sense when looked at via the short history of big league sports in Tampa Bay. The Bucs were epic losers under Culverhouse. Despite their on-field woes, the team was among the most profitable in the NFL, mostly because its owner preferred to keep the money than spend it on good players. When Malcolm Glazer came aboard in the '90s, it took just a few years for the team to ascend to the elite, then championship, ranks. Fans forgave the owner's remoteness — because he had delivered a winner.
Similarly, the Lightning struggled through the stewardship of an all but anonymous Japanese cartel, and then a loose cannon named Art Williams. When William Davidson took over, it all turned around. The codger in the cardigan dispassionately watched his hockey club squeak past Calgary while his basketball team, the Detroit Pistons, embarrassed the L.A. Lakers.
We can only hope that new Devil Rays ownership could yield something close to similar results — the haves and have-nots economic system of MLB will make it tougher — but the situation does not look to improve under the status quo.
The best owners in professional sports generally have extremely deep pockets, hire able people to make most of the sports decisions, and provide the necessary cash when it's needed. By contrast, Naimoli is not spectacularly rich — the team has had to take out loans during his tenure — he's been known to meddle in baseball-related affairs, and, most well-documented of all, he has been particularly resistant to forking over extra funds. No one questions the owner's love of his team and hunger to win — he goes to every home game and many road contests, says Rays PR director Rick Vaughn — but mere desire does not deliver results.
In many ways, Vince Naimoli's failure as the Devil Rays' managing partner was preordained. He simply lacks the skills for the job, and harbors certain business philosophies that don't square with professional sports. He's missing the charisma to be a fan favorite, does not possess the rhetorical finesse to effectively woo the media. His photographs often show him scowling, as if he's stomping on puppies. A native of hardscrabble Patterson, N.J., his education was in mechanical engineering, although he earned an M.B.A. from Farleigh Dickinson University in 1964. He worked his way up through the manufacturing ranks. In the early '80s, he took out a home equity loan and invested $122,000 of his own money, along with $900,000 from other investors, to lead a $77-million leveraged buyout of Anchor Glass, a subsidiary of New Jersey-based conglomerate Anchor Hocking. Naimoli cashed out to the tune of $20 million when the company was sold six years later.
He went on to become a corporate turnaround artist with a specialty in cost-cutting. He insisted on approving all expenses, right down to office supplies, and ordered staffers in his various companies to use both sides of memo sheets. To save on postage, he ordered execs traveling to distant locations to bring along paperwork that needed delivery.
Naimoli's thrift has carried over to the Rays. He holds to the belief that attendance drives payroll — the more asses there are in the seats, the more money he can spend on players — but his critics contend that he has it backwards. Field a good, exciting — winning — team and crowds will grow. These days, experts say that will take a minimum player outlay of $50 million to $60 million.
Naimoli may be gun-shy about such numbers. In 2000, he broke from a five-year plan and signed several high-dollar free agents. The payroll ballooned to more than $60 million, while the team finished a dismal 69-92.
Naimoli became St. Petersburg's lead moneyman in its pursuit of baseball during the ill-fated attempt to wrest the Giants from San Francisco in 1992. He carried the torch through a failed expansion bid that saw a franchise go to Miami instead, then was named managing general partner when MLB awarded St. Pete a team in '95.
It didn't take Naimoli long to make his first public gaffe. During thorny negotiations with the city over a $65-million upgrade to Tropicana Field to make it baseball-ready, the new owner actually made noises about moving the team.
He only picked up steam from there. Here's a highlight reel:
1998: Naimoli ticks off civic leaders who had long pursued a baseball franchise by claiming that he alone landed the team.
He blows up at Dillard's brass for using the team's logo without permission. The chain responds by pulling all Devil Rays merchandise from the shelves.
2000: Naimoli freaks out over a Times spoof depicting him as Tony Soprano. He threatens to sue, contacts the Italian Anti-Defamation League and pulls Times papers from the Trop — for one day.
He orders the Rays to shun a fundraiser for the medically needy because organizers decide to hold it at the St. Pete Coliseum instead of Tropicana Field.
The St. Petersburg High School marching band, scheduled to play the national anthem for the final home game, cancels because the front office insists they buy tickets.
2001: During a luncheon speech at the Hyatt Regency in Tampa, the Rays owner chides the corporate community for not buying enough tickets. His remarks do not go over well.
2004: During the first week of the season, Naimoli gets into a press box dust-up with a visiting Baltimore reporter, who buys a personal-size pizza at a concession stand and brings it to his seat. Naimoli threatens to revoke his media credentials. "Bringing food into the press box is a health department violation," Naimoli exclaims. "And I'm not going to get fined for it." Rays PR head Rick Vaughn intervenes and the scribe finishes his assignment, and his pizza.
Even when Naimoli was trying to make nice, it sometimes backfired. In 2001, during a classy Trop sendoff to Orioles' ironman Cal Ripken, fans showered the owner with boos.
When the league awarded St. Pete a baseball franchise in '95, Mark Ferguson had visions of his three-year-old sports bar becoming a haven for Rays fans. Enthusiastic throngs would drop in before and after home games. They'd gather in front of the bar's TVs to watch the team on the road. It hasn't worked out that way. Although he gets a decent boost in business when the Rays play at the Trop, Ferg's in no way subsists on the local ballclub. He's more excited about a nearby condo project in the works than the Major League Baseball team that plays a few blocks away. No small irony there.
As the Devil Rays' inaugural season approached, the city of St. Petersburg threw considerable resources into spiffing up Central Avenue between Dr. Martin Luther King Blvd. and 16th Street. They dubbed it the Dome District. Entrepreneurs flocked to the site, anticipating a busy strip. It worked fairly well early on, especially when the Rays averaged crowds of nearly 31,000 at the Trop in '98 (45,369 turned out for the inaugural home game, the only sellout in team history). But then the team's attendance dropped by more than 9,000 a game the following year, and steadily decreased to a low of 13,070 in 2003.
Ferguson witnessed the Dome District's drop-off. By his count, 23 bar/restaurants have opened and closed since the team's debut.
These days, the stretch of Central is anything but a sports promenade. A handful of small eateries remain, but the area seems to be taking on the arts-oriented flavor of Central Avenue to the east.
Steve Capinegro, who owns Steve's Tav and Ave. on Central east of the dome, tended bar one recent afternoon for a small crowd of regulars. He opened in 1990, and admitted to thinking the new baseball team might significantly boost his business. It hasn't happened. After some prodding, the bar owner said of Naimoli, "He's a bust. How can you say anything else?"
A trickle of folks stop into the bar to oil up on cheap beer before Rays games, Capinegro said; it's better than paying the steep prices inside the dome.
Once inside Tropicana Field, there's a good chance they're in for a less-than-satisfying experience. The team's reputation for customer service is poor; it continues to cut back on amenities. "It always feels like they're contracting, cutting back," councilman Bennett says. "There are less giveaways, less things that make the experience exciting."
Then there are the Seat Nazis. Tropicana Field is notorious for not letting fans improve where they sit, even when there are crowds of less than 4,000, as was the case a few times late in the season. Ushers descend on fans who try to move up a few (empty) rows — even in the upper deck.
The Trop has a drab exterior and is showing wear and tear inside. "The toilets don't flush properly," says Bob Andelman, a local author who runs the website emailtherays.com. "There's a sink in one of the restrooms that's been running since 1998."
It shouldn't be that way. Under the use agreement the Devil Rays have with the city, the team is responsible for the year-round running and upkeep of the building. The Rays pay no fixed rent, but the city gets 50 cents from every ticket sold at the dome. The first $250,000 in ticket revenue goes into a capital improvement fund set aside for major repairs beyond routine maintenance. Next, monies go toward the roughly $1 million a year the city pays in property insurance.
Any subsequent revenue is earmarked for city coffers, but St. Pete has never enjoyed such a windfall. Instead, the stadium costs the city about $1 million a year, says Joe Zeoli, St. Petersburg's managing director of city development administration. That does not include the $4 million or so that St. Petersburg pays in bond debt incurred during the stadium's renovation.
Bennett would like to see closer ties between the Rays and city hall. "All I can say is that there always seems to be a gap in the relationship," he says. "They tolerate us. When the team came home from that winning streak, it was the city that put on the parade [at Baywalk]. They sent a couple of players down, but other than that it was, 'OK, go ahead.'
"Even though the team has a 20-year lease [at the Trop], there's this nagging feeling that it could slip away, that the trucks could pull up in the night and haul everything away somewhere."
There are certainly people out there who think that wouldn't be such a bad thing, but, McEwen says, "It may not seem to matter until the team leaves. These are still big-league events. If would be a terrific blotch on the area if the team leaves."
Although relocation talk has quelled in the last couple of years, it can quickly flare up again. Assuming that the Devil Rays stay, they still need to make major improvements — on the field and in the front office — in order to really gain a foothold in Tampa Bay. That will be best facilitated by a change in ownership. "We could have a good team here," Peterson says, "if not for this one man."
This article appears in Sep 29 – Oct 5, 2004.
