As the Tampa Bay Rays last month were going about putting together the best record in Major League Baseball, they were continuing to attract paltry crowds to lonely Tropicana Field, a development that brought forth front page stories in both local dailies last week.
Now that story is going national. Yesterday in the New York Post, scribe Joel Sherman wrote that "it is clear that this is not going to work in St. Pete," adding:
As opposed to say Baltimore or Cleveland, teams which have a history of drawing three million in attendance when they have been good, and Toronto, which actually bettered four million, there is no legacy of drawing in St. Pete to suggest that fans will one day show up in significant numbers.
Think of St. Pete like New Jersey: People might go from New York to Jersey for eight weekend football games. But I don’t imagine a lot of folks in Brooklyn or Queens would go constantly for 81 baseball games, in the way that Jersey-ites are more willing to go to baseball in the boroughs. Tampa residents seem to have the same inclination when it comes to traveling to St. Pete; they just won’t do it in the way St. Pete residents will go to Tampa, the Rays surveying has shown.
This article appears in Apr 28 – May 4, 2010.