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Rays Owner Stu Sternberg Facing Pressure To Sell From Fellow Owners, Commissioner’s Office

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Rays owner Stu Sternberg is facing pressure to sell the club from MLB commissioner Rob Manfred and “several” fellow owners, according to a report from Evan Drellich of The Athletic. On Thursday, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported that while no deal was close, a group of businesspeople local to the Tampa Bay area have started to put together ownership groups with their sights set on purchasing the team. Drellich’s report expands on that report, confirming that no sale is close but that “several groups” with ties to Florida have expressed interest in purchasing the club.

Drellich reports that those involved in one group include the family of San Francisco 49ners owner Edward DeBartolo Jr. and former Yankees minority owner Joe Molloy, with Tampa-area business man Dan Doyle Jr. involved in another group. Molloy subsequently confirmed to Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times that he’s leading a group with interest in purchasing the Rays, adding that his group would have interest in pursuing the stadium deal the Rays currently have in place with Pinellas County and the city of St. Petersburg. Notably, Molloy led the Yankees while George Steinbrenner was suspended during the 1990s, while Doyle previously expressed interest in purchasing the Rays back in 2023.

That deal, of course, has been publicly thrown into doubt by clashes between the Rays and the Pinellas County Board of Commissioners. The county delayed a vote in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton that the Rays claim held up the construction process and increased costs, and the club argues that it should not cover those costs on its own despite the deal stating that the Rays will handle any cost overruns. That deal is just weeks away from a key deadline on March 31, just after Opening Day, that requires Sternberg to meet certain obligations if the stadium deal is to proceed.

Given the hostile relationship between Sternberg and local officials, Drellich suggests that it could be difficult to revive the deal if Sternberg allows that March 31 deadline to pass without acting. It’s possible the deal could be revived in some form under new ownership, however, and that appears to be the impetus behind Manfred’s push for Sternberg to either work out the stadium issue or sell the club. Drellich emphasizes the MLB believes strongly in Florida as a viable market despite the lackluster financial showings of the Rays and Marlins since the franchises came into being during the 1990s, and the league seems unlikely to approve relocation out of Florida for Sternberg—or a hypothetical future Rays owner. If the stadium deal in St. Pete falls through, Drellich reports that MLB believes the Ybor City neighborhood in Tampa or perhaps even Orlando could be viable alternatives for the Rays.

As the commissioner’s office looks to pressure Sternberg, Drellich writes that the league could look to take away at least some of the Rays’ revenue sharing dollars, which he notes add up to around $60MM annually. That would be a major blow to the club’s finances, but it’s one that could not be exercised unilaterally by Manfred. Instead, alterations to revenue sharing would need to be collectively bargained during the next CBA negotiations. The current agreement runs through 2026, and when it expires Drellich suggests that Manfred and the league could seek a carve out in the CBA that applies specifically to the Rays that would cut the club off from its revenue sharing dollars if they failed to get a stadium deal done before a certain date. As Drellich points out, the league utilized a similar tactic to pressure A’s owner John Fisher into getting a binding stadium agreement into place by January 15, 2024.

Of course, any pressure tactic that needs to be collectively bargained wouldn’t necessarily have much of an immediate effect given that the end of the current CBA is nearly two years away. With that being said, Drellich does note that Manfred has some ways to financially pressure the Rays and Sternberg at his disposal in the more immediate future: the commissioner’s discretionary fund and supplemental discretionary fund. The distribution of those funds is not publicized, but Drellich notes that the Rays have been a beneficiary and that the payments from those funds are typically in the neighborhood of “several” million dollars, though not quite reaching tens of millions.

It’s unclear to what extent any losses in funding from the league, be they from the commissioner’s discretionary fund or eventual revenue sharing losses at some point in the future, would impact the Rays from a baseball perspective. The club already runs one of the league’s lowest payrolls with their $90MM projected payroll for 2025 ranking in the bottom five in the league per RosterResource. That’s exactly in line with last year’s payroll numbers, but slightly higher than where the club has lived in the past. It wouldn’t be a shock, then, if the losses in funding were passed on in at least some capacity to the baseball operations department.

Infielder Ha-Seong Kim’s $16MM player option is the only guaranteed contract on the Rays’ books beyond this season apart from the Wander Franco contract that is currently going unpaid, but the club does have a number of pricey club options on veterans like Yandy Diaz, Brandon Lowe, and Pete Fairbanks next season. If the club’s baseball operations budget tightens in response to financial pressure from the league, it’s possible the front office could look to move some of those players in the offseason or even at the trade deadline this year depending on the club’s position in the standings.

As Drellich notes, there’s little incentive for Sternberg to lower his asking price for the Rays in order to facilitate a sale. The Rays were estimated to be worth $1.25 billion according to franchise valuations by Forbes last year, and that value figures to have only gone up since then. Even if Manfred and the commissioner’s office begin putting financial pressure on Sternberg to sell, those financial losses would surely pale in comparison to the potential loss in value that would come with selling low on a franchise estimated to be worth more than a billion dollars.

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