Montreal wants to share the Rays with Tampa Bay

The future of Major League Baseball in the Tampa Bay area is in doubt.

The Rays are probably the most problematic franchise in the league right now. Despite a shockingly-good season on a shoestring budget in which the Rays won 90 games, they ranked dead last with an average of 14,258 fans per game.

Beyond that, the Rays badly need to upgrade their stadium. To be honest, calling Tropicana Field a stadium is generous. It’s basically an abandoned Costco with green shag carpet with stains from the lingering sweat-based humidity in the air.

Last summer, the organization announced plans for a new stadium project that would be ready for 2023, but the plan was taken back to the drawing board after the Rays failed to reached fundraising goals by the December deadline. There’s no doubt The Trop sucks ass for a variety of reasons, including it being out-of-date and having a poor location, but the Rays are going to have a bad time trying to syphon money from taxpayers given what the State of Florida just went through in Miami with their new mega-stadium.

Anyways, here comes Montreal businessman Stephen Bronfman to the rescue! According to a report from La Presse, Bronfman has a plan in which Tampa and Montreal share the Rays. The Tampa Bay Expo Rays of Montreal, according to this plan, would play their spring and late summer games in Tampa and their warm summer months games in Montreal.

Bronfman leads a group hell bent on bringing Major League Baseball back to Montreal. Bronfman’s group eyes the Peel Basin area of Montreal as the ideal home for a new stadium, given Olympic Stadium is obviously obsolete. Montreal’s mayor reportedly supports the idea, but it would require support from the federal government.

As cool as this sounds, there are plenty of logistical issues with sharing a baseball team between two cities. Beyond just the nightmare of travel and scheduling, the Rays are legally bound to the city of St. Petersburg until the end of the 2027 season. If the Rays want to play elsewhere or move to a new city or, uh, share time with Montreal, they need to work with St. Petersburg to break the current lease they’re locked into.

Of course, the city wouldn’t want the Rays leaving, given the team is the main tenant of the shitty ass facility which really bares no function if they aren’t playing there. If the Rays pack up and move, the city is suddenly saddled with a white elephant they’re paying for to just sit there and take up space.

So as cool of an idea as it seems for Montreal and Tampa to do something similar to what the Bills did with Buffalo and Toronto a few years ago, the legalities and logistics make it very, very difficult. The Bring Back The Expos group is better off endeavouring for an expansion franchise than they are trying to pry the Rays out of their deal in St. Petersburg.