Report: MLB kills plan for Rays to split home between Tampa, Montreal

Major League Baseball has put an end to plans made by Tampa Bay Rays ownership that would have seen the ball club split its time in Tampa and Montreal, Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times reports.

Topkin says Rays principal owner Stuart Sternberg will address the issue in a press conference Thursday afternoon.

Rays officials had been very public about the plan, going as far as to say it was the “only” way the Rays — who regularly rank near the bottom of attendance in MLB — could remain a profitable franchise. Now the club will need to find a way to build a new stadium in the Tampa area to replace the ageing Tropicana Field, while also generating enough support to keep the team sustainable for all 12 months of the year.

The Rays initially conceived of the idea in 2019 as the team plans for a future beyond 2027, when the lease at Tropicana Field expires. At a press conference outlining the plan in 2019, Sternberg said the Tampa region cannot support a ball club for 81 home dates but added he doesn’t plan on fully relocating the team.

“I have no intention of selling this baseball team,” Sternberg said in 2019. “I love being involved with baseball and all I’m able to do with it. What happens next (if the Montreal plan fails) I do not know. Even though it seems like a longshot idea to everybody and a cockamamie idea and whatever else it’s been called, we really do feel great about it and think it can get done.”

While not everyone supported the idea — Sportsnet’s Shi Davidi reports the mayor of St. Petersburg was against it — Rays ownership did have a potential partner in Montreal. Stephen Bronfman, the son of former Montreal Expos owner Charles Bronfman, is leading a group to bring baseball back to Montreal and spoke with the Rays on multiple occasions about the idea.

In 2021, the Rays announced plans to hang a sign in support of the plan at Tropicana Field during the post-season. However, after criticism from the fanbase, the sign never saw the light of day.

Still, as recently as October, Rays president Chris Auld was speaking publically about the split-city plan, telling the Wall Street Journal that “We’ve concluded that it’s next to impossible that full-season baseball can succeed in Tampa Bay today.”