“Wishing I was somewhere else, having fun and acting cool. I just want to be myself, and I finally found a home where I’ll never be alone, right here where I belong.”
-Huey Lewis, “Finally Found a Home”, 1983
My old boss was a shrewd businessman. While he’d inherited his trucking company from his father, it was he who built it into a multi-million dollar a year industry. We’d haul food grade products around the country for companies like Minute Maid, Ocean Spray, TG Lee, and Publix. One day, when I asked him why he chose to haul food around the country with his hundreds of trucks instead of anything else, he simply responded “People gotta eat. I supply them with the food they have on their breakfast table.”
He was right, to the tune of a company that provides an invaluable service and remains successful to this day.
I learned a lot about business from that man, and a lot about supply and demand. Every time we’d pass an Outback Steakhouse, he’d point to their parking lots and ask me if I knew why their parking lots were so small. He said it was to create a sense of demand. I never found out whether that was true, but every time we would pop in for a happy hour cocktail, there’d be a line of hungry and thirsty people out the door. The Outback restaurant chain remains wildly successful here in America, first opening in Tampa in 1998. There are now over 1,000 Outback restaurants worldwide.
There’s another franchise that has struggled with supply and demand that also opened in Tampa in 1998. That’s the Tampa Bay Rays. At long last, the city of St. Petersburg announced they have come to terms with ownership to build a new stadium in the area. This comes after… hold your breath… years of push and pull between St Petersburg, Tampa and other cities thrown into the mix about where to relocate the team, hyped press conferences within which plans were revealed prematurely to build a stadium in Ybor City, only to be nixed once a $2 billion price tag was revealed. There has been relentless complaining about the city’s infrastructure and why no corporate money could fund a stadium, the old St Pete mayor saying the team would be moved over his dead body, countless attempts to break a lease the team had signed decades earlier, a clueless commissioner’s plans to have the team play half its season in Montreal, fans complaining about the drive, the current stadium’ facilities and basically every other reason not to see a winning baseball team play live. You can now exhale. All this team has done on a shoestring budget compared to the rest of the teams in the league, and particularly within its own division, is win, win, win no matter what, for the most part at least.
For a fan base that has complained endlessly about this stadium deal, with every fan having an opinion, it’s good to finally be one step closer to an agreement, and then one step closer again, for this bickering has gone on for years. Locals have become skeptical. I’ll believe this is a done deal when they officially break ground, but it looks like the demand has finally been created. This won’t be some grandiose 60,000-seat stadium but rather half that. This is baseball after all where, on average, under 30,000 fans attend a game. Remember, small parking lots.
Over the last few years, the Rays have done everything in their power to put together a competitive franchise. They’ve reached the post-season in the last five years yet still rank 27th in the league in attendance. The question remains: if they build it, will they come?
I’ve listened to countless fans over the years come up with reasons they don’t go (see above) without taking accountability or perhaps just saying they’re not that interested in baseball. This is still the South where football rules but that doesn’t explain why the Tampa Bay Lightning have done so well. I can tell you I take a trolley to the where the Lightning play and the Rays are a considerably farther swim from where I work.
I’m just as guilty for not attending, choosing to watch their games on TV but I also work nights. Sure, it’s a drive to see great entertainment in Major League Baseball’s dive bar of a stadium but no new ballpark smell will magically solve this market’s problems. And therein lies the rub.
The Rays are one big step closer to getting their new home, or so it seems. Here’s hoping the fans demand to get inside those new friendly confines while supplies last.
