Bleacher Report ranks Rays ownership in the middle of the pack despite shaky offseason

With the Rays' recent offseason, there being as many ups as downs, it's tough to say where the Rays' ownership group ranks in baseball, but Bleacher Report attempted to do so, ranking the Rays at No. 14 out of the 30 MLB teams.

Does 14 seem a bit high for a team that's one more weirdly vaguely threatening letter away from relocating and leaving the Tampa Bay area entirely?

Yeah, maybe a little bit.

Sure, there are owners like Bob Nutting and Arte Moreno who are incompetent for completely different reasons, with one cheaping out, but having a gorgeous stadium (does Nutting get credit for that? Probably not, but he also hasn't managed to screw that up either) and the other for spending in all the wrong ways.

John Fisher is the worst, by a very wide margin, as he's relocating the Athletics to Las Vegas after some ugly and very half-baked efforts to stick around in Oakland.

But honestly, the Rays' ownership group isn't too far behind what Fisher did, and if things don't change quickly, they could be just as bad.

The Rays have until the end of March to solidfy a stadium deal they agreed to last year that gives them over half of a billion dollars in public funding to build a privately owned baseball stadium.

The Rays have balked at that deal due to the delays caused by the Pinellas County Board of Commissioners voting to approve bonds for the new stadium, built in essentially the same area as Tropicana Field, which was blown away by a major hurricane in 2024.

What's their end goal? Is it to truly stay in the Tampa Bay area, but try to see if Tampa proper is interested instead of staying in St. Pete, or is it to try to leverage more money out of an area that was just hammered by a massive storm?

It could also be to try and get a sweet deal elsewhere, something they're technically not allowed to do until their lease is up with the City of St. Pete.

The common refrain is that Stu is probably going to end up selling the team, hopefully to local business leaders who have actual investment in the area and want to commit to keeping the team in Tampa Bay, but of course, he could end up selling to a group looking to pack up and move to one of the many attractive expansion options MLB has around the country.

Either way, it's a tricky proposition because while in an ideal world, a local group comes in and makes all of these troubles go away, there has been some positives under Sternberg's ownership.

The Rays are one of the most successful teams in baseball during his tenure, because he's made excellent hires and has seemingly been able to allow people to do their thing in regards to being creative and cutting edge with how they look at the game.

Plus, this offseason the Rays signed a couple of (for them, at least) big contracts in Ha-Seong Kim and Danny Jansen, addressing 2 positions of need going into the offseason.

Add in their decisions to hold onto big contracts like Pete Fairbanks, Brandon Lowe, and Yandy Diaz, and the Rays had themselves a pretty aggressive offseason that is hard to call anything but a successs.

But, they've always been in the bottom third of baseball in spending on player payroll, despite having one of the more well-run front offices in baseball and providing support for the team in other less obvious areas like player development systems (it's a running joke that they'll turn a bunch of random pitchers into success stories every year) and having a seemingly robust R&D department.

So it's completely understandable to want to rank Stu and the Boys low, because who the heck cares about how efficient or good a team is if they're not staying?

If the rankings were done by RaysColoredGlasses, Rays ownserhip would probably be somewhere in the 20s (ahead of the Athletics, Rockies, Angels, Pirates, White Sox, and Marlins) instead of the upper half of the game, because the unsettled nature of the Rays' future in Tampa Bay weighs heavy in these discussions.

If they get that settled though, they could very easily shoot up into the upper half of baseball.

Here's to hoping that happens.