Maybe Recent Rays Headlines All Part of St. Pete's Poker-Playing

With so much interest in this morning's blogpost on whether St. Pete's lawyers are really making any progress with the Rays', here's an encore post to get your commenting juices flowing.

Field of Schemes' Neil deMause speculates why the Rays' Stadium Saga is heating up now:

Still, maybe Foster and the council have decided that enh, go ahead and let Sternberg look at sites, then they can tell him how much money he’ll have to pay to get out of his lease early. And then Sternberg can complain about how he doesn’t have the money to do all this — don’t forget, not only doesn’t he have a site, but his stadium dream doesn’t have even the inkling of a funding plan — and it’ll be Tampa’s fault for not coming up with the money, instead of Foster’s fault for being obstructionist, or whatever he’s ostensibly doing by holding Sternberg to his lease. There’d be a risk here — if Sternberg is able to create some media momentum for a site elsewhere, then there’d be pressure on Foster to haggle over the price — but maybe Foster feels like he’s tired of not talking about stadium sites, and would rather not talk about stadium funding instead.

Or maybe Nurse, who’s previously expressed a desire to get stadium talks moving, just decided to create some momentum on his own. He certainly made lots of headlines, so step one, check!

Nurse, by the way, runs for re-election on August 27.