Sternberg Does, In Fact, Get Why St Pete Rejected His Last Offering

Taking a look back at a Martin Fennelly column from this past week, he wrote how Rays' owner Stu Sternberg "doesn't like (his) potential villain role":

He added, “I still don’t quite understand where the opposition is necessarily coming from. The one thing that came out of the (city council) was the idea about our development rights, which was never our intention, and it obviously got a little bungled there that day, but we cleared that up right away. And yet, still, there’s always something else, something else. We don’t even know what it is that we can do differently, and it’s little bit dismaying.

“I just don’t exactly know why the council people feel it’s not in the best interest of the citizens of St. Petersburg to get the land back, develop the land, have a bunch of taxes coming in, create construction jobs, create long-term jobs, still have baseball in your midst and guarantee that baseball is going to be in your midst for multi-, multi-, multigenerations. I don’t get it.”

But Sternberg does get it - he gets that council's job is to protect the financial interests of its citizens.  And many on council don't feel they're getting enough in exchange for letting the team break the terms of the deal it signed.

It's just that Sternberg's job happens to directly conflict with council's: he needs to get the Rays out of their current contract - for as little as possible - so they can explore new stadium sites in Tampa (or elsewhere) without damaging the bottom line.

And that's why we've had eight years of stalemate in the Stadium Saga.