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Tampa Bay Rays moving to Ybor City

Downtown Tampa is within a 30 minute drive from the trop.

The Trop is surrounded by water on 3 sides. There's roughly 600,000 people that live within a 30-min drive of the Trop (next lowest in all of MLB is over 2 million...Cleveland). There's over 2 million people that live within a 30-min drive of where the proposed stadium was to be.
 
Tampa isn't Miami (as much as some of the city leaders want to try and make it be...). Yes it's a transplant area, but again...why does the Lightning draw so well? It has a great ownership group (amazing right now to see the difference between Vinik and Sternberg) but also has the numbers to pull from.

I wish Jeff Vinik would buy the Rays and get the stadium in Ybor done. We are Lightning season ticket holders that live in South Tampa, you can't pay me to go to a Rays game in St. Pete on a weeknight bc of the traffic. The team will never be more than they are in St. Pete, unfortunately. We would probably buy quarter season tickets if the Ybor stadium had happened. (81 games is too much for anyone with a career and a life)
 
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I wish Jeff Vinik would buy the Rays and get the stadium in Ybor done. We are Lightning season ticket holders that live in South Tampa, you can't pay me to go to a Rays game in St. Pete on a weeknight bc of the traffic. The team will never be more than they are in St. Pete, unfortunately. We would probably buy quarter season tickets if the Ybor stadium had happened. (81 games is too much for anyone with a career and a life)
I live in downtown Tampa and would probably also have a 20 game pack type thing. I follow the Rays closely but only make it to 2-3 games a year. As the poster above pointed out there’s a huge population increase moving into Tampa but beyond that there’s a huge corporation increase. Downtown St pete is a ton of fun but there aren’t many office buildings. Tampa has many more potential businesses close by that would likely buy season tickets to entertain clients.
 
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