Stadium For Rent: 7. Taking Away Tom's Bone

STADIUM FOR RENT:
Tampa Bay's Quest for Major League Baseball
By BOB ANDELMAN

7. Taking Away Tom's Bone

"If you are for something you ought to do
everything you can to get it done."
-- Tom McEwen, Sports Editor, Tampa Tribune

Chicago White Sox co-owner Jerry Reinsdorf's bittersweet romance with St. Petersburg in 1988 had an unexpected side effect. The six-year war between the Pinellas Sports Authority and the Tampa Bay Baseball Group, Tampa and St. Petersburg and the Tampa Tribune and the St. Petersburg Times -- over baseball, at least -- came to an abrupt halt.

Armistice was declared.

"The White Sox took away all of Tampa's ammunition," PSA executive director Bill Bunker says.

St. Petersburg's flirtation with the White Sox validated the downtown stadium's site in the mind of Frank Morsani and spelled the end of the Tampa Bay Baseball Group.

Morsani, a pragmatist, always knew there could be only one stadium and one baseball team in the Tampa Bay area. In his heart, he knew that the day St. Petersburg started pouring concrete for the Florida Suncoast Dome would be the last day he'd dream of building his own facility.

If his proposed purchase of the Minnesota Twins had gone through years earlier, the team would have played in Tampa at the TBBG's planned Tampa Coliseum. But when he pursued the Texas Rangers in 1988, he knew the only practical place to relocate them would be the Dome -- in St. Petersburg.
* * *

For Rick Dodge, the end of the Florida White Sox was the beginning of a new era in St. Petersburg.

"This was a community whose mindset was still anchored in Ueberroth's telegram. 'St. Petersburg is not among the top candidates' for baseball," he recalls. "There was tremendous doubt that we could even be competitive. Our credibility within baseball jumped dramatically. We went from being a pretender to being a contender. The community said, 'Hey, we didn't expect to get here this quickly.' It was a sense of, yes, we missed it, but we could play at this level."

Dodge put in a call to Morsani to talk turkey. The men were not previously acquainted.

"Mr. Morsani," Dodge said, "I am not sure how to do this but I think there's an opportunity for us to solve this puzzle."

Dodge rented a hotel room in mid-Pinellas County so he and Morsani could meet without prying eyes. Dodge's first impressions of the Tampa car dealer were of a dynamic, speak softly and carry a big bat guy teaming with self-confidence.

"We still think we are the best guys and offer the best way to get a team," Morsani said.

"That may be true," Dodge said. "You might win and in that case we are going to be embarrassed that we built the stadium. But the other case is we might win and you're going to be standing there holding a lot of canceled checks."

"You've got to persuade my partner, Bill Mack," Morsani said.

Dodge agreed and a meeting was set up. "Frank coached me before-hand and said, 'He has to be sold.' "

The approach Dodge took was to speak to Mack as if he had never been to Tampa Bay, citing demographics, market size and potential media revenues. Mack responded to Dodge by repeating the TBBG's familiar refrain, that a Tampa-based team would be a better draw than a St. Petersburg-based team.

"If your assumptions are wrong," Dodge said, "you are holding on to an anchor that's going to sink you. These assumptions of yours will not carry through. They are overstated."

Dodge made his point. The TBBG was at last coming to St. Petersburg.
* * *

Bob Ulrich and Sandy Freedman were elected mayors of St. Petersburg and Tampa at roughly the same time. The two brought a sense of regionalism along with their mandates to govern. They discovered in each other what former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once said of former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev: This is someone we can do business with.

"We got together to discuss the issues, the things we could agree on, the things that made sense for all of Tampa Bay," Ulrich says.

Ulrich and Freedman represented a marked difference from their predecessors. In Tampa, Bob Martinez had been a hardliner, pro-business and especially pro-Tampa. In St. Petersburg, Ed Cole took a hard-line to maintained the sleepy status quo, making his mark as anti-business and anti-stadium, but pro-green benches and shuffleboard tournaments. The new mayors, by contrast, considered their cities incomplete without the cooperation of one another.

"Shortly after I took office in 1987, I contacted Frank Morsani," Ulrich says. "We had a meeting at which we discussed the need to unify Tampa Bay and to enlist his support to secure a team to play in the Florida Suncoast Dome. I delivered to Mr. Morsani a page from our consultant's report in which the consultant answered the question: 'Would there be an appreciable difference in attendance at a baseball stadium on Dale Mabry Highway in Tampa or one in downtown St. Petersburg?' The answer was no.

"Frank's belief at the time," Ulrich says, "was that the consultants simply were wrong. He just couldn't bring himself to spearhead an effort to bring a Major League Baseball team to a facility that he felt had been misplaced."

Morsani was eager to cooperate with Peter Ueberroth's mandate about unity. But he also sought to protect the millions of dollars he already invested in the TBBG. If Morsani were going to put his money on the line, he wasn't going to put it in a franchise at a facility he didn't think people were going to attend. "You can only admire the courage of his convictions," Ulrich says.

Morsani commissioned his own consultant's report in 1988 to verify what Ulrich told him the year before. Then the mayor and the car dealer met again. This time, Morsani agreed his view of downtown St. Petersburg needed to be modified.

It was time to get Tampa Bay's only potential baseball ownership group under the roof of Tampa Bay's only big league baseball stadium.
* * *

About this time, Frank Morsani and Florida Progress chairman Andy Hines caught up with each other at a meeting of the Florida Council of 100 in Palm Beach. Despite their differences over baseball, the two were friends and Hines wanted to know what progress Morsani was making toward a commitment to use the Florida Suncoast Dome.

"I think I can make this happen," Morsani said to Hines, "but you've got to give me some elbow room. Don't push me. I am working on it; I can handle it. But I can't do it in the media. I have to do it behind the scenes and I have got to convince guys like [Tampa Tribune sports editor] Tom McEwen."

Morsani set about building a two-county consensus for baseball unity.

He met with mayors, legislative delegations and business leaders. He lunched with McEwen's counterpart, St. Petersburg Times sports columnist Hubert Mizell. He met with Times editor Andrew Barnes and his editors. "I talked to Andy several times," Morsani says. "They were not always supportive of me. I thought they were an impediment to making things happen rather than being a catalyst for change. That was especially true when [editor Gene] Patterson was there."

The toughest sell: Tom McEwen.

"Tom was the loudest," Bob Ulrich says. "I love him to death but he ain't always right. He didn't want to let go of that bone as long as he could hold it in his teeth."

The Tampa Tribune sports editor seethed with contempt. Play ball in St. Petersburg? Morsani betrayed him and all of Tampa. At every opportunity in his daily column, he said so.

"The [Tribune] was very difficult to deal with," Morsani says. "Tom and I have been friends. He has been very supportive. I just explained to Tom the realities of things. Tom said, 'Baseball said this and that,' and I said, 'Tom, baseball can say whatever they want but we could not raise [the money to build a stadium]. If you had the money would you build it? Forget about whether Bill Mack has the money or whether we could sell the bonds. Do you think we could sell the bonds to a bond holder for a $100-million stadium when we have a $100-million stadium across the way? The answer is no. It doesn't make any difference what you think, Tom: There is no alternative.'

"He never did like it," Morsani says.

McEwen doesn't disagree with that assessment.

"Maybe it was parochial," he says, "or maybe it was just being a local, but I honestly felt like the best site for the baseball stadium was [beside] Tampa Stadium.

"It bothered me when Frank Morsani met with me at Avila Country Club for lunch and said he was going to go to St. Petersburg," McEwen says. "I wrote the next day that that was it. It's his decision and that's the way it had to be because it was his money. I felt let down. I gave him full support in every way. He kept getting these reports from baseball: 'We don't want to go over there [St. Petersburg]. We do not want to play there.' I don't know whether that was true or not."

* * *

Morsani and Dodge continued their courtship out of the public spotlight by meeting in the office of Florida Power president Allen Keesler.

Another story developed: Morsani and Mack broke away from the Tampa Bay Baseball Group and formed a new partnership, MXM Corp. Negotiations were undertaken to formalize a lease between the Florida Suncoast Dome and MXM.

Dodge held the upper hand this time.

"We had just been schooled by the White Sox," he says. "We were graduates of the Reinsdorf Academy of Lease Negotiations and we really knew how to go about it."

Dodge favorably impressed Morsani as they negotiated the deal that obligated Morsani to the Florida Suncoast Dome with a team to be acquired later. When the deal was signed, Morsani told Dodge he was the kind of guy he'd like working for him one day.

"He never compromised his position," Morsani says. "The deal was done. I thought I could work well with Rick. He was a take-charge [person] . . . a bulldog on this stadium thing. He was a good advocate for St. Petersburg."

St. Petersburg Mayor Bob Ulrich called Tampa Mayor Sandy Freedman. She convinced the Hillsborough legislative delegation to join hands with the Pinellas delegation in support of Morsani's change of heart. Meanwhile, construction on the Dome continued apace. The formal announcement that Morsani and Mack would play ball in the Dome earned front page stories in both the Tampa Tribune and the St. Petersburg Times. A political love-in was scheduled at the Dome featuring officials from both counties and starring Frank Morsani and Bill Mack.

"It was absolutely a necessary move for Frank to make," Dodge says, "but it was also a courageous, personal move because he pissed everybody off in Tampa. He did it for the right reasons. I am convinced what really motivated Frank was it was the right thing to do for the region. The spirit he had was really contagious."

Finally, there was no question where baseball was going to be played in Tampa Bay.

"Everybody won," Dodge says. "Frank was going to win. We were going to win. The region would win and it was a good feeling."

"It might not have been the right thing to do for baseball," Morsani says, "but it was the right thing to do for the community. They did a good job of marketing their program in St. Petersburg. I really felt it would solidify Tampa Bay. Baseball kept telling us to get both sides together. We did that. They wanted political clout and I believe we demonstrated that."

Morsani eliminated the "us" and "them" between St. Petersburg and Tampa and unified the area as much as anyone could.