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Roger Mooney

Roger Mooney covers the Tampa Bay Rays for The Tampa Tribune, TBO.com and News Channel 8. He has covered the Rays since their first season in 1998, including 11 years for the Bradenton Herald. Roger has also covered Florida, South Florida and Florida State football, the Bucs and the Lightning.

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Sternberg on payroll and attendance

Posted Feb 19, 2010 by Roger Mooney

Updated Feb 19, 2010 at 01:41 PM

Rays owner Stuart Sternberg talked about topics other than the new stadium issue.

He also talked about cutting payroll after this season and the attendance.

How much will payroll be reduced?“It’s a word we use often: opportunistic. It was an opportunity this year, and it was a long, hard thought to trade for (Rafael) Soriano and sign him. We’ve signed a number of players to long-term contracts, so it’s a question that can’t be answered really right now, but my belief and what should happen is that our payroll is going to be a good deal lower, and we’ll go from there.

Will lower payroll be a factor in the stadium issue?“None of the decisions we make like that have any relevance, we don’t look at the outcome to the stadium to whether we spent $40 million our first year, $28 million and this year it’s $73. You can tell there’s not much of a pattern here.”

Fans have to get used lower payrolls. The realities and pitfalls of this market?“Yeah. Players work hard, they go through a lot, they have success and they should and will try to do what’s best for themselves, for their families, whether that’s where they’re going to play or how much they’re going to get playing. It ultimately becomes their decision, and we do our best, but clearly we don’t have the resources. The flip-side to everything is that when you have the kind of quality players we have here is over time they tend to cost more money than guys who aren’t very good. ... I would have said to you absolutely, as recently as two years ago, there’s no way this team can run a 70-plus million dollar payroll, let alone a 60-million dollar payroll at any point. But we did some things right, and I felt it was best to try and continue the success, and now I think we’ve definitely over-stepped our comfort zone, and over-stepped our ability to pay, and that’s got to come out at some other point of time.”

Upset that market says he can’t afford to pay“I’d say it concerns me. It’s the nature of the beast. It’s where we are. I question whether I’m doing the right think by spending it now or what? The last thing you want to do when you preach to people to be careful with themselves is to overspend your means and we are overspending our means, and there is always a cost for that.”

How much did they blame attendance on the economy“We measured it very carefully, and that’s why when we sat here one year ago, my goal was to be average. I wasn’t looking for pie-in-the-sky. I wasn’t looking to be leaders at any sense other than in the standings. And that was really the measure, because the economy is an issue around the country. Clearly this area has more challenges than many other areas. Clearly Detroit has its challenges. Where do you benchmark yourselves. There are other areas in the country that have their challenges and we didn’t meet what I thought was sufficient coming off of a World Series. I my mind, at least, it came to head when we had a matchup of the World Series in June when school was out and a team that has roots in Clearwater and has a lot of fans, and we drew less than 55,000 for three games. That was to me the most telling of all. It wasn’t bad weather, it wasn’t school. We had promotions going on.”

His goal for attendance this year“To get as many people, really. Our budget is what we budget and we always budget conservatively, but quite frankly, after last year, I don’t really have an expectation until the season starts. We’ll have a sense of things after the first month or two. But after seeing that surprise with the Phillies, we penciled in sellouts for those games, which is over 100,000. We missed by half. I’m not used to doing business projections and missing by that much. When that happens I have to reevaluate things.”

How did he view that?“Things are a bit broken … I think we’re more energized to come out and give it another shot this year. The economy did, I would say stabilized a bit. We’re not in a downward spiral … People have to make choices, I can’t tell them what to choose. And we’re going to figure it out how to get it right.”

Season-ticket renewals
“Bad.”

Fair amount of drop-offs
“Yes.”

By what percent?“We haven’t closed the book on it yet. We’re stilling selling season tickets. We’re getting renewals. The numbers are still up dramatically from where we are when we took over, and we’ll see how it progresses. It’s the lifeblood of the organization.”

Sponsorships are great“
Everything else is fine, but for some reason people are choosing not to come out as they do in other parts of the country from major league baseball.”