TORONTO -- The Rays’ season ended Sunday afternoon with a 13-4 loss to the American League East champion Blue Jays at Rogers Centre, a fittingly disappointing finish to a 77-85 season and a second straight year without October baseball for Tampa Bay.
It also marked the end of an era.
In the coming days, Rays principal owner Stuart Sternberg is expected to officially sell the franchise to a group led by developer Patrick Zalupski, capping his 22-year tenure with the club. Sternberg wrote a letter to Rays fans that was posted to social media on Sunday morning, acknowledging the point at which “my time comes to a close and a new ownership group steps forward.”
Wearing a black T-shirt and sunglasses as he stood on the field with his family, outgoing team presidents Matt Silverman and Brian Auld and their families, Sternberg recalled his favorite (and least favorite) moments and tried to summarize the wave of emotions he felt on his final day leading the club.
“Proud. A little wistful, I guess,” he said. “It's just a lot, and it all comes crashing together.”
In his first comments about his decision to sell the team, Sternberg said he believes the move will be in the best interest of the organization and its long-term future in the Tampa Bay area, although there are still times he laments that the situation came to this conclusion.
“There's some days I'm 70/30 I wish I weren't doing it, and other days I’m 70/30 I'm glad I am. But I'm a realist. I recognize that it was the right thing to do, the right time to do it,” he said Sunday afternoon on the field at Rogers Centre. “I have said since the very beginning, and I meant it: I was never going to threaten to move this team. I never did.
“And in soul-searching over the last 10 months, I wanted to make sure I stood by that. And this, to me, gave it the best opportunity to keep this team in Tampa Bay.”
Sternberg’s long-running search for a new Rays ballpark appeared to be over in July 2024, when they celebrated the approval of a stadium as part of a massive redevelopment of the 86-acre Tropicana Field site. But after Hurricane Milton significantly damaged Tropicana Field and the Pinellas County Commission twice delayed its vote to approve bonds to finance the county’s share of the new park, the Rays called for further negotiations and announced in March that they wouldn’t move forward with the deal.
Unsuccessful in his efforts to secure a new ballpark, Sternberg said he decided it was time to sell because “to keep the team here in the area, somebody who had a better opportunity and a clearer path to that would be better suited for that.” He never opened a formal sale process but said he fielded interest from several people and groups before entering exclusive negotiations with Zalupski’s group.
“It seemed to me that this was a guy who believed in the area and believed in Florida and wanted to build it here, and had the business and political mettle and connection to really get it done,” he said. “So could we have gotten more money, less money? I don't know, and I'll never find out, and I'm perfectly comfortable with that. And I'm mostly perfectly comfortable with the idea that this is the guy who absolutely has the best chance to get it done in Tampa Bay.”
How that will take place remains an open question, at least until the sale is finalized and the new owners assume control of the organization. As the transition takes place, there will also be questions about the group’s approach on the baseball side -- from payroll to personnel -- as the club looks to bounce back from its worst record since going 68-94 in 2016.
“I'm really, really proud of, under Stu's ownership, what has been accomplished here and how much we've elevated the profile of this organization,” president of baseball operations Erik Neander said. “As we look ahead, there's still some sizable, significant steps that we still want to take.
“Certainly from a baseball standpoint, it's winning a championship. And by all accounts, it feels like these are people that are going to come in and be just as committed to that as we are.”
The Rays didn’t accomplish that goal during Sternberg’s tenure, although they reached the World Series twice, still own the Majors’ third-most wins since their worst-to-first turnaround in 2008 and saw their executives and coaches scatter around baseball, arguably influencing the current state of the game as much as any other organization.
“As far as baseball is concerned,” Sternberg said, “I can sort of drop the mic on that one.”