ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — After Rays owner Stu Sternberg’s team was bounced from the postseason again by the Rangers yesterday, he was a most disappointed man. Not about the way his team played, but about the present and future of baseball here in the Tampa Bay area.
The Rays did not even sell out this game, the first non-sellout in Rays postseason history.
The financial future is so bleak that Sternberg called the situation “untenable” and told The Post and another reporter, “At some point this team is going to vaporize.
“It’s just a matter of time,” he said after the season-ending 4-3 loss to the Rangers. “It can go on another nine, 10 or 12 more years, OK, but between now and then it’s going to vaporize.”
Sternberg said the team could wind up “anywhere.”
There has been talk of the Rays moving to Connecticut to feed off the AL East rivalry with the Red Sox and Yankees.
Even if the Rays, who had the second-lowest payroll in baseball at the start of the season at $42 million, went out and mortgaged their future and made a trade for a big hitter, Sternberg did not think it would provide a major boost in revenue.
“[We] get $9.82 extra at the gate, so what’s the sense?” he asked. “Other teams, the Pirates, could say, ‘Hey, we could win if we spend another 15 to 20 million bucks, we can sell season tickets, we’ll see improvements at the gate,’ ” he noted. “Our ticket base has gone down, so I don’t know.
“If we had won the World Series this year, I wouldn’t think my attendance would be higher next year. It didn’t go up in ’09 after we got to the Series in ’08. Then we got to the playoffs in ’10 and it went down.”
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Johnny Damon most likely played his last game as a Ray. He was 0-for-4 and hit .235 for the series. The Rays probably will sign a different DH next season. . . . In their two home games, the Rays’ 2-3-4 hitters went a combined 1-for-20 against the Rangers’ pitchers, who were in attack mode the final three games of series.
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Neftali Feliz collected three saves for the Rangers. Only three other pitchers had done that in the ALDS: the Yankees’ Goose Gossage in 1981, Cleveland’s Mike Jackson in 1998 and Mariano Rivera in 2000.