If there’s one basic principle in negotiations of any kind, it’s to hold your cards tight and not give your opponent any unnecessary leverage. Even if you want to ultimately agree to a deal, to get the best one possible for your side you want to keep your focus on your own advantages, and don’t let — oh just never mind:
“I believe that it’s either going to be located at (Hillsborough College) or the team’s going to be in Orlando,” [Hillsborough County Commissioner Ken] Hagan said on a sports radio show Wednesday. “The reality is the they have significantly more bed tax revenue than we do, and they’ve been pushing for a team.”
Let’s say that it’s true that Orlando officials are likely to jump to throw money at the Tampa Bay Rays if Tampa does not. (They haven’t before now, but also former Rays owner Stuart Sternberg was mostly focused on playing off cities in Tampa Bay against each other, plus Montreal for some reason.) Or even let’s just say that Hagan believes that Orlando will jump to lure the Rays, and that new Rays owner Patrick Zalupski would be willing to move there. You still don’t say that out loud! Not when your city and county are about to have to negotiate unspecified “incentives” to help Zalupski build a new stadium on the campus of Hillsborough College, on top of $1 billion or more in land and tax breaks.
Hagan said something similar back in September when Zalupski first bought the Rays, declaring, “If for any reason we’re unable to get over the finish line, then the team may ultimately be in Orlando. It’s Tampa’s to lose.” But this week’s statement was phrased as even more of a threat on Zalupski’s behalf.
There’s been a lot of speculation over the years about why local elected officials do the bidding of sports team owners when they don’t have to, most of which come down to the ideas that they’re 1) stupid or 2) on the take. (My leading theory remains that they’re just doing what all the lobbyists and other people at the right parties are telling them to do.) But statements like Hagan’s betray a deeper problem: Many elected officials just want to make team owners happy, regardless of the cost to taxpayers. Announcing that the Rays will move to Orlando without subsidies in Tampa is horrible tactics — it will almost certainly raise the eventual public cost — but it does increase the chances that Tampa will win the right to shower Zalupski with money, and if that’s the only goal, then Hagan has done his job perfectly.
This has been Hagan’s M.O. for a long while now, back to when he declared the “sense of urgency” around building a Rays stadium to be “borderline dire” way back in 2013. Normally I would warn that being the commissioner who cried wolf will stop you from being taken seriously, but here Hagan is still getting headlines in the Tampa Bay Times with his dire warnings, so I guess it works different when you’re a county commissioner-for-life.