What you're saying about Sunday's story

As you can imagine, there has been a lot of feedback to our story Sunday, "Do the Rays have a future in bay area?" There have been some common themes in reader responses, and I wanted to address a couple of the most common here.

Look at the Bucs and the Lightning. When they won, people showed up. Just give it time.

This is probably the comment I've gotten the most. And time, as we said, is the only way we're going to get an answer.

But comparing baseball to other pro sports just doesn't work. Let's do the math. The Bucs play eight regular-season home games and have about 530,000 tickets to sell. The Lightning play 41 regular-season home games and have about 841,000 tickets to sell. The Rays -- they play 81 home games -- and not including the tarped off seats, have 2.92-million seats to sell. I hope that sinks in. The Rays have more than five times as many tickets to sell as the Bucs.

Move the team to Hillsborough County, the demographics will be better there.

All of the data we reported Sunday (age, income, cost of living, etc.) included Hillsborough County. We set the boundaries of the Tampa Bay area the way the federal government does, which includes Pinellas, Pasco, Hillsborough, and Hernando counties.

Why not include Sarasota and Manatee? That would change the numbers.

We decided to stick with the boundaries set by the federal government. Yes, Manatee and Sarasota counties may have altered the numbers slightly. But the point here is that the vast majority of the Tampa Bay fan base comes from Pinellas and Hillsborough.

Numbers can say whatever you want them to.

We looked at every indicator we could think of that would make a major league market successful and then compared it to the 24 other MLB markets. Using comparisons negates the fuzzy math factor. Moreover, we included the best number for the Rays, which is the size of the television market. If there's something you think we should have checked but didn't, let me know.

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Are we a baseball town?

The upstart Tampa Bay Rays were about to take the field in the World Series. Tropicana Field was gorging with fans and media. A national TV audience looked on. Yet one big question continued to hang in the air.

Do the Rays have a future in the Tampa Bay area?

The answer, Rays principal owner Stuart Sternberg recently said, may not be clear until next spring, or possibly September.

"To operate here, we have to have sponsors, and have season-ticket holders, and have TV revenue, to have any chance of this thing working," he told a visiting reporter.

Sternberg's remarks could simply be a push for a new stadium. But he has good reason to question whether the Tampa Bay area can support a baseball team in the long run.

Despite two relatively large population centers and a history of spring training, the Tampa Bay area remains one of the poorest, oldest and most fractured communities with a Major League Baseball team, according to a St. Petersburg Times analysis of the 25 U.S. baseball markets.

Read the full story here.

Coming Sunday: Are we a baseball town?

Using bellwether population and demographic data from baseball’s 25 U.S. metropolitan areas (four areas have two teams, and the Toronto Blue Jays play in Canada), we were able to compare Tampa Bay to other Major League Baseball cities.

The data shows .... we'll you'll have to wait for that.

If I get the OK, I'll post the story here Friday. Otherwise, look for it on doorsteps Sunday.

In New York, benefits of new stadiums in question

Because there's nothing else going on today, right?

The New York Times has an interesting report today on the construction of new baseball stadiums for the New York Yankees and Mets. Read it here. If you don't remember Rays senior VP Michael Kalt, the team's stadium point person, worked on behalf of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to strike the deals with both New York ball clubs.

Oh, and I couldn't help thinking on my drive to work that we were supposed to be voting on a new stadium plan of our own today. Kind of crazy, huh?