Halfsies

Your dad never met Stuart Sternberg. Of that we can be reasonably certain.

That's because your dad was the one who always told you "If you're gonna do a job, don't do it halfway," and "Half measures are no measures at all." You took that to heart. I took it to heart. But Stuart Sternberg?

He just said, "Ah, screw your dad."

Sternberg, see, is the owner of the Tampa Bay Rays, one of baseball's more stable franchises on the field and a complete money pit off it. And so Sternberg, who's been lobbying Pinellas County officials for some time for a new ballpark to replace the inconveniently located, never-that-good-to-begin-with Tropicana Field, hit on a radical solution to his problem.

He went to Major League Baseball and proposed that the Rays split time between Tampa and Montreal. And MLB -- which would love to get back into the Montreal market -- gave him the OK to explore it.

How this would work, apparently, is the Rays would spend the early spring and summer in Tampa. Then they would play the rest of the season in Montreal once summer finally kicked in up north. Wags and pressbox wits have already begun weighing in on what the team would be called:

1. The Montrampa XRays.

2. The Tampreal Rexpos.

3. Canada Stole Our Baseball Team (Tampa version.)

4. Eff You, Eh, Washington Stole Ours (Montreal version.)

Seriously, no one except Sternberg sees how this possibly could work. In Tampa, officials who were already reluctant to kick in the requisite corporate welfare to help Sternberg build a new ballpark are already saying "Oh, HELL, no" to building one for half a season. So if this is a ploy to strong-arm the county into replacing Tropicana, it doesn't seem especially well thought-out.

The fans, meanwhile, or what there are of them, absolutely love this idea. OK, so they don't. As you might imagine, they're ticked off -- which suggests they might protest by staying away in droves.

OK. So bigger droves, then, considering its Tampa.

In any case,  this raises the intriguing possibility that the Rays might actually achieve the ultimate in public disinterest and play a game in front of no one someday. They already play in front of almost no one -- one Rays home date this year drew only a tick over 5,000 fans -- and that's a shame, because the Rays are consistently one of the better teams in the AL East.

Right now, for instance, they're 44-32 and sit comfortably in second in the East behind the Yankees. If the playoffs began today, they'd be in as a wild card.

The suspicion here is that Sternberg would dearly love to get the hell out of Tampa, but doesn't have the stones to go full monty on it. So instead of petitioning MLB to relocate, he petitioned it to kinda-sorta relocate.

Yeah, I wanna move the team. But, you know, I don't want everyone to be all mad at me. So what if I kinda moved the team? Montreal's nice in the summer. Plus, they still pine for the Expos up there. So what if I gave Tampa a little baseball, and Montreal a little baseball? That way no one can say I'm a heartless greedhead who dumped his first market for a Trophy Market, like the Davises, the Spanos and that awful Stan Kroenke over in the NFL.

To which the Davises, Spanos and Kroenke would no doubt have a one-word rejoinder:

"Candy-ass."