The board of Major League Baseball (MLB) team owners has unanimously approved the sale of the Tampa Bay Rays franchise to a consortium led by Jacksonville, Florida, real estate developer Patrick Zalupski.
Zalupski and his group can now finally complete the acquisition of the team from the current primary owner and managing general partner, Stuart Sternberg, having entered exclusive negotiations for the purchase in June.
Go deeper with GlobalData
Discover B2B Marketing That Performs
Combine business intelligence and editorial excellence to reach engaged professionals across 36 leading media platforms.
The group also includes Bill Cosgrove, Ken Babby, and a number of other prominent Tampa-based investors.
Sternberg led a group that acquired the team in 2004 for $200 million before becoming the principal owner the following year.
By comparison, this acquisition is reportedly worth $1.7 billion, illustrating the growth of MLB franchise values over that time.
In 2008, the team, formerly the Devil Rays, was renamed to simply the Tampa Bay Rays, and since then, the franchise has had the third-highest winning percentage in MLB (behind the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Yankees), and has reached the World Series twice (2008, 2020).
US Tariffs are shifting - will you react or anticipate?
Don’t let policy changes catch you off guard. Stay proactive with real-time data and expert analysis.
By GlobalDataIn recent years, however, fan pressure has mounted on Sternberg to sell the team, stemming from 2014 revelations that he had discussed relocating the Rays to Montreal, Canada.
Despite the team’s on-field success, the Rays consistently rank in the lower reaches in terms of annual total attendance (no team has a lower average total attendance over the past 15 years than the Rays).
Struggles in cultivating a strong MLB market in the area have been compounded in recent years with the team’s stadium struggles.
Sternberg struck a $1.3 billion deal to replace the outmoded Tropicana Field in 2023 after close to two decades of angling for a new home, but pulled out of the deal earlier in 2025, citing funding and pricing issues, just weeks before a significant development deadline.
In doing so, Sternberg burned significant bridges, including with St. Petersburg, Florida, mayor Ken Welch, who said that he would no longer work with the Rays’ ownership group, something that MLB itself reportedly also took note of, contributing to the pressure on him to sell the team.
In 2024, the team missed out on the playoffs for the first time since 2018, and did so again in 2025, after a season blighted by weather delays in an open-air stadium, enforced by damage to Tropicana Field during Hurricane Milton in 2024, meaning the team had to play all of its 2025 home games at the open-air Steinbrenner Field in a facility used by the Yankees for their spring training earlier in the year.
With MLB expansion reportedly on the cards for the coming seasons, the league will likely have approved the Zalupski purchase on the provision that it sees the team remain in the Tampa Bay/St. Petersburg market, which is a lucrative TV area for the league despite the team’s attendance troubles.
