Major League Baseball (MLB) has confirmed the sale of the Tampa Bay Rays franchise to a consortium led by property developer Patrick Zalupski.
The sale was ratified on September 30, after MLB franchise owners voted unanimously to approve the purchase, which also includes prominent investors Bill Cosgrove and Ken Babby.
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Going forward, Zalupski, who is the founder and chief executive of Dream Finder Homes, will serve as the team’s co-chair and controlling owner.
He will be joined at the executive level by co-chair Cosgrove, the chief executive of Union Home Mortgage, which is the title sponsor of US college football’s annual Gasparilla Bowl, played in Tampa.
Meanwhile, Babby becomes the chief executive and will manage the daily business operations around the team.
Babby, the founder and chief executive of Fast Forward Sports Group, owns a pair of minor league baseball teams through that company, the Florida-based Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp (a AAA-affiliate of the MLB’s Miami Marlins), and Ohio’s Akron RubberDucks (a AA-affiliate of the MLB’s Cleveland Guardians).
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By GlobalDataDespite the churn, president of baseball operations Erik Neander, a 19-year veteran at the team, will remain in his role.
In terms of the wider ownership group, a number of prominent Tampa-based investors will also join the team and its advisory board.
Zalupski and co were represented in the acquisition process by law firm Foley & Lardner LLP.
This acquisition is reportedly worth $1.7 billion, and ends the tenure of now-former owner Stu Sternberg, who led a group that acquired the team in 2004 for $200 million before becoming the principal owner the following year.
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).
In 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.
