Visiting baseball fans spent $70-million during Rays season

All those visiting Yankee and Red Sox fans — and the money they spend — really add up.

Tampa Bay Rays games brought slightly more than 250,000 overnight visitors to the county during the team's 2008 regular season, according to the study released Wednesday to Pinellas County tourism officials. That represents 5 percent of the 5.2-million annual visitors who spend at least one night in Pinellas.

Visiting fans spent $70-million, said the study by Research Data Services of Tampa, which compiles visitor statistics for the county. They had a total impact of $126-million, if you count how the money recirculates through the local economy, the study concluded.

The numbers could help bolster a bid for public funding to build a stadium. Rays officials earlier this year proposed using a portion of the county's 5 percent hotel bed tax to help finance a $450-million stadium on St. Petersburg's waterfront.

They withdrew the plan in June and turned over the stadium question to a community coalition organized by Progress Energy Florida chief executive Jeff Lyash. The group, called A Baseball Coalition, is studying options for location, design and financing. Members hope to make recommendations by late 2009 or early 2010.

The team believes out-of-town fans make up a bigger share of Rays crowds than the study suggests. About a quarter of all tickets — some 460,000 last season — were purchased by customers with credit card addresses outside the Tampa Bay area, said Michael Kalt, senior vice president of development and business affairs.

Still, he said, the study's numbers were "generally consistent" with the team's estimates. "It shows baseball has an impact on the economy," Kalt said. "Any time you remind people of that impact, it helps our effort."

The biggest share of fans at Rays games are day-trippers who drive from outside the county and return home for the night, the study found. They made up nearly 930,000 of 1.8-million game attendees last season, or 51 percent.

Members of the county's Tourist Development Council, which oversees how hotel bed tax revenues are spent, said luring those fans to stay the night should be a priority — and not just to boost the economy.

"I went to playoff games … and I saw a number of people who should not be driving back," said Dunedin City Commission member Julie Scales.

Times staff writer Aaron Sharockman contributed to this report. Steve Huettel can be reached at huettel@sptimes.com or (813) 226-3384.