Stuart Sternberg and four other members of the Rays front office are meeting today with Pinellas County Commissioners, one week after meeting with Hillsborough County Commissioners. You can follow along with notes from the meeting at the Twitter account of Shadow of the Stadium. But we already have one damning nugget from Sternberg…

Sternberg: Only 300 season-ticket holders in the city of St. Petersburg.

It was later clarified that the 300 accounts account for “just shy of 1,000 tickets.”

That is still a disturbingly low number. Two years ago, we speculated that the Rays sold approximately 7,500 season tickets and that 2,500 of those were corporate season tickets. Now I am beginning to think those numbers were overly optimistic.

If the Rays are selling 5,000 non-corporate season tickets, 4,000 would have to come from outside the city of St. Pete and that seems like a stretch. But even if the number is much lower, it still tells us that the Rays are receiving more support from other areas and that the Rays need to be in Tampa.