ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. – As Interstate 275 touches down off the Sunshine Skyway Bridge and snakes north toward this scenic downtown, sports aficionados are naturally inclined to crane their necks.
And whether you’re a sucker for roadside stadia or not, Tropicana Field is impossible to miss.
Its tilted roof, retro space age appearance and outdated font screams instant obsolescence, but since opening in 1990 it has seen a Final Four, NHL playoffs, a World Series and the enduring success of the Tampa Bay Rays, who for nearly 20 years have overcome market size and traffic-choked barriers to become consistent contenders in baseball’s toughest division.
Now, however, a glance at the Trop serves not as the picture of a climate-controlled baseball haven, but rather a grim reminder of a devastating natural disaster, leaving the club homeless and casting what appeared to be a secure future in Tampa Bay very much in doubt.
On Oct. 9, Hurricane Milton made landfall in Sarasota County, roaring off the gulf coast at maximum wind speeds of 120 mph. It was still moving at 102 mph when it rolled through St. Petersburg, ostensibly not quite strong enough to threaten a stadium roof designed to withstand gusts of up to 115 mph.
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But the stadium and its Teflon-coated fiberglass roof were no match for Milton. By night’s end, the shredded roof was one of the dominant images illustrating the power of the Category 3 storm.
More than four months later, it is baseball season again, but not in St. Pete. The Rays will play their 2025 home schedule at Tampa’s Steinbrenner Field, thanks to the New York Yankees graciously bequeathing their freshly renovated spring training home to the club for this season.
Milton destroyed 446 Pinellas County homes, and between Milton and Hurricane Helene 10 days earlier, 714 were lost and more than 40,000 damaged. Yet no destruction is as publicly palpable as the Trop’s, its infrastructure bare to the elements, its insides exposed.
“It was heavy. You walk in and the offices are washed out and ceilings are washed out,” says Rays president of baseball operations Erik Neander. “You’re looking out on the field and pieces of the roof and the fabric are all up there and the catwalk is just hanging and flapping in the wind. Just a big mess.
“It’s difficult seeing it like that. But again, you find that perspective. You go back to the fact that we have staff where their homes were that way.”
Friday, the Rays will begin a most unusual season in an appropriately strange fashion: They’ll play their Grapefruit League opener in Tampa against the Yankees, in a stadium where they’ll occupy the home clubhouse and dugout for 81 games.
On this day, they’ll be visitors, and after this season, St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch tells USA TODAY Sports, he is confident the team will return to a repaired Tropicana Field in 2026. Engineers’ repair estimates have stayed in the original $56 million range and the city, as it is contractually obligated, will foot the bill; Welch says payments from insurance and the Federal Emergency Management Agency will cover “the vast majority” of repairs.
Yet for the Rays and the city they call home, the timing of the hurricane was particularly cruel. A two-decade quest to find a permanent, modern home had reached the endgame: A $1.3 billion dollar mixed-use project, the “public-private partnership” that Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred often touts, only needed October approval from the Pinellas County Commission.
Then Milton hit, a franchise’s short- and long-term future suddenly was in doubt, and a historically disadvantaged neighborhood was faced with starting over again.
“I really think it’s providential,” says Welch, a third-generation St. Petersburg resident. “Because in that community I grew up in as a boy, adapting to challenges is nothing new.”
A public-private fracture
The Rays’ stadium saga has been an endless, meandering journey through two municipalities divided by multiple bodies of water, all leading to one question: Tampa or St. Petersburg?
When owner Stuart Sternberg purchased controlling interest in the Rays in October 2005, a new stadium soon was front of mind. Tropicana Field was immediately antiquated in the 1990s ballpark boom, and while MLB saw fit to place an expansion team there in 1998, the Rays remain the only franchise to never host an All-Star Game and reap the benefits inherent to that jewel event.
It figured the Midsummer Classic would have to wait until the region had a ballpark to match, and the club probably leads the league in stadium renderings since. A dearth of corporate support in Tampa Bay relative to other markets, and the Rays’ perpetual lower-revenue status complicated matters, as did their hopes of finding a suitable location in Tampa, where a larger population could be tapped without having to cross bridges to St. Petersburg.
Last July, though, the club, the city of St. Petersburg and Pinellas County finally settled on a site, and a plan, and a vision: A 30,000-seat indoor stadium in the city’s Historic Gas Plant District, with an amphitheater, 5,400 residences, a hotel and museums and green space. Hines, the developers behind the Atlanta Braves’ Battery district, would spearhead the project.
Good-faith nods to lower-income housing are in the deal, along with “significant features that honor the neighborhood’s history and its descendants,” namely a predominantly Black population displaced when the area was razed in the 1980s to make way for interstate traffic and so-called economic development, which became Tropicana Field.
Those restorative elements and the ballpark would be a near 50-50 proposition: The Rays would front $700 million and St. Petersburg and Pinellas County $600 million, plus $130 million for infrastructure. The ballclub would be responsible for the cost overruns before it opened in time for the 2028 season.
And then the hurricanes hit.
Suddenly, Tropicana Field – where the Rays’ lease expires after 2027 – was inoperable. The field has no drainage system, and the shredded roof was just the beginning of damages.
Meanwhile, the region was devastated: A recent estimate pegged the damages to Tampa’s Hillsborough and Pinellas counties at $5 billion.
Yet the Rays stadium deal had reached third base, and unlocking the funds only needed approval from the Pinellas County Commisson. But with the region ravaged by storms, the commission opted to delay an Oct. 29 vote to approve the bonds, drawing the Rays’ ire.
The commission eventually approved the county’s $312.5 million share in December. But a copacetic partnership between public and private had soured.
The Rays said the delay in funding would push the ballpark’s opening from 2028 to ’29. And anticipated cost overruns for which the club is responsible suddenly jeopardized their calculus for the project.
Sternberg faces a March 31 deadline to commit his $700 million to the project. He has remained non-committal.
“Having the money and putting it in are two different things,” Sternberg told the Tampa Bay Times in his most recent public comments.
“We can get ahold of the money — does it make any sense to do it? That’s really it.’
Should the Gas Plant District project fall through, the franchise returns to a familiar, uncomfortable interchange: Try again, sell the team to a local buyer, or move the franchise.
It’s far from the direst development of a hurricane that was described as a once-a-century event. Yet given the longstanding efforts to ensure a franchise’s viability, it is cruel in its own fashion.
“The deal’s taken 15 years to get to this point,” says Jake Ferguson, who along with his father Mark owns and operates Ferg’s Sports Bar, a sprawling indoor-outdoor venue in the shadow of Tropicana Field. “This was never on our radar. The shock factor of something we never thought would happen – we haven’t had a storm hit us like this in 100 years – and at this time when we’re about to get this deal done…
“We just hope they go forward.”
A season in the elements
There’s some upside to the Rays’ playing home games this season in Tampa. A portion of the fanbase accustomed to an hour-ish commute to ballgames will suddenly find its home team reachable via surface streets.
Yet despite the Rays’ famously poor attendance, it leaves a void in St. Petersburg.
Ferg’s opened in 1992, converting an old Sunoco station to a watering hole. At the time, says Ferguson, St. Pete’s Edge District had just 35 business.
Now, there are 135, he says, not all of them dependent on baseball but certainly benefiting from the slow drip of six months of ballgames.
“We’re going to miss out on 81 home games,” says Ferguson, who says the post-COVID population influx has diversified the bar’s sports makeup. “We’ll be fine, but it’s affecting St. Pete as a whole.”
While Tropicana Field won’t make anyone’s top 10 list of most aesthetically pleasing ballparks, that shredded roof provided certainty in a stormy, humid region.
“I tell you what I did like about the Trop,” says Baltimore Orioles manager Brandon Hyde, whose Sarasota County home suffered flooding in both hurricanes. “If a game was scheduled for 7:05, it was at 7:05.”
Not so in Tampa, where the “hot season” runs for five months from early May to early October. July is its rainiest month, averaging 5.7 inches; the relative humidity reaches 72% while the average temperature hits 90 degrees.
“I’ll be very interested to see how that turns out, just with all the rain and heat,” says Yankees right-hander Clarke Schmidt, who played for the club’s Class A Tampa team in 2019. “Day games are really, really brutal. Hopefully, it goes smoothly.
“And the ball flies here.”
The Rays are remaining sanguine, with $50 million in renovations to Steinbrenner Field to make it championship season-ready, along with the Yankees’ own improvements at their 11,026-seat spring home. Players and staff will spend the majority of time there on the stadium’s bottom floor, where the experience will be like most of their workdays.
“As a player, on the underbelly of the stadium, it’s going to be really, really nice,” says Rays right-hander Zack Littell, who resides in Tampa during the season. “We’re going to deal with the heat. We’re going to deal with the weather, smaller crowds.
“But we’re going to have really good crowds; the capacity’s just going to be smaller.”
And Littell, who played Class AAA ball in the San Francisco Giants’ organization, says the Rays will have it better than the Oakland Athletics, who are spending at least three seasons in Sacramento until their Las Vegas stadium is possibly constructed: “It’ll be a lot better than Sacramento, I can tell you that. Hot, not a great stadium. It could be worse.”
Neander says the temporary home factored into his roster construction this season, for a Rays team that stayed in wild-card contention well into September and returns a healthier, deeper pitching staff.
“Look, it’s baseball. We have an opportunity to stay local and play our games local,” he says. “Different venue, but I think for our players – and we’re very mindful of the group we’re bringing in – we wanted to make sure we had the right group to galvanize around these circumstances that exist and to lead into it.
“And to make it an enjoyable year and make sure, again, we’re focused on the part we can control and make a lot of other people proud.”
Day of reckoning?
Friday morning, the Rays will depart their spring training facility in Port Charlotte and bus to Tampa to kick off the exhibition season. Should they opt for the westward fork around the bay, they’ll pass right by their damaged stadium.
“Driving by the Trop, it’s sad and disappointing,” says the Orioles’ Hyde. “That was another reminder of what we all went through. This whole area was like a war zone for a while. Until everything got cleaned up and picked up, there were piles in the streets and everywhere. Boats in yards and streets.
“I know people who had three feet of sand in their living room, personal property destroyed.”
The stadium itself has been a virtual laboratory for executive brilliance in baseball, with three former Rays executives now at the wheel for other franchises. They’ve reached the playoffs eight times in the past 15 years.
“That’s been our place of work. And we’ve poured so much into that building, and have so many memories there,” say Neander. “We have to get it back together.
“It served as some sort of symbol for the effects of these storms and the area and the damage they did.”
The Rays will play their Tampa opener March 28 against Colorado, but the more significant date will likely come three days later, Sternberg’s deadline to commit his $700 milllion to the stadium cause.
For a franchise that’s had an uncertain future almost since its inception, a daunting deadline is nothing particularly new. Nor is adversity for its home city.
The very interstates – I-275 and I-175 – that connect the world to Tropicana Field were also a part of the “urban renewal” projects a half-century ago that razed neighborhoods and displaced residents – mostly from predominantly Black communities – only for the promised economic development to never appear.
Welch learned to chop wood at his grandfather’s woodyard in the Historic Gas Plant District, but the business was not the same after it moved. The district was declared blighted by the city council in 1978 and targeted for development – not specifically for a stadium, though that was the outcome.
“In subsequent years, though, none of that development happened,” says Welch. “You had Tropicana Field and acres of asphalt. None of the economic development happened.”
Fulfilling promises broken more than 40 years ago, says Welch, is a big reason the city sees fit to sell the land for the stadium project at a below-market rate. The workforce development, jobs, affordable housing, minority business access and $10 million toward a new Woodson African American Museum of Florida are key components for the deal.
And should the Rays find the deal untenable, the high hopes remain for the district.
“It was a vibrant area, it was a neighborhood way before baseball,” says Welch. “My preference is clearly to have baseball. That’s why we have those agreements.
“But even if we don’t, I do believe we’ll have a vibrant area for people in downtown St. Pete as it expands.”
Hanging in that balance is a fan base hoping for a long-term reason to buy in – and an area that will thrive either way, yet prefers that its most significant neighbor stick around.
“We’re optimistic,” says Ferguson, leaning against his bar as a lunchtime crowd populates his establishment. “We hope that the city and the owners can come to a meeting point and go forward with it.
“It’s not just a stadium with baseball players in it. It affects a lot of lives.”
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