In what seemed like the inevitable outcome of five months of back and forth drama, the Tampa Bay Rays announced today that they will not be moving forward with the new stadium that was supposed to be built in St. Petersburg.
It’s been a drawn out story, and well documented, but the gist of it is this:
- The Rays and the city of St. Petersburg struck a deal to build a new stadium as part of a multi-billion dollar redevelopment plan for St. Petersburg.
- Hurricane Milton hit the region on October 9th, causing widespread damage and ripping off the roof of Tropicana Field, home of the Rays.
- Following the election of several new city commissioners in November, a delay was put on the final vote for the bonds that would help pay for the stadium.
- The Rays announced that due to the extensive damage to the Trop, they would play the 2025 season at Steinbrenner Field in Tampa. The decision ruffled the feathers of several Pinellas County officials, who felt that the team should play in one of the Spring Training ballparks within the county.
- When the bonds were finally approved, the Rays claimed that the delay had resulted in increased costs that they felt they could not absorb.
- MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred became personally involved in negotiations to help finalize the deal.
- Rumors started swirling that the team was going to pull out of the deal, and further rumors suggested that MLB might try to force the Rays ownership group to sell the team.
And then we have today’s official news that the Rays are, in fact, backing out of the deal. While the team maintains that it is ready to move forward under a revised deal, elected leaders in St. Petersburg and Pinellas County have indicated that there will be no additional funding or renegotiation of the current deal.
Which leaves the future of MLB baseball in Tampa very uncertain. The possible scenarios now include:
- The team and local officials somehow work out their differences and salvage the deal
- The team turns to other options in Tampa for a stadium deal
- The team tries to relocate to a different market, with Orlando, Nashville, and Portland as eager suitors
- MLB intervenes and tries to force a sale of the team to other owners who will try to keep the team in the Tampa/St. Pete region
But some of those options seem unlikely, based on both public statements as well as basic rationality.
The team turning to Tampa is certainly an option, but it’s been tried before – many times – and hasn’t worked. Of course that doesn’t mean a deal can’t be done, but history isn’t on the side of success with this. And even if it could result in a deal, the likelihood of that happening quickly seems low, and MLB has become impatient with this process. They are eager to expand the league by two teams, but they are also committed to delaying that expansion until the stadium situations with the Rays and Athletics are both resolved. Having to restart a ballpark negotiation from scratch doesn’t seem like something that would result in a new stadium deal in the near future.
Meanwhile, the team attempting to relocate out of the Tampa Bay region may be a non-starter. While MLB is eager to expand, with Nashville and Portland as top candidates, a team relocating to another market would cheat the owners out of a multi-billion dollar expansion fee. While they could turn around and get that expansion fee from a new Tampa ownership group, the poor attendance track record of the Rays could put a damper on that fee.
Which means that MLB trying to get to the current ownership group to sell the team to another ownership group could be their preferred option, and they have various financial tools at their disposal that could put pressure on the Rays owners to make a deal. That outcome would likely mean that the current stadium deal would be revived, as-is, and the new ownership group would move forward with the St. Petersburg project.
And then, of course, there is the chance that the current ownership group and local officials will bury their hatchets and come to a deal. But to many observers it seems like the team may have simply had second thoughts about remaining in Tampa, and the circumstances of the Trop being damaged, plus the delay with the bonds vote, have given them a viable way out.
But, to be fair, the ownership group having doubts about investing billions of dollars into professional baseball in the Tampa Bay area isn’t such a crazy thing. Despite fielding a team that has had consistent success (on a small-market, limited player budget), fans have simply not turned out in big numbers to support this team. Many have blamed that on Tropicana Field – both the quality of the venue, as well as the location.
Sure, the ballpark is old – 35 years to be exact. And even when it was first built in 1990 in an attempt to lure the Chicago White Sox to the region, the building never seemed like a jewel of ballpark architecture. The Trop has long been accused of being one of the two worst ballparks in MLB (along with the Oakland Coliseum, former home of the Athletics), and while we think there’s very little comparison between the two (the Coliseum is a legit dump, while the Trop had some definitive charm to it), it was hard to argue that it was a ballpark that needed to be replaced.
But even with a less than stellar ballpark, good teams tend to still draw fans when they’re playing well, and the Rays just haven’t. In 2024, their average attendance was approximately 16,000 fans per game, with their smallest crowd being around 10,500. There’s just no way to get around it: that’s not the attendance of a healthy franchise or a supportive fan base.
And then there’s the location excuse: that the ballpark’s locale near downtown St. Petersburg was just too far away for Tampa fans to trek to. While that’s certainly legit … it can take 30-60 minutes to get from downtown Tampa to the Trop … the reality is that there are plenty of stadiums where fans have to commute that sort of distance to. Teams like Kansas City have venues in the middle of nowhere that everyone needs to drive to, and the same goes for a place like Globe Life Field in Arlington, where it seems like every fan has to drive 30-45 minutes to get there … even if they live right around the corner. And have you ever sat in traffic in Los Angeles on the way to Dodger Stadium? You could be coming from five miles away yet still have to sit in an hour of bumper-to-bumper traffic.
So the challenge with moving the team to Tampa is that the fans that live in St. Petersburg would then be the ones with the commute – and who’s to say they would do it? So unless the team knows that a disproportionate percentage of their fanbase lives closer to the Tampa side of the bay, moving the ballpark there would just be trading one problem for the same problem. For baseball to succeed in the region, it would seem that fans from both sides of the bay would need to be on board.
So what will happen next? It’s anyone’s guess. For 2025 the team will play at Steinbrenner Field, where rainstorms and reduced revenues will likely be constant topics of discussion. But it’s hard to imagine MLB allowing this drama to ensue for much longer. We think they’ll probably force a sale to another investor group and will push to revive the St. Petersburg deal. But don’t rule out a new owner moving the team to Orlando – a city that has been somewhat overshadowed during the most recent expansion discussions. Moving the team to a larger market just 90 miles away might be the answer that everyone is looking for.
