Tampa Bay Rays principal owner Stuart Sternberg and manager Kevin Cash watch as pitchers and … More
What timing. Less than a week before Opening Day at Steinbrenner Field the “CBS News Sunday Morning” show ran a feature on St. Petersburg’s Dali Museum. It was at the downtown waterfront location in June 2019 that Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg and others high up on the club’s masthead hosted a press conference that was more community theater as a split-season plan with St. Pete and Montreal was touted. How surreal it was.
It was only one year earlier, in July 2018, when the Rays released details of a $900 million stadium in the Ybor City district close to downtown Tampa. Both serve as examples of the tremendous amount of time, energy and money spent on everything from architectural renderings to press conferences and assorted dog and pony shows the past several years.
The “Here to Stay” campaign revealed in September 2023 when Sternberg, St. Pete mayor Ken Welch and assorted team, city and county officials stumbled over themselves to praise one another after agreeing to a $1.3 billion ballpark as part of the larger redevelopment of the Gas Plant District within which Tropicana Field was built in the mid-1980s? Just another chapter in a four-decade-old mess.
(Speaking of stumbling, Welch approved a $250,000 bonus pool for 17 city hall staffers who helped bring the stadium deal together. The bonuses, paid in summer 2024, were rescinded when they were found to be in conflict with state law. The human resources director was suspended without pay for five days as a result of the incompetence.)
With the curtain about to rise on the 2025 season, where has it all led? At least for the team, and with a huge assist from Mother Nature, it has led to Tampa and 11,000-seat Steinbrenner Field.
More Bay Crossings?
The Rays’ lease at damaged Tropicana Field was extended one year through 2028 when it became clear they would not occupy the venue this season. The team has since proposed a stadium renovation with a 10-year lease extension through 2038. With respect to the current lease agreement with the city of St. Petersburg, the Rays could return to a repaired Trop in time for the 2026 home opener, or at some point next season, if indeed repairs are completed. (Venue repairs initially had a price tag of $55 million, or half of what it cost to build Camden Yards in Baltimore in the early 1990s.)
Couple the above with the Rays announcing earlier this month that they will not move forward on the aforementioned $1.3 billion stadium as part of a $6.5 billion redevelopment of the 86-acre Tropicana Field site, it is entirely possible they could cross the bay a third time ahead of the 2029 season to play in a new Tampa-based stadium.
True, including the Ybor City proposal, Tampa has previously been brought up in relocation discussions. That’s nothing new. Often, it has been done out of mere convenience due to proximity than any potential marriage between city and team. That said, everything would seem to be on the table at this rate, including Orlando where a group has secured $1 billion in funding.
Tampa Bay Rays owner Stuart Sternberg, left, talks to St. Petersburg mayor Ken Welch as the baseball … More
Of course, there is no telling the number of twists and turns this hideous soap opera will take even by, say, the middle of this summer let alone next year and beyond. If it is up to Welch, moving ahead with the grand plan, or perhaps any plan with the Sternberg-owned Rays, is no longer an option.
“I have no interest in working with this ownership group,” said the mayor, who is up for reelection in 2026. “That bridge has been burned.”
The Rays maintain they want to remain in the region, a desire that Major League Baseball has expressed on multiple occasions.
“This doesn’t change our devotion to the Tampa Bay area and our desire to figure something out,” team president Matt Silverman said on Tampa Bay’s sports radio, WDAE. “We are going to build a stadium in Tampa Bay and we are going to figure this out.”
Given recent developments, or lack thereof, one might wonder if Hurricane Milton tore apart more than the Trop’s roof. An act of Mother Nature may have provided a convenient escape hatch.
“It was a stretch to make this work, but we felt like we had the wind at our back and felt like we had great partnerships with the city and county,” said Silverman, in an awkward choice of words given the storm’s devastation. “We all worked so hard on this project and it’s tough to walk away. But for this thing to work and for us to have the conviction in it, we have to believe it is going to lead us to be able to have great attendance and the necessary resources to increase our payroll. As we looked at it today, we didn’t have the belief it would do those things and accomplish those goals for our organization and put us in the right position for the next 30 years.”
It all flies in the face of the aforementioned “Here to Stay” giddiness as well as last summer when the Pinellas County board of commissioners approved $313 million toward construction. So, the uncertainty regarding a team sporting the fifth-best winning percentage in MLB the past decade goes on and on.
