Tropicana Field, the home of Major League Baseball’s Tampa Bay Rays, will not be ready for the league’s opening day next year according to the Tampa Bay Times’ Marc Topkin. It still remains to be seen where the Rays will play to open up the 2025 season, with their planned new stadium not set to arrive until 2028.
The facility sustained significant damage during Hurricane Milton last week, most notably with the fiberglass roof being shredded by the high winds. It’s not yet known the extent of the damages beyond just the tattered roof, and whether it will be possible to reopen ‘The Trop’ between now and its planned farewell in 2027. An engineering audit is planned for the off-season to assess the full scope of the repairs.
To our Rays family, fans and the entire Tampa Bay community. 💙 pic.twitter.com/X9fwjZdcRX
— Tampa Bay Rays (@RaysBaseball) October 10, 2024
The time window to complete the requisite repairs before Opening Day 2025 would be about six months, with the inaugural game of next season landing on March 27th. The Rays are not currently using the facility, having missed the ongoing 2024 MLB playoffs late last month. They played their most recent home game on September 22nd against the Toronto Blue Jays.
Potential Options for the Rays
Options for the Rays to play their 2025 home games seem limited. Should they be able to strike an agreement, the most obvious choice would be Raymond James Stadium, the home of the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers down the road. With only two months’ overlap between the football and baseball seasons, it may require the least schedule changes to make a shared occupancy work. Raymond James has a seating capacity of 69,218. It’s even in the realm of possibility Tropicana Field could be repaired before the Bucs need to use their stadium.
Also on the radar is George M. Steinbrenner Field, the home of the Single-A Tampa Tarpons, a minor league affiliate of the New York Yankees. The Yankees also use the facility as their Spring Training field each March before the regular MLB season begins. The seating capacity at Steinbrenner Field would be the biggest obstacle, with it only holding 11,026 fans compared to Tropicana Field’s 25,025. Still, the Rays pulled an average attendance of only 16,515 per game according to ESPN, 28th out of 30 teams in the league.
There are also twelve other Spring Training fields in South Florida which may be available to the Rays as an option should Steinbrenner Field not work out. Several of these are used as facilities for minor league teams as well, meaning an arrangement with the regular season inhabitants would need to be arranged. If the Rays do wind up in a minor league park, there’d be two MLB teams using one at once; the Oakland Athletics are set to play in a Triple-A facility in Sacramento, California while they await the construction of a new stadium on the Las Vegas Strip.
Another obstacle to these propositions is the lack of a roof. Tropicana Field, along with the Miami Marlins’ LoanDepot Park, both were built with covers to protect against delays from Florida’s rainy summers. The scheduling headache created by a temporary home would be made doubly worse by having to account for re-scheduled games which were rained out in an uncovered park.
Making the Best
One other group of Tropicana Field occupants has already found a new home: the seven cownose rays who’ve lived in the stingray touch tank above center field have been relocated to the nearby Florida Aquarium in downtown Tampa. The rays were still in Tropicana Field while Hurricane Milton passed overhead, but were reported to be unharmed and transitioning smoothly to their new home.
Bay-area Rays fans were quick to find opportunity in the aftermath of the disaster. At least a few people swooped into the area of the stadium after Hurricane Milton and snatched up shreds of the roofs that’d blown to the ground below. Those shreds are now selling in multiple listings on eBay, asking up to $1,000 for a rare and bizarre piece of Rays memorabilia. Even a patch of artificial turf that somehow made its way outside showed up for a grand.
