If you’re spent any amount of time in the greater Tampa Bay area over the summer, you’re keenly aware of two things. One, it gets really hot and humid. Like hard to spend time outside and not have to change your clothes kind of weather. Second, it rains pretty much every afternoon. Not like a drizzle, but chaotic thunderstorms that make you want to hide in your bathroom. How long that lasts varies, sometimes a quick downpour and sometimes electric storms lighting up the night skies.
Those conditions, as you can imagine, are not ideal for outdoor sports like baseball. Which is why the Tampa Bay Rays, the Major League team that plays in St. Petersburg, plays in a domed stadium. Mind you, it’s an awful one, a stadium that needed repairs before it was finished. But now it’s even worse, with its fabric roof torn off by Hurricane Milton. That damage has made Tropicana Field unplayable for the 2025 season. So while they fix the roof at the cost of around $56 million, the Rays will play next season in George M. Steinbrenner Field, the spring training home of the New York Yankees, a field that seats 11,000 and, to state the obvious, does not have a roof. That means that as spring turns to summer, there will be an increasingly likely chance that home games will be either delayed or cancelled due to rain and lightning. That’s a big problem for major league teams trying to accommodate a 162-game schedule with a tight travel plan and few days off. So cancelling a bunch of summer games could have a domino effect on everything up to and including who makes the playoffs and when they can start.
To help avoid that dilemma, the League will have Tampa Bay play lots of their home games in the beginning and end of the season, when there’s less chance of torrential rain, and a bunch of away games during the height of summer. Basically, they’re the snowbirds of baseball. That should hopefully get everyone through the season. What it won’t do it solve a bigger fight over building a new, $1.3 billion domed stadium in St. Pete that would be a cornerstone of a much larger city redevelopment plan, which seems to be how new stadiums get built these days. At the current moment, Pinellas County is at an impasse with Rays’ ownership over how long this stadium will take to build and who’s going to cover the overages. There’s an arbitrary deadline of December 1 to come to an agreement, which will undoubtably get pushed back. All that happens while the Rays prep for a season in a minor league park of a competitor, and a new fabric roof will be sewn onto Tropicana that apparently will only last five years. So to put it mildly, these are unsettling times for the Tampa Bay Rays.
There’s a bunch of questions wrapped up in this pressured moment. For starters, and this isn’t new, but is it worth publicly funding a stadium for a team that admittedly doesn’t draw well despite recent success? Second, should the Rays cut their losses and find another town with looser purse strings, not unlike what the A’s finally did in leaving Oakland for Las Vegas? And does that market exist? As easy as it is to make threats, it’s not always as simple to find a town willing to roll out the red carpet – especially when that team doesn’t play in the NFL.
Third, and this is the new wrinkle, how much should team owners and leagues be thinking about how the evolving climate might change a whole lot more than when fans can go shirtless in Buffalo? Not for nothing, but stadiums take exacting architecture in the best of times. Perhaps as global conditions get more volatile, it might change how and where we put teams. And realize that just like a lot of people, a lot of teams and stadiums live on the coasts in increasingly risky environments. And that’s to say nothing about what it’s like for football players and fans in places like Arizona to be outside for early September games, daytime or night. I know in the overall landscape of climate change, sports may not be at the top of the list. But given it’s prominence in the social condition, I’d argue it’s not at the bottom either.
That’s the long term question for the Tampa Bay Rays, and really everyone. But for now, it looks like the team will simply hope to stay dry.
Keith Strudler is the Dean of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him at @KeithStrudler
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