Rays’ home opener sells out. Would a new stadium bring crowds year-round?
Fans have argued for years over whether a different location would better draw fan support. Here’s what some said at Thursday’s game. The Tampa Bay Rays are hoping a new stadium will attract year-round crowds for the team, which has been struggling to find a home opener at Tropicana Field 18 seasons in a row. The team has finished in the bottom two of the MLB in attendance 11 times, ranking 22nd in 2010 and 27th in last year's ranking. The Rays are betting that a new $1.3 billion stadium, even a parking lot across the parking lot from the stadium, could attract the crowds. The city of St. Petersburg and the Rays are also close to agreeing on the terms for a $1 billion stadium and a plan to convert the lots around it into homes, offices and an entertainment destination. Despite the team's on-field performance, the Rays consistently rank near last despite five consecutive postseason appearances.
Published : 4 weeks ago by Jack Evans in Sports
ST. PETERSBURG — Soon they would be all noise and movement, clogging the concourse and the walkways, clutching enormous hot dogs and moonshine slushies before settling butts into sold-out seats — ignoring the empty 300 level, which wasn’t put on sale. Then they were lifting them back out again as Yandy Diaz slapped a ball over the leftfield wall for the first run of the Tampa Bay Rays’ season.
But before all that, as the fans filled Tropicana Field on Thursday for what the Rays hope to be the stadium’s fourth-to-last home opener, Bob Teele was out in Lot 2, reflecting for a minute on 1998. Before the Rays ever played a game, he waited overnight, with a sandwich and a lawn chair, for a ticket to see St. Petersburg’s new Major League Baseball team. Years later, he began organizing an annual Opening Day tailgate to support a nonprofit named for his late son, Derek, who died in a car crash in 2007. The home opener at the Trop is always packed, and Bob Teele has never missed one.
But Teele, who makes the drive from Clearwater for 10 or 15 games a season, knows as well as anyone how mightily the Rays struggle to fill the seats the rest of the year.
“Travel’s a cop-out excuse,” he said of the conventional reasoning for the team’s attendance struggles — that St. Pete is just too far for most people. “If you like baseball, you find a way to come.”
This is what the Rays are betting on: that location is no object, and that a new stadium — even one across the parking lot from Tropicana Field — will court the crowds that have generally eluded the team. As the season got underway Thursday, the Rays and city believe they’re closing in on a deal to make it happen.
Votes by the St. Petersburg City Council and Pinellas County Commission could come as soon as May on the terms for a $1.3 billion stadium and a plan to turn the lots around it into homes, offices and an entertainment destination.
For 18 seasons in a row now, not counting the pandemic-altered 2020 season, the Rays have sold out their home opener. In those years, Tampa Bay has finished in the bottom two of the MLB in attendance 11 times. It has never ranked better in that time than 22nd, which it did in 2010. Last year’s rank, 27th, was its best since then. And it’s still chasing the high of its inaugural 1998 campaign, during which an average of more than 30,000 people packed the Trop.
Providing a good on-field product has hardly moved the needle, with the Rays consistently ranking near last despite five straight postseason appearances. The contrast between quality and quantity was starkest last year, when the Rays made history to begin the season — tying the modern-era record with 13 straight wins out of the gate — only to end it with two playoff games attended by the smallest nonpandemic postseason crowds in 100 years.
Fans on hand to watch the team’s 27th season begin expressed a mix of optimism and skepticism.
“I’m not convinced a new stadium is definitely the answer,” said Ashley Gonnelli, a St. Petersburg native, now living in Palm Harbor, who has cheered for the team since its inception. “I hope it is.”
Location might be one factor, she said, but she doubted it was the only one. She and her husband, Bill, and their two kids were about to join the tide flowing into the Trop — a decisive Rays majority.
“Usually we’re like the away team,” he said.
Austin Dobrowolski was 15 on the Rays’ first opening day in 1998. He and a friend sat in the nosebleeds and heckled the beer guy. He lives in St. Petersburg and loves being close enough to easily attend a handful of games a year. But still: “I think it should be in downtown Tampa,” he said.
“I think they’ll sell out for the first couple of years,” he said of the plan for a new St. Petersburg stadium. New ballparks have a well-established novelty effect. “Then it’ll be right back to this.”
For a while, that was the idea for the Rays — to get away from their longtime home. The Rays’ owners have been agitating for a new stadium, or a move to Tampa, for the past 16 years.
Team and Major League officials echoed a longtime fan complaint: Nestled in a downtown grid toward the southern end of a peninsula, across the water from the region’s actual population center, the Trop was too hard to get to. Analyses by both the Rays and county planners found that a proposed Ybor City site would have dramatically increased the number of people living within a short drive of the stadium. A half-decade later, they say they are committed to St. Petersburg.
In years past, the Rays have kept new-stadium talk at a minimum during the season. That won’t be possible in 2024, with the team eager to get a deal done in order to keep a timeline to have a new stadium open in 2028, and with St. Petersburg City Council and Pinellas County Commission votes on the subject still to be scheduled.
Inside the stadium, Tyler Cochrane, 19, showed off the Rays logo tattoo on his left biceps. He’s 19, a Pinellas County native, part of the first generation born into Rays fandom. He knows a lot of people think the Trop is an eyesore; to him, it’s a “classic place.” He lives in Largo, and the idea that St. Petersburg can’t support a ballpark seemed silly to him.
“If you’re a real Rays fan,” he said, “you’ll make the drive.”