Based on what happened last week in St. Petersburg, the answer could be “Yes.”
There’s an ongoing saga, as you know, regarding where the Tampa Bay Rays will be playing going forward.
There was a deal nearly all settled for a new Rays stadium to be built in St. Petersburgh and opening in 2028, before Hurricane Milton not only blew the roof off of Tropicana Field but might have also blown up those plans. The image at the top of this post was a rendering for a proposed retractable-roof stadium with a cover that looked like a sail. Proposed in 2007, it was supposed to open in 2012 in St. Petersburg but then, as now, had funding issues.
My SB Nation colleague Danny Russell, managing editor of our SB Nation Rays site DRays Bay, has put together this excellent timeline of the entire stadium saga, which I would commend to you to read in its entirety.
Most important in that article is this summary of what happened in the St. Petersburg City Council last week, where the Rays went from “get repairs to Tropicana Field and new stadium bonds approved” to “there’s no deal for repairs OR a new stadium” in just a few hours:
November 21, 2024 — Rays President Brian Auld convinces the St. Petersburg City Council to delay repairing Tropicana Field (link), leading the Council to delay their stadium bond issuance into 2025. Here’s a breakdown of this dramatic turn of events:
City Council convenes to consider cost to repair Tropicana Field and approve new stadium bonds
City Council narrowly votes 4-3 to fund $23m to initiate the repair of Tropicana Field’s roof after fierce debate
Council takes a 15-min recess before considering approval of the new stadium bonds
During the recess, Auld tells the gathered media that he wishes the Council had not approved fixing Tropicana Field
City Council returns to session, calls Auld forward to answer questions on the letter he provided to the Pinellas County Commission and his comments during the recess
Rays president clarifies that, from his perspective, there is no stadium deal anymore and that efforts to repair Tropicana Field on the team’s behalf are not worthwhile
City Council votes 5-2 to delay bond vote to 2025 so they can seek a legal withdrawal letter from the Rays on the new stadium deal
City Council recalls the vote on funding Tropicana Field roof repair, striking it down in a unanimous vote of 7-0
So that’s… something. The article concludes:
There have been no further statements from the Rays about any new plans.
What we know now: The Rays will play their 2025 schedule at Steinbrenner Field in Tampa.
After that? ¯_(ツ)_/¯
The most likely scenario, I think, is that Stuart Sternberg sells the Rays to a group that will move it elsewhere. And maybe…
I heard a rumor recently that MLB will orchestrate some deal where the Rays will sell themselves to Dave Stewart’s Nashville expansion group in conjunction with a 1961 Washington Senators-style “expansion” Rays promised to Sternberg down the line, but I can’t decide if it’s plausible or insane.
— Craig Calcaterra (@craigcalcaterra.bsky.social) 2024-11-25T17:53:54.167Z
(Click here for the Bluesky post above if you are reading this via Apple News)
That could be, as Craig Calcaterra says, either “plausible” or “insane.” What’s not insane is that the Rays will need a place to play in 2026 and beyond and it’s very likely NOT going to be Steinbrenner Field, which is, at least for MLB purposes, a temporary solution. (The rest of that Bluesky thread is interesting reading, too.)
Could they wind up in Nashville, either as an outright sale, or by Sternberg’s ownership group moving them there? Sure, although it would seem to me that MLB considers Nashville a top candidate for an expansion franchise and a likely $2 billion expansion fee payout to existing team owners. Might owners extract a moving fee from Sternberg? Maybe, but even if they do it won’t be $2 billion.
Could they wind up in Montreal? There is a group called the Montreal Baseball Project, headed by former Expos outfielder Warren Cromartie, dedicated to bringing MLB back to Montreal. There are issues, including the Canadian dollar now being worth about 71 cents, but one thing they’ve got in Montreal is a ready-to-use stadium suitable for baseball. Is it a great stadium? No, no it is not, but it could host the Rays for a handful of years until they could get a new park built. Maybe they could resurrect this 1998 new stadium proposal or this one from 2000, though given the weather in Montreal I suspect they’d want to put a retractable roof on anything built there. One thing the Rays would have on a move to Montreal would be a built-in divisional rivalry with the Blue Jays.
There are other possibilities, many of which I went over in this article last month. Could they even consider Oakland? (Probably not, the other owners would likely never approve a move there.)
One thing is almost certain: 2025 is likely to be the last year the Rays play in the Tampa Bay area, barring some sort of miracle, although this article in The Athletic by Evan Drellich quotes Commissioner Rob Manfred being optimistic:
“I’m not going to speculate about what can or can’t happen in Tampa Bay,” Manfred said at MLB’s headquarters. “Given the devastation in that area, it’s kind of only fair to give the local governments in the Tampa Bay region opportunity to sort of figure out where they are, what they have available in terms of resources, what’s doable.”
That article says there’s another stadium funding vote scheduled in Pinellas County on Dec. 17, but given the bad blood between the Rays and local city and county authorities, my colleague Elizabeth Strom, an editor at DRays Bay, made this comparison:
The Rays seem like a person who wants to end a relationship but doesn’t… end it so they are really awful to their wife/husband forcing the other person to initiate the breakup.
Sounds just about right.
One last note: Monday, MLB announced that the Rays series against the Angels and Twins in 2025 will flip home sites. The result of this is that the Rays will play 37 home games before the end of May, and only eight at home in July and eight in August, trying to avoid outdoor play in the hottest months in Florida. Imagine that! Adjusting a schedule to not play in the worst weather.