If you’re a baseball fan, you probably follow the wins and losses of the Tampa Bay Rays.
But even if you're not into sports, the ongoing stadium saga may still grab your attention, particularly if you're a taxpayer in St. Petersburg and Pinellas County.
The city of St Petersburg is fixing the damaged roof of Tropicana Field after it was destroyed during Hurricane Milton last year. This season, across the Bay in Tampa, the team is playing its home games at Steinbrenner Field.
But here’s the question you — and a lot of your neighbors —may really want answered once and for all: Will the team stick around long-term after the $1.3 billion deal to redevelop the stadium collapsed?
“Honestly, I don't know the answer to that,” Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred said during an interview on Sirius XM last month.
Manfred said he believes Tampa-St. Pete is a major league market, and he wants Rays owner Stuart Sternberg to figure out a way to stay in the region. Getting the Trop’s roof patched up just buys the team a bit of time.
ALSO READ: With the St. Petersburg stadium deal dead, where do the Rays go from here?
WUSF’s Steve Newborn and Tampa Bay Times reporter Colleen Wright stopped by Florida Matters to help get you caught up with the latest twists and turns with the Rays and why this story reverberates far beyond the Trop.
When the deal to build the new stadium officially fell through on March 31, so did plans to develop the land around it, including an African American history museum, and affordable housing.
“Now, just now, people start to pick up the pieces and figure out what's next,” Wright said.
Ken Welch is not the first mayor of St. Petersburg to try and work with the Rays to redevelop the stadium, she said.
“Now that there is finally a deal, the Rays agreed to these terms, one of which was covering all cost overruns, and they couldn't go through. And with that kind of perspective, Mayor Welch was kind of like, any further negotiations would undermine the city's position,” Wright said.
“The mayor won't work with this ownership group,” Wright added. “I know that that sentiment is the same, also at the county level, they feel the same way, and they also feel like, if the Rays couldn't make it work with $700-plus million in public funding, would it ever work? I don't know.”
Newborn said negotiations on a new stadium go back decades.
“Tropicana Field was never a beloved ballpark, you know, like maybe Fenway Park or Camden Yards in Baltimore,” he said.
Newborn also explained the origins of the idea and how it's been seen as spurring a development that would create new taxes in the area around the stadium to make it profitable.
“This was pitched by Mayor Welch as a way to right what he views as a historical wrong," Newborn explained. "He had relatives who grew up in that old Gas Plant neighborhood, which was bulldozed back in the 1980s to build [Tropicana Field], you know, which was by no means a sure thing. It was kind of ‘build it and they will come’, right?”
You can listen to the full episode in the media player above.
