Pictured above: Tropicana Field’s location in Downtown St. Petersburg is hard to access for many Tampa Bay residents due to limited highway entry points.
Courtesy of Tampa Bay Times
By Max Steele
Whether you’re an avid baseball fan or a St. Petersburg native, you may have noticed news circulating around the Tampa Bay Rays and possibilities of the team relocating.
For nearly a decade now, the Rays organization have shown interest in leaving St. Petersburg’s Tropicana Field and relocating to a higher populated area.
The team have discussed moving to Tampa, Orlando, and are now even considering a split-season in Montréal, Canada.
The reason behind wanting to move is simple: Despite being one of the top-performing teams in Major League Baseball (MLB) for nearly a decade, the Rays average one of the league’s lowest in-game attendance per season.
Now, if the team was not performing well, there would be a reason as to why fans don’t show up for the games. But as a 100-win American League East champion team in 2021, the lackluster crowd doesn’t do the team justice.
The Rays have struggled with attendance at Tropicana since the team’s creation in 1998.
Fans and players have argued that the stadium is severely outdated, including its sideline bullpens, obstructing ceiling catwalks, and an overall unaesthetically pleasing interior.
Despite its ability to seat 42,735 fans at full capacity, Tropicana Field averaged approximately 9,500 fans per game in 2021, the third lowest in the entire league, according to ESPN.
Don’t let the relatively small number lead you to believe the Rays have a limited fanbase, as the team averaged nearly 100,000 television viewers per game last season, most of which were broadcasted in Tampa Bay, according to Bleacher Report.
Residents from Tampa and surrounding suburbs prefer to watch the games at home as they find Tropicana’s downtown St. Petersburg location not only far from their homes, but also a traffic nightmare due to its limited highway access.
If the stadium were closer to this audience, it’s likely more fans would show up to games, and this is why the Rays should move to Tampa.
The baseball team would join the Buccaneers and the Lightning. This season, the Buccaneers’ Raymond James Stadium averages over 65,000 fans per game and the Lightning’s Amalie Arena averages over 19,000 fans per game, according to ESPN
The Rays discussed building a stadium in Ybor City, a lively district within the city of Tampa that has potential to draw a large crowd. This move could benefit the team both financially and psychologically, while boosting the surrounding economy as a whole.
The Rays lease to play in Tropicana runs through 2027, meaning the team would face a hefty fine if they decided to move out before then.
Only time will tell what will happen to our hometown team, but one thing is for sure: the Rays deserve better.
Max Steele is a junior digital communication and multimedia journalism major at USF St. Petersburg.
I would like to think that this whole “Sister-City” thing with Montreal is nothing more than a leverage ploy to get a new stadium in one city or the other, however, Stu and Brian Auld have explicitly said that “MLB will NOT work in the Tampa Bay Area on a full-time basis.” This isn’t exactly a statement that you make if you’re trying to get a full-time stadium built in your home market.
At the threat of moving half of our games out of the Bay Area to Montreal, I’ve already stopped watching and mostly stopped caring. When the local business leaders and politicians cave in and build a part-time stadium and kowtow to Stu and his ridiculous plan, the Rays will officially be dead to me and I suspect a lot of other fans in the Bay Area.
This is like being married to a woman for 23 years and suddenly she decides that life with you isn’t that great anymore, that she needs more excitement and is leaving you, but still wants to sleep in your bed half the time.
Good riddance to the Rays and Stu Sternberg. Tampa is perfectly fine with the Bucs and Bolts, and maybe local fans can throw their support behind the Magic.