The homeless big league baseball team

Where should the Tampa Bay Rays go in 2025 to 2027 now that their baseball stadium is in ruins?

Hurricane Milton ripped the roof off of the Tampa Bay Rays’ baseball stadium and there appears to be no way to get the roof back on by the time the 2025 season starts. Plus, nobody likes that ballpark, so a new stadium was scheduled to begin construction next year for completion in 2028, so the franchise isn’t crazy about investing heavily to repair a doomed domed stadium.

The Tampa Bay Rays (formerly the Devil Rays, but the name was changed due to Christian fundamentalist objections to the fish) are one of the less popular teams, averaging 16,500 per game this year in comparison to the Los Angeles Dodgers’ 48,7000, despite the Rays often overachieving down through their history despite their small budget. (A decade ago the Dodgers hired away from the Rays their genius front office executive Andrew Friedman and have been highly satisfied with their choice ever since.)

The two Florida franchises (Tampa Bay and Miami) have attendance problems because many Floridians are bigger fans of other teams, either because they used to live in the North or because many older teams hold their spring training in Florida, so locals root all summer from afar for teams they watch in February and March.

In 2024, the Rays’ won 80 and lost 82, so their biggest home crowd was opening day’s 25,000. In 2023, they had gone 99-63, so their biggest home crowd was 32,000 against the New York Yankees in mid-season. So, they probably need a stadium seating at least 20,000 to get lousy attendance of a million (12,000+ per game for 81 home games).

America has lots and lots of athletic fields, but major league-sized baseball stadiums are highly specialized. The West Florida News-Press reviews 15 potential sites for the Rays and notes that there are only two former big league stadiums still standing: in Montreal and Oakland. But nobody liked them when they were being used. Plus, there are few bonds of affection between Montreal or Oakland and West Florida (as well as a language barrier in the case of Quebec).

Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium used to host the Marlins of the National League, but it was widely hated when reconfigured from football to baseball use.

The Marlins now have their own baseball-only ballpark, Loan Depot Stadium, with a retractable roof, 265 miles from Tampa. But the Marlins have even worse attendance than the Rays, averaging 13,400 per game, so how many would the Rays average if they played in the Miami area?

The News-Press also points out that the 2025 MLB schedule has already been released and the Rays and the Marlins have 50 home games scheduled on the same day. But it doesn’t seem impossible to tear up the 2025 schedule and start over: other teams have shared ballparks for a few seasons, such as the Dodgers and Angels sharing Dodger Stadium from 1962-1965.

Florida is full of spring training ballparks in the 5,000 to 13,000 seat capacity, but almost none of them are covered. It rains a lot in summer in Florida.

Minor league baseball parks are pretty small. The Rays’ Triple A team plays in Durham, North Carolina, and the superb 1995 Durham Bulls Athletic Park in downtown Durham is a worthy tribute to the 1988 Kevin Costner Bull Durham baseball movie:

But it’s current capacity is only 10,000 and it’s not obvious where you could add bleachers.

The Press-News points to a couple of minor league facilities that might draw big crowds in the hopes of being upgraded to major league status in the next expansion: Nashville and Charlotte. Baseball is basically a middle class white sport, and there are a handful of cities where the white population is growing, such as Nashville and Austin.

But both have capacities only around 10,000. It’s hard to tell how quickly stadiums can be expanded by adding temporary bleachers.

Minor league baseball used to be pretty awesome a century ago, back when minor league teams could hold on to great players just because they felt like it, the way the minor league Baltimore Orioles held on to the world’s greatest pitcher, Lefty Grove, from 1920 through 1924, because they liked winning.

But there was no system of promotion and relegation like in European soccer, so eventually, after 5 seasons at Baltimore in the International League where he went 108-36, it made economic sense for minor league Baltimore to sell Grove to big league Philadelphia in the American League, where he went 31-4 in 1931 on his way to a 300-141 career record.

But then, Branch Rickey figured out how to turn minor league teams into farm teams, so that kind of impertinence was no longer allowed.

Weirdly, Austin does not have a minor league baseball team. The U. of Texas has a 7,000 seat stadium, but it hasn’t been rebuilt since 1975.

The biggest minor league stadium in the country is Sahlen Stadium in Buffalo, NY at 16,600. Upstate New York and West Florida are not disconnected.

The biggest baseball-only stadium in the country that has not hosted a big league baseball game is Charles Schwab Field Omaha, home to the College World Series. It has a respectable capacity of 24,000 and usually comes quite close to selling out all College World Series games each June. Its dimensions are slightly too big: 408 feet to center and 335 down the line.

On the other hand, unlike Nashville, Charlotte, or Austin, Omaha is not in line for a future MLB team. Omaha is clearly a great baseball town, but would Omaha fans turn out en masse to see a random MLB team like the Tampa Bay Rays if they were randomly plunked down in Omaha from 2025-2027?

Beats me.