Yes, that plan is playing at the Yankees spring stadium in Tampa. Capacity is 11,000 and they likely won't draw half that many people. Without a new stadium deal, relocation is a real possibility. Owners never say they want to leave town until it happens...
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Tampa Bay Rays --Tropicana Field
- Thread starter tbolt909
- Start date
Of course they don't.
So do the Rays try to compete during this period of homelessness or sell off their remaining assets (all that pitching returning from Tommy John and other surgeries) and shoot for the White Sox' record until they're settled somewhere?
Wit the win against Pittsburgh, the fans may let up on calling them the Cleveland Clowns or Cleveland Frowns playing at the "Factory of Sadness"
The Devil Rays, simply Rays now, did not exist when I was growing up there in the 60s but The Yankees training facility was there so got taken to a few exhibition games there. As a default, many Tampa Bay kids rooted for the Yankees as the "hometown" team.
The Rays have had good teams in recent years. The small crowds for playoff games at Tropicana Field were embarrassing. There's no guarantee that a new stadium would energize the fan base there...
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Deleted member 108832
Guest
Y'all may want to look up the name K.S. "Bud" Adams, Jr. He threatened, snorted, huffed and puffed about moving out of Houston for a NUMBER of years before actually leaving for Memphis in '97.
Just imagine, had the City of Houston not given in to his demands to revamp the Dome in '87, we'd currently have the Jacksonville Oilers playing in the league right now.
Don't forget about Al Davis. He moved the Raiders to LA for a couple years. They moved back to Oakland and he ruined the Coliseum for baseball with a redesign. Now, the Raiders are gone for good. The Rams left LA for St. Louis and now have boomeranged back.
The Colts once left Baltimore in the middle of the night. Look up footage of Mayflower moving vans on their way to Indianapolis. Owners will often use "double talk" during hostage negotiations. "We'd like to stay, but City XYZ is offering much more"...
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Since I’m now in the fringe of the Tampa Bay Area and equally close to Orlando, I’m getting inundated with reports from both Markets (until Oct 2021 I lived less than a mile from Tropicana Field)….at any rate MLB wants the Rays to remain in the Tampa Bay Area. Tampa’s mayor Jane Castor has been salivating over having the Rays in Tampa and she is proposing a site in Ybor City. I really think the Rays will remain in the Tampa Bay Area, but better than a 50/50 chance that the Ybor City section of Tampa will be the new Rays home. IMO, Tampa has the advantage over Saint Petersburg, due to the fact that in Hillsbourough County, Tampa is the county seat and by far the largest city; whereas in Pinellas County, Clearwater is the county seat and there has always been a deep rivalry between St Petersburg and Clearwater. Saint Petersburg’s mayor Ken Welch wants to believe that the Rays will end up rebuilding Tropicana Field, but I’m not as optimistic as SP MayorKen Welch.
True, but the Pinellas County commission, which has the power to prevent anymore funding to rebuild Tropicana Field is with two new Commissioners on board who don’t want to spend the money to rebuild Tropicana Field and there’s been some talk of completely razing what’s left of the Tropicana Field after the damage from Hurricane Milton and building something else in the gas-plant area where Tropicana Field is located.
The deal for the new stadium in St. Petersburg has collapsed. The bond money was rejected(to the Rays owners surprise). The Rays would still be playing at Tropicana Field next year if it hadn't been damaged. The money to repair that facility may not be coming either. This means any talk of a different location for a new stadium is starting from scratch...
Tear it down! Rebuild Webb's City! More people would go there than the baseball park.
Bud Adams also tried to get a new downtown stadium built for the Oilers in the mid-1990s without success, which is what finally drove him to Tennessee.
The 1980s Astrodome renovation was criticized by many fans, as it removed the old “exploding scoreboard” that was an original feature of the stadium. However that scoreboard, although impressive in 1965, was pretty passé twenty years later. The first time I saw the scoreboard in the 1970s my reaction was “THIS is what all the hype is about? This is rinky-dink.”
I never minded the Astrodome for baseball, but will quickly add that Minute Maid Park…..errrr…..Daiken Park, is a far superior facility. However the Astrodome was absolutely awful for football, as it seemed the seats were a mile away from the field.
Getting back to the Rays, I have a family member who worked for them for a season some years ago. Even then there was a realization that the team would do better in Tampa rather than St. Petersburg, as a more central location would be more convenient for fans.
(An aside: that same family member also once worked for the Arizona Coyotes. He is now musing that two of his former employers will have moved somewhere else.🤣)
The Raiders were in Los Angeles for 13 years, the 1982 through 1994 seasons.
Hey, they could always go back to their original home of Cleveland if the Browns carry out their threat to move. Browns are also wanting a new stadium…again.
If they do move to Montreal, you can simply combine the Expos and Rays… and call them the ExRays…
Continuing with this non-radio discussion of the Rays, looks like some of their home games next year on the schedule will be swapped with the away team's stadium in order to avoid the heat and humidity (not to mention thunderstorms) of July & August. There's still allot of that going on in June and September too.
sports.yahoo.com
MLB swaps Rays' July, August home dates with Angels, Twins due to Tampa Bay's move to Steinbrenner Field
Rather than play home games in summer humidity and rain, MLB has heavily back-loaded the Rays' schedule with road games.
And what are they going to do if some early hurricane comes along and blows the Yankee;s facility to Cocoa Beach?Continuing with this non-radio discussion of the Rays, looks like some of their home games next year on the schedule will be swapped with the away team's stadium in order to avoid the heat and humidity (not to mention thunderstorms) of July & August. There's still allot of that going on in June and September too.
MLB swaps Rays' July, August home dates with Angels, Twins due to Tampa Bay's move to Steinbrenner Field
Rather than play home games in summer humidity and rain, MLB has heavily back-loaded the Rays' schedule with road games.
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Deleted member 108832
Guest
Call Major Anthony Nelson. He's local to Cocoa Beach, and it's my understanding that his wife, Jeannie, can put the facility right back to the way it was in the event of a catastrophic event such as that.