Rays and A’s must adapt to Minor League parks
Joe Mock
Posted 3/24/2025 Written for USA TODAY. All rights reserved
In 2009, Carrie Underwood brought tears to the eyes of Country music fans with her #1 hit “Temporary Home.” She sang of a child being shuttled from foster family to foster family, and a dying man who’s about to leave this life to enter his heavenly home.
This is my temporary home, it’s not where I belong, the chorus tells us, adding This is just a stop, on the way to where I’m going.
Two Major League teams enter the 2025 regular season feeling like their journeys belong in a Country song. Their heartaches, joys and frustrations are the stuff of Nashville hitmakers.
For the Tampa Bay Rays, what they thought was a solid plan to build a new stadium started to unravel due to Hurricane Milton, forcing them to play this season across Tampa Bay from St. Petersburg. And the Athletics – whose lack of a geographic identifier symbolizes the temporary nature of their trek — will be in a Minor League park 86 miles from their home for the past 57 summers.
Jubilation turned to dilemma
Last summer, the front office of the Rays was both relieved and overjoyed. Following 17 years of concerted effort to obtain a replacement for dreadful Tropicana Field, a deal had finally been struck with the two governmental entities that mattered.
On July 18, the St. Petersburg City Council voted to approve a $6.5 billion development to be constructed next door to the Trop, with the Rays tapped to spearhead it. At the heart of this Historic Gas Plant District would be a shiny new fixed-roof stadium, projected to cost $1.3 billion. The city indicated it would contribute $287.5 million specifically for the ballpark.
Twelve days later, the Pinellas County Commission also approved the development, pledging $312.5 million for the stadium. The Rays would be responsible for the other half of the venue’s cost, ostensibly recovering some of that with higher revenues from the new facility and money generated by the overall development.
The Rays announced that their new state-of-the-art showplace would debut on Opening Day 2028. Planning on the development and the stadium began in earnest.
When last October arrived, you could almost hear the mournful wail of a pedal-steel guitar. Hurricane Milton ravaged the Gulf Coast of Florida, making the tattered shreds of the Trop’s roof an enduring symbol of the storm’s fury.
Partially because of the widespread devastation in the area, votes to issue stadium-construction bonds that were supposed to be a formality were postponed by the city and county. By the time those approvals arrived in December, the Rays had concluded that the already-tight timeline for a 2028 delivery date was no longer possible. And a year’s delay meant over $100 million in higher construction costs, and millions more in lost revenue a new venue would’ve provided in 2028.
So the Rays, who claimed that they’d already invested $50 million in architecture and planning on the new development, abruptly stopped all such expenditures. A March 31 deadline to accept or reject the public money to build a delayed stadium loomed.
Decision is ‘major disappointment’
Stu Sternberg, managing partner of the Rays since 2005, ended one type of drama but created another on March 13. He released a statement saying the team was not moving forward with the plan for a new ballpark or the Historic Gas Plant District development.
In other words, the Rays decided that the agreement that had been reached last summer with the city and county was dead.
“A series of events beginning in October that no one could have anticipated led to this difficult decision,” Sternberg’s statement says in part.
Reaction was swift, with St. Petersburg mayor Ken Welch telling reporters that he viewed the decision as a “major disappointment.” He adds that it’s preferable to learn the Rays’ intentions now rather than after construction bonds had been issued. “It’s better to get out of a bad engagement than a bad marriage,” the mayor surmises.
Much like the third verse of a Country song, a startling new twist emerged. Word leaked out that Sternberg was actively negotiating to sell the franchise. He didn’t want to bind new owners to a commitment to the St. Pete project if they wanted to move the team elsewhere.
Prospective ownership groups quickly emerged, each with its own idea of where the team should build a new park. One group wants to build a new stadium in Orlando, another in Tampa, another in Nashville and yet another next to the Trop in St. Pete.
Welch welcomes discussions with new owners, adding he has no interest in further talks with Sternberg, even if they involved a major rebuilding of the Trop with a ten-year lease extension. “That bridge has been burned,” he says.
While Tampa, already home to the NFL and NHL, would be a logical landing spot, the Rays would face opposition from other owners if they want to abandon the growing Tampa Bay market altogether.
Amidst the swirling drama of the stadium situation, the Rays accepted the gracious offer of the Yankees to play the 2025 regular season in their spring-training stadium in Tampa, which has just undergone $50 million in improvements. The Yankees’ Florida State League team that usually plays at Steinbrenner Field will move their home games to an upgraded practice field next door.
And when the Yankees come to Tampa to take on the Rays in a series that starts April 17, New York will be using the visitor clubhouse in their own ballpark.
Since the summer months see plenty of hot, humid, often-stormy weather around Tampa Bay, MLB changed the Rays’ regular-season schedule. The Rays will now host 16 series in Tampa prior to July 4th, and only another five prior to Labor Day.
The current plan calls for this to be a one-year arrangement. The City of St. Pete is contractually responsible for the Trop, so they’ve announced that they will spend approximately $56 million to repair its roof and all of the wreckage on the interior. This would allow the Rays to move back there for the 2026 season.
After that? The ending of that song hasn’t been written yet.
Heading to Vegas
The story of the Athletics might lack the ongoing intrigue of the Rays, but it’s had no less drama.
On the afternoon of September 19, 2024, the A’s played the ultimate getaway game. With the team mired in last place with no hope of making the playoffs, the baseball world knew that it would be the final contest at the Oakland Coliseum.
In 2023, MLB owners granted the A’s the right to move to Las Vegas, following the same path out of town as their NFL brethren the Oakland Raiders. This fall, the Las Vegas Raiders will play their sixth season at Allegiant Stadium, across Interstate 15 from the famous Strip. The A’s plan to occupy a new stadium that will soon be constructed on the site of the now-demolished Tropicana, one of The Strip’s legendary hotel casinos.
It might be a stretch, but if construction goes perfectly, the new venue could be ready by 2028.
That means the A’s had to find an interim home for three years, at least. Many options were examined, but playing inside air-conditioned Allegiant Stadium wasn’t one of them, since its design can’t accommodate a baseball field.
More viable options included sharing Oracle Park with the San Francisco Giants, playing in the Triple-A ballparks in Reno or the Summerlin suburb of Las Vegas … or moving to the 28th biggest metro area in the U.S.
That would be Sacramento.
A ‘great landing spot’
The capital city of California already had a major-league-level sports team in the NBA’s Kings. In fact, the Kings own the Sacramento River Cats, the Triple-A baseball team that plays at Sutter Health Park in West Sacramento.
“When this opportunity came about, we wanted to make sure that we let everybody know that Sacramento would be a great landing spot for the A’s in their transition to Las Vegas,” John Rinehart, the Kings’ president of business operation, tells USA TODAY Sports. “Obviously, (the A’s) know what they are doing, and they’ve seen the support that the Sacramento region has for its sports teams.”
The Kings and A’s entered into an agreement to split the cost of significant upgrades to the Minor League park, and will share the ongoing expenses and revenues while the big-league team is in Sacramento.
This means that the ballpark will see almost daily use, with both the River Cats and A’s playing their full home schedules there. Because of the pounding the playing surface will take, artificial turf was slated to be installed. Instead, after the MLB Players Association balked, the surface will continue to be natural grass. It’s scheduled to be replaced midseason, perhaps during the All Star break.
The biggest addition to Sutter Health Park is a two-story structure beyond left field that will serve as the A’s clubhouse. Other upgrades include bigger bullpens and dugouts, new light towers, more batting tunnels, a new videoboard and expanded hospitality areas for fans.
“I think we’ve proven we can share the spaces,” says Rinehart.
“River Cats fans and players will be able to enjoy all of these new experiences that they didn’t have before.”
It’s an interesting irony that the A’s are likely to experience an impressive bump in attendance in the significantly smaller venue this year, as most games in the 14,014-capacity park will be sold out.
The team won’t be adopting the name “Sacramento A’s” during their stay, though. To the chagrin of a number of media outlets, they will go without a geographic designation until they move to Las Vegas.
That doesn’t bother Rinehart. “Everybody is very excited for the impact that we’re about to make in the region.”
For both the Rays and A’s, their surroundings this season will simply be a stop on the way to where they’re going, as Carrie Underwood might sing. If either team can grab a playoff berth under their trying circumstances in 2025, the achievement would certainly warrant its own hit song.
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