After more than 20 years of ballpark problems for the Athletics and Rays, the situation has reached critical mass for these vagabond Major League Baseball clubs.
Both teams will play the 2025 season in minor league facilities, for vastly different reasons. The A’s chose to move from Oakland to Las Vegas, where a new ballpark isn’t on the horizon until 2028, if then. After being kicked out of the Coliseum, the plan is to play in West Sacramento’s 14,014-seat Sutter Health Park.
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The Rays, meanwhile, are at the mercy of the elements—and local government. The team has been told by St. Petersburg that the damage created by Hurricane Milton in October, when the storm blew the Teflon roof off Tropicana Field, will cost the city $55 million to fix on top of $6.5 million already allocated for other repairs. The catch is that construction won’t be finished until the start of the 2026 baseball season, leaving the team currently homeless.
The City of St. Pete and baseball commissioner Rob Manfred had said they prefer the Rays remain in the area at a minor league/spring training facility, and the decision was made Thursday to share Steinbrenner Field in Tampa where the New York Yankees stage spring training and their minor-league Tarpons play.
“This outcome meets Major League Baseball’s goals that Rays fans will see their team play next season in their home market and that their players can remain home without disruption to their families,” Manfred said in a news release.
A new ballpark is slated to be constructed and open adjacent to the Trop by 2028. Except new elected officials may scuttle the bond issue earmarked for that project at an upcoming Pinellas County Board of County Commissioners hearing Nov. 19.
In any event, that means two of the American League’s lower revenue franchises are going to be playing in facilities with small capacities and barely at Major League standards. They will continue to survive on substantial revenue sharing, most of that paid by the big-market clubs.
Four months before the March 27 start of the regular season, this is not what anyone wants.
“It would be ideal to have all 30 teams settled in Major League ballparks yesterday,” MLB Players Association executive director Tony Clark said during the World Series. “Suffice it to say that wherever the players are in 2025, we will have a seat at the table to ensure that those [big league] standards are upheld.”
Rest assured, MLB players are not going to be happy. Clark and his deputy Bruce Meyer said they are aware of the pitfalls and are ready to field the myriad complaints they’re going to receive from the players when they have to work in these minor league situations this season.
Having seen the conditions in West Sac, the A’s may have to re-evaluate after one season playing in the cramped facility, despite millions of dollars spent to improve the quality and cover up all the blemishes.
We witnessed this when the Coyotes played their last two Phoenix seasons in a 5,000-seat college arena on the Arizona State campus. The club invested upward of $10 million to build new locker rooms and bring Mullett Arena up to NHL standards. It was fun for the first year, but last season the complaints from players came flying in as fast and loud as hockey pucks slamming against Plexiglass.
Like the MLBPA, the NHLPA has no control over where franchises play. But their executive directors can make life very difficult for their various commissioners, as Marty Walsh did to Gary Bettman last season, telling him frankly, “This is not the way to do business.”
When it became clear the arena situation in Phoenix would not be rectified, Bettman pulled the team, which now resides at the Delta Center in Salt Lake City.
In West Sacramento, the open-air ballpark needs new lights, new clubhouses, new dugouts and better access for the players, who will have to play in 100-degree heat for most of the summer. Likewise, the Rays will compete in an open-air facility during the heat and humidity of the Florida summer months.
“It is singularly the best opportunity for our fans to experience 81 games of major league Rays baseball,” Rays owner Stu Sternberg said about the 11,000-seat ballpark. “As difficult as it is to get any of these stadiums up to major league standards, it was the least difficult. You’re going to see Major League Baseball in a small environment.”
The A’s have to share the ballpark with the minor-league River Cats, and the decision has been made to play 156 regular season games on natural grass rather than replace it with artificial turf and a cooling system beneath it.
“Grass can be replaced,” Manfred said. “That’s a question of relatively modest investment in order to make sure it’s the best place for them to be playing.”
Think again. MLB need only look at the natural grass problems plaguing multiple sports at Snapdragon Stadium in San Diego. The field was in such unplayable shape that a recent San Diego Wave soccer match had to be moved to the rival’s facility in Louisville “due to ongoing player and field safety,” the club said in a statement. The field conditions for San Diego State football games have been sketchy at best.
The players are baseball’s main selling point, although sometimes MLB doesn’t act like it. It’s hard to imagine putting a $700 million player like Shohei Ohtani or a $360 million star like Aaron Judge at risk playing even a handful of games in a subpar facility.
And what about the A’s and now, Rays, having to play 81 home games in minor league parks? One can argue the Rays are suddenly in this mess because of a quirk of nature. But both the A’s and Rays’ situations should have been resolved years ago.
They both were cited as MLB’s biggest problems during Bud Selig’s commissionership, and Manfred inherited them. Back in 2005, Selig hand-picked his frat buddy Lew Wolff to buy the A’s alongside John Fisher, and Wolff was replaced as team president by Dave Kaval in 2015.
Their ballpark issues became political footballs tossed around by various team owners, and multiple government figures in California and Florida. They were disasters waiting to happen. And here we are.
The A’s could have moved to San Jose in 2011, but the San Francisco Giants blocked it because Santa Clara County is considered part of their territory. Despite promises to the contrary, Selig failed to negotiate a deal with the Giants to relinquish those rights. The City of San Jose lost an antitrust fight in court.
Now in Vegas, current owner Fisher is trying to sell a portion of the A’s to pay for his share of a proposed $1.5 billion ballpark by overvaluing his team at $2 billion. Sportico valued the A’s earlier this year at $1.37 billion. Not surprisingly, there have been no offers.
In 2018, the Rays had a deal to build a $900 million ballpark on the Tampa side of the bay in Ybor City, 50% funded by public dollars. But Sternberg decided against it at the last moment.
Recently, Pinellas County and St. Pete agreed to share the cost of a $1.3 billion domed ballpark with Sternberg, seemingly settling the issue. Then Milton struck, causing $75 million worth of damage to the Trop, the waterfront and other local structures.
In last week’s election, two decidedly anti-ballpark citizens were elected to the County Commission. Both are threatening against issuing the bonds.
“We are in a new era here,” Chris Scherer, one of those new commissioners, told the Tampa Bay Times. “I mean, whatever we agreed to before needs to be looked at differently now.”
With no new ballpark plan and questions about Trop repairs, the Rays might have to move.
Manfred knows he has to solve all of this by the time he retires on Jan. 25, 2029. But clearly these issues have now reached the crisis point.
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