ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Baseball’s haunted house still lurks by the highway, impossible to miss. For three decades, Tropicana Field’s famous slanted white roof towered above I-275. Now the blue skies gleam through its rafters.
“Sad,” said Rays ace Shane McClanahan.
“Devastating,” said catcher Ben Rortvedt.
“Horrible,” said the Rays’ one-time manager, Joe Maddon.
“I didn’t believe it,” said their current manager, Kevin Cash.
It has now been more than five months since Hurricane Milton unleashed nature’s wrath on the Trop, leaving fragments of its fiberglass roof flapping in the 100 mph winds. Those fragments are gone. But there are so many questions about what comes next — for this ballpark and the team it used to house, the Tampa Bay Rays — that if we typed them all up and printed them out, they’d cover the whole darned roof.
Less than two weeks before Opening Day, the Trop is all but empty. A few stadium workers come and go. Two National Disaster Response Team trucks are parked outside. But only minor repairs are underway — until the politicians and the Rays get their next moves sorted out.
“It reminds me of one of those abandoned malls,” Rays closer Pete Fairbanks told me. “It’s wild.”
“I was thinking it was more like a haunted house,” I replied, to which he nodded in agreement.
“Yeah, you could probably make it into a pretty good haunted house,” Fairbanks said. “You could definitely make it into something spooky.”
Inside what is left of Tropicana Field, only the baseball ghosts remain, rattling around a deserted ballpark. Are those ghosts lofting fly balls off the catwalks, then rounding the imaginary bases, listening for the roar of the crowd? If they are, it’ll be quite a wait.
A little over a week ago, I walked around the perimeter of this freakishly quiet ghost town of a ballpark. I came across a stadium worker, leaning against an outer wall, grabbing a few minutes of sunshine.
He politely declined to give me his name. But we chatted about the sights we’d seen inside this place before the hurricane evicted the tenants.
“If you listen hard,” I told him, “you can almost hear the cheers.”
“Not anymore,” he replied. “You can hear them in Tampa now.”
Tampa is where the Rays will take their 2025 nomad act — playing the entire season at the Yankees’ spring training park, George M. Steinbrenner Field. But now that the Rays have announced they’ve pulled the plug on their $1.3 billion stadium deal in St. Petersburg, it’s difficult to say where this team will be playing in 2026 … or 2029 … or 2037.
On March 27, the St. Petersburg City Council will vote on whether to authorize the purchase of a new roof for the Trop. If it passes, that new lid could theoretically be in place by December.
The good news is, that’s more than three months before Opening Day 2026. The bad news is, that’s still nearly nine months from now. And who knows what could happen in that span?
I asked Fairbanks to predict where the Rays will be playing in 2026.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But if it’s going to be the Trop, there needs to be something to cover it before it rains. If it’s not covered by (the start of) rainy season in some capacity, all bets are off.
“There aren’t enough ServPro trucks in Central Florida to restore what could start growing in there,” he said, “if it keeps getting wetter and wetter.”
‘The world’s biggest cheeseburger’
The Leaning Tower of Tropicana still teeters precariously on the corner of 16th Street and 1st Avenue. Since the late 1990s, this 25-foot-tall white concrete tower stood firm and proud, welcoming thousands of visitors to Tropicana Field. Today, it practically defies gravity.
The hurricane yanked it from its foundation but left it leaning at an unfathomable angle, where it somehow has remained for months.
A 25-foot tower welcoming visitors to Tropicana Field sustained damage but remains upright — barely. (Jayson Stark / The Athletic)
The Leaning Tower is the first shocking sight I saw earlier this month as I approached the Trop on foot. It was not the last. I asked the Rays for permission to see the inside of the stadium but was denied. So I toured the outside.
Near the Leaning Tower, two workers dug their spiked shovels into a strip of grass outside the ballpark.
“What are you guys repairing?” I asked them.
“Nothing,” said one. “Not yet.”
That summed up where almost all of this place’s repairs stand. But I kept orbiting the perimeter of the stadium, just to see it all for myself.
Next, I noticed a massive hole in the outer wall, in the general vicinity of the third-base upper deck. Fortunately, it had been covered with a blue tarp.
Unfortunately, the winds had done what Florida winds do — and ripped away a corner of the tarp from the clips that once secured it. So the tarp rippled in the breeze.
On the next corner, I shook my head at the sight of a giant HOME OF THE RAYS sign. This, I thought, wasn’t the home to much of anything anymore.
I kept walking, past locked gates and empty ticket windows. When I reached Gate 3, I found myself peering through a huge glass window, staring at an escalator to nowhere.
I peered into the team store. On one side of the room, T-shirts still hung on the racks. On the other, dozens of boxes were stacked almost to the ceiling. This was a closeout sale waiting to happen — if you brought your hard hat.
Suddenly, the steel door at the loading dock began to open, allowing me a glimpse of the field and stands. A giant tarp covered much of the lower deck. But the most mind-blowing sight was one I never thought I’d live to see:
The bluest sky ever to masquerade as “the roof” of a domed stadium.
It was hard to process. Over the next few days, I reached out to folks who have a connection to this place, and asked what they thought when they saw that no longer invisible sky shining through a no longer functioning roof.
“It’s sad,” said Maddon, who drives by the ballpark several times a week on his way to the golf course. “I always thought of that slanted roof as, like, the world’s biggest cheeseburger, if you look at it right. A great promotion would have been to dress it up like a cheeseburger from the outside and then play Jimmy Buffett’s ‘Cheeseburger in Paradise’ in the bottom of the eighth every night. It would have been perfectly fitting for that place.”
Except now, the bun is off the cheeseburger.
“Right. The top part of the bun is no longer there, man,” he said. “So that little thing on the top is like the toothpick that holds the burger together.”
‘No lid on the pot’
An aerial photo of Tropicana Field, before and after Hurricane Milton in October. (Maxar Technologies / USA Today Network via Imagn Images)
So that’s what baseball’s haunted house looks like from the outside. Few people can describe what it looks like on the inside.
Those who painted that picture best were members of a small group of Rays pitchers who were allowed to throw and work out in the bowels of the stadium in the offseason. The field itself, battered by the elements and with no drainage system to cope with any of that, was off-limits. But the clubhouse, the pitching lab and the training room were somehow unscathed.
“The videos we saw were pretty appalling,” Rortvedt said. “But you don’t really get a good feel for it until you’re inside. I went there two or three times in the offseason. It’s crazy. I went there on a stormy day, too, so the whole field was flooded. So it was a little extra crazy.
“It sucks,” he said. “I mean, it’s your home, and when your home gets destroyed, it’s pretty devastating. It was a shock to everybody.”
Fairbanks was one of three pitchers — along with starter Ryan Pepiot and reliever Kevin Kelly — who visited the Trop regularly in January to get rolling on their pre-camp throwing program.
“At that point, underneath (the ballpark) was fine,” Fairbanks said. “Now, underneath may not be as fine, given that we’re kind of hitting the rainy season and there’s no lid on the pot, right? So I think the pot is probably just kind of filled with water.
“But the locker room and training room and everything were fine, initially. And then the rain started. And it’s like when you pour water down your roof when it gets a leak. All of a sudden, it’s going to start showing up in interesting spots, whether it’s the AC vents or the light fixtures, etc.
“Water has its way of finding its way back to the ground. Our locker room found that out (after a storm) sometime in January. Then it felt like we were in a splash pad.”
‘It threw a wrench into my life’
Mark Ferguson’s sports bar, Ferg’s, is near the Trop. The lack of Rays home games will hurt his business. (Jayson Stark / The Athletic)
As the hurricane approached, Mark “Ferg” Ferguson did what the authorities advised — left home. Except what he did next was not what those authorities advised. He and his wife slept that night on the floor of their sports bar, Ferg’s.
If you’ve ever been to the Trop, you’ve probably been to Ferg’s. It sits just 300 yards from the stadium — so close you can behold the shock of the missing roof from the parking lot.
In the middle of Hurricane Night, as Ferguson fell into a deep sleep, his wife, Sherry, jostled him.
“Honey,” she said, “the Trop’s roof ripped off.”
“What?” Ferguson asked, wearily, then drifted back to sleep, almost as if this had been a surreal dream … until the morning of Oct. 10, when he walked outside his miraculously undamaged business and gazed upon a spectacle that upended his world.
“I looked over there,” he said, “and I couldn’t believe it.”
Thousands of people in the Tampa Bay area had their lives turned upside-down that night. They lost homes and cars and their most cherished possessions.
But this is a story of loss in all shapes and sizes. And for many people, that loss is being felt in waves that have only begun to ripple through this storm-ravaged community. So of course they are feeling that loss every day at the beloved sports bar that has sat in the Trop’s shadow for the past three decades.
But will life at this place ever be quite the same?
Ferguson is one of thousands of people who try to imagine an alternative universe where that hurricane changed course. I asked him how often he thinks about what it would feel like in that other universe. The pained look on his face said it all.
“It threw a wrench into my life,” he said. “We’re still trying to figure it out, but that’s what happens. You know, the journey is not always a straight line. It’s always up and down. No matter what people throw in front of you, you’ve got to go around it, over it or underneath it. And that’s what we’re going to do.”
For 27 seasons, every Rays game night was a block party, where Ferg’s quadrupled its usual daily business. Hundreds of people would filter in for a pregame burger and beverage, then return afterward and often stay for hours. But not this year.
So Ferg’s is making plans for game-night watch parties, hoping to draw in Rays fans who don’t travel to Tampa. But Ferguson estimates the move across the bay will cut a 30 percent hole in his business. And who knows what it will mean for the other restaurants, bars and stores in this neighborhood.
This wasn’t the dream. If the Rays had followed through with their stadium deal in virtually the same location as the Trop, all of these establishments seemed in line for a bonanza. The new park was going to be one part of a community development plan with elements similar to the Battery around the Braves’ park in Atlanta. But now, who knows?
Until a few days ago, Ferg was hopeful about the St. Petersburg stadium deal. Instead, what he got, from Rays owner Stu Sternbeg, was “a gut check,” he said.
“I really thought he would go through with the deal,” Ferguson said, “or somebody would buy the team and go through with the deal. So it was just a punch to the gut when they said, ‘No, we don’t know what we’re doing. We’re lost.’ I’m speechless.”
In the long term, he is clinging to optimism. So he remains “90 percent” confident that somehow, some way, the Rays will end up in St. Petersburg, just because, by his logic, it still feels like the most feasible of all the possible options. But not all of his friends and neighbors share that view.
“So if Stu Sternberg walked into Ferg’s today, what would you like to tell him?” I asked.
“You need help getting the (broken) roof down, Stu? I’m right here,” he said. “I’ve got some scissors. We need to get that (new) roof back on.”
‘A Barnum and Bailey component’
If the Trop is now a haunted house, then this must be a ghost story. So close your eyes and imagine those wacky ghosts of Tropicana Field.
It’s the nuttiest and most unusual place ever to host big-league baseball games. So think about the ghost stories that are unfolding inside and ask: How can they possibly be any weirder or wilder than what happened in this stadium in real life?
Catwalk country — Did you know that, by the Rays’ count, 200 fair balls clanked off the four catwalks that dangled from the roof of the Trop, plus five more in the postseason? No wonder this place sometimes felt more like a giant pinball machine than a big-league ballpark.
Attention, Sir Isaac Newton — Not even the law of gravity applied at the Trop. That’s because eight different fair balls went up, got tangled up in a catwalk and forgot to come down. This actually happened, to fair balls, in major-league games that counted. What a place.
Foul play suspected — And so many foul balls have gone up and not come down that the Rays decided it wasn’t even worth keeping track of them anymore.
The man on the roof — Then there was that fair ball that hit the roof. The Twins’ Miguel Sanó lofted that one back in 2016. It caromed off that roof, 210 feet above Trop level, then plummeted back toward the infield, where it was caught by Evan Longoria for the most unprecedented P-5 out in baseball history. Sanó also once lost a home run because it splattered off a speaker at the Trop.
Jose, can you see — Remember world famous Devil Ray Jose Canseco? He was the first man to learn that what goes up at the Trop isn’t required to come down. On May 2, 1999, he lost a three-run homer because a catwalk ate it. His normal-human reaction: “That may never happen again.” The Trop’s definitely-not-normal reaction: Naturally, 20 days later, he did it again!
Don’t look up — Carlos Peña had a game in May 2007, in which he hit two popups off nearly the same spot on the catwalk in three innings. The next day, he looked up at the spot — and found a mannequin stationed up there, in a Twins uniform, wearing a glove. Only at the Trop could they overload a shift to the left side of the infield, the right side and the sky side.
The white lotus — Then again, looking up was never a good idea at the Trop, if only because the roof was white. No one ever kept a count of how many fly balls and popups got lost in the sky because the roof was the same color as the baseball. But it’s amazing that there weren’t more of those than fans in the stands.
“It’s impossible,” Maddon said. “It just gets lost. It gets lost in the labyrinth. It’s almost like an anatomy, where you look up there and it’s between the muscles and the tendons and whatever. You can’t find it.
“Look, I know there have been other fields that have had that issue. But when you think about all of those things combined at the Trop, there was a Barnum and Bailey component to it.”
Not that Maddon didn’t lean into his own version of that circus act at times. He brought in a witch doctor, from a Native American burial ground, to cure a teamwide slump. He tried to lighten the mood with a boa constrictor. He hired a mariachi band to serenade his team on Cinco de Mayo. So “normal” wouldn’t describe his managerial vibe, either.
But he also finds a way to peer beyond the Trop Show and vividly recall that amazing baseball moments happened there.
“I often used to remind myself,” he said, “that a World Series was played in that building.”
Yes, once upon a time, in 2008, a World Series really was played at Tropicana Field. On the unforgettable final night of the 2011 season, Evan Longoria launched a playoff-clinching, walk-off home run that feels like it’s still flying. And lest we forget, a Final Four was even played there in 1999: UConn over Duke, beneath the majestic catwalks.
“I was never a fan of the building,” Maddon said. “I swear I wasn’t. But so many good things happened there, I have to give it credit.”
The Backstreet Boys perform the national anthem before Game 1 of the 2008 World Series between the Phillies and Rays. (Chris O’Meara-Pool / Getty Images)
‘And a divination with a swami’
“Did you bring your crystal ball with you to spring training?” I asked Fairbanks.
“No. I wish I had,” the Rays’ closer said. “I wish I had one — and a divination with a swami — so we could maybe divine our future a little better.”
Just assume nobody truly knows the future of this team. But let’s draw a rough sketch.
March 27 — The city council seems likely to approve the funding for the new roof and other repairs to the Trop. Let’s assume those repairs are completed in time to get the building reopened in time for Opening Day 2026. That’s hardly certain, but let’s assume that happens to look ahead.
The Rays then would be legally obligated to play three more seasons at Tropicana Field and would need a new home for 2029. Here’s where this could get messy: If repairs take significantly longer than expected — and the Rays can’t return to Trop World until 2027.
If that happens, they would need to find a temporary home for yet another season — with no assurance that the Yankees would be as willing to invite them back to Steinbrenner Field. It also would extend the Rays’ Trop lease through the 2029 season, because the small print adds a year for every season the team doesn’t play there.
That doesn’t seem like a likely scenario — at this moment. But after all the wild twists and turns in this saga, can we really rule anything out?
Meanwhile …
The search for a “permanent” home — At least we know that one of these days, months or years, the Rays will exorcise their haunted house and play baseball there again. Just not forever. But then what?
As Evan Drellich reported in The Athletic last week, Major League Baseball is frustrated with Sternberg, because the powers that be see no path to a new ballpark, either in St. Petersburg or Tampa, as long as Sternberg is the owner. So MLB is applying pressure on Sternberg to sell the team — and is almost openly rooting for a solution that gets a ballpark built in Tampa.
But that feels like commissioner Rob Manfred’s end game, not Sternberg’s. Rays team president Matt Silverman has already fired off a “team is not for sale” response on local radio. And Rays management seems enticed by the opportunity to play a full season in Tampa and rewrite this script.
Except by opting out of what once looked like a done deal, Sternberg’s own pitch clock is now ticking. To get a new ballpark built by 2029, he would need to make a deal, relocate the team or sell the franchise in the next 12 to 18 months.
Or, as the Tampa Bay Times reported Friday, he could extend that window by hammering out a 10-year extension on the Trop lease, along with vast renovations and a reimagined ballpark concept. But remember, the league and a whole bunch of Tampa Bay politicians have a say in that.
“I don’t care what anybody says. The Trop is home for us, and it’s our ballpark,” Shane McClanahan said. (Nathan Ray Seebeck / Imagn Images)
So now … back to our tales of the Trop — and the men who won’t be playing baseball in it this year. They have lives. They have families. And they have about as uncertain a future as any big-league team has ever had. If you didn’t know how we got here, you’d have a hard time believing this was happening.
The whole thing is “sad,” McClanahan said — for many reasons, on many levels. For one thing, he said, this is personal for all of them.
“I had a lot of good memories in that park,” he said. “I don’t care what anybody says. The Trop is home for us, and it’s our ballpark. We take a lot of pride in beating the s— out of people there.”
But they’re not oblivious to the realities of the world around them. They saw a hurricane power through their town — and it took more than a ballpark with it.
“Our prayers and thoughts are with the community,” McClanahan went on. “In the grand scheme of things, baseball seems so minimal when you know people lose their houses and their loved ones.
“So for sure, we’ll adapt,” he said. “We’ll overcome. So put us on a back field, somewhere in the middle of any state you can name, and it’s still Major League Baseball. It’ll still be 60 feet, 6 inches.”
All they can do, for now, is go play 162 baseball games wherever the schedule tells them to play.
“I think it’s almost easier for us because we know that our jobs aren’t changing,” Fairbanks said. “Our jobs are still to score runs, get outs, win games, right? You know, my dad always would get mad when I’d worry about stuff that I can’t control. He’d be, like: ‘Control your sphere.’ So as long as we control our sphere and stay in that little bubble that we encapsulate, it makes it easier to deal with.”
They may not have packed their crystal balls this spring. But they’ve packed their blinders. So welcome to Rays Baseball 2025. Control the sphere. Try not to fixate on their haunted house. And pray that one of these days, somebody will put that lid back on the pot.
(Top photo of Tropicana Field in January: Kirby Lee / Getty Images)
