Tampa Bay Rays officially announce plans to move the team to Tampa

Just two days after the Tampa Bay Rays kicked off their 20th anniversary celebration — which includes throwback uniforms that will remind you of half the questionable shirts you owned in the ‘90s — the team made a bigger announcement, albeit one that many knew was coming.

The Rays announced during a press conference on Friday that they officially intend to move the team from their current St. Petersburg location to Ybor City, a neighborhood in Tampa, and shed the hideous, worthless shell of Tropicana Field once and for all. Like a hermit crab moving out of the sardine tin it’s been living in for a year because it finally found a nice new shell that fits it far better and will allow it to make friends.

Tropicana Field is the worst, the worst, for many reasons. That’s not even a controversial statement. It’s bad, and the Rays clearly need a new home.

In the press conference, Hillsborough County Commissioner Ken Hagan (the county which encompasses Tampa) said that ticket sales are dropping off in St. Petersburg and that he’s “confident” that won’t be the case in a new park, according to the Tampa Bay Times’ Marc Topkin. The team also needs to succeed to secure a future of higher ticket sales and fan engagement, but at least if that remains unachievable, the new stadium being half full on a Saturday night will look less depressing than a handful of fans sitting in the cavernous Trop.

The mayor of Tampa, Bob Buckhorn, thanked the team for their “vision” of moving to Tampa while also making clear that this is only the beginning of the process.

And oh, what a process it will be. While the team has now made its intentions clear about the move and is clearly excited about building a new start in an up-and-coming neighborhood, there are already obvious roadblocks present.

The team noted that it will be putting in a “good amount” of money towards the stadium’s construction although, it didn’t cite a hard number or give any sort of range that Tampa could rely on moving forward. So whether this will be another case of a city heavily subsidizing a team’s construction or not is yet to be seen. The last stadium proposal included a $150 million contribution from the team’s side, which is very low for something that could easily reach into the high hundreds of millions.

So besides confirming the specific site that the park will sit on, what the stadium will actually look like, how much it will cost, when they’re moving, and who will pay for it, the plan is lining up great!

But at least the Trop is nearing the end of its life as a baseball stadium. Once the Rays move out, whenever that is, the ownership of the site will go back to the city of St. Petersburg, who won’t get “Loria’d” in this deal and will actually be able to make some money from the sale. There are lots of unknowns in this plan, but the one (hopefully) sure thing is that the Rays being bogged down by the Trop won’t be the case much longer.