People and Pop Culture
Closing Shot: Before The Dome Became A Home
Thirty years ago, a new stadium opened in St. Petersburg, Fla., with eyes on an MLB franchise. After having a devil of a time landing an existing club, Tropicana Field finally welcomed an expansion team in 1998.
Wade Boggs warms up before the final exhibition game prior to the Devil Rays’ first season at Tropicana Field.Peter Muhly / AFP via Getty Images
Even before Tropicana Field opened 30 years ago — March 3, 1990, to be exact — it was already prone to hard-luck moments.
The current home of the Tampa Bay Rays was, in essence, built on spec. Despite those perilous circumstances, two years before the domed stadium opened, civic leaders thought they had pretty much solved their big-league vacancy problems.
What gave them that idea? Well-received overtures to relocate the Chicago White Sox, who, at the time, resided in Major League Baseball’s oldest stadium. Sox owners Eddie Einhorn and Jerry Reinsdorf delivered an ultimatum to Illinois legislators: Build a new ballpark or we will flee. The Illinois legislature did just that, approving a ballpark on the last day of the 1988 session.
Sorry, St. Pete.
Construction continued on the $138 million domed stadium ($272 million adjusted for inflation). St. Petersburg taxpayers paid for the future ballpark, then known as the Florida Suncoast Dome. It opened with a concrete floor and bare necessities because city leaders wanted to wait for a definite baseball tenant before designing and investing in the field, locker rooms and other features. Their first big-league sports tenant wasn’t a baseball team; it was the NHL Lightning, who played three seasons there in the mid-1990s.
Baseball agonies persisted: near-miss flirtations with the Seattle Mariners and the San Francisco Giants and a failed expansion bid in the early 1990s. The Suncoast Dome filled its calendar with concerts, Davis Cup tennis and Arena Football League games.
Rick Mussett, a retired St. Petersburg city government administrator, was there for all of those ups and downs, including the successful 1995 expansion pitch that — finally — resulted in the arrival of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays three years later. The franchise dropped Devil from its name in 2008.
“A lot of people said it would never happen,” Mussett said. “It happened. And we got a lot of good years out of it.”
Interior catwalks supporting the roof are frequently in play. According to the Rays, 179 batted balls have hit the catwalks during games, creating unusual ping-pong uncertainty for fielders, baserunners and batters.
“I don’t have as much of a problem with the ballpark as some people seem to have,” said Dewayne Staats, the Rays’ TV play-by-play announcer who has been with the team for its entire history. “Every park has its issue or two or three or four.”
On the plus side, Staats said the park has good sight lines and is a comfortable place to watch a game. With a knowing laugh, he noted that it’s easy to get in and out of The Trop, in part because it’s never filled with 40,000 people. Last year the Rays closed the upper deck and reduced capacity to 25,000.
The team’s current lease ends in 2027. A perennial attendance doormat, the Rays seem to have spent almost as much time trying to escape The Trop as they have spent playing there. The latest pitch to keep the team in the Tampa Bay area is a hybrid plan to secure new ballparks in Tampa and Montreal and divide the Rays’ home schedule to strengthen support and revenue.
When SBJ asked Staats about the dome’s approaching anniversary, he said, “I had some rough idea [it was coming up].” He then paused, adding, “Nobody’s throwing a big party, though.”
Erik Spanberg writes for the Charlotte Business Journal, an affiliated publication.
