THE SLOW, PROTRACTED death of the Oakland A’s played out over two decades, offering a fresh blueprint of how to torpedo a professional sports franchise. The slow, protracted march of the Tampa Bay Rays toward a similar outcome is playing out in real time. And both serve as warnings to the rest of the sport that when it comes to the pursuit of new stadiums, major league dreams can end up in minor league parks.
The A’s quest to secure a new stadium in the Bay Area repeatedly ended in failure. They eventually gave up and pivoted their attention to Las Vegas, where they plan to move for the 2028 season. In the meantime, they are asking to be called, simply, the A’s, even though they’ll spend the next three years squatting in West Sacramento, California.
While the destruction of Tropicana Field’s roof in October by Hurricane Milton forced the Rays to seek refuge for 2025 at a minor league stadium across the bay in Tampa, Florida, many of the same issues — chief among them a relationship with local politicians drowned by distrust — have left the Rays with a deal for a new stadium they could abandon any day and a future defined by its uncertainty.
For now, the teams find themselves in the same purgatory, caught between the stadiums they yearned to desert and the gleaming, billion-dollar palaces about which they fantasize. The A’s and Rays will spend the 2025 season playing in minor league ballparks about one-third the size of a standard Major League Baseball stadium.
Earlier this spring, commissioner Rob Manfred called the minor league parks “intimate” and “charming,” real estate euphemisms instantly recognizable to anyone who has looked at too-small houses and apartments. It’s not just the size of the ballparks, either. Temperatures in Sacramento regularly climb into the triple digits in the summer, and Sutter Health Park lacks the roof of big league parks in other scorching cities. In lieu of playing at the Trop, the Rays will spend 2025 at the open-air Steinbrenner Field and contend with summer rains that threaten to destabilize their schedule.
The A’s and Rays are cautionary tales of what happens when big, complicated challenges are met with half-measures and inaction — and reminders to teams with unsettled stadium issues in places like Chicago and Kansas City, Missouri, that the longer they take to reach resolution, the messier these situations get. With every city council meeting that ends with no deal, every local voting result that kicks the can down the road to the next election, every ballpark rendering torn up before a shovel ever enters the dirt, the likelihood of best-laid plans being replaced by worst-case scenarios multiplies.
For the Chicago White Sox and Kansas City Royals — two teams angling for public money to help finance new stadiums — there are countless lessons to learn about the fragility of deals and their capacity to go sideways. Already there has been resistance to the White Sox’s request of $1 billion to help build a new stadium in the South Loop, and voters in Kansas City last year rejected a sales-tax extension that would have helped fund a downtown ballpark. Public cynicism over using tax dollars to fund billionaire owners’ real estate plays has made turning visions of a new stadium into reality that much more difficult and the ramifications of letting a potentially volatile situation decay that much greater.
The upshot of stadium volatility goes beyond the teams and extends to the league. While Manfred has said he wants the league to expand from 30 to 32 teams before his planned retirement in January 2029, the instability of the A’s and Rays has prompted MLB to pause laying out any expansion timeline.
For all the good in the game during Manfred’s time as commissioner — the generation of notable stars, the success of the pitch clock, the excellent early returns on the automated ball-strike challenge system — the sight of two big league teams existing in small stadiums is rich with subtext. And with a labor negotiation expected to threaten games in 2027, a widespread dissatisfaction among fans about MLB’s competitive balance and a local-television landscape in need of an overhaul, the challenges in Manfred’s final four years as commissioner go well beyond the perception that comes with shrunken stadiums.
Teams have weathered minor league ballparks before. The Toronto Blue Jays called Buffalo, New York, home in the 2020 and 2021 seasons because of COVID restrictions. The Montreal Expos spent about a quarter of their games in 2003 and 2004 in Puerto Rico before moving to Washington, D.C. The A’s played six games in Las Vegas in 1996 because of unfinished renovations at the Coliseum. Never, though, have two teams simultaneously endeavored to make big league ball work without big league stadiums. When the Rays and A’s play their home openers in temporary residences later this month, it will mark uncharted territory for the sport.
FROM THE PERCH of I-175 just south of downtown St. Petersburg, Tropicana Field looks like a relic, a building whose inevitable fate is condemnation. Milton shredded 18 of the 24 fiberglass panels that comprised the structure’s roof, and the beams that once supported them jut into the city’s skyline. The Trop opened in 1990, and the hallmarks of its antiquity remain, highlighted by the lettering spelling out TROPICANA FIELD in Hobo typeface on the side of the stadium: a bygone font for a bygone edifice.
Three months before Milton and Hurricane Helene devastated the Tampa Bay area, the Rays finally believed that after 17 years of searching for a new stadium, they had found their future home: right where they’d been all along. On July 31, Rays officials and a group of local luminaries — including St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch — gathered to announce a deal for a new $1.3 billion stadium on the same site as the Trop.
The franchise would finally have a home befitting of a club that has won more games than any team except the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees since that search began in 2008. Between the gleaming 30,000-seat stadium and the mixed-use development around the ballpark, the team would mimic the approach of the Atlanta Braves: leveraging baseball into a financial windfall from ownership of the surrounding land and businesses.
Optimism gushed from a news conference in which the parties celebrated a deal that would complement the Rays’ $700 million investment with $600 million in public funds for a stadium to open by 2028. All of the prior failed efforts — the $450 million waterfront plan in St. Petersburg hatched in 2007, the $900 million stadium in Tampa’s Ybor City neighborhood that held up for barely a month in 2018, the ill-fated efforts to spend half the season in Tampa and the other half in Montreal — were moot.
“We know the baseball team is going to be here,” Rays president Matt Silverman said that day, “and it’s going to be here forever.”
Forever didn’t even last a year. Today, the stadium is on the precipice of falling apart. The Rays have until March 31 to offer proof of their $700 million or abandon the deal. The latter would send the franchise into the sort of limbo not even the A’s have faced. Following a delay in approving bonds and a subsequent public fight with county politicians, the Rays said the stadium’s cost had increased significantly and requested additional public money to bridge the funding gap. Welch, the mayor who has been the foremost proponent of keeping the team in St. Petersburg, has said if the deal falls apart, the city will not revisit another. If that happens, there is no clear path to a stadium being built in Tampa. Rays owner Stuart Sternberg could sell the team. But Manfred has been vociferous in saying he does not want MLB to abandon the Tampa Bay area, even if the status quo is untenable.
Compounding the lack of clarity is the state of the Trop. The city’s agreement with the Rays calls for it to replace the stadium’s roof. Repairs are estimated to cost more than $50 million. The city said work could be done in time for the 2026 season, a notion the Rays contested before reversing course. Already the team’s deal with the city for the Trop has been altered because of a clause that extends the contract by a year for every season the team doesn’t play at the stadium. If it is not repaired by 2026, the agreement could run through 2029.
The specter of further ugliness — litigation if the team walks away from the deal and the potential slowdown of Tropicana Field repairs — leave the Rays a literal team without a home. Their executives are working out of rented office space in St. Petersburg. The Yankees retrofitting Steinbrenner Field for an AL East rival and moving their Single-A team, the Tampa Tarpons, to the complex’s backfields is a one-year-only favor. Rays players, already on alert due to the team’s propensity to trade those nearing free agency, wonder aloud what the lack of a home for 2026 and beyond means for their future.
With no obvious solution, multiple prominent Tampa-area businesspeople have started to put together ownership groups intent on attempting to buy the team, though no deal is close, sources told ESPN. The groups’ belief, according to sources, is that Hillsborough County, where Tampa is located, would be more amenable to offering public funding for a new stadium to a local ownership group. (Sternberg lives on the outskirts of New York City.) The 2025 season could serve as a proof of concept, with the Rays expecting to pack the 11,026-seat stadium far more often than they did the Trop, which typically holds games with more of its 42,735 seats empty than filled.
“If not for Steinbrenner Field and the Yankees, I don’t know what we would have done,” Silverman told ESPN. “The quick yes from Hal Steinbrenner gave us peace of mind when we really needed it. I think there’s real excitement for outdoor baseball in Tampa. The whole region is talking about it.”
Tampa, long regarded as a better fit to draw fans in the Tampa Bay area, will see 42 of the team’s first 65 games at home (a schedule stacking intended to avoid July and August, when rain regularly pelts the city). But it’s tempered by the potential for the team’s exodus from the region. In addition to a possible local ownership transfer, multiple groups weighing expansion bids have entertained the possibility of trying to buy the Rays from Sternberg, sources said. Doing so would allow a group to purchase a major league franchise for less than the expansion fee that Manfred estimated in 2021 at $2.2 billion. At the same time, it would require approval from MLB owners, a scenario fraught with potential peril on account of Manfred’s dictate to keep baseball in the Tampa Bay area.
For all the hope that the coming weeks and months will offer a well-defined path for the Rays to follow, it’s never that easy. One need only look at the tortuous journey of the A’s to see why.
IN EARLY JANUARY, A’s manager Mark Kotsay and four of the team’s core players trekked to Sacramento for a look at their future home. They scarfed down a five-course meal at a local restaurant, visited a local coffee shop, meandered around a park, took in a double-overtime win by their NBA brethren Kings and toured Sutter Health Park to see firsthand how their next three years would look.
While at the Kings game, one of the players, designated hitter Brent Rooker, finalized a five-year, $60 million contract extension, the third-largest deal ever given out by the A’s. The confluence of the visit and Rooker’s signing was the latest sign that the not-Oakland A’s planned to operate differently than the team that had caused such consternation with its abandonment of Oakland.
In the near-quarter-century since the A’s first looked to move from a decaying Oakland stadium whose disrepair regularly made national news, the combination of miserly ownership and politicians unwilling to meet the team’s demands led to what was once unthinkable: the A’s following the Raiders from Oakland to Las Vegas. The A’s final season in Oakland had a funereal air, with fans alternating between celebrating the rich history of the team’s half-century in the city and regaling owner John Fisher with expletives and boos over his handling of MLB’s first franchise relocation since the Montreal Expos absconded to D.C. in 2005.
Extending Rooker and handing the largest contract in franchise history to free agent right-hander Luis Severino — a three-year, $67 million deal that helped fulfill the team’s need to guarantee revenue-sharing money through increased spending — signaled a shift toward normalcy for an organization that had brought the plot of “Major League” to life, only without the happy ending. After the A’s agreed to a stadium deal in Las Vegas in 2023 amid simultaneous negotiations with Oakland — whose mayor, Sheng Thao, was later indicted on unrelated federal bribery and conspiracy charges — they focused on Sacramento, home of the San Francisco Giants’ Triple-A affiliate, as a temporary stopgap.
Rather than agree to a $97 million extension fee that would have allowed the A’s to stay at the Coliseum before moving to Las Vegas, they opted for Sacramento, which allowed the team to keep the majority of its $67 million-a-year local television contract. The A’s have sold 6,500 season tickets — including a three-year commitment for premium tickets — and expect to have plenty of sellouts in a stadium with 10,624 seats and a capacity of 14,014, including a standing-room option on the grass berms in left and right field.
Still, there are constant reminders that Sutter Health Park is a minor league ballpark cosplaying a major league stadium. MLB and the MLB Players Association mandated improvements throughout the park, including upgraded clubhouses, lighting, trainer’s rooms, weight rooms, a new batter’s eye and the installation of a grass field. Beyond the playing surface, the ballpark has features that wouldn’t normally fly in the majors, such as the clubhouses, batting cages and weight rooms — places where players often spend time during the game — being located past the outfield walls instead of attached to the dugout.
Even so, the A’s are focused on being adaptable to their new home. Kotsay, who spent four of his 17 big league seasons with the A’s and is entering his fourth season as manager, grew to love the Coliseum in spite of its flaws and hopes to do the same in Sacramento.
“Whether it was 3,000 or 7,000 in a midweek game, the energy was still great,” Kotsay said. “That’s the one thing that I can honestly say I’ll miss, because even though there may not have been a lot of fans in the stands, the passion that they brought for us through the years was incredible. But I’m excited about Sacramento. I don’t know really what to expect. I do know that we’ve sold the place out and that energy in itself will be awesome to witness.”
With the contract extension securing his future, Rooker bought a house in Sacramento. In his three years at Mississippi State, Rooker played at the Bulldogs’ Dudy Noble Stadium and LSU’s Alex Box Stadium and Arkansas’ Baum-Walker Stadium, all with capacities between 10,000 and 15,000, and lauded them for their atmosphere. It’s an environment he hopes the A’s — whose young core could keep them in contention in a wide-open American League West — experience at their new home.
“It’s going to be obviously a unique environment, a different environment than we’re used to playing Major League Baseball games in,” Rooker said. “But we think it’s going to be people who are excited to be there and are there to support a new team … so, we’re looking forward to it.”
GROUND STILL HASN’T been broken on the A’s new stadium in Las Vegas, and if there’s a lesson to be taken from their trials and travails, as well as the Rays’, it’s that nothing is done until shovels hit the dirt. Manfred said Fisher told him the stadium — whose cost has ballooned from $1.5 billion to $1.75 billion, with $380 million coming from the state of Nevada — is still scheduled to open in 2028.
Skepticism about the project persists. The nine-acre plot on the former site of the Tropicana hotel would be the smallest footprint for any major league stadium. Renderings of the stadium are missing a bullpen for the visiting team. The A’s intend to offer around 2,500 parking spaces — one-third of what Clark County code mandates, with one space for every four seats in the planned 30,000-seat stadium.
Flaws and all, the team is surging forward and expects to start construction over the summer on a futuristic-looking building that plans to feature seats closer to the field than any other MLB stadium. Not only would a groundbreaking constitute a triumph for Fisher’s maligned ownership, but it would also serve notice to other owners that the appeal of baseball remains strong enough to close a stadium deal, regardless of the ruin in its wake. At the same time, the cost to do so is profound. The A’s attempt to secure a stadium is a case study in dysfunction. The Rays face years of ugliness ahead. The White Sox and Royals have already encountered roadblocks in their efforts.
Manfred remains undaunted, arguing that “the reality of today’s economics is that either building or renovating a stadium almost by definition has to be a public-private partnership.” The Diamondbacks found success in doing so. Last week, the Arizona House of Representatives passed a bill to divert $200 million in tax money to help a $500 million-plus renovation of Chase Field, where the Diamondbacks have a lease that runs out in 2027.
Other teams simply opted to stay where they are. The Los Angeles Angels, who play in the fourth-oldest ballpark in baseball, renewed their lease of Angel Stadium through 2032, with a pair of options that can extend it to 2038. The Angels had sought to buy the land surrounding the stadium to potentially build a new one, but an FBI investigation revealed Anaheim Mayor Harry Sidhu had funneled confidential information to the team in hopes of receiving $1 million in campaign contributions. He later pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges and is awaiting sentencing.
Manfred’s predecessor, Bud Selig, reinvigorated baseball throughout the 1990s and 2000s by encouraging what became a stadium boom. Those days are over, with the lessons of Oakland and Tampa Bay reminding teams of the manifold land mines around which they must tiptoe.
In almost everything it does, MLB moves at a languid pace. With the pitch clock and ABS, this behooved the league. With the collapse of the regional-sports-network model that provided billions of dollars annually for teams’ local television rights, it left the league compromised. With new stadiums, it’s clear: The longer the idea of one festers without closure, the likelier it is to see something major devolve into minor.
