Inside The Tampa Bay Rays' Mad Dash To Reinvent Their Business After A Devastating Hurricane

Forbes

21-03-2025

When Hurricane Milton slammed into Florida in October, peeling the roof off Tropicana Field like a ripe orange, the Tampa Bay Rays were left to scramble to find a stadium for the 2025 season. It ultimately took them just five weeks to announce their new home: Tampa's George M. Steinbrenner Field, a minor league ballpark and the New York Yankees' spring training complex.
Then came the real race against the clock.
The Rays had four months to get ready for Opening Day—and that meant much more than shipping some bats and balls across the bridge from St. Petersburg or redecorating the players' clubhouse. The team's 300 or so employees, needing a new headquarters, moved to a temporary office space less than a mile from the Trop and got to work rebuilding their ticketing infrastructure and coordinating with Major League Baseball to get Steinbrenner Field ready for national television broadcasts.
The Rays would also have to rejigger sponsorships—which, at best, typically take three months to come together, and sometimes years—to fit their new inventory of signage space. They would have to adjust to a new concessions operator, speeding up a process that took them a year and a half the last time they switched vendors, and decide whether they needed trailers or additional cold storage space. They had to figure out how to ship merchandise from their warehouse at the Trop and start planning for kiosks on the stadium concourse to compensate for the smaller footprint of the team stores. And they had to connect with a different city police department and county sheriff's office, plus a new fire inspector.
'It was almost like standing up a new business, frankly, in the span of a few months,' says Bill Walsh, the Rays' chief business officer. 'Whatever the baseball analogy of building the plane while you fly it is, I think, is fair to say.'
The sprint to the finish will be next week. The Rays are not permitted to move into Steinbrenner Field until the Yankees move out, leaving only around 120 hours between the end of New York's spring training game on March 23 and the start of Tampa Bay's regular-season opener against the Colorado Rockies on March 28 (a matchup that was pushed back a day to allow for a little extra time). Those five days will be an around-the-clock rush by 50 workers from five companies as well as more than 80 team staff members to mount more than 3,000 signs and other marketing assets—not just corporate logos but also Rays-themed 'see something, say something' and 'watch for foul ball' placards. The giant 'YANKEES' lettering plastered on each side of the stadium will be covered up, the pinstriped merchandise in stores swapped for Tampa Bay blue, and the security screening process ironed out.
There will be no avoiding a revenue impact this season as the Rays move from Tropicana Field—which has been configured to hold roughly 25,000 fans since 2018, with 54 luxury suites, and can be expanded to around 42,000—to a 10,046-seat minor league ballpark with 13 suites. That's more bad news for a franchise that ranked 27th (out of 30) on Forbes' 2024 list of MLB's most valuable teams at $1.25 billion, with estimated revenue of $301 million. But the Rays are confident that their busy offseason will minimize the disruption—and even lead to some new money-making opportunities.
Home Away From Home: The Rays will spend the 2025 regular season at Steinbrenner Field, the Yankees' spring training complex in Tampa, about 20 miles from their usual headquarters in St. Petersburg.
This situation isn't entirely unprecedented for Tampa Bay, which had to shift its spring training home to Orlando in 2023 after its facility in Port Charlotte was damaged by Hurricane Ian. And other pro teams have had to make unexpected moves at the last minute. For instance, Covid-19 travel restrictions forced the Toronto Blue Jays to move for 2020 and parts of 2021 to Buffalo, New York, and Dunedin, Florida, where their minor league affiliates usually play. Fifteen years earlier, the NBA team then known as the New Orleans Hornets and the NFL's Saints temporarily relocated in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
But that history does little to mitigate the challenge facing the Rays, who learned relatively quickly that 35-year-old Tropicana Field could not be repaired before the end of the 2025 season. Wanting to stay in the region, they struck a deal with the Yankees, reportedly for $15 million, although insurance is believed to be covering at least some of that fee.
In a bit of lucky timing, Steinbrenner Field recently completed a two-year renovation, but even so, 'it's not turnkey,' Walsh notes. For instance, more room had to be created to accommodate major league umpires and players' families, and the stadium's lighting had to be improved. Tampa Bay also had to cover the costs of upgrades to a practice field on the property that will now serve as the home of the Class A Tampa Tarpons, Steinbrenner Field's usual summer tenant.
In perhaps the most conspicuous change, MLB altered the Rays' schedule to prevent conflicts with the Tarpons and with the NFL's Buccaneers, who play down the street at Raymond James Stadium, and to avoid the rain that tends to drench the region in the summer months. Tampa Bay will play 19 of its first 22 games at home and be on the road for 69 of 103 to end the season.
But the Rays, who have played home games under a dome since they made their MLB debut in 1998, also see playing outdoors as a chance to experiment with their business. They expect to add fireworks to their game-day experience and can now sell sponsorship space on the tarp used during rain delays, as well as video-board spots that pass the time until the game can resume. Air conditioning will be a major draw for Steinbrenner Field's suites, and Orlando Health, which became the Rays' official healthcare partner coming out of the pandemic, will place branded sunscreen and hydration stations around the concourse to combat the summer sun.
That attitude of turning lemons into lemonade permeates the organization—and occasionally covers other kinds of fruit. 'Our sponsors kind of understood, 'Hey, I'm not going to get an apple, I'm going to get an orange, but I like oranges, too,'' says Walsh, acknowledging that Steinbrenner is a much smaller facility than the Trop to adorn with company logos. While some marquee ad placements—such as the outfield wall or behind home plate—are comparable, other relationships have required a different mix of signage or hospitality offerings, or an accommodation in the form of a deal extension or deferred payment.
The Rays have installed LED boards around Steinbrenner to carry more ads, and their sponsorship team also had an all-new perk to dangle thanks to the field's location: signage outside the stadium facing Dale Mabry Highway, one of Tampa's busiest streets.
'Those eyeballs on our brand and impressions are such an easy way for us to prove ROI,' says Orlando Health senior director of sports partnerships Ultima Espino, adding, 'I think I was prepared to be more nimble than I really had to be.'
Orlando Health's investment in its sponsorship is roughly flat from last year, and that isn't uncommon across a Rays portfolio that has seen a retention rate perhaps even better than usual. 'Very close to all folks have indicated a path forward to get everything transferred over, and some folks have even stepped up and done more,' Rays vice president of corporate partnerships Anthony Rioles says. 'And for the very few handful of folks that for one reason or another made sense for us to take a slight break this year, it's not full stop—we're keeping the long-term relationship intact.'
Tampa Bay had to go through a similarly painstaking process to adapt its ticketing for the 2025 season, starting with reassembling its customer history within Tickets.com's management system. The Rays had already completed their season-ticket renewal process by early September, so they had to figure out how to transfer those fans to a new ballpark configuration.
'We sat down in a group of eight or 10 of us—for many, many hours each session—and literally manually moved dots on the map into what we felt would be the most comparable location,' Walsh says. 'And then we invited those folks to view that location and either accept them or decline.'
The Rays ranked 28th in MLB with average home attendance of 16,515 last season, but even that relatively small step-down to Steinbrenner Field's capacity would translate to a revenue loss of more than $14 million over a full season, assuming the average ticket price held steady, according to Forbes estimates. The inevitable result of the scarcity: Tickets are more expensive this season. Walsh says it would be too difficult to come up with an average increase—'I think we have 25 or 30 different pricing codes,' he says, and single-game tickets went on sale only recently—but the Tampa Bay Times found one fan whose season package was rising 39%, to $26,325.
Despite that jump, the Rays' season-ticket base is larger than it was last season, and 45% of those fans are new this year, Walsh says. Tampa Bay also created new types of partial-season plans and even rethought its strategy around giveaways. For one thing, it is planning to hand out items that could be useful outdoors, such as hats and sunglasses. More importantly, the team is shifting its promotional calendar from a 'peak on peak' model—trying to make attractive matchups even more desirable—to one that emphasizes games that might otherwise be more difficult to sell.
Quick Turnaround: During the Rays' first trip to Steinbrenner Field this year, for a spring training game against the Yankees, they were the visitors. Across five days next week, they'll move in as the home team.
'That was another area that was leave no stone unturned,' Walsh says. 'I don't think we coasted on anything, really, in any aspect of the business.'
This massive effort may be for just this regular season—but it could be for longer. There has still been no decision made on where Tampa Bay would play postseason games this year, and while the front office is generally operating under the assumption that the Rays will be back at Tropicana Field next season, that future is somewhat uncertain as well.
An assessment in November found that the St. Petersburg City Council could repair the Trop for roughly $56 million in time for 2026's opening day, but the Rays, who have been seeking public funding for a new ballpark for years, have voiced complaints that the plan would cover 'only the bare minimum' and indicated that the stadium has sustained additional damage in the months it has remained without a roof.
Longer term, the outlook is even murkier. In September, the Rays announced an agreement with St. Petersburg and Pinellas County for a public contribution of roughly $600 million toward a $1.3 billion ballpark to replace Tropicana Field, which is now among MLB's oldest stadiums and widely considered one of the worst major pro sports venues in North America.
But after an offseason of sniping between the team and city and county officials—much of it ostensibly over delays in the process and potential cost overruns—the Rays withdrew from the project on March 13. It called to mind an earlier deal for a new stadium in the Ybor City neighborhood of Tampa, which met a similar end in 2018 when Rays principal owner Stuart Sternberg abruptly said the plan was no longer viable. (A year later, he made a bizarre proposal to split the season between the Tampa Bay area and Montreal.) In recent days, the Rays have floated the idea of a more significant Tropicana renovation that could extend the ballpark's lifespan by 10 years, although it was immediately met with skepticism by Mayor Ken Welch of St. Petersburg.
A permanent solution is clearly a priority for MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, who has publicly expressed support for keeping the Rays in the region while saying the team's stadium situation must be solved before the league can fulfill its goal of adding expansion franchises. Last week, the Athletic reported that Manfred and other team owners were pressuring Sternberg to sell the Rays.
It's one more hurdle for Tampa Bay's business executives, but few front offices have had as much practice dealing with adversity.
'We have a culture here of embracing opportunity through disruption,' Walsh says. 'That's part of our culture and part of our DNA. The [2025 season] is perhaps a different scale and a different timeline, but the muscle memory for many of us remains similar, and it's just about finding opportunities through the differences.'