Tampa Bay Rays' new stadium will be 'most intimate ballpark in baseball'
By Breanne Williams
Tampa Bay Business Journal
Published: May 30, 2024

The Tampa Bay Rays want their new stadium to become a front porch to the Historic Gas Plant District in St. Petersburg.

St. Pete City Council, meeting as the Committee of the Whole, will review a deal to build a $1.3 billion stadium for the Rays on June 12.

The team on Thursday released new ballpark renderings ahead of that meeting. Rays president Matt Silverman told reporters that the team and architect Populous have designed the “most intimate ballpark in baseball.”

“We’ve had the benefit of operating Tropicana Field as a management group for almost 20 years,” Silverman said. “It’s actually a great canvas for us to figure out what works with a fixed roof ballpark and what doesn’t. This design reflects a lot of ideas over the years from what we’ve been missing, what we wanted Tropicana Field to be.”

The stadium will have approximately 30,000 seats and will feature a three-deck design and a tiered roof. Roughly 70% of seats will be in the lower seating levels. Silverman also said they have heavily reduced the number of suites in the stadium.

“We can create a variety of seating products because we don’t have to worry about how they wear in the weather, how the sun is going to beat down on those products,” Silverman said. “A lot of our seating types are going to take their cue from arenas, NHL and NBA arenas where you have that sense of comfort and intimacy that is not often found in baseball stadiums.”

While some of the details are not yet finalized, the stadium will have some element of a water feature, including a successor to the “touch tank” of stingrays at Tropicana Field.

Silverman said team officials have also visited stadiums, ballparks and arenas for reference points for the design.

“We’ve been working with Populous for 17 years now, and we have designed a series of ballparks together,” Silverman said. “I don’t think there’s a management team that has this depth of experience in designing ballparks. We’ve been unsuccessful in actually building those ballparks, but we’ll build this one. So we have the benefit of all of that experience going into this.”

Zach Allee, the project’s lead designer, said the pavilion-style design will feature glass in many of the upper tiers and lower walls, offering views of the field from the street.

Second Avenue South will connect the stadium to an entertainment district with the Booker Ballroom Music Venue. If the stadium is the front porch of the Gas Plant district, this area, Allee said, will be the living room. Silverman said the plaza would be active 365 days a year, whether for baseball, a graduation, a concert or a festival.

It’s a rare opportunity for one developer to design both a ballpark and a surrounding mixed-use development at the same time. The city council is expected to vote on the ballpark and development agreements in July. If approved, construction on the stadium will begin in January 2025, with a goal of having it completed in time for opening day 2028.

Some council members have expressed frustration about the tight timeline and have asked for more meetings to fully discuss the ballpark deal and the development agreement for the mixed-use project planned for the surrounding Historic Gas Pant District.