With the recent news that Hurricane Milton damaged Tropicana Field, the home of the Tampa Bay Rays, so severely that the ballpark will not be ready for the start of the 2025 season, the club is going to need to find somewhere to play 81 home games next season, and do so relatively quickly.
Earlier this week, World Baseball Network’s Alfred Ezman listed four places in Florida — George Steinbrenner Field in Tampa, the Rays spring training complex in Port Charlotte, Al Lang Stadium in St. Petersburg, and the Stadium at Disney’s Wide World of Sports Complex — as possible places for the Rays to play home games next season.
However, all of these parks are relatively small in capacity, and while Tampa Bay doesn’t fill the ballpark on a nightly basis, they also are all open to the air, leaving them vulnerable to Florida’s rainy season, which runs from May to October and would wreak havoc upon a team trying to play on Florida’s Gulf Coast on an outdoor field. While Orlando isn’t quite as vulnerable to rain, it still sees an average of more than six inches of rain each month from June to September.
Assuming Tropicana Field won’t be ready for opening day, all or some home games will have to be played… well, somewhere. And Florida’s rainy season would give the club far less certainty in their schedule than would befit a Major League Baseball team.
Here are six places outside Florida that could possibly host the Rays next year.
1. Olympic Stadium (Montreal, Quebec, Canada) – The former home of the Montreal Expos is still standing, mostly vacant, in the Montreal borough of Hochelaga. The stadium hosted Major League Baseball for 27 seasons, and has hosted 10 exhibition games featuring the Toronto Blue Jays since the Expos moved out, with those games drawing an average of 49,251 fans.
With a metropolitan population of nearly 5 million, a history as a Major League city, and a ballpark that would need some improvements but is nearly MLB-ready, Montreal has already been used as a negotiating chip by the Rays, who proposed potentially splitting their home schedule between Tropicana Field and Olympic Stadium.
Montreal would be a good fit for an American League East club, as it is easily accessible from New York and Boston, would reduce travel time for Baltimore, and would have an instant rival in the Toronto Blue Jays.
Why would it be a bad choice? Like Tropicana Field, Olympic Stadium’s roof, which was originally designed to be retractable, is in bad shape. The Provincial Government expects to spend C$870 million to replace the roof on the stadium over the next four years.
2. Estadio Hiram Bithorn (San Juan, Puerto Rico) – Like Olympic Stadium, Estadio Hiram Bithorn has previously hosted MLB games, serving as a part-time home to the Montreal Expos in the 2003 and 2004 seasons, and hosting regular season games again in 2010 and 2018.
The 18,264-seat park would likely need some improvements to host some or all of the Rays’ 2025 schedule, and would increase travel time for every team traveling in to play the Rays. The ballpark currently hosts the Senadores de San Juan and Cangrejeros de Santurce of the Liga Beisbol Profesional Roberto Clemente, Puerto Rico’s winter league.
3. Sahlen Field (Buffalo, N.Y.) – Sahlen Field, which opened in 1988 and was designed to be expandable should Major League Baseball put a team in Buffalo in the 1992 or 1998 expansion cycles, hosted the Toronto Blue Jays during the 2020 and 2021 seasons.
While the Rays would have to “de-Jaysify” the ballpark, as it is home to the Blue Jays’ Triple-A affiliate, it would likely need no significant investment to bring it up to MLB standards, and seats nearly 20,000.
Playing the 2025 season in Buffalo wouldn’t significantly add to any travel time for teams coming to play the Rays, and they’d be able to build a rivalry with the Blue Jays, who are a 90-minute drive up the Queen Elizabeth Way.
That said, like the other three Triple-A parks on this list, the Buffalo Bisons would (again) have to be displaced for a season. In 2021, the Bisons spent the season playing as the Trenton Thunder at Arm & Hammer Park in Trenton, N.J. The Rays would likely have to financially compensate the Bisons ownership group for this to occur.
4. Durham Bulls Athletic Park (Durham, N.C.)/Truist Field (Charlotte, N.C.)/First Horizon Park (Nashville, Tenn.) – I grouped these three ballparks together, because they all have somewhat similar characteristics. The Durham Bulls Athletic Park hosts the Rays’ Triple-A affiliate, the Durham Bulls, while Truist Field hosts the Charlotte Knights, the Triple-A affiliate of the Chicago White Sox, and First Horizon Park hosts the Triple-A affiliate of the Milwaukee Brewers. All three parks seat around 10,000, which would, at least potentially, create significant ticket scarcity compared to any other park on this list.
Durham, which sits in the Research Triangle Region of North Carolina, along with Nashville and Charlotte, has been talked about as a potential expansion city for Major League Baseball, so a season of Rays baseball would be a good test run to see how the market would react.
Charlotte, Nashville, and Raleigh/Durham all have teams in other major leagues, so the corporate sponsorship base is there.
The big questions are: how much would it cost to get each stadium up to MLB standards? How long would it take? And can the renovations be completed by opening day?
Photo: On March 28 and 29, 2014, the Toronto Blue Jays played two exhibition games against the New York Mets at Olympic Stadium in MontreaL. It was the first time that Major League Baseball was played there since the Montreal Expos left in September 29, 2004 and became the Washington Nationals in 2005. (Carlos Osorio/Toronto Star via Getty Images)
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