That Other MLB Bay Area Team — Tampa Bay Rays — Also Plans Intimate New Stadium Slated To Open In 2028
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By Alan Snel, LVSportsBiz.com Publisher-Writer
There’s another Bay-area MLB team joining the Athletics with lofty plans to build a big league baseball stadium for the 2028 season.
The Tampa Bay Rays — another low-payroll MLB team that has struggled to build a new ballpark for years like the A’s — announced a proposal to build a $1.3 billion baseball stadium in downtown St. Petersburg.
The proposed Rays stadium is billed as the “most intimate” ballpark in the majors with 30,000 capacity — 3,000 less than the 33,000-seat stadium the A’s are planning for the former Tropicana hotel-casino site on the Strip.
The settings for the two proposed stadiums are very different.
The Athletics want to build their $1.5 billion domed stadium on a nine-acre footprint at the 35-acre site at Las Vegas Boulevard and Tropicana Avenue.
The A’s are playing their final season in Oakland in 2024 and plan to play in Sacramento for 2025, 2026 and 2027 while their new stadium in built in Las Vegas.
The land is controlled by Gaming and Leisure Properties, Inc. (GLPI), a Pennsylvania-based corporate spinoff from Penn National Gaming. GLPI owns casino properties and then leases the land back to the casinos like it did with the Bally’s Corp.-owned Tropicana hotel-casino. The historic Tropicana closed April 2. Here’s a rendering of the A’s stadium:
While the A’s stadium will be shoehorned onto nine acres on the 35-acre Strip location on the Strip, the Rays’ $1.3 billion stadium is part of a $6.5 billion mixed-use development project in St. Petersburg’s Historic Gas Plant District that is slated to include 5,400 residential units, 750 hotel rooms, 1.4 million square feet of office and medical space, and 750,000 square feet of retail space.
The A’s are building their $1.5 billion stadium thanks to $380 million in government aid, including $120 million in bonds from Clark County that are supposed to be voted on by county commissioners in the first quarter of 2025.
The Rays’ $1.3 billion stadium will be financed by $600 million in city and Pinellas County contributions and $700 million from the Rays.
