RETURN TO THE TROP
Monday was a home opener and a homecoming for the Tampa Bay Rays playing at Tropicana Field for the first time in 160 days.
Yesterday I prematurely declared home openers and the celebratory games that go along with them done for the season. Today, The Trop came back in St. Pete. It marks an important renewal of games in southern Pinellas County and a home opener that played like a true homecoming.
Tropicana Field is hard to love. So it is all the more meaningful to have its attractions revealed by its absence last year. Rays first pitch Monday was the first in 560 days since Hurricane Milton tore through and ripped the fabric roof off the Trop.
“We get back to making memories, we get back to fun, we get back to baseball,” Neil Solandz said as play began.
Topless Trop
The view from my vehicle two weeks after Hurricane Milton came ashore.
Welcome back to the ThunderDome, as the Trop was known in its second incarnation, starting in 1993, when the new Lightning began firing pucks on net. It started life as a spec house, completed in 1990 for $183 million on the prayer of luring a major league team. The expansion Rays would not throw their first pitch there until 1998.
The Trop was born an orphan and now continues as an unwanted stepchild. It turns out it’s true.
Be it ever so humble, there is no place like home. And now home has a drone and a wire cam and an armored golf car called the Sting Machine with a mounted T-shirt howitzer rapid-firing merch into the stands. Last year’s wander in the wilderness of Tampa at Steinbrenner Stadium is over and they are back at The Trop.
Playing the Cubs.
The Rays will make the Trop home for another three years for sure. After that, the only question is if they will then play at a new building across the Bay in Ybor City or anywhere else on the continent.
First big league game
The Trop’s roof kept this 2014 game going during a violent thunderstorm.
Since 2008, the woeful, small-market Rays flipped the script. They went to the Series that year and with few exceptions have been doing interesting, fun baseball things since. My view of The Trop itself changed, too. In 2014 we went for my son’s first big league game with the Cardinals challenging the Rays. As we listened to the thunder and showers pelt down in the third inning, I became a lifetime fan of the unlovable building.
It’s good for the Rays to be back, if only as a launching pad to its next landing spot.
“The first event in this buidling was not a baseball game, not a hockey game. It was a concert. It was a Kenny Rogers concert,” Solandz said on WDAE during the fourth inning before reciting lyrics to The Gambler.
“Every gambler knows that the secret to surviving, is knowing what to throw away knowing what to keep.”
Those words, Solandz averred, “were about a card game, but in a lot of ways it fits this building.”
For the time being, the Rays keep playing in The Trop and St. Pete keeps the Rays. In the home opener, the Rays won, 6-4. If the Rays keep playing in Tampa Bay – whichever side of the water – everyone will win and no one has to walk away.