The entrance rotunda at Tropicana Field, a mural of Rays players wrapping the curved facade beneath the Tropicana Field sign

Why Tropicana Field Matters

The quick read

St. Petersburg built this dome before it had a team to put in it. The Florida Suncoast Dome opened in 1990 as a bet that Major League Baseball would come, and the wait lasted eight years, long enough for the building to host NHL hockey under a different name first. The site carries a heavier history than the building: the Gas Plant District, a historically Black neighborhood, was displaced to clear the land. The Devil Rays arrived in 1998 and lost for a decade. Since then the dome has seen a worst-to-first pennant in 2008, the Game 162 walk-off in 2011, and a second pennant in 2020, still with no World Series title. In October 2024 Hurricane Milton tore most of the roof off. The Rays played 2025 in Tampa, the roof was rebuilt panel by panel, and baseball returned on April 6, 2026.

A dome built with no team

In the late 1980s St. Petersburg decided to force the question. The city put up the Florida Suncoast Dome, a $138 million fixed dome designed by HOK, and opened it in 1990 with no baseball team to play in it. The building was bait, a finished major-league stadium waiting for a franchise.

The architecture is odd on purpose. The roof is a non-retractable dome built at a tilt, angled at 6.5 degrees, and it is the last of its kind in Major League Baseball: every other roofed park in the league opens.

The bait nearly worked twice before it worked for real. In 1988 the Chicago White Sox came close to moving to St. Petersburg before Illinois kept them in Chicago with a new stadium deal. In 1992 the San Francisco Giants agreed to a sale that would have brought them to the dome, and National League owners blocked it.

The Gas Plant District

The land under the stadium had a neighborhood on it first. The Gas Plant District was a historically Black community of homes, businesses, and churches in St. Petersburg, and the city displaced its residents in the 1980s to clear the site for the stadium project. Residents were promised jobs and redevelopment benefits in return for the relocation. Those benefits took decades to materialize.

The ThunderDome years

Hockey moved in before baseball did. The NHL’s Tampa Bay Lightning played home games in the dome from 1993 to 1996, and the building carried the name ThunderDome for those seasons. A Lightning postseason game in 1996 drew 27,227, an NHL attendance record.

Baseball finally arrived on paper on March 9, 1995, when MLB awarded Tampa Bay an expansion franchise. On October 4, 1996 the building was renamed Tropicana Field.

The Devil Rays decade

The first game came on March 31, 1998. A crowd of 45,369 watched the Devil Rays lose 11-6 to the Detroit Tigers, and Wade Boggs hit the first home run in franchise history that day.

The losing did not stop there. From 1998 through 2007 the Devil Rays never finished with a winning record, ten straight losing seasons to open the franchise’s existence. Ahead of the 2008 season the team dropped the “Devil” and became the Rays.

2008: worst to first

The name-change season turned into the turnaround season. The 2008 Rays went 97-65, and the first winning season in franchise history was also an American League East title. In the ALCS they beat the defending champion Boston Red Sox in seven games, clinching the pennant at Tropicana Field with Akinori Iwamura recording the final out. The World Series ended in five games against the Philadelphia Phillies.

Iwamura’s pennant-clinching putout is one of the two statues outside Gate 4.

Game 162

September 28, 2011, the final night of the regular season, with a postseason berth on the line. The Rays trailed the Yankees 7-0 in the eighth inning. Dan Johnson, down to his last strike with two outs in the ninth, homered to tie it. In the twelfth, Evan Longoria lined a walk-off home run over the low left-field wall, and the Rays clinched the wild card minutes after Boston’s September collapse ended.

The spot where the homer landed is now a left-field corner space called 162 Landing. The swing is the other Gate 4 statue.

The 2020 pennant

The shortened 2020 season produced the franchise’s best record. The Rays went 40-20, the top mark in the American League, then won the pennant with a Game 7 ALCS victory over Houston, played in the neutral-site bubble in San Diego. The World Series went to the Los Angeles Dodgers in six games.

The franchise has two American League pennants, 2008 and 2020. It has never won the World Series.

The cornerstones

Evan Longoria leads the franchise in most counting stats, and both of the field’s signature moments run through him: the 2011 walk-off and the 2008 core he anchored. The Rays retire his No. 3 on July 12, 2026, one day after his Rays Hall of Fame induction, during Longo’s Legacy Weekend.

Wade Boggs’s No. 12 is also retired, and his 3,000th career hit came as a Devil Ray in 1999. The team honors longtime baseball man Don Zimmer with No. 66. Joe Maddon managed the club from 2008 through 2014, the run that covered the first pennant and Game 162.

The sale and the new ballpark

Stuart Sternberg’s two decades as principal owner ended on September 30, 2025, when a group led by Patrick Zalupski completed its purchase of the franchise. The new ownership has said it wants to build a new ballpark in the Tampa Bay area.

The roof comes back

On October 9, 2024, Hurricane Milton tore most of the roof off Tropicana Field. The Rays played the entire 2025 season across the bay at George M. Steinbrenner Field in Tampa while the city of St. Petersburg funded and ran the restoration.

The new roof is 24 translucent panels of PTFE, a Teflon-coated fiberglass, each weighing around 5,000 pounds, installed by crews working on ropes more than 200 feet above the field. The final panel went in on November 21, 2025, ahead of schedule.

Tropicana Field reopened on April 6, 2026. The Rays beat the Cubs 6-4 in front of a sellout crowd of 25,114.