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The speed of the game is a little quicker with the Astroturf infield. The ball takes more of a skip off the dirt after the hop off the Astroturf, so you have to be ready to react to that.

—Dave Wills, Tampa Bay Rays radio broadcaster

You’re always inside, the ball can hit the catwalks, and the lights are not where they would normally be in an outdoor ballpark; those are the things you deal with that are different than anywhere else. Otherwise, it plays like a baseball field.

—Charlie Slowes, former Tampa Bay “Devil” Raysradio broadcaster

Baseball has been played on a professional level in the Tampa Bay/St. Petersburg area of west central Florida for over 100 years, when teams like the Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Browns would conduct their spring training operations prior to the regular season.

Today, half of Major League Baseball calls Tampa and its surrounding towns home from mid-February through opening day. With so much of a presence in Cigar City, it’s baffling that representation by an actual Major League team itself eluded the area for so long. In fact, the city of St. Petersburg, in poker terms, “showed its hand” in 1990 by building the Suncoast Dome. In 1992 Tampa came as close as it ever had to acquiring a team when San Francisco Giants owner Bob Lurie agreed to sell the team to a Florida group when the city wouldn’t agree to help fund the construction of a new stadium. For the Tampa Bay and San Francisco sides of the country, it really was “A Tale of Two Cities.” Current Washington Nationals and former Tampa Bay “Devil” Rays broadcaster Charlie Slowes describes the team that never was: “To get a team, a ball needed to be in place. It (Suncoast Dome) was designed by HOK but not necessarily with people of a Major League Baseball team because it was built in the hopes of getting the Giants or another team to move. It looked like they almost had San Francisco moving, when, at the last minute, Peter Magowan, one of the Giants owners, stepped in and they eventually built AT&T Park and that team didn’t come. They were printing T-shirts and sweatshirts that said, ‘Tampa Bay Giants.’ Vince Naimoli was going to be the owner. MLB stepped in and this was back when they still had individual league presidents. Former big league first baseman and later a Yankees broadcaster Bill White was the National League president. He told Magowan, ‘One of the owners needs to step up. We don’t want to lose San Francisco.’ They didn’t, and then the next expansion, it was the Marlins and Rockies in 1993. They thought they were going to get the team in Tampa Bay and they gave the other team to Wayne Huizenga and the Marlins, so they had this empty ballpark sitting there. It was used for other events, including the Tampa Bay Lightning playing hockey there for several years.” As if getting passed over in 1991 for a town just as prone to hurricanes and not under the cover of a dome wasn’t enough, a city full of Salvation Army and Goodwill stores overstocked with fan apparel for a ghost team really had to rub salt into the wounds of would-be baseball fans in Tampa. Finally, two and a half years after Lurie’s near sale, another announcement was made by Major League Baseball, in March 1995, this one making Tampa Bay the proverbial prettiest girl in the room. Finally, on March 31, 1998, after an open house lasting eight years, Tropicana Field opened its doors to 45,000 plus fans, as the (then named) Devil Rays took the field for the first time ever against the Detroit Tigers.

When it comes to uniqueness, Tropicana Field stands out from the other 29 ballparks in Major League Baseball in two areas: what stands above and what lies below. For a fan approaching to take in a game of baseball, Tropicana Field looks more like the world’s largest indoor pool, as its fixed roof—the only one in Major League Baseball—towers above the field like a half-inflated hot air balloon. With its construction taking place roughly around the same time the Rogers Centre was attempting the first “functional” retractable roof, Tropicana Field would have to settle for the “dome” feel like in Houston, Minneapolis, and Seattle, which, unbeknownst to everyone, would become a thing of the past by the time a Tampa Bay team would actually play in it. Not open to the night sky—as an open air ballpark would be—or with a steel-truss-woven, retractable roof, Tropicana Field has a ceiling idiosyncrasy no longer found anyplace else. Current radio play-by-play broadcaster for the Rays Dave Wills describes the roof’s effect on the players: “The dome plays differently day versus night. It’s a white colored, Teflon that you can still see—when it’s daytime—the sun shining on top of it. At night, it’s a little different when it comes to watching the baseball up against it from a standpoint of lights and everything like that. I think our lighting system at Tropicana Field is very good. I spent a lot of time with the White Sox before I came to Tropicana Field, and when I would watch Devil Rays games on TV, I thought the place was dark and drab and played brutal on television, but then I went in there for my first interview and the lights weren’t even on. It looked brighter in person than on TV. Playing with that light-colored roof, you’re not used to following the baseball. Most of these new domes are darker-colored domes. It’s not as bad as it was at the Metrodome or maybe the Kingdome, but you really have to keep your eye on the baseball when it’s up against the dome on pop-ups. It’s tough, especially for infielders, who seem to have the toughest times for opposing teams. They’re accustomed to taking their eye off the ball to find out where they are, and then they have a tough time of picking the ball back up under the roof.” While fielders struggle trying to find a red seam on a white ball soaring across a white backdrop, it’s likely they prefer the optical challenge to fielding a grounder at “the Trop.” Charlie Slowes describes the uniqueness of the infield: “When I was hired by the Rays, I was actually hired in September of 1997, and, when I flew in for a press conference, they introduced us in the press box at Tropicana Field. There was no baseball field in place, yet. They didn’t have grass down because they weren’t using it for baseball. They had to figure out what kind of field it was going to be, and they eventually went with artificial field turf with infield dirt, which no one had done in a long, long time. The players initially didn’t like that because you’d get a true hop off the grass and then they’d get a different hop off the dirt, so these balls were like rockets coming at them. Since there was cement under the dirt, they couldn’t keep it soft. When you water something, the water underneath helps keep it soft. It would just dry out so quickly because they were in a facility that had air conditioning on 100% of the time. They didn’t like that, but they’ve never gone away from it. They’ve put down new versions of artificial turf, but they still have a dirt infield so it looks more to the fans like a real field. That’s what they were going for.”

Though the patent for the term “home field advantage” probably belongs to some pigskin broadcaster from the late nineteenth century, one could make the case for Tropicana Field as its “term photo” in the dictionary. Dave Wills explains, “For the other teams coming into town for the first time, there’s no other place in Major League Baseball where they can have an experience like they do when they come to Tropicana Field. It takes maybe a game—game and a half—for them to get acclimated to the roof. Get acclimated to the turf and the dirt. It should really seriously be a home field advantage for the Tampa Bay Rays. They have Astroturf in only one other field. If you’re not in the American League East, what we’ve noticed is there are a lot of teams that are grouped with the Tampa/Toronto combination on their schedule. The Rays have adjusted, obviously within the first couple of games of any particular year, and have been able to use that to their advantage by winning close to 50 games per year at home the last handful of seasons. Any team that wins 50 games at home, you’re doing what you need to do to play in the postseason. That’s one of the reasons why the Rays have been to the postseason four of the last six years.” Playing into the Rays’ success is their having been accustomed to the unique roof above them and all the ground rules that come with its structural nuances.

A Four-Ring Circus

Being Major League Baseball’s only fixed roof facility, Tropicana Field and its unique dome shape bring with them catwalks, or in Tampa Bay lingo, “rings,” which stand high, watching over the field like a stagehand in an opera house. Like a group of teamsters “on break” playing a pickup game inside a crate-filled warehouse, certain rules had to be made inside Tropicana Field for when the ball would come into contact with these rings. Dave Wills explains both the schematics and the rule book “appendix T” at “the Trop”: “The highest catwalk is the A ring. Then it goes down to the B ring, the C ring, and the D ring. The C ring and the D ring really only come into play during home runs. If you hit the C ring or the D ring in the outfield, it’s a home run. I think that rule came into play right after one of the first few games. Frank Thomas of the White Sox hit one of them, and I don’t think they were really clear on what they were supposed to do. I think the umpire decided, ‘If that ball was going to be a home run, it should be a home run.’ The C ring and the D ring are the two lowest catwalks at Tropicana Field. Now, if it hits the A ring or B ring in foul territory, it’s a dead ball. If it hits the A ring or B ring in fair territory, the ball’s in play, so you have to play caroms off the rings. John McDonald, when he was with the Toronto Blue Jays, made an incredible catch on a ball that went up there in one of the rings and rattled around for a little bit before it came down and he made the catch. We’ve also seen times where it gets up there and gets stuck and it’s a double. One day, it almost cost us a chance of winning the division late in 2010 against the Twins when Michael Cuddyer popped one up against Joaquin Benoit. Jason Bartlett was getting ready to make the catch. It hit the ring and fell in and they scored a run to beat us. We’ve said many times over the past few years, when this team was the Devil Rays and they were losing 100 games a year, those things were cute, but they’re not going to be so cute if they cost the Rays a chance to get into the postseason. You shouldn’t be playing Major League Baseball popping things up and hitting things. That’s what happens when you’re playing wiffle ball in your front lawn. For a while then in the ’10 postseason, MLB management said any time the ball would hit the rings, it would be a do over. A do over is something you shouldn’t be having in Major League Baseball either. That’s stuff for your backyard. It’s kind of funny to see when things happen. When a ball does hit the ring on the infield, it’s always kind of funny to see the reaction of the umpires and the opposing players, coaches, and managers. To see how closely they paid attention to the ground rules and read up on them as well.” Unless Major League Baseball allows for the world’s largest broomstick to be used to poke truant fly balls from the rings, the front yard style of baseball may just have to stay in Tampa until the Rays find a new home.

New Name, New Uniform, New Stadium . . . Well, Sort Of

For the first 10 years of their existence, the Tampa Bay “Devil” Rays averaged 97 losses a season, including three 100-loss seasons. In fact, the club’s one shining success occurred in 2004 when a low-for-them 91-loss record was good enough to emerge from the American League East cellar. With an average attendance plummeting from the inaugural season’s 30,000 plus to just over 13,000, the “Devil” Rays were over a million lower than the league’s average. To stimulate good rapport with the fans, the team, in November 2007 and under the relatively new ownership of Stuart Sternberg, cast out the “Devil” and changed their name to simply the “Rays.” The team’s uniform went from green to navy blue, and, in an attempt to take away what Charlie Slowes refers to as a “cavernous feel” inside the Trop, many unused seats were removed to make way for fan amenities that would, hopefully, induce fans to come to the ballpark. Slowes notes, “They’ve done everything they could possibly do to bring that place up to modern standards. It was built with small concourses with no view of the ballpark. It was like you were in a tunnel when you were going to get food. You used to have to go down to a different level to get across from left field to right field. They changed that last year by removing the Center Field Restaurant.” Dave Wills describes other measures that were taken to “top the Trop”: “The Rays tank was just put in there in 2007. It’s become a fan favorite at the ballpark. When Sternberg’s ownership group took over, they cleaned up every corner of that particular ballpark. Now they have an area in left field for kids. They have a bunch of carnival-like games, a batting cage, areas to go get your baseball card picture taken or make your own uniform. There are attendants now inside the bathroom to make sure they stay clean. There’s a couple of areas where fans can mingle now. This past year (2013), we introduced ‘the Porch’ out in the outfield. At U.S. Cellular Field’s ‘Victory Level,’ you could start from home plate and walk around and you could still keep an eye on the field while you get something to eat or drink. There’s those social areas where you could gather in the outfield. The big concourse out there by the scoreboard and video boards. Our ownership group noticed that, so this past offseason, they spent a few million dollars on a thing they call ‘Rays 360.’ There’s a walkway behind the seats in right and left that bring you out to ‘the Porch’ in center field. It’s right behind the batter’s eye, and 200 people can gather to watch the game from there, have a few beers, and just chill out. It’s for the ‘twentysomethings’ that probably get a little antsy sitting in their seats for nine innings. Now they can all go out, get together, and have a couple of cold ones. Really, it’s become one of the more popular places around Tropicana Field. Even [on] our minuscule attendance days, that area is still crowded. It’s really become a hit.” Perhaps the biggest “hit” the Rays had given their fans was the tutelage of manager Joe Maddon.

October 19, 2008: A Rays Catwalk Down Memory Lane

Wearing his “Buddy Holly-esque” thick-framed glasses, 2008 Manager of the Year Joe Maddon completed a 62-game swing for the Tampa Bay Rays with an American League East title and an improbable “worst to first” one-year turnaround. Dave Wills notes, “In 2008, I think we knew we were making strides under new ownership with manager Joe Maddon. I think everybody thought ’08 would be the year we might make a run at .500. We got off to a pretty good start and jumped into first place. We had a little bit of a hiccup right before the All-Star break where we lost seven straight, and then, right after the break, we got back into first place and hung around there. There were so many magical moments there in the 2008 regular season. Then we get into the playoffs, and we beat the Chicago White Sox in four games. Then we advanced, obviously, to take on the Red Sox.” As if the defending World Series champs needed any kind of antagonist backstory set up for this American League Championship Series, many of the “Cowboyed up” players on this Boston team of ’08 had not only crawled out of a 1–3 hole the previous year to defeat the Cleveland Indians in the 2007 American League Championship Series, but also made an unprecedented comeback from a 0–3 deficit to defeat the New York Yankees in 2004 en route to the team’s first title in 86 years. Commenting on the 2008 matchup, Dave Wills adds, “The Red Sox kind of reinvented baseball in 2004 when they won the World Series. They won it again in 2007. We’re battling them in 2008. We have a brawl with them at Fenway Park, and now we’re playing them in the American League Championship Series. We lost the first game, and then we just destroyed them in the next three. We beat ‘em up pretty good in the first two at Fenway. Now we get the chance to possibly clinch at Fenway and we have a 7–0 lead and lose it. I just remember when we were walking out of Fenway Park, my broadcast partner Andy Freed said to me he thought we lost our chance of going to the World Series because of losing that game 5, and I said, ‘You know what? There’s just something about this team that this story’s not supposed to end that way.’ We come home and lose game 6 and now here’s game 7. The place is packed. Close to 40,000 people there at Tropicana Field, and the place was rocking.”

Considering the Red Sox’s playoff mystique since the ’04 season, many Rays fans had butterflies in their stomachs once the series went to a winner-take-all, decisive game 7. Wills comments, “You go back to September 20th of 2008, we’re playing the Twins and getting a chance to clinch our first ever postseason birth. That was probably a more relaxing day because you figured, ‘Well, if we didn’t get it done today, we’ll get it done tomorrow,’ but there was no tomorrow in game 7. It was they do or die. On that particular day, waking up that morning, my wife looked at me and said, ‘I can’t believe the Rays are doing this to us,’ but game 7’s are the ultimate. It’s going to be great. I remember Andy getting to the park all nervous and upset that we’re playing a game 7. I actually played him Kurt Russell’s speech from Miracle, so it got him in a better mood. Then we have our daily bantering with Joe Maddon. Joe told us he’s already envisioning himself standing on the third base line at Citizens Bank Park for game 3 of the World Series. We ask, ‘But we open at home. Why are you envisioning that?’ Maddon goes, ‘Well, because I’ve already stood on our line. Now I’m envisioning myself standing on their line.’ So, after we walked out of that room, Andy said, ‘I feel better. After watching the ‘Miracle’ speech and talking to Joe, I feel better.’ We knew what happened the year before in Cleveland. While we were tested a bit, we were still a relatively young group—kind of like Cleveland was—but we came home. I thought we had a pretty good chance with James Shields on the mound in game 6. James gave up a home run to Jason Varitek, and that game got away from us. Now we’ve got Matt Garza throwing in game 7, and, while Garza has incredible stuff, he can blow up at any minute. He gives up that first inning home run to Pedroia, and we’re like, ‘Uh oh. This isn’t going to be pretty.’ This might be one of those games where the Red Sox came back against the Yankees. It might be a huge blowout, but Garza settled down, and our bats did just enough like they seemed to do all year long. We come back and end up winning the game 3-1. David Price goes on in the eighth to get the final two outs in that frame. Then, in the ninth, on the ground ball by Jed Lowrie to Akinori Iwamura, he takes it to the bag himself and we get out of the game. On the broadcast, I said, ‘This improbable season has another chapter to it. The Rays are going to the World Series.’”

On their first ever trip to the postseason, the ’08 Rays made it to the World Series, where, though they lost in five games to the Philadelphia Phillies, they proved to fans that the season was no fluke, and the team returned to the playoffs three out of the next five seasons. Signing off on the Rays’ first ever American League pennant, Dave Wills adds, “What I remember most about that was obviously just the way the crowd was going nuts. What I remember seeing in person and I saw later on in highlights, some people were just soaking it all in. They were just stunned, and then there were others who were high fiving and cheering. People were crossing the aisles of sections to go and hug people. That moment was just incredible because the Red Sox had always been kind of the bully to the Tampa Bay Rays and then to do it on a night where 90 percent of the crowd was Rays fans. You’ve got to remember, back in ’05 and ’06, and even in ’07, the only time that place would be filled up would be when we would play the Red Sox or the Yankees, and, most of that time, in the first couple of years in that turnaround, it was still 50–60 percent Red Sox or Yankees fans, and, honestly, the Rays would be somewhat outnumbered. It was just incredible for that game 7, where I would say it was about 85-90% Rays fans, and to be able to beat them in game 7 at our place, it was just a magical moment, and, to this day, it still gives me some goosebumps thinking back to that incredible night.”

While Joe Maddon and his “Buddy Holly” frames will be taking in “fresh” air at 1060 West Addison Street in Chicago (Cubs) for the ’15 season, the Rays, thanks to the hitting of Evan Longoria, Ben Zobrist, and Yunel Escobar; the pitching of Alex Cobb, Chris Archer, and Drew Smyly; and the “home turf” advantage of Tropicana Field, will more likely be changing the filters in the Rays tank for many postseason runs to come.