The World Series Comes Monday to a Dome That Waited Eight Years for a Team

Game 3 of the World Series is on Monday night in St. Petersburg, Florida, with the Brewers two games up on the Rays, and it will be the first World Series game played under the roof of Tropicana Field since October 2008. That roof was finished only this spring, after a hurricane tore most of the old one off. It is also, if you count from the day the concrete was poured, a building that spent longer waiting for a baseball team than some teams spend in a city.

A stadium with no tenant

St. Petersburg broke ground on the Florida Suncoast Dome on 22 November 1986 (Chuck Berry played at the ceremony, which tells you how confident everybody was), and opened it on 3 March 1990 at a cost of about $130 million in public money. It was a baseball stadium in everything but the one respect that mattered. The city had built it on the theory that a Major League team would move in once a building existed, and for most of the 1980s that theory had looked sound. The Twins, the White Sox, the Rangers, the A's and the Mariners had each at some point let it be known that Tampa Bay was an option.

Owners find a half-built stadium on the Gulf coast very useful. It is the kind of thing you mention to your own city council. Every team that flirted with St. Petersburg ended up staying where it was, usually with a new publicly funded ballpark at home, and the dome sat there for eight seasons hosting arena football, tennis, sprint-car races, concerts and, from 1993 to 1996, the Tampa Bay Lightning, who drew a hockey crowd of 28,183 there in a playoff game. For eight seasons it was a useful building for everything except the thing it had been built for.

Three minutes past midnight

The closest the city came was with the Chicago White Sox in 1988. Jerry Reinsdorf's team was threatening to leave the old Comiskey Park, St. Petersburg had a lease ready, and the Illinois legislature had until the end of its session on 30 June to pass funding for a new stadium in Chicago. Governor James Thompson spent the evening on the floor of the House twisting arms. The session was supposed to end at midnight. The vote came a few minutes after it, and the clocks in the chamber were, by every account I have read, not consulted too closely. The White Sox stayed in Chicago. In St. Petersburg a welcome party had already been planned.

Then came the Giants. In August 1992 the San Francisco owner Bob Lurie agreed to sell the club for about $115 million to a Tampa Bay group led by Vince Naimoli, who announced at a press conference that the team was moving to the dome. In November the National League's owners voted it down, 9 to 4, and the Giants were sold instead to a San Francisco group for less money. Naimoli sued. In between those two episodes, in 1991, the league had chosen Denver and Miami for its two new franchises and passed St. Petersburg over again.

The Devil Rays, finally

Major League Baseball awarded Naimoli's group an expansion franchise on 9 March 1995, the same day it gave one to Phoenix, which went some way to settling the lawsuit. The Tampa Bay Devil Rays played their first game on 31 March 1998 in front of 45,369 people and lost to Detroit 11 to 6. The building had been renamed Tropicana Field by then, after an orange juice company, which is about as Florida as a stadium name gets.

The team became the Rays in 2008 and reached the World Series that same year, losing to Philadelphia; those were the last World Series games the dome hosted until now. The Rays have been good far more often than their crowds suggest and have been trying to leave the dome for most of the last two decades, through a long list of proposals for Tampa, for a different part of St. Petersburg and, for a while, for splitting the season with Montreal.

A roof, a hurricane and a Monday night

On 9 October 2024 Hurricane Milton shredded the translucent roof and flooded the inside, and the Rays spent the 2025 season across the bay at the Yankees' spring training park in Tampa, which holds about 11,000 people. The repair, at roughly $55 million, was argued over by the St. Petersburg council for weeks before it was approved. Tropicana Field reopened on 6 April this year with a 6 to 4 win over the Cubs.

The club has new owners too. A group led by the Jacksonville home builder Patrick Zalupski bought the Rays for about $1.7 billion in a sale that closed on 30 September 2025, and this summer the city of Tampa and Hillsborough County approved agreements for a new ballpark near the Dale Mabry campus of Hillsborough College, with a target of opening in 2029. So the dome that waited eight years for a team is now waiting out its last few seasons with one. The Rays, down two games to none, would do well to make Monday's game memorable, since the building has had a lot of practice at being empty.