Strike 3: When Spring Training comes to a close next March, the Colorado Rockies will board their team charter and fly to Florida to open regular season play at, another Spring Training facility. Steinbrenner Field in Tampa – the spring home of the New York Yankees – will serve as the home of the Tampa Bay Rays for the 2025 season. This comes after Hurricane Milton destroyed the roof and made the Rays home, Tropicana Field, totally unplayable for the foreseeable future. Steinbrenner Field seats just over 11,000 fans. The Rockies and Rays play a three-game series there March 27-30. Players should be excused if they feel like they’re still playing exhibition games.
On the other side of the country, the team formerly known as the Oakland A’s have played their final game in the rundown Oakland Coliseum. Before they relocate (presumably to a sparkling new home field in Las Vegas in time for the 2028 season) they’ll play in a Triple-A facility, Sutter Health Park in Sacramento. The minor league park seats 14,000. You’ll excuse the players if many of them feel like they’ve been sent back to the minors.
Considering what’s going on elsewhere, local baseball fans should be thankful for Coors Field.
Opened in 1995 – meaning there will likely be some sort of 30th anniversary celebration next summer – the stadium at 20th and Blake was one of the first downtown “retrofit” ballparks constructed for an MLB team. Buffalo built a similar facility earlier in the decade, but they only kinda, sorta pursued an MLB expansion franchise. So Shalen Field (the stadium originally known as Pilot Field is on its sixth different name) remains a Triple-A park. Camden Yards in Baltimore – the first of MLB’s retro stadiums – opened three years before Coors Field. Several others followed suit.
To date, no one has done it any better than we did here in Denver.
And we should count ourselves fortunate to have it.
While most parts of the country don’t have to worry about Mother Nature wrecking their stadium like happened in Tampa (our worst snowstorms aren’t as bad as a major hurricane) many do have to deal with lease issues like the Athletics dealt with for the last several years. The Coliseum – which also used to house the Raiders of the NFL – was never really renovated nor improved in any meaningful way. It was the worst park in the American League 35 years ago, and it only got worse. The city, team ownership, the taxpayers and politicians could never get together on stadium improvements, nor on the construction of a new ballpark in the East Bay area. Regardless of who gets the blame, Oakland’s collective unwillingness to improve their stadium situation has cost them their MLB franchise.
Ironically, back on the other coast, they’re having some issues getting together on a new home for the Rays as well. Before the hurricane did that significant damage to their outdated home field, the plan was for the Rays to get a new stadium in Tampa in time for the 2028 season. Those plans appear to have been blown apart as well, with everything on hold while they try to get repairs done on the Trop. Most recently, Kathleen Peters, chairperson of the Pinellas County baseball commission, wrote a letter to the team seeking a commitment in writing on whether or not the team still plans to move forward with the plans for the new stadium. She wants an answer before next week. The team offered a lukewarm response about being “eager to find a solution” and all that.
We’ll probably start hearing some chatter about the Rays moving to someplace like Nashville in the coming months.
Another of the issues we thankfully don’t have in Denver.
Everyone understands that the product on the field hasn’t been very good lately. Nonetheless, Coors Field remains one of the jewels of sports, and even though it’s now among the oldest parks in MLB, it remains one of the best.
Something to be thankful for.
