On Rays opening day, a home run in Tampa, a bummer in St. Petersburg

For 27 years, Tampa Bay Rays fans have started early on opening day, playing hooky from work and crowding downtown St. Petersburg with a sea of team gear and good vibes from the bars to the ballpark.

On Friday, before the first pitch of the 2025 season, it was hard to spot a Rays cap or jersey along Central Avenue, even on the stretch where lampposts are adorned with Rays banners.

Game time ticked closer, and Bruce Reynolds stood in the parking lot staring at empty, storm-damaged Tropicana Field, where the former minister has worked 16 years as a fan host.

“It’s like a friend of mine is wounded,” he said of the empty ballpark, echoing others who stopped by and said it just didn’t feel like opening day. Through the window of the team store, hats and shirts sat piled on the floor in disarray.

In Tampa, fan Miguel Nieves and his dad played their traditional game of catch, but outside the Rays’ temporary home at Steinbrenner Field. The trauma and drama around the Trop and the Rays’ future felt, for a day at least, very far away.

Soon there was a military jet flyover and a breeze cooling the sunny stands, unheard of for the dome-dwelling Rays. By the time Kameron Misner hit an electrifying walk off homer to win it for Tampa Bay, a question hung in the air: Maybe this is how baseball should be? Outdoors. On grass, not turf. Fireworks to celebrate.

It felt like opening day. Baseball Christmas.

“The atmosphere is better,” said Casey Warner, a producer for a sports show on WDAE-FM. He didn’t miss the air conditioned Trop at all on Friday, he said, “But ask me again in July or August and I’ll tell you different.”

Baseball, as God intended

Outside Steinbrenner, kids stalked the Rays player parking lot seeking autographs. Friends with matching Rays sunburst tattoos commented on how the tailgating in Tampa on grass was better than on the Trop’s asphalt lot.

There were familiar sights, like a guy with a big sign reading, “REPENT,” and 52-year-old Chris Harris, who has been drumming on 5-gallon buckets for tips outside Tropicana Field for 20 years. Harris was feeling disoriented in Tampa though. And he had competition in the form of a sax man.

A new sight: scalpers. They told the Times that they couldn’t operate outside the Trop due to differing laws.

The vibe was decidedly Tampa. Unlike the Trop’s St. Pete vista of hip breweries and coffee shops in a walkable downtown, Steinbrenner sits along a sprawling highway in the shadow of Raymond James Stadium. Scores, a strip club steakhouse south of the ballpark, now bills itself “as Tampa Bay Rays headquarters” on its marquee.

Inside Steinbrenner, fans marveled at the transformation of the Yankees’ spring training home, after a scramble by team staff to put up 3,000 pieces of Rays art and signage and build temporary shelters for the bars and merch stores.

Still, the Yankees logo remained uncovered on the blue stadium seats. Few, if anyone, cared. Outside, a giant sign put up by the Rays thanked their division-rival Yankees for making this happen.

“This is phenomenal. I love outdoor stadiums. We should have an outdoor stadium,” said Scott Suban, 54, from Clearwater. “It’s better than a dome.”

Workers rapidly restocked racks of a heather gray, opening-day shirts with Steinbrenner Field on it, a future collector’s item that eventually sold out.

And some, like Punta Gorda’s Janet Tuggle, said they hoped the team would move to Tampa permanently. “It would make a huge difference in the fan appeal and attendance.”

You could almost forget the strife around the abandoned deal that would have brought a new Rays stadium to St. Petersburg, until pockets of fans broke into a brief chant of “sell the team, sell the team” in the sixth inning.

Owner Stuart Sternberg stood on the balcony of a suite. Below, a Bradenton man riled up the crowd with a sign reading “$ell $tu.” He was sure Sternberg made eye contact with him.

You could almost forget about the natural disaster that precipitated all this until video played on the big screen showing what Tropicana Field looked like from the inside after Hurricane Milton ripped the roof off.

Back in St. Petersburg

Inside Ferg’s Sports Bar & Grill, “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere” by Alan Jackson and Jimmy Buffett died down as the volume was turned up on the game.

Aaron Lester, 58, and his aunt, Joanne Campbell, 79, drove from Tierra Verde to watch. Campbell said she would be disappointed if the team never returned to St. Petersburg. Tampa already has the Bucs and the Lightning, she lamented.

“Why can’t we have (baseball)?” She asked. “Everything goes to Tampa.”

Ferg’s owner Mark Ferguson worked the bar while sipping a non-alcoholic beer and keeping one eye on the game on TV.

The sprawling bar drew a big crowd for opening day, though Ferguson said he’s used to three times as many customers, and it felt “surreal” to have the Rays playing a home game in another city.

He’s hopeful the season will keep his bar, an institution generally considered in St. Pete to be the next best thing to being at the game, busy.

“Not everybody can afford the tickets in Tampa,” Ferguson said. “So if you don’t have your tickets, you can always come here.”

And he’s hopeful the team will come home to St. Pete.

“I think we’re a major-league city because of them,” he said. “We need to keep them happy and get the roof done.”

Kim Snyder, who “paused” her Rays season tickets, watched the game from a section of the Ferg’s patio with tables set up especially for opening day crowds, though most were empty. Right above the jumbo screen loomed the skeletal dome of Tropicana Field — inescapable.

By the fourth inning, Snyder couldn’t take it. She walked the tunnel from the bar to the ballpark and stood yards from it.

“I just thought maybe I’d hear the sound of the fans echoing off it from the speakers (at Ferg’s),” she said, “and that maybe it would really feel like opening day.”

She loves the Trop for all its quirks and lack of interruptions. “When it rains,” she said, “the sound on the roof relaxes me. When there’s lightning, the lights dim for a second, but there’s no interruption. But now, now we’re interrupted.”

Holding out for next season

Bellied up to the bar on the Ferg’s patio in St. Petersburg, four longtime Tropicana Field employees plucked shot glasses from a tray of free samples and raised them high. On the TV above, the bottom of the sixth inning.

“Rays up!”

Down the hatch went the Jägermeister, followed by slight winces.

“Tastes like licorice!”

They were all a little wistful, but making the best of it. When they’d said goodbye in October they assumed they’d all be reunited on opening day, said Diane Dorr. It turned out they weren’t at the Trop, but they were together.

She’d gone to lunch at Chicken Salad Chick with five other fan hosts from her beloved Gate 4 crew before heading to Ferg’s with her husband Douglas Dorr, who works right field, to meet Ruth Hagerdorn, who works left field and Will Garcia, who works Gate 1. They live downtown and used to walk to work.

“We took the season off,” Garcia said, “but the Rays said we’re welcome back.”

Diane Dorr, originally from Boston, said walking into the Trop normally is like TV’s Cheers.

“Everybody knows your name,” she said. “You might not feel like going to work that day, but you get there, and they put a smile on your face. … It’s going to be a strange summer.”

Bruce, the fan host who’d made a pilgrimage to the empty Trop, said it feels like fans in St. Pete are lost right now. He held a copy of his book, No Place Like Dome, about friendships forged in the stands.

“We’ve had forever to adjust to the idea of this,” he said, “but now that the reality is here, how do we adjust? There’s no script.”

Back in Tampa: fireworks

Tied at 2-2, with the sun getting low, Misner led off the bottom of the ninth and smacked the first pitch he saw into the right field seats — his first career homer. The fairy-tale ending. Never before in major league baseball history has a player’s first ever home run ended a game on opening day.

Huge cheers erupted at Ferg’s in St. Petersburg. A live band started to play on the patio. Some stayed to drink and eat while others filed out.

“Walk-off hit — couldn’t have been any better,” Ferg’s patron Dani McIntire said.

At Steinbrenner, more fireworks lit up the open sky.

“Walk-off home run opening day! Yeah!” cheered Scott Suban in the stands, raising his Coors Light.

It’s true that the Rays’ future has never been more uncertain. And you can’t have baseball everywhere. The Trop is still topless and the team doesn’t know where it will be beyond 2028.

But on Friday, there was Rays baseball, somewhere in Tampa Bay, and the home team won.