It seems like the death of the Tampa Bay Rays is finally upon us, with the City of St. Petersburg requesting the team formally withdraw from an agreed upon new stadium project.
How did we get here?
The efforts of Rays ownership to find a home field other than Tropicana Field goes back at least to 2008, when the team first proposed building on the site of Al Lopez Park (now the Rowdies home pitch). The section of DRaysBays articles chronicling these efforts, which are all grouped into a section called “Tampa Bay Stadium Saga,” has its first post in 2010; here is an early 2011 post outlining some of the problems with the Tropicana Field site and teasing some great places the team could move to in Tampa.