Tropicana Field Hosts Its First World Series Game Since 2008: What Two Years of Repairs Mean for the Rays Tonight
Two years ago this month, Hurricane Milton peeled the roof off Tropicana Field and left the Tampa Bay Rays without a home. Tonight the building hosts a World Series game.
Game 3 between the Milwaukee Brewers and the Rays is at 8 p.m. ET on Fox, and it is the first World Series game played at the Trop since 2008. It is only the third in the building’s history.
A Year in a Spring Training Park
The 2025 Rays played their home schedule at George M. Steinbrenner Field, the Yankees’ spring home across the bay, in front of 9,713 people a night in an 11,026-seat park. They went 77-85 and missed the playoffs, which spared Major League Baseball an awkward problem, because Rob Manfred had made clear he was not inclined to move their postseason games anywhere else.
St. Petersburg approved close to $60 million to fix the dome. The last roof panel went on in November 2025. Baseball came back on April 6, 2026, with a 6-4 win over the Cubs. Mayor Ken Welch calls the restored park “a great symbol of resilience” and says the city “got it done on time, under budget and ready for the ’26 season, and the rest is history.”
Welch also delivered the line of the whole saga: “It’s a different vibe. The Yankees don’t own Tropicana Field anymore.”
The Cheap Seats Nobody Could Buy Are World Series Seats
Tropicana Field has spent years as the smallest ballpark in baseball, listed around 25,000 with the upper deck tarped over, 29th of 30. The Rays pulled the tarps for October. ALCS Game 6 against Cleveland drew 40,230. Across five home playoff games the Rays averaged 37,697 and went 4-1. The Associated Press expects a sellout north of 40,000 tonight.
The regular season told the same story. The Rays drew 1,414,975 at 17,469 a game in 2026, the largest increase in the sport, which helped lift league-wide attendance for a fourth straight year. Ken Babby, the club’s chief executive, called the Trop “a great American comeback story” and pointed out that “a year ago, we didn’t have a roof over our heads.”
And the Building Itself Is a Weapon
The dome does not move. It is fixed, tilted from 225 feet above second base down to 85 feet in center field, and it holds the park at about 72 degrees with four steel catwalk rings hanging underneath it. A fair ball off the lower two rings is a home run. A fair ball off the upper two is still in play, and a ball that lodges up there is a ground-rule double. Any foul off any catwalk is dead.
Pat Murphy, the Brewers manager, has been diplomatic about all of it. “It’s very much a different place,” he said. “It seems like a great place, and you have to make adjustments to it.” His reliever Aaron Ashby got closer to the real question: “They have stingrays in the outfield here? I didn’t know that.”
Kevin Cash is counting on every bit of it. “I know our fans are going to be really loud and excited to see us come back and kind of reset ourselves a little bit,” the Rays manager said.
They Need All of It
Milwaukee won the first two games by one run each, 3-2 and 5-4, in front of more than 43,000 both nights, and in both games Tampa Bay had the tying run at third base in the ninth. Freddy Peralta, the ALCS MVP the Brewers traded away, starts against Milwaukee left-hander Robert Gasser, who has allowed one run in nine postseason innings.
Ten teams in the history of the World Series have come back from 0-2. The last one was the 1996 Yankees. The Trop gets three games to make it 11, and then it gets replaced by a $2.3 billion ballpark in Tampa in 2029.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
