Because of my job, as a college professor, I get to travel to different cities for research. The research happens during the summer, so when I am not in a library or archive, I might go to a ballpark. What have I learned? That great baseball cities in the U.S. usually have public transit.
Take Boston. A few years back, good luck took me to the John Carter Brown Library, an amazing collection of early Americana in Providence, Rhode Island. I wanted to catch the Rays at Fenway. So my wife Julie and I caught the Providence/Stoughton line, then walked from Ruggles station to the ballpark. The game was a rain out, and as we sheltered under the outfield bleachers, it hit me—beyond the historic patina, Fenway is minimalist at best. Green paint over grimy concrete and rust. The Atlantic pegged it. “A picturesque dump, but still: a dump.”
What makes the difference? Beyond Fenway’s rabid fans, a century of baseball lore, and the Green Monster … Trains.
Transit makes baseball. As a Mets fan back in the 1980s, I watched the 7 train from the upper deck thread through Queens. The fourth inning at Yankee Stadium features a race between three of the half dozen or so subways servicing the Bronx: the B, D, and the 4. Philly’s Broad Street line runs straight from City Hall to Citizens Bank Park. In Chicago, the red line to Wrigley. The Colorado Rockies’ Coors Field, a downtown gem five years older than Tropicana Field, links to Denver’s Union Station, light rail, and traffic-dissolving rapid buses.
So what’s wrong with Tropicana Field? Empty seats. The problem is connectivity. No one complains about the Trop during a summer storm. And no one complains when fans pack the joint. “The environment here is electric,” we hear, first night of the Rays’ three-game Yankees sweep; “rocking,” they said, as the Rays took down the Guardians.
What sucks about the Trop? A silent upper deck through the regular season. Do not blame distance, do not blame location. Put the blame on poor public transportation.
And yet, where has transit sat in our long stadium saga? My friends with PSTA throw up their hands in frustration. From St. Petersburg’s first round of RFPs in 2021, then another round to the botched $2 billion St. Pete/Pinellas deal, to the glassy corporate boondoggle on soon-to-be-former HCC campus, the Rays have used baseball as a front for real estate development.
Boosters cite the Atlanta Brave’s Truist Park as a model. This is not how you build a city. A middle finger to Atlanta proper, Truist Park (named for a bank) moved the Braves 15 miles from the heart of Black Atlanta to whiter Cobb County. The park anchors the Battery, a capitalist playground where office space, entertainment, and sport meld seamlessly into a giant, immersive advertisement for Coca-Cola and Home Depot.
I went to one game at Truist Park. Never again. A 15-mile drive from the Braves’ former home, Turner Field, to Cobb County took 45 minutes. This traffic is by design; suburban Atlanta famously turned its back on regional light rail. The Braves’ relocation was “about moving cars in and around Cobb,” former Republican Party county chair Joe Dendy explained, “not moving people into Cobb by rail from Atlanta.”
Barf.
From the beginning, the Rays have sought some version of the Battery. First in St. Petersburg, now Tampa delivers. A ballpark on Dale Mabry Highway, across from Raymond James Stadium, regards transportation as an afterthought. The Rays may be getting closer to a new stadium but the core problem remains: how will people get there? If prior trends are any indication, Rays attendance will spike for a few seasons, then after the initial excitement fades, more long summers of empty seats. In the scholarly language of sports economics: “a transitory positive consumer demand shock from fan curiosity, which decays as the novelty of a facility subsides.”
Folks will quickly tire of sitting at red lights on Dale Mabry, as before, they refused to cross the Howard Frankland Bridge. We’ll revert to our regional habit of watching TV. Call this strike three, end of inning, another opportunity lost. Alongside stories of transit and sports, with models like Boston or New York or Chicago or Philly, we chose Atlanta. We choose corporate handouts and a snarled interstate.
State, county and city government will throw hundreds of millions at a stadium no one really needs, letting a perfectly good Dome rot, while the real problem continues. Our roads are choked. Our regional transit sucks. Moving baseball across the bay means nothing if you can’t get to the ballpark.
Congratulations, Tampa. You just bought more gridlock.
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This article appears in Oct. 15 – 21, 2026.
