Mayor Castor, City Rally Behind Rays Downtown as Team Enters Playoffs With Franchise-Best Season

Mayor Jane Castor and a crowd of city leaders and staff gathered outside Old City Hall in downtown Tampa on Tuesday at 12:30 p.m. to send the Tampa Bay Rays into the playoffs in style, raising a Rays flag over the historic building and dropping a Rays banner down the front of the Tampa Municipal Office Building next door. Former Rays outfielder and Tampa Bay native Brett Phillips joined them, along with members of the public who showed up to cheer.

The timing matters. The Rays just wrapped the best regular season in franchise history, finishing 98-64, winning the American League East and locking up the top overall seed in the American League. That earned them a bye through the opening round. Their postseason run starts Saturday, Oct. 3, at Tropicana Field against whoever survives the Yankees-Red Sox series.

For Castor, the celebration carried an extra layer. The Rays are on their way to becoming a Tampa team in more than just the name on the schedule. City Council and Hillsborough County commissioners approved a deal in late August to build the team a new $2.36 billion ballpark on the Hillsborough Community College Dale Mabry campus, a 31,000-seat stadium the Rays are funding with roughly $1.37 billion of their own money, alongside $796 million from the county and $80 million from the city.

Castor said the city was proud of what the Rays had accomplished this season and wanted the team to know Tampa Bay was behind them, adding that it felt especially good to rally around a club that will soon call the City of Tampa home once the new ballpark is finished.

Site work on the new stadium was expected to begin moving forward this fall, following the council and county votes. Under the agreement, Hillsborough County will own the ballpark and the Rays will pay $4 million a year in rent over an initial 35-year use agreement, a deal years in the making after repeated false starts on where the team would eventually play.

Tuesday's event outside Old City Hall was open to the public as well as media, and it doubled as a low-key preview of what a Rays-in-Tampa era might look like: city officials, ballplayers past and present, and residents on the sidewalk on East Jackson Street, watching a flag go up rather than watching from a distance while another county's stadium hosts the team.

What happens next plays out on the field first. The Rays' bye buys them extra rest before Saturday's series opener at the Trop, and city leaders say they plan to keep the banner and flag up through the postseason run, however far it goes.

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Header photo: Ebyabe / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.5)