Climate change, new stadiums, and the Rays

The Trop is likely no more. The Rays’ new stadium deal might also be no more. A hurricane spawned by a warming Atlantic caused both of these issues, and there are more hurricanes to come.

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The Rays aren’t going to play in Tropicana again — the damage caused to both the roof and the inside of the domed stadium, and the no vote by the county commission to cover the costs of repairs confirmed that — but they also might not play in St. Petersburg again. To a degree, that’s about the upcoming vote on selling the bonds necessary for Pinellas county to fund the construction of a new stadium, but it’s also about what destroyed the Trop in the first place: a hurricane.

Florida is no stranger to hurricanes, but the intensity of the ones that make landfall, and the length of the hurricane season, are both growing. The Trop was built to withstand the hurricanes of a different era — the Rays began playing there in 1998, yes, but it was actually completed in 1990, when it was known as the Florida Suncoast Dome, and $70 million in renovations were made on a stadium that had cost $130 million to build less than a decade before.

Is it possible to make a stadium that could withstand the growing power of hurricanes? Someone is going to have to find out at some point, but it might not end up being the Rays, if their stadium deal does end up falling through. Hurricane Milton wasn’t some freak occurrence: as the ocean warms, hurricanes are only going to become more powerful, more quickly than they used to, as Milton did. Erik Klemetti at Discover wrote a feature about this very thing, with the Rays and the Trop as the centerpiece, just last week:

Hurricane Milton formed on the far side of the Gulf of Mexico near the Yucatan Peninsula. That means the hurricane moved only about 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) before it hit the Tampa area. In fact, it reached Category 5 in only a few hundred miles before churning across the Gulf of Mexico and losing a little oomph before it struck the coast. How did it get so strong in such a short time and distance?

It comes down to the energy trapped as heat in the surface ocean waters. Hurricanes wind up by taking evaporating seawater and driving them upwards where the moisture-laden air condenses (it convects). The warmer the air and water, the more the storm will grow. Hurricanes extract so much heat energy from seawater, they will often leave a trail of cooled sea surface temperatures as they pass. The hot Gulf waters were more or less a massive fuel tank for Hurricane Milton.

Conditions were right for taking a small disturbance on the west side of the Gulf of Mexico and converting it into a monster hurricane when it reached the east side. Without the very warm waters produced from the overall warming of the planet’s atmosphere, there wouldn’t have been nearly as much energy for the storm to consume. The result was a massive hurricane hitting the west coast of Florida, nearly barreling directly into Tampa and St. Petersburg.

The first line of the last paragraph there is what should be the most alarming. Milton, at its inception, was “a small disturbance,” not an obvious candidate to become a category 5 hurricane. And yet, due to the warm waters acting as “a massive fuel tank,” Milton got there, and in a hurry. A category 5 hurricane, by the way, has winds of 157 miles per hour or higher, and are expected to cause “catastrophic damage,” with the National Hurricane Center explaining that, “A high percentage of framed homes will be destroyed, with total roof failure and wall collapse. Fallen trees and power poles will isolate residential areas. Power outages will last for weeks to possibly months. Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks or months.” Milton was the second category 5 hurricane of 2024.

From 1924 through 1991, there were 22 Atlantic hurricanes classified as category 5. Starting in 1992 with Hurricane Andrew — once the most destructive and most expensive hurricane in Florida’s history until it was later surpassed in both accounts by later hurricanes — there have been another 20 category 5s. That’s a category 5 every three years or so, on average, for 67 years, and now they’re occurring roughly twice as often as that over the last 33. The water continuing to warm will not slow that rate, either: there will be more Miltons, and they could end up hitting the next Trop, or destroying the area around that stadium, and so on. The roof of loanDepot Park was designed specifically with resisting hurricanes in mind, but if the rest of Miami ends up drowned due to a hurricane, that’s not going to help the Marlins much.

Just so it’s clear what the issue is regarding stadiums in particular, too, even a category 3 hurricane can have winds of up to 129 mph, or, more than the Trop’s roof was designed to withstand. So, there’s no shortage of these destructive occurrences in the future for teams in the likely paths of them — what’s to be done about that? For now, nothing besides designing a better roof, from the look of things. But at some point, as the intensity and frequency both increase further, as more of the effects of climate change begin to ravage the United States on its coasts, much bigger questions are going to need to be asked and answered. We’re already seeing some reticence from Pinellas county’s commissioners after Milton, with regard to funding a new Rays’ stadium using public funds — that money could be used elsewhere, if the nearly $60 million to repair the Trop, which very much fits into the “want” but not “need” category of structures reminded them.

Will teams, so hellbent on having to public foot the bill, decide to simply leave the coasts behind over time, moving inland to whichever cities will cover most of the costs of a new stadium? What will MLB and its owners do over time if the public and its representatives decide there are better uses for these funds? One wonders who is going to budge first on this, in a league where the air quality index is viewed as an annoyance, in a world where (most) athletes stay silent as the world alternates between drowning and burning. It might have to be the cities and counties and states finally saying enough is enough, if no one on MLB’s side has anything to contribute besides demands for more and more subsidies.

We’ll see soon enough — December 17 — if Pinellas county is even able to keep on that track.

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