By Dominic Feo
Before the Tampa Bay Rays moved into Tropicana Field as Major League Baseball’s 30th franchise, Mark Ferguson described his self-named sports bar and grill in a quaint yet unsavory manner.
Ferguson recalled the state of Ferg’s during its opening year in 1992.
“One room, 75 seats, cold food and warm beer,” Ferguson said.
Thirty-three years later, Ferg’s is thriving as an official partner of the ballclub and was named the best local sports bar in the country by USA Today. The Rays’ new ownership, however, has thrown this beer and baseball relationship a curveball.
Rays new ownership led by Jacksonville-based businessman Patrick Zalupski announced on Jan. 15 a proposal for a new stadium located on the Hillsborough Community College campus. The decision was heavily influenced by the damage dealt to Tropicana Field’s fiberglass roof from Hurricane Milton in 2024.
“My belief is that they’re going to have a hard time getting the deal done in Tampa,” Ferguson said.
While repairs were made to the roof, the Rays played the 2025 season at Steinbrenner Field in Tampa, Florida. The Rays temporary absence meant adaptation for Ferg’s, but the establishment still suffered losses.
“We had to do more concerts and more fundraisers, more events. We had to come up and create stuff, pitch comedy,shows, pickleball, concerts, and we were still down (on profit) 30% for the summer without baseball,” Ferguson said.
Another business impacted by the Ray’s time in Tampa was the vintage clothing store Full Court Classics. Merely a ten-minute walk away from Tropicana Field, the brands St. Petersburg location is a hotspot for throwback Rays apparel.
The close proximity brings essential foot traffic to the store.
“(Fans) have to hang out in the area and that’s kind of like best for us and for (the Rays), because that makes people want to come back,” Full Court Classics employee Jack Spittle said. “They get to discover the things that aren’t in the stadium that they like to hang out and do outside of the game, and then they come back for another game because they like having fun.”
Spittle views the Rays as something which proverbially keeps the store breathing.
“When there is a game is, that’s the funk, it’s like a breeze, (the downtown population) literally expands and shrinks and expands and shrinks,” Spittle said. “That’s what brings more and more business.”
If the team leaves, however, Spittle is concerned that the Rays might as well remove the “Bay” from their name.
“Tampa has two teams already, each team is called Tampa Bay, but they’re in Tampa,” Spittle said. “This is part of the bay that has something besides Tampa, and we’re so popular, we’re growing so much. How can you even give them (the Rays) too?”
The city has already begun researching ideas for how to keep people around a Tropicana Field with no team. Mayor Ken Welch and the St. Petersburg government have already accepted proposals for a convention center that would host events and conferences year-round.
“I guess the idea is that conventions bring in tourists all year long, and not just baseball season,” said University of South Florida associate professor Elizabeth Strom. “Although find me somebody who’s going to plan a conference in St Pete in August, I don’t think that organization exists.”
Aside from teaching at the university’s school of public affairs, Strom is an avid Rays fan with a grasp of the team’s tourism pull.
“People travel to see the Super Bowl; they don’t travel to just to see a regular baseball game. So it may be that there are some people from Chicago and the Cubs are in town, and they’ll go watch them, but I don’t think there’s much evidence that people travel specifically to see a baseball game,” Strom said.
While optimistic about the team’s chosen location to move, Strom knows it’s a long road ahead for the small-market team to make a big decision.
“The big question is, how to pay for it,” Strom said. “Right now, there’s conversations that they’re asking the city and the county for over a billion dollars in subsidy, so I think the real issue is, where will that money come from?”
