This story was excerpted from Adam Berry’s Rays Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.
TAMPA -- The first thing you’re probably going to notice are the signs out front.
On the southeast corner of Dale Mabry Highway and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, there’s Raymond James Stadium. To the northeast is Al Lopez Park, so named for Al Lopez, the city’s first native to play (and manage) in the Majors and Tampa’s first Hall of Famer.
And now, on the southwest corner, there are three banners hanging from the back of the George M. Steinbrenner Field scoreboard. On the left is Shane McClanahan, smiling with his arms crossed. On the right is Taj Bradley, with the same pose and grin. And in the middle, it says “RAYS UP,” with the team’s burst logo between the two words. Written below that: “THANK YOU, YANKEES!”
It's a fitting welcome. Steinbrenner Field is the Yankees’ longtime Spring Training and Minor League home. This season, it belongs to the Rays. Forced out of their home ballpark at Tropicana Field due to damage caused by Hurricane Milton and thankful for the Yankees’ generosity, the Rays spent the past five days making that rapid transformation happen.
Between the final out of the Yankees’ last Grapefruit League game on Sunday afternoon and Ryan Pepiot’s first pitch on Opening Day, the Rays had to make this place feel like home for themselves and their fans.
It has been, as chief business officer Bill Walsh said, “an incredible logistical feat.”
“It's nothing short of a miracle. And I know there are 30 Major League teams, and I'm guessing all the others could have done it. I just couldn't imagine anybody doing it any better,” Rays principal owner Stuart Sternberg said Friday. “We have a beautiful outdoor day today. Outdoor baseball is special, and we’re expecting to have an amazing season.”
The Rays had more than 50 installers from five companies and more than 80 of their own staff members working around the clock the past four days. Warren Hypes, the Rays’ vice president of creative and brand, figured there has been someone working inside the ballpark every hour of every day since Sunday.
“Our staff and everyone has been grinding,” infielder/outfielder Richie Palacios said. “They all look super tired, so I know they've been grinding.”
The work truly began more than four months ago, when the Rays determined they would spend this season at Steinbrenner Field. Understanding the magnitude of the task at hand, they started planning immediately. The Yankees helped provide a list of all the signage around the ballpark, with the sizes for each, and it took months for the Rays to build out all the art they needed.
In the end, they came up with more than 3,000 individual pieces of marketing material -- more than a mile, if laid out end-to-end, according to the team.
They covered all the outfield ads, redoing them for their partners and sponsors. They put their logos on top of both dugouts. They covered the prominent Yankees logo atop the scoreboard with a “TB” logo. They swapped out all the merchandise at the ballpark’s various retail locations.
They replaced the banners down the first- and third-base lines spelling out “YANKEES” with letters and sponsor logos of their own. With Yankees markings and New York baseball history depicted on the walls connecting the concourse to the seating area, the Rays designed artwork to fill that space instead.
Changes like that are relatively easy to see, and they blend in well with the ballpark’s fortuitously similar navy color scheme. The same goes for the new video boards installed on each side of the ballpark. And the sod work done by director of special projects and field operations Dan Moeller and his crew, cutting out Yankees logos and replacing them with the Rays’.
There’s also been a ton of work behind the scenes. Director of Major League equipment and clubhouse operations Tyler Wall said the staff unloaded seven trucks -- four from the Trop, three from their Spring Training complex -- between Monday night and a 15-hour workday on Tuesday.
“It’s been hectic,” Wall said. “It’s been a busy couple days. We’re all running on fumes, but we’re excited.”
They’ve upgraded broadcasting cables and wireless internet, constructed a new space for the umpires and expanded the visiting clubhouse. They made significant upgrades to the adjacent field where the displaced Single-A Tampa Tarpons will play. They thought of seemingly everything, right down to replacing the Yankees logos on every massage table and placing suction cups over logos on the hot tub tiles inside the luxurious home clubhouse.
“They did a fantastic job. You couldn’t even tell,” Pepiot said. “You’d think it would have been our home, for what they had set up. It’s pretty cool.”
Not everything will look different, though. Yankees hat logos remain at the end of each row in the stands, as the club had no cost-effective, weather-proof way to cover them all. There’s still a statue of George Steinbrenner outside, and the Yankees’ retired numbers are on display around the park.
In other ways, the Rays are leaning into their unique circumstances.
Playing outdoor home games for the first time, they will feature light and sound shows for all games starting after 4:10 p.m. ET. They’ll have fireworks during the national anthem, after every home run and after each Rays win. The 6th Air Refueling Wing from nearby MacDill Air Force Base is conducting the club’s first pregame flyover on Friday. Their giveaway items include tropical shirts, hats and cooling towels.
With the inevitability of the club’s first-ever home rain delay, the Rays had their grounds crew work Yankees home games during Spring Training. Of the current crew, only Moeller and head groundskeeper Mike Deubel had ever pulled a tarp like the one down the left-field line. The Rays also started a website (RaysBaseball.com/Weather) just to keep fans up to date on weather conditions around Steinbrenner Field.
“It’s going to be different for us, for sure,” Moeller said.
Just inside the visitors’ clubhouse, there is a photo hanging on the wall. It was taken from inside Tropicana Field shortly after Hurricane Milton devastated the Tampa Bay area. The roof is in tatters, with pieces hanging from the catwalks and others scattered in the stands, and the sunlight is streaming through.
It’s a reminder of why the Rays are here, where they hope to return and why they’ve been hard at work converting a rival’s spring ballpark into their home away from home.