Rays expect new ballpark by 2029 despite 'daunting,' 'overwhelming' challenges

Tampa Bay Rays CEO Ken Babby says the team is hyper-focused on getting a new ballpark built and fully expects to have it completed by April 2029 when that baseball season begins.

“That’s not a date we picked casually,” Babby said earlier this week on the Hunks Talking Junk podcast. “We’ve studied comparable projects across the league, and we believe Tampa Bay deserves certainty and momentum.”

The new ownership of the Rays, which bought the team in September, has said from the beginning that its priority was finding a space to build a ballpark as a well as a mixed-use development around it.

It has actively been looking for a 100-acre piece of land where it can build a project similar to The Battery Atlanta surrounding the Atlanta Braves’ Truist Park.

Babby says the challenge, as it was for the previous ownership, is finding the right place to do it and the public support to help make it financially feasible. The previous ownership twice announced deals for a new stadium were done before backing out and openly flirted with sharing the team with Montreal.

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Babby and the new ownership are also facing the real possibility of a Major League Baseball player strike or lockout before the 2027 season and there are issues with the media rights surrounding its broadcast contract.

(Earlier this week The Athletic reported that Main Street Sports Group, which runs the FanDuel Sports Network of regional sports channels, is trying to renegotiate broadcast contracts with 29 teams, including the Rays. This would leave the teams less revenue than expected.)

“It is it is daunting, you know, and some days, honestly, overwhelming to look at the mountain that we have to climb,” Babby says on the podcast hosted by Nick Friedman, founder of College Hunks Hauling Junk and Moving.

“I've said this, in North America, at least in my eyes, there's not a professional sports team that is in more crisis and has more headwinds than the Tampa Bay Rays. Our current ballpark got destroyed by a hurricane. We have no forever future ballpark.”

Despite the stadium woes and the broadcast and labor issues, Babby remains confident that the leadership team in place will be able to get done what it needs to. That includes fully intending to open a new ballpark by April 2029.

He points to the former Oakland A’s as an example of how that timetable can work. The A’s play in Sacramento, California, now as the team waits for it new ballpark in Las Vegas to be built.

Babby says ground broke on the Vegas ballpark in 2025 and it is scheduled to open in April of 2028.

“We're following that same trajectory and moving that path forward,” he says.

He then adds a sentiment that jaded fans and observers of the Rays have heard variations of before.

“I can tell you, I think Tampa Bay deserves this. I believe we're going to be successful here. Conversations have been really positive. I think there's a great sort of burning desire to figure this out.”