THE ROOF WAS SLANTED FOR HURRICANES, YET MILTON WRECKED TROPICANA FIELD

Thank goodness no one was injured, despite green cots set up for 10,000 redeployed workers, and anyone who even cares about the Tampa Bay Rays should know this: They move into a new stadium in 2028

     The roof was slanted, like a dented soup can, protecting the place from hurricanes. Tropicana Field always graced the St. Petersburg sky like a big top without a circus, though it did have the Rays, who almost won a World Series with a smallish payroll and a manager who wore an Elmer Fudd cap and brought a 20-foot python, a cockatoo and two penguins to the clubhouse.

     Remember when the White Sox almost moved there, saving their 121-loss season for Chicago’s South Side? Remember when the Giants almost moved there, saving their three championships for San Francisco? Chemicals were found beneath the site. Four catwalks caused Major League Baseball to establish idiosyncratic rules, such as when a foul ball broke a lightbulb, causing the music man to play a theme from “The Natural.”

     It was quirky. It was kooky. It prompted curious prose from writers accustomed to Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, Yankee Stadium and Dodger Stadium. Soon enough, The Trop will be replaced by a new $1.3 billion ballpark for the 2028 season.

     And thank goodness, when the slanted roof was destroyed Wednesday night in the fury of Hurricane Milton, no one was injured. We have seen long rows of green cots on the field for 10,000 workers, planned for first responders and operations people who left for Ocala before the storm. All we’re left with are disturbing photos of shredded white roof fabric, hanging from the same catwalks after gusts of 101 miles per hour. A tragedy was avoided on Florida’s west coast.

     “They were relocated,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said Thursday. “Tropicana Field is a routine staging area for these things. The roof on that ... I think it's rated for 110 mph and so the forecast changes, but as it became clear there was going to be something of that magnitude that was going to be within the distance, they redeployed them out of Tropicana. There were no state assets that were inside Tropicana Field.”

     No one cares about the Rays today. What we know is that the team spent decades trying to escape The Trop. Last year, Game 1 of an American League Wild-Card Series was played in front of 19,704 fans — MLB’s smallest postseason crowd since 1919. At one point, commissioner Rob Manfred saw interest in playing half a season in Tampa Bay and the other half in Montreal. Finally, a deal was cut to play in the Historic Gas Plant District. Only 30,000 seats are planned in St. Petersburg. The roof is tiered and pavilion-styled.

     “The most intimate ballpark in baseball,” Rays president Matt Silverman said recently. “The coolest part is how close the fans will be to the field and how close a connection they’ll feel to the game that’s being played on the field.”

     “The inside is outside, and the outside is inside,” said an architect with Populous, which is designing the park.

     Three more seasons must be played at Tropicana Field, we presume. The roof must be stronger given the state’s increasingly violent winds in recent surges. Some fans might not want a covering when The Trop will be torn down in four years. The Rays might look for a second home, maybe in Miami.

     So be it. Next time we see the structure, we’ll remember it not for the Rays or Joe Maddon or weird nights when Yankees and Red Sox fans jammed the seats. “You need a better facility,” Maddon said in 2017, when he was managing the Chicago Cubs. “They need a place that’s more baseball-oriented. You don’t need an erector set. You don’t need stuff hanging from the ceiling.”

     Now, there is no ceiling. The dented soup can lost its lid.

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.