Tampa Bay Rays

Baby When The Lights Go Out: Rays stadium goes dark again

It’s extremely rare for the power to go out at an MLB stadium. That is, unless you play in the mausoleum known as Tropicana Field.

Thursday night, the fans who took the trek over the Sunshine Skyway Bridge from Tampa to St. Petersburg, waiting in long, rush hour traffic just to watch the Tampa Bay Rays shoot for first place in the American League East were greeted with a power outage. No, this isn’t a play on words talking about the lack of power from the Rays bats, the lights literally went out.

That’s Juan Toribio with MLB showing the world that he’s sitting in a stadium that’s only light source is that terrible flashlight on the back of people’s IPhones. This would be great if it was Undertaker night and the famous WWE Wrestler was making an appearance, but 20 minutes later even the Deadman would be to the pitcher’s mound by then.

Nope, this is the ineptitude of the Tampa Bay Rays and their stadium. It took about 36 minutes for The Trop to get the lights back on. It was apparently due to a lightning storm that hit St. Petersburg, and a lot of the city was without power, but there are certain places that still have power in the area because they have high-powered generators.

How the Rays don’t have a generator is beyond all of us. Maybe they pulled an XFL and forgot to put gas in the generator. Either way, a major professional sports team should not have a nearly 40-minute delay when you built a dome to avoid this type of situation.

The Rays are stuck in Tropicana Field until 2026 after a push to move across the bridge to Tampa never came to fruition. Now, they’re stuck in a stadium that’s literally lost the lights twice before the All-Star Break.

This will become a running joke for a long time. Something to the tune of “if a few more people came to the stadium, they could finally pay the electric bill.” Either way, it’s pathetic that this has happened twice in one season. We don’t ask much of our baseball teams. We want them to put out a competitive product, think about how to win now without mortgaging the future, and oh yeah keep the lights on!

Next: 5 players the Reds should trade away

And this is a team that’s probably making the playoffs this season. Wonder what the FOX crew would do when the lights went out?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *