Latest Rays stadium renderings avoid showing actual Rays baseball

The Tampa Bay Rays have a new stadium proposal! Or rather, a developer interested in redeveloping the current site of Tropicana Field has partnered with Rays owner Stu Sternberg to include plans for a new stadium on the site. Or at least, has included a picture of a stadium, or what we can assume is a stadium because they say it is:

That is definitely a building! With a roof, which, according to the Tampa Bay Times reporting what Rays officials told them, “would be made out of a hard deck with sections of the fluorine-based plastic ETFE which can let in diffused light,” so basically a fixed dome with a few narrow translucent skylights. Here’s another angle:

This one shows a good view of Booker Creek, which lets us know that the stadium would be built in the current stadium’s Lot 7. It also shows people wandering some rooftop grass lawn atop the Woodson African American Museum of Florida, which is currently planning a new building a few blocks away but is presumably included here in honor of the site’s new preferred name of the Gas Plant District, an attempt at a nod to the historic African American neighborhood that was demolished for the nearby interstate and for Tropicana Field, because America loves to name places after the people who were displaced to make way for them.

Anything else?

That’s just a bunch of clip art people standing around and taking selfies on some sort of wood boardwalk while a bunch of birds fly by! (Stadium renderers really love birds right now, even more than fireworks; either this is some kind of attempt to seem more eco-friendly, or the latest software upgrade included a Bird Expansion Pack. Either way, those people are totally getting pooped on.) The only way to even tell this has anything to do with a ballpark, or with Tampa Bay at all, are the couple of people in Rays jerseys and a bunch of Rays signage — well, that and the presence of Raymond, the Rays’ horrifying chimeric “seadog” mascot.

So, seriously, what would the actual stadium part of the stadium look like, given that that’s presumably the whole point of building a new stadium, so have a place where Tampa Bay baseball fans would rather go see games?

The Rays, working with the well-known Populous architectural firm, said they have not yet designed the interior of the stadium.

Um, guys? That’s not actually a stadium design, if you neglected to design anything more than “here’s a box that the stadium will go in.” (Rays execs did reveal that the stadium would hold “around” 30,000 fans and have no upper deck, which sounds an awful lot like their current stadium if they just closed the upper level. They did not reveal how this design meshes with team owner Stuart Sternberg’s expressed desire for a stadium that will be “iconic yet you won’t even know it’s there.”) Since something will have to hold up that roof, and there will need to be room for seats and concessions areas and, oh yes, a baseball field, it’s not even 100% clear that the building pictured would be big enough to hold everything required, though I guess if you’re including museums that aren’t even likely to be located in your project, verisimilitude isn’t your main concern.

More important, however, is that without a real design, there’s no way to know how much this box-of-something would cost. But then, these are just architectural plans; team owner Stuart Sternberg didn’t include any financial plans for how to pay for a stadium without him footing much of the bill, as is his preference. It does check off Mayor Ken Welch’s box of “some kind of domed stadium on the current stadium site,” though, and Welch is the person who’ll be picking the winning bid to redevelop the site, so maybe normal baseball fans and taxpayers are not the target audience here after all.

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