NHL/MLB markets where hockey and baseball share special links
By Al Daniel
Shared NHL and MLB market: Tampa Bay
The widely panned Tropicana Field is the only building to have had a full-time tenant in both the NHL and MLB.
Each team’s high point there even had a common visiting market. The stadium’s only Stanley Cup playoff series featured the Philadelphia Flyers while its lone World Series to date involved the Phillies.
The Trop went by the name Thunderdome while serving as a stand-in for the Lightning’s Ice Palace (now Amalie Arena) from 1993 to 1996. The Bolts slaked St. Petersburg’s sports appetite until their more conventional hockey mansion in Tampa was ready.
Coincidentally, the year the Lightning moved across the market was also when Tampa Bay fulfilled the dome’s founding purpose. The expansion Devil Rays were conceived in 1996, and set to launch two years later.
While in St. Petersburg, the Lightning and their fans capitalized on their cavernous abode by repeatedly resetting attendance records. The home opener in 1993 drew 27,227 ticketholders. Two 1996 playoff dates yielded 25,945 and 28,183 live viewers, a high mark for the postseason unlikely to fall.
In addition, those crowds remained the largest NHL audience for any game in an enclosed structure until the 2014 Heritage Classic at Vancouver’s B.C. Place.
Since hosting a combined 109 regular season and postseason NHL games, the rebranded and resurfaced Trop has held nearly 1,800 MLB contests, including 17 in the playoffs. But other than a few tantalizing Octobers, the Rays have not radiated much in any department, particularly attendance.
In 2019, the Rays averaged a nightly crowd of 14,552, almost half of what their house attracted for Game 4 of Lightning-Flyers 23 years earlier. To date, the building whose data defied the notion that hockey cannot work in Florida has epitomized the spring training hotspot’s struggles with its yearlong teams.
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