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Could Matthew Tkachuk become the biggest hockey star to ever come through South Florida?

And in some ways, is he already there?

Perhaps asking such a question is premature. Even a bit hyperbolic, or at least a manifestation of recency bias. How can someone who is on the verge of finishing his first campaign with the Florida Panthers — a franchise that has had more than 440 players over its near 30-year history — already create this sort of discussion?

Maybe it has more to do with the realization Tkachuk might be unlike anyone the Panthers have ever seen.

“To look at all the players who have come through this organization, Pavel Bure cannot compare to him,” said Bill Lindsay, who spent seven seasons with the Panthers and is now a member of the team’s broadcast crew. “Jonathan Huberdeau — they are night and day different players. Brad Marchand is a comparable around the league somewhat in that he plays with that edge.

“He’s changed the trajectory of this franchise. To me, he is unique. Of all the players who have come through here, he’s a one-of-a-kind player.”

Markets such as South Florida face a constant crucible from the outside world when it comes to how hockey is valued. All the familiar talking points have shadowed the franchise for the majority of its existence.

Not enough fans. Not enough long-term success to create generational fandom. There are too many entertainment options in South Florida. The Panthers play in an arena that is closer to the Everglades Wildlife Management Area than Fort Lauderdale.

Yet Tkachuk’s arrival has hushed a number of those criticisms, while offering context to those who are not familiar with how sports fandom works in South Florida. It’s a market that isn’t always invested in every single game of a team’s schedule. What does enthrall South Florida, however, is when something is an event.

This is why Formula One is there. It’s why the NFL makes it a Super Bowl destination. It’s why the Orange Bowl is a College Football Playoff/New Year’s Six Bowl Game option.

Watching Tkachuk play hockey is an event. Watching Tkachuk in a press conference is an event. Watching Tkachuk on “Inside the NBA” is an event. Watching him talk about what it meant to be in People Magazine is an event.

“He has everything you’d want,” said Dave Hyde, the longtime columnist at the South Florida Sun Sentinel. “He’s funny. He’s personable. He’s very much a team player. He’s a big scorer. He fights. This was a quiet, cute Panthers team a year ago when they led the league in [points in] the regular season. They didn’t have a real loud personality. Now, their leading scorer has a fire to him that you don’t have to understand hockey to understand what is going on. In that measure, he’s perfect in that he transcends hockey.”

South Florida has seen hockey stars before. Bure, Dino Ciccarrelli, Jaromir Jagr, Igor Larionov, Roberto Luongo and Joe Nieuwendyk are Hall of Famers. Joe Thornton will eventually join that list. All of them played with the Panthers.

Bure was a walking highlight reel who had two 50-goal seasons. Jagr had the mystique along with the relatable experience of being someone at a more advanced age who chose to live in South Florida. Luongo had the longevity, as 11 of his 19 seasons were in South Florida, coupled with the fact that his wife’s parents owned a pizza restaurant not far from the team’s practice facility in Coral Springs.

There are also other stars on this year’s Panthers, such as two-time Vezina Trophy winner Sergei Bobrovsky and two-time NHL All-Star Aleksander Barkov, who also has a Selke Trophy.

What makes Tkachuk different? What is it about him that has allowed him to own the conversation and made him more visible in one season than anyone else who has played there?

George Richards, who covers the Panthers for Florida Hockey Now, has been around the team for nearly 20 seasons. He explained how Bure had stardom because of his 50-goal campaigns and the fact he was dating pro tennis player Anna Kournikova. But he was in South Florida for just two full seasons. Jagr was with the team for three seasons at a stage in his career when he was a household name from his many years with the Pittsburgh Penguins.

Luongo remains recognizable but Hyde points out that Luongo’s best years came when he was with the Vancouver Canucks and that the Panthers made the playoffs only once in his time with the club.

“[Tkachuk] has become the poster boy, and in December was South Florida running amok with Matthew Tkachuk? No,” Richards said. “The most casual fan didn’t know who he was and they didn’t know who he was when they traded Huberdeau for him.

“He got off on the wrong foot in South Florida because he played in Calgary. The hockey people had to tell the fans how good he is. Nobody here really watched the Calgary Flames. The thought was, ‘You traded Huberdeau?’ Nobody got past that. But since he came here, like Barkov said, it felt like he has known the guy for 10 years. Tkachuk won them over.”

Hyde, Richards and longtime South Florida radio host Joe Rose all said the love affair with Tkachuk in South Florida started at his introductory press conference. Tkachuk turned heads for his now famed line of, “I hate Edmonton, but I hate Tampa more now.”

Even so, Richards said, many fans had reservations after seeing the Panthers trade Huberdeau, a homegrown talent and 100-point scorer who never hid his affinity for South Florida.

Richards said Tkachuk did things like throw out the first pitch at a Miami Marlins game and leave an impression with the Marlins’ television broadcast crew during his in-game visit, all before training camp even started.

“He was selling it from day one,” Richards said.

But it took time for everyone to get on board. The Panthers went from dominating the NHL in the regular season in 2021-22 to looking like they could miss the playoffs this season. But then, Tkachuk produced in ways that helped the Panthers win while also putting himself in the Hart Trophy discussion as the league’s most valuable player.

He also made his mark at the All-Star Game, which was held in South Florida. Tkachuk was named the game’s MVP after scoring seven points in front of many of the fans who watch him play on a nightly basis.

“It had the Miami Vice feel and here’s Matthew Tkachuk on his golf cart being the typical Florida guy,” Richards said. “He took a lot of blame and a lot of people thought, ‘We would have been better off if we had kept Huberdeau.’ He had to overcome that. When this team was not very good, he took a lot of blame. … The All-Star Game really helped. The Panthers were getting better and with Tkachuk in that Miami Vice jersey, he was the story.”

Getting the Panthers into the Stanley Cup playoffs, finishing with the fourth 40-goal season in team history, the second-most assists (69) and second-most points (109) in team history and just the second 100-point season in team history was only the start. Leading Florida out of a 3-1 series hole to beat the Boston Bruins, who finished with the best regular-season record in NHL history, changed everything.

Tkachuk was one of the team’s most visible figures in that series, scoring three goals and six points, including the winner in overtime in Game 5 to keep the season alive.

“Last year’s team was so much fun. They could be down three goals in the third period and score seven,” Rose said. “They put up stupid numbers and they were fun. But they didn’t play that well in the playoffs. What he did in the regular season is one thing. But he comes into these playoffs. He’s talking it, walking it, talking it again and he’s got game-winning goals, setting guys up, jumping and trying to help. I think it’s those things and his personality.”

For former players such as Lindsay and Ed Jovanovski, also a member of the Panthers’ broadcast team, seeing Tkachuk and the team do this well has made them emotional for many reasons.

It reminds them of what it was like during that 1995-96 season, when the Panthers were in the Stanley Cup Final. They remember what it was like to see the entire metro area care about the team and take interest in the sport.

They also remember the difficult years of the Panthers missing the playoffs and the constant reboots that came with the oft-used theme of “this time will be different” only to have the same disappointing result.

What Tkachuk is doing is coming at an important time for the Panthers. They’ve made the playoffs in four straight seasons, starting with the qualifying round in 2020. This is the longest stretch of consecutive playoff seasons in team history which, in turn, makes it the golden age of Panthers hockey.

“It’s exciting because of what they have and where they are at age-wise, it should be a thing for where you are looking at this and you’re going to put a great product on the ice,” Jovanovski said. “The foundation is there and starting with Matthew and Barky, these guys are here long-term. A lot of their core guys are in the prime age of their career.”

Rose said that’s why the next long-term goal for Tkachuk and the Panthers is to sustain what they have done. He said South Florida still comes with the challenge of being a place that does not have an abundance of rinks. And while there are South Floridians in the NHL, Shayne Gostisbehere and Jakob Chychrun notably, there is work to be done when it comes to creating a long-term connection with the rest of the market.

Right now, the Miami Heat and the Panthers have South Florida’s undivided attention. The Heat are used to that, whereas it has been a while for the Panthers. Rose cited the importance of the Panthers having the same established success that has allowed the Heat to create their long-standing fandom and interest.

“The winning and the fact that a lot more people down here can pick up a basketball, go to a gym and see kids are playing basketball,” Rose said. “[The Panthers] got hurt by that. There wasn’t a lot of hockey being played down here before [original team owner] Wayne Huizenga, and they had that one run and that died out after the success of going to the finals. This is going to be fun to see where this goes. I am curious to see where hockey fits into the big picture of South Florida.”

The fact that Tkachuk is just 25 and is completing the first season of an eight-year contract on a team that is enjoying its longest period of sustained success creates optimism. So could Tkachuk be the biggest hockey star South Florida has ever seen?

“If he wins the Cup, he’s the biggest star that ever comes through here,” Lindsay said. “Nobody has done that. Nobody has ever done what he’s done in the playoffs.”

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First impressions from the Athletics’ new home opener

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First impressions from the Athletics' new home opener

A local television news crew was stationed outside the Sawyer Hotel in downtown Sacramento on Sunday night, ready to catch every nuance of the magical moment the bleary-eyed Chicago Cubs stepped off their bus to enter the lobby. This was the first time a major league baseball team had arrived in Sacramento to play a legally sanctioned regular-season game, and no story was too small. If you ever wondered what Ian Happ looks like walking toward a hotel and being surprised by the presence of a camera and a reporter, CBS-13 was the channel for you.

“That was different,” Cubs pitcher Matthew Boyd said. “But it’s the first time a big league team has come to Sacramento, and they’re excited. Baseball’s that cool thing that brings everyone together.”

It was quite a week for Sacramento — more specifically, West Sacramento, the place with the street signs declaring it “The Baseball Side of the River.” It got to host the first three games of the Athletics’ expected three-season interregnum between Oakland and Las Vegas, and it got to call a big league team its own, even if the team has decided to declare itself simply the Athletics, a geographically nonspecific generic version of a Major League Baseball team.

It’s tough to explain the vibe at Sutter Health Park for the first series. It looked like big league baseball and sounded like big league baseball; it just didn’t feel like big league baseball. The crowds were mostly sedate, maybe because there’s room for only about 14,000 fans, and maybe because the Athletics were outscored 35-9 over the course of the three games, the first and third of which could have been stopped for humanitarian reasons.

This is a team that is supposed to be better this season, and three games shouldn’t change that expectation. It spent some money nobody knew it had on a free agent contract for Luis Severino and extensions for Brent Rooker and Lawrence Butler, moves that assured a payroll high enough to abide by the revenue-sharing rules of the collective bargaining agreement, but moves that improved the team nonetheless. (You’ve got to spend money to make money is an adage that, for the first time, appealed to owner John Fisher.) The A’s have a universally respected manager in Mark Kotsay, several promising young players from recent drafts and the confidence that came from playing really good baseball over last season’s second half. There is a creeping suspicion that they could be building something that could make West Sacramento proud.

It’s a long, maybe even interminable season that will contain every iteration of peak and valley. Three games can end up being the equivalent of one breath over the course of a lifetime. But still, it’s impossible to deny the Athletics brought back a lot of their old classics for their Sacramento debut: They walked 10 batters in Monday night’s home opener; they kicked the ball around enough for four unearned runs in three games; they walked seven more Wednesday afternoon. The crowds were mostly quiet; the numerous Cubs fans were noisy until it felt mean, but the A’s fans, when they found something cheer-worthy, reacted as if they were cheering for someone else’s kid at a piano recital. As first impressions go, it could have been better.

The A’s players, in their defense, are going through an adjustment period. When I asked closer Mason Miller how he likes Sacramento, he starts counting on his fingers and says, “I’ve literally spent five nights here.” They’re young, wealthy and accustomed to living in a new place every season as they progress through the minor leagues, and they’re trying to view their new home as an opportunity to bond over experiencing something together for the first time.

“We’re all new here,” rookie second baseman Max Muncy says, “so even though I’m a rookie, I can earn some cred if I find a good restaurant and let everyone know.” I mention the toughest reservation in town, a Michelin-starred, fixed-price restaurant less than 2 miles away.

“That sounds like a two-month wait,” he says.

“Not if you tell them who you are,” I joke.

“Yeah, I can’t imagine doing that,” he says. “Besides, if I say, ‘Max Muncy,’ when I show up they’ll say, ‘Oh great, we got this one.'”

The A’s bigger concern is playing the next three seasons in a minor league ballpark and sharing it with a minor league team, the Triple-A Sacramento River Cats. It’s kind of like a senior rooming with a freshman; the senior has dibs on just about everything, but he still has to deal with the roommate. For the A’s, that means wondering how the field will hold up over the course of the 155 games it’ll wear this season, and figuring out how to cope with having a clubhouse beyond the outfield wall, disconnected from the dugout.

Severino made his first home start for the A’s on Tuesday night, and he had to tweak his routine to account for the new reality: Once he left the clubhouse, there was no going back. It was cold and windy, so he had to make sure his jacket made it to the dugout with him. The notes he likes to reference during the game had to be there, too. His usual practice of popping into the clubhouse to watch the game on television while his team hits (“It looks easier and more fun on TV,” he says with a laugh) is on hold for home starts for the foreseeable future. He had to sit there with his teammates whether he pitched well or not — on Tuesday: not — and know that every one of his emotions would be picked up by at least five cameras.

“You just have to stick it out,” Severino says. “You can’t have all the stuff you have in a normal stadium. When you go out there, you have to bring everything with you. You have to try to stay warm and find out a different routine. It’s not the same, but the thing is, it doesn’t matter because it’s happening, and we need to get used to it. Just treat it like spring training, because it feels like spring training.”

Players coming off the bench to pinch-hit or play defense have nowhere to get loose. In any other park, they’d jump into the cage behind the dugout and take some swings or stretch out and run a few sprints. Here, they have to do whatever they can do within the confines of the dugout. “Just do some arm circles and maybe run in place,” Cubs infielder Jon Berti says. “Make it old-school.”

Just one of the three games sold out, an unexpected development after months of civic backslapping and grand proclamations about Sacramento cementing its status as a major league city. Tickets for Wednesday’s game, which drew 9,342 fans, were selling on the secondary market for $20 about 30 minutes before first pitch. The A’s have the highest median ticket prices — $181 — in baseball, according to data compiled by the ticket app Gametime. The idea was to employ the time-honored scarcity=demand concept to seize maximum profits from minimal opportunities, but one sellout — the opener, which also included roughly 2,000 comped tickets — in the first three games shows the A’s remain capable of straining even the most fundamental economic concepts.

It’s probably not fair to judge Sacramento’s worth as a baseball town based on its willingness to support a team that won’t be identified by the city’s name during its time here. And it’s definitely not fair to judge a region based on the number of fans eager to hand money to an owner who pulled the team out of Oakland after 57 years and is on his way to Las Vegas.

In the days after Kings/River Cats owner Vivek Ranadive joined with Fisher to bring the A’s to Sacramento, someone identified to me as “as Sacramento as it gets” sent a text that illustrates the conflict that lives within the Sacramento sports fan:

So many thoughts as I’ve been following this:

1) I hate it in that we are just bailing out Fisher

2) I hate that we are basically acting as Seattle a decade ago with regards to the Kings and poached the A’s away from Oakland. That’s an awful feeling I wish on no one

3) I am interested to see if this actually goes anywhere other than just bailing out Fisher for 3 years while he waits out whatever magic is gonna happen in LV

4) Reeeeeally wish Vivek read the room on this one

5) We could buy $30 lawn seats and catch a ball from Mike Trout or even better, [Austin] Slater, on a Wednesday night in Sac. That would be wild

The A’s are quick to point out that there weren’t many crowds of 10,000 on Tuesday nights in Oakland. (There was just one last year, during the final homestand of the season.) Still, Sacramento is a city attempting to use this three- to four-year run to audition for its own big league team. And if the A’s can’t sell out a minor league stadium in an area with established fans of the team, what does that foretell for their eventual move to Las Vegas, where the team is forecasting sellout crowds, including nearly 5,000 tourists per game — in a 33,000-seat stadium in an area with no connection to the A’s?

But that’s someone else’s problem, some other day. Three trips this week to Sutter Health — Sunday for the River Cats, Monday and Wednesday for the A’s — was a chance to watch big league baseball in a quaint, intimate ballpark. I thought it might be like venturing back in time, maybe what it felt like to watch a Philadelphia A’s game in 1907 at Columbia Park if Columbia Park had a state-of-the-art video screen that looks like an 86-inch television hanging from the wall of a studio apartment. This would be baseball back when games were just games and big league ballparks didn’t feel obligated to stock luxury suites with $300 cabernet and fist-sized prawns. Back to when every concession stand sold pretty much the same thing (at Sutter Health, each vendor has a set menu and one or two “specialty” items, like the pizza at Pizza & Pints) and fans could bring a chair or sit on the grass out in right field and dream of Mike Trout or Austin Slater.

Its charms are undeniable, but sustainable? The workers in the ballpark are all genial and helpful, thrilled with having major league baseball in their humble yard, but maybe we should check back in August. At the River Cats’ game Sunday, I spoke with an employee working in the team store who laid out the process of turning it from a River Cats’ store to an Athletics’ store over the course of roughly 24 hours. Starting at 5 p.m. Sunday, three overlapping shifts worked through the night and well into Monday, folding and packing and hauling out all the minor league gear, storing it somewhere she isn’t privy to, while hauling in all the big league gear, unpacking it, unfolding it and displaying it nicely enough that someone might feel compelled to forfeit $134.99 for an authentic JJ Bleday jersey.

As she detailed the process, and the time constraints, knowing this River Cats-to-A’s and vice versa conga will take place roughly every 10 days to two weeks over the next six months, I was beginning to feel stressed just looking at every cap, sock, T-shirt, bobblehead, Dinger the mascot doll and performance men’s half-zip pullover sweatshirt that awaited their attention.

“Will it get done?” I asked her.

She laughed.

“I guess it has to,” she said, “but I’m off tomorrow.”

And poof, just as there was no sign of the A’s on Sunday, there was no sign of the River Cats on Monday. Everything brick red and gold was replaced by something kelly green and gold. Even the sign proclaiming Sacramento’s Triple-A championships was replaced by one proclaiming the A’s nine World Series wins, five in Philadelphia and four in Oakland. But, like everything else involving the 2025 Athletics, there is no geographic designation. As the A’s know better than most, you are where you are until you’re where you want to be.

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What are torpedo bats? Are they legal? What to know about MLB’s hottest trend

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What are torpedo bats? Are they legal? What to know about MLB's hottest trend

The opening weekend of the 2025 MLB season was taken over by a surprise star — torpedo bats.

The bowling pin-shaped bats became the talk of the sport after the Yankees’ home run onslaught on the first Saturday of the season put it in the spotlight and the buzz hasn’t slowed since.

What exactly is a torpedo bat? How does it help hitters? And how is it legal? Let’s dig in.

Read: An MIT-educated professor, the Yankees and the bat that could be changing baseball


What is a torpedo bat and why is it different from a traditional MLB bat?

The idea of the torpedo bat is to take a size format — say, 34 inches and 32 ounces — and distribute the wood in a different geometric shape than the traditional form to ensure the fattest part of the bat is located where the player makes the most contact. Standard bats taper toward an end cap that is as thick diametrically as the sweet spot of the barrel. The torpedo bat moves some of the mass on the end of the bat about 6 to 7 inches lower, giving it a bowling-pin shape, with a much thinner end.


How does it help hitters?

The benefits for those who like swinging with it — and not everyone who has swung it likes it — are two-fold. Both are rooted in logic and physics. The first is that distributing more mass to the area of most frequent contact aligns with players’ swing patterns and provides greater impact when bat strikes ball. Players are perpetually seeking ways to barrel more balls, and while swings that connect on the end of the bat and toward the handle probably will have worse performance than with a traditional bat, that’s a tradeoff they’re willing to make for the additional slug. And as hitters know, slug is what pays.

The second benefit, in theory, is increased bat speed. Imagine a sledgehammer and a broomstick that both weigh 32 ounces. The sledgehammer’s weight is almost all at the end, whereas the broomstick’s is distributed evenly. Which is easier to swing fast? The broomstick, of course, because shape of the sledgehammer takes more strength and effort to move. By shedding some of the weight off the end of the torpedo bat and moving it toward the middle, hitters have found it swings very similarly to a traditional model but with slightly faster bat velocity.


Why did it become such a big story so early in the 2025 MLB season?

Because the New York Yankees hit nine home runs in a game Saturday and Michael Kay, their play-by-play announcer, pointed out that some of them came from hitters using a new bat shape. The fascination was immediate. While baseball, as an industry, has implemented forward-thinking rules in recent seasons, the modification to something so fundamental and known as the shape of a bat registered as bizarre. The initial response from many who saw it: How is this legal?


OK. How is this legal?

Major League Baseball’s bat regulations are relatively permissive. Currently, the rules allow for a maximum barrel diameter of 2.61 inches, a maximum length of 42 inches and a smooth and round shape. The lack of restrictions allows MLB’s authorized bat manufacturers to toy with bat geometry and for the results to still fall within the regulations.


Who came up with the idea of using them?

The notion of a bowling-pin-style bat has kicked around baseball for years. Some bat manufacturers made smaller versions as training tools. But the version that’s now infiltrating baseball goes back two years when a then-Yankees coach named Aaron Leanhardt started asking hitters how they should counteract the giant leaps in recent years made by pitchers.

When Yankees players responded that bigger barrels would help, Leanhardt — an MIT-educated former Michigan physics professor who left academia to work in the sports industry — recognized that as long as bats stayed within MLB parameters, he could change their geometry to make them a reality. Leanhardt, who left the Yankees to serve as major league field coordinator for the Miami Marlins over the winter, worked with bat manufacturers throughout the 2023 and 2024 seasons to make that a reality.


When did it first appear in MLB games?

It’s unclear specifically when. But Yankees slugger Giancarlo Stanton used a torpedo bat last year and went on a home run-hitting rampage in October that helped send the Yankees to the World Series. New York Mets star Francisco Lindor also used a torpedo-style bat last year and went on to finish second in National League MVP voting.


Who are some of the other notable early users of torpedo bats?

In addition to Stanton and Lindor, Yankees hitters Anthony Volpe, Austin Wells, Jazz Chisholm Jr., Cody Bellinger and Paul Goldschmidt have used torpedoes to great success. Others who have used them in games include Tampa Bay’s Junior Caminero, Minnesota’s Ryan Jeffers and Toronto’s Davis Schneider. And that’s just the beginning. Hundreds more players are expected to test out torpedoes — and perhaps use them in games — in the coming weeks.


How is this different from a corked bat?

Corking bats involves drilling a hole at the end of the bat, filling it in and capping it. The use of altered bats allows players to swing faster because the material with which they replace the wood — whether it’s cork, superballs or another material — is lighter. Any sort of bat adulteration is illegal and, if found, results in suspension.


Could a rule be changed to ban them?

Could it happen? Sure. Leagues and governing bodies have put restrictions on equipment they believe fundamentally altered fairness. Stick curvature is limited in hockey. Full-body swimsuits made of polyurethane and neoprene are banned by World Aquatics. But officials at MLB have acknowledged that the game’s pendulum has swung significantly toward pitching in recent years, and if an offensive revolution comes about because of torpedo bats — and that is far from a guarantee — it could bring about more balance to the game. If that pendulum swings too far, MLB could alter its bat regulations, something it has done multiple times already this century.


So the torpedo bat is here to stay?

Absolutely. Bat manufacturers are cranking them out and shipping them to interested players with great urgency. Just how widely the torpedo bat is adopted is the question that will play out over the rest of the season. But it has piqued the curiosity of nearly every hitter in the big leagues, and just as pitchers toy with new pitches to see if they can marginally improve themselves, hitters will do the same with bats.

Comfort is paramount with a bat, so hitters will test them during batting practice and in cage sessions before unleashing them during the game. As time goes on, players will find specific shapes that are most comfortable to them and best suit their swing during bat-fitting sessions — similar to how golfers seek custom clubs. But make no mistake: This is an almost-overnight alteration of the game, and “traditional or torpedo” is a question every big leaguer going forward will ask himself.

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St. Pete to spend $22.5M to fix Tropicana Field

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St. Pete to spend .5M to fix Tropicana Field

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — The once and possibly future home of the Tampa Bay Rays will get a new roof to replace the one shredded by Hurricane Milton with the goal of having the ballpark ready for the 2026 season, city officials decided in a vote Thursday.

The St. Petersburg City Council voted 7-1 to approve $22.5 million to begin the repairs at Tropicana Field, which will start with a membrane roof that must be in place before other work can continue. Although the Rays pulled out of a planned $1.3 billion new stadium deal, the city is still contractually obligated to fix the Trop.

“We are legally bound by an agreement. The agreement requires us to fix the stadium,” said council member Lissett Hanewicz, who is an attorney. “We need to go forward with the roof repair so we can do the other repairs.”

The hurricane damage forced the Rays to play home games this season at Steinbrenner Field across the bay in Tampa, the spring training home of the New York Yankees. The Rays went 4-2 on their first homestand ever at an open-air ballpark, which seats around 11,000 fans.

Under the current agreement with the city, the Rays owe three more seasons at the Trop once it’s ready again for baseball, through 2028. It’s unclear if the Rays will maintain a long-term commitment to the city or look to Tampa or someplace else for a new stadium. Major League Baseball has said keeping the team in the Tampa Bay region is a priority. The Rays have played at the Trop since their inception in 1998.

The team said it would have a statement on the vote later Thursday.

The overall cost of Tropicana Field repairs is estimated at $56 million, said city architect Raul Quintana. After the roof, the work includes fixing the playing surface, ensuring audio and visual electronics are working, installing flooring and drywall, getting concession stands running and other issues.

“This is a very complex project. We feel like we’re in a good place,” Quintana said at the council meeting Thursday.

Under the proposed timeline, the roof installation will take about 10 months. The unique membrane system is fabricated in Germany and assembled in China, Quintana said, adding that officials are examining how President Donald Trump’s new tariffs might affect the cost.

The new roof, he added, will be able to withstand hurricane winds as high as 165 mph. Hurricane Milton, one of the strongest hurricanes ever in the Atlantic basin at one point, blasted ashore Oct. 9 south of Tampa Bay with Category 3 winds of about 125 mph.

Citing mounting costs, the Rays last month pulled out of a deal with the city and Pinellas County for a new $1.3 billion ballpark to be built near the Trop site. That was part of a broader $6.5 billion project known as the Historic Gas Plant district to bring housing, retail and restaurants, arts and a Black history museum to a once-thriving Black neighborhood razed for the original stadium.

The city council plans to vote on additional Trop repair costs over the next few months.

“This is our contractual obligation. I don’t like it more than anybody else. I’d much rather be spending that money on hurricane recovery and helping residents in the most affected neighborhoods,” council member Brandi Gabbard said. “These are the cards that we’re dealt.”

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