I Think I'm Actually Starting To Warm Up To How Shitty Tropicana Field Is
Never change, Tropicana Field. Never change.
I used to lose my mind over this shit a few years ago. Tropicana Field, the shithole that it is, never really bothered me until the Rays went from being the joke of the AL East to a legitimate contender in 2008. As a Red Sox fan, my logic was basically, I don’t want my team losing a meaningful game in Tampa because a ball hit off the friggin’ the catwalk. As a baseball fan, once Tampa reached the World Series in ’08, I was more like, please God don’t let the outcome of a World Series game be determined by a ball hitting off the catwalk. I don’t really care as much now.
In the three other major pro sports, the court, rink and field are all the same size throughout their respective leagues. I love that baseball’s different in the sense that ballpark dimensions can literally be whatever the fuck you want them to be. We’re used to it now, but just think of how fucking crazy it is to stick a 37-foot high wall in left field at Fenway Park, or have ivy on the outfield walls at Wrigley, or build a hill out in centerfield in Houston. It’s bananas when you really think about it.
But the catwalks in Tampa, as stupid, ridiculous, and often infuriating as they are — that’s just Tampa’s thing. You hit a ball in the air, and sometimes it comes down like normal. Sometimes it lands nowhere close to where it would’ve landed had Tropicana Field been a normal domed stadium, and sometimes you hit a ball in the air and it just doesn’t come down at all. It took me 19 years, but I think I’m finally starting to warm up to how shitty Tropicana Field is. Seeing an outfielder lose the ball in the ceiling and watching the ball land 50 feet away from them will never not be funny. Keep baseball weird.