PHOENIX — Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred couldn’t put an exact price on how much it’s going to cost to bring Sutter Home Park in West Sacramento up to Major League standards for the Athletics this season. But he was pretty explicit about the cost to get Steinbrenner Field in Tampa up to par for the Rays: $50 million.
“We have am expert who’s working with the city and the club on this,” he said during a Cactus League spring training media conference Tuesday in Arizona. “He’s trying to see what has to be done and how fast it can be done, but it’s going to be in the $50 million-plus range.”
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That’s on top of millions of dollars in upgrades the New York Yankees also made to their training and spring facilities.
Those improvements, part of a two-year project, were separate from the needed upgrades being made to the 11,026-seat stadium in preparation for the Rays, who will call Steinbrenner Field home during the 2025 MLB regular season. The Rays had to vacate Tropicana Field after Hurricane Milton tore off its roof last year, causing $55.7 million worth of wind and water damage.
The Rays are hoping to return to the Trop in 2026, but considerable work by the city of St. Petersburg still has to be accomplished.
“The industry owes [Yankees principal owner] Hal Steinbrenner a real debt of gratitude, a ton of credit for the approach he took,” Manfred said. “He put literally 10s of millions of dollars into improving Steinbrenner Field. The first people who are going to get to use it for any period of time is the Rays. That support for the industry, that collegiality is really an important thing.”
The Yankees renovated the home clubhouse in the spring training ballpark and added 34,000 square feet of contiguous dining areas, weight rooms and training rooms in their year-round adjacent training areas, bringing the overall footprint to about 50,000 square feet.
There is now an additional 12,000 square feet of concourse space along the first-base side of the stadium above the new construction. The square footage devoted to players has doubled.
The Yankees are scheduled to play 15 home spring training games, and the team will have control of all the facilities during that period. They will then turn over the keys to the home clubhouse and the ballpark to the Rays for the regular season. The Yanks visit the Rays for two series this season, and for those six games, they will be the visiting team, using the upgraded visiting clubhouse facility.
The Yanks’ Single-A club, the Tampa Tarpons, will play most of its games this season on Field 2 next to the first base side of the main stadium, which will be equipped with lights, enhanced dugouts and padding on the walls surrounding the playing field at the Rays’ expense.
The Rays are responsible for field maintenance, box office, game day operations and their own ballpark branding. They will also take over the team store. Fiber optic cables have also been upgraded.
In West Sacramento, the A’s are hoping to play three seasons in the home park of the River Cats, sharing it with the Triple-A affiliate of the San Francisco Giants before moving to Las Vegas in 2028. They left Oakland at the end of last season. The minor-league ballpark holds 14,014—10,624 grandstand seats and the remaining on a right field berm and in standing room. The seats have already been sold, mostly as high-priced season tickets.
The dugouts, clubhouse, lighting, press box, video board and field turf all had to be upgraded for MLB games and a schedule that includes 81 A’s and 75 River Cats games. To accommodate the A’s, a new home clubhouse is being built beyond the left field fence. A decision was made last year to play all the games on grass, hoping to withstand average summer temperatures of 95 degrees.
The upgrades are a project being split by A’s owner John Fisher and Vivek Ranadivé, the co-owner and chairman of the NBA’s Sacramento Kings. Ranadivé also owns the River Cats and the stadium.
Manfred visited the facility last month and noted that “the ballpark is charming.”
“It was a really positive day,” he said. “The level of excitement in the community is really palpable. Their desire to have Major League Baseball in the short and long term is really impressive. I think the owners [of both teams] have worked hard to make it as close to a Major League experience as it can be. There was a lot of investment in the ballpark that wouldn’t have been done otherwise.”
As far as the Las Vegas ballpark is concerned Manfred said the A’s are still on the same schedule.
“I don’t think the timeline has changed,” he said. “The last time I talked to John abut it last week we believe we’re going to be on time to go in 2028 and I can’t give you any more granular detail than that.”
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