TL;DR: The home of the Tampa Bay Rays, Tropicana Field, decides to close off the upper decks due to paltry attendance
As an expert on baseball parks,* this story interested me, or at least made me think that I could barf out some words about the topic and call it a brog post.
*someone who has been to every MLB city
To cut to the chase, the Plop (a derivative of the actual nickname “the Trop”) is kind of a shitty place. It’s an old and dated structure in a city full of old and dated people, the architecture of the place makes very little sense, the ceiling isn’t actually high enough to where it doesn’t occasionally come into play, and it’s overall a really lousy place to watch baseball.
It’s kind of ironic too, because the Tampa Bay Rays are one of those teams that I kind of lean towards favoring, because they’re a franchise that has relied on outsmarting the competition because they certainly can’t compete with the payrolls of everyone else in MLB, and has actually succeeded a lot more than they’ve failed over the last few years, yielding somewhat respectable win-loss records since the magic switch was flipped in 2008 where they decided to stop sucking, and made it all the way to the World Series.
They’re a team that I think is kind of cool in the sense that they’re never really a threat to my lukewarm Braves fandom, and I always have respect for teams that rely on smarts and analysis over just haphazardly signing free agents and hoping for instant results. And it’s a shame that they play for such a disinterested fanbase, inside of a ballpark that’s amongst the worst in the Majors.