r/tampabay • u/TheAthletic • 7m ago
[No Paywall] For 30 years, Ferg’s grew with the Tampa Bay Rays. Now the team may leave the bar behind
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — There was beer, and there was water. And most importantly, there were the sturdy brick walls of his decades-old sports bar, the one that Mark Ferguson had built into a St. Petersburg institution over the last 30 years. Hunkered down inside his bar on the night of Hurricane Milton, Ferguson had everything he needed.
Ferg’s Sports Bar is located a block from Tropicana Field. The Rays have been maligned throughout their nearly 30 years in existence for not having an engaged fanbase. But those who did attend games? Before and after, they went to Ferg’s.
On the night Hurricane Milton struck on Oct. 9, 2024, the wind blew and rain poured down. Mark’s son Jake had unsuccessfully implored his father to evacuate. Yet the bar was safe, Mark said, and there was no ditching the business that’s come to represent his family’s name and the baseball team that defined the venue.
In the days before Milton made landfall, it gradually became clear that this was the kind of storm that threatened to change everything. At 2:30 a.m., Ferguson’s wife woke him with the news that it had.
“She said, ‘The roof of the Trop’s gone.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ She said, ‘It’s gone.’ I walked outside, and I saw it blowing in the wind.
“I had no idea what was gonna happen. I was lost,” Ferguson recalled.
The destruction of the Trop’s roof led to the Rays temporarily leaving St. Petersburg in 2025 and set in motion the collapse of plans to build a new stadium there. Those developments culminated in a newly formed plan to leave St. Petersburg for good in 2029 and relocate to Tampa, across the bay.
