Charlotte Sports Park

Home plate entrance to Charlotte Co. Stadium, Sep-2009.

A look at the seating bowl from just beyond the left field foul pole.

The view from directly behind the plate, in the reserved seating area.

Chronological Tour: Stop 351

• Location: El Jobean Road (FL 776), 1.4 miles west of Toledo Blade Boulevard, Port Charlotte, Fla. (map it using Google Maps)
• Opened: 1987 as Charlotte Co. Stadium (renovated 2009)
• Home team: Charlotte Rangers, Florida State League (1987-2002); Charlotte Co. Redfish, South Coast League (2007); Charlotte Stone Crabs, Florida State League (2009-19); spring training, Texas Rangers (1987-2002), Tampa Bay Rays (2009-present)
• Capacity: 5,424

Rating: 3 baseballs

The Tampa Bay Rays and Ripken Baseball announced in August 2008 that they had jointly purchased the Vero Beach Rays and were transferring the club to Port Charlotte. This was in addition to the Rays announcing that they were moving their spring training from Al Lang Field in St. Petersburg to the Charlotte Sports Park, which had seen use for youth and college tournaments in the seasons when the complex was without a spring tenant.

The entities promptly renovated the stadium. All the seats in the seating bowl were replaced, a new souvenir shop and team locker rooms were added, and in order to accommodate the walk-around concourse that is so popular among ballpark visitors, they added a boardwalk beyond the outfield fence. This elevates the outfield walkway and allows for drainage into the ponds adjacent to the stadium. The bullpens are between the outfield wall and the boardwalk.

Finally, the Rays marketed their new team, which was now called the Charlotte Stone Crabs. While many Major League clubs that field entries in the Florida State League are content to live off their spring training revenue, the Rays and Ripken agreed to do everything they could to bring fans into the park. Nearly every evening featured a promotion or giveaway of some type. The strategy worked, as the Stone Crabs led the notoriously ill-attended FSL in ticket sales in 2009. At least three times in their inaugural season, attendance exceeded 6,000, a figure practically unheard of in the class-A loop.

Those numbers didn’t last, though, and by 2019 the Stone Crabs had fallen back to at least the middle of the pack in FSL attendance. Despite the Rays using the park for spring training, they no longer held an ownership interest in the Stone Crabs, unlike many of the league’s teams that play at spring sites. With the Rays content to have their affiliates elsewhere, the Stone Crabs were eliminated in the 2021 Major League Baseball restructuring of the minors.

Hurricane Ian, which made landfall about 20 miles south of the park in September 2022, did significant damage to the complex, so much so that the Rays announced in December that they would utilize Disney’s Wide World of Sports south of Orlando for their spring activities in 2023, with the big club playing their exhibition games at their regular season home, Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg.