Charlie Crist Launches TV Ad Signaling St. Petersburg Mayor Run

Charlie Crist turned Opening Day into a political opening move Tuesday, appearing in a new television ad tied to a political committee aligned with him that signals a likely run for St. Petersburg mayor.

The spot, paid for by the St. Pete Shines political committee, shows the former Florida governor sporting a throwback Devil Rays jersey, the original purple, turquoise, green and yellow design with its stingray logo, while speaking from Al Lang Stadium on the St. Pete waterfront. The ad is running on Bay News 9, the Rays network, MS NOW and Fox News.

“Opening Day, one of the best times of the year, especially here in St. Pete,” Crist says in the ad, which leans heavily on baseball nostalgia and the city’s long relationship with the sport before wading briefly into the murky politics surrounding the Rays’ future.

The choice of Al Lang Stadium as a backdrop is not accidental. The structure, built in 1947, spent decades as a Spring Training home to the St. Louis Cardinals, New York Yankees, New York Giants and Baltimore Orioles. Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio both played there. Crist himself has a personal connection to the site, having worked there as General Counsel for Minor League Baseball. The stadium now hosts the Tampa Bay Rowdies soccer team and carries neon green and yellow accents to match, but its baseball identity still runs deep in St. Pete’s civic memory.

The ad threads that nostalgia through a montage of Tropicana Field footage and Rays headlines before arriving at the central political tension hanging over the city. After back-to-back hurricanes in 2024, including Hurricane Milton, which damaged the Trop, previous Rays ownership walked away from a redevelopment agreement with the city and Pinellas County for the Historic Gas Plant District site. The team is now planning a move across the bay to Tampa, a decision that has generated significant frustration in St. Pete.

“Our community is facing important decisions about the future of baseball,” Crist says in the ad. “It’ll be important we have leaders with the right vision.”

The line is the ad’s sharpest political point, aimed squarely at incumbent Mayor Ken Welch, who Crist is widely expected to challenge. Crist has not formally announced his candidacy, but the ad makes the direction of travel clear.

The spot pulls back quickly from that shot, closing with Crist urging viewers to set politics aside for the day. “Today, let’s put that aside and cheer on our team. Play ball!”

The baseball framing gives Crist a relatively soft entry point. He is not leading with policy attacks on Welch or detailed plans for the Gas Plant site. Instead, he is working to establish himself as a St. Pete figure with authentic local roots, someone who was at Al Lang Stadium before he was in Tallahassee, who hosted the Governor’s Baseball Dinner in 2010 with Hall of Famer Andre Dawson and then-Commissioner Bud Selig on the guest list.

For readers who follow waterfront development closely, the Gas Plant District question is the story beneath the story here. The 86-acre site sits at the edge of downtown St. Pete and has been at the center of competing visions for years. The original redevelopment plan included a new stadium, retail, residential, and commercial space. With the Rays now pointed toward Tampa, the future of that parcel, one of the most significant waterfront-adjacent development opportunities in the Tampa Bay region, is genuinely unsettled. Whoever wins the mayor’s race will have significant influence over what happens there.

The Al Lang Stadium site itself carries its own waterfront real estate history. A proposed stadium to keep the Rays in St. Pete and place them on the waterfront at that location failed back in 2008, a reminder that baseball and bayfront development have been tangled together in St. Pete politics for a long time.

Crist’s campaign, if and when it formally launches, will have to get specific on all of it. An Opening Day ad is a handshake. The redevelopment negotiation is the actual conversation.