Kara and I made a road trip to Florida. First stop was in Miami to see a game at Sun Life Financial Field, because we knew that was the final year of baseball there. The Marlins were moving to a new ballpark in downtown Miami. The next day we headed across Alligator Alley and up I-75 to Tampa-St.Pete.
There’s a huge Sunshine Skyway bridge over Tampa Bay. I’ve hard people say they’re scared to drive over it, but it’s plenty wide for two lanes each way and to me it’s spectacular. It looks like two sloops are sitting on top. This is what the new bridges over the Cape Cod Canal should look like-if they ever build them.
The Red Sox were visiting the Rays. The Rays hats say TB (no, not for Tom Brady), but the Trop, as locals call it, is not in Tampa Bay. Neither is Raymond James Stadium where the Buccaneers play. If they were actually in Tampa Bay they’d be underwater.
The Buccaneers play in Tampa, the Rays play in St. Petersburg. The ballpark itself – and I use the term loosely – is the worst MLB field, hands down.
The Rays are weak-known for having the worst attendance. Makes sense, they have the worst field. They also have the smallest fan base, due to a few factors: 1) The team finished in last place and lost 90+ games every year for the first ten years of their existence. Three times they lost 110+ games. 2) Basically nobody in the Tampa- St. Pete is originally from there. The entire area is loaded with retirees and snowbirds. Meaning nobody grew up rooting for the Devil Rays. And every spring there are tons of great Grapefruit League spring training games and you can see the Red Sox, Twins, Pirates, Cardinals, Yankees, Blue Jays and others while enjoying the March sunshine. 3) The team’s payroll is almost always the lowest in the majors. 4) The year-round folks would rather play golf or fish, then go to sleep early. That’s probably a Florida thing, as Miami has even worse attendance.
In 2008 the team turned things around. They dropped the word Devil from their name and went from 96 losses and last place for the 10th straight time…to 97 wins, first place, beating the defending champion Red Sox in the ALCS and winning a trip to the World Series. Which they lost to the Phillies, but hey, after 10 terrible years they got there. And still with the lowest payroll.
During the 2008 World Series the team handed out cowbells for the fans to ring when a Ray did something good. And the jumbrtron would tell them when to ring it in case some of the folks were nodding off.
We went in 2011, which was the chicken-and-beer fiasco in Boston that cost Terry Francona his job. And the Rays, still with the lowest payroll finished second in the AL East.
Game: June 14, 2011: I knew the PA announcer at the Trop and he had invited me to come up into the booth anytime I was in town. I scrolled all through my phone but could not find the message. We had nice seats, first base side. Like every Rays home game it was not even close to a sellout. To be fair, there were 20,000 fans, but that’s less than half full. It’s also 50% higher than their average of 14,000. As you can see above, they put a tarp over about half of the second deck, figuring that no one would ever sit there. The field has infield dirt, not just cutouts, but the grass is not only fake, it’s really bad fake. The high domed ceiling ,makes the place look cavernous, and there are multiple catwalks circling the ceiling. I would not want to walk around up there. Then weird thing: if a popup hits a catwalk, it will drop straight down to the field. But, depending on which catwalk it hit, it might be fair, it might be foul, and it might be a home run. The PA announcer that I know “yucked”, as we radio people say, when announcing every Tampa Bay hitter, but barely mumbled when announcing Sox hitters. To be fair, this is de rigeur in many ballparks. This guy wasn’t all that bad, relatively. I’ve heard much worse in Milwaukee and Atlanta. The most egregious ones are in Phoenix and especially in Houston. I could make a joke here about the guy in Houston needing to yell over the buckets being banged, but that would be too easy. There was one guy a few rows ahead of us with a cowbell fan the 2008 Series, but he only rang it a few times.
As usual, both Kara and I were scoring the game and noted that Johnny Damon was leading off for Tampa Bay as DH. When Damon went from the Red Sox to the Yankees in 2006 we both accidentally started putting him at leadoff for Boston out of habit. Of course, we were scoring in ink. Damon went 1 for 4. Playing 1st was Casey Kotchman who had been with the Sox in 2009. They traded Adam LaRoche to Atlanta to get him.
Boston had Jacoby Ellsbury leading off, Pedroia at 2nd, Adrian Gonzalez at 1st, Youk at 3rd, Papi as DH, and Carl Crawford in left. Crawford had come from Tampa Bay, where he was a big deal. Stole 6 bases in one game at Fenway the year before. That’s why Boston signed him as a free agent for way too much money. It was a horrible deal. Maybe he was thrown off by the nightly sold-out crowd and close media scrutiny in Boston compared to the sparse crowds in Tampa Bay. and he media not paying much attention to him. His .307 BA turned into .255. 110 runs turned into 65. 90 walks turned into 56 and 47 stolen bases turned into 18. Then into 5 the following year. You can’t steal many bases when you never get on base. Tim Wakefield started for the Red Sox and gave up 4 hits and 2 runs, but that was more than the Rays needed. “Big Game” James Shields threw a complete-game shutout. Rays 4, Sox nil.
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