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Hernando Today

'Rays' Of Sunlight

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By JOHN HERBERT, From Where I Sit

Hernando Today

Published: October 14, 2008

It's quite a relief to travel around the Red Sox nation in northern New England these days and be cheered as a "conquering hero" from Tampa Bay.
In the bad old days of the last decade, any admission that I was from the Tampa Bay area was met with abject sympathy and even an occasional, "You poor old sod. Won't you ever learn how to play baseball in Tampa?"
I don't have to sweat those trips any longer. Tampa Bay's baseball team has done us very proud. The dream team has gone from worst to first, reminding me of the "incredible" New York Mets of a couple of generations ago.
The Rays have done for Tampa Bay what the local chamber of commerce has been trying to do for years: to give the area some much-needed and consistent front-page publicity all across the nation.
Now, if we could just fix it so the Boston Red Sox and Tampa Bay Rays take turns as a championship team every other year, life would be close to perfect.
The Rays did what they had to do to produce a winner: almost double the annual payroll (to $45 million, still low by league standards), bring in new management, tighten infield defense (a speedy vacuum cleaner these days), add seasoned utility players to the bench and give the bullpen relief corps almost a total facelift.
The bullpen alone is worth its own full-color feature; it went from league-worst 30th place to fourth place in just a year.
I can't prove that a name change also helped. But, at least for some fans, it might have. I found it hard to root for the "Devil Rays," which inevitably were associated with nasty sting rays. Today, the name can be interpreted with a "ray" of sunshine as well as with a more benign marine creature.
All the Rays have to do, now, is to keep working on their starting pitching. They've initiated the process; the most promising arms may still be down on the farm. The Rays' challenge is that just about every other team in the major leagues is making exactly the same effort to bolster starting pitching.
The new Rays management must be a wee bit wet behind the ears on one point, though. It continues to insist the Rays should have a new (and open) stadium.
Early estimates put a brand new field at roughly a half-billion dollars. The Rays would contribute $150 million. Imagine the taxpayers footing the rest of the bill in this tough financial climate.
If the Rays have $150 million to play with, the team should instead try to catch up with the Steinbrenner family fortune and the New York Yankees.
At most games, even this winning year, the stands at St. Petersburg's covered Tropicana Field are half empty. Visiting teams' players are bound to notice. I doubt they keep that information to themselves. They can easily draw the wrong conclusion, that Tampa Bay doesn't support its team.
Until the Rays can more or less consistently fill Tropicana Field to its 37,000-seat capacity, the Tampa Bay region should stay put. In the meantime, find the money to put a retractable roof over the stadium. And, adjust the air-conditioning.
Anything but a covered stadium is suicide. The weather is hot and sticky from April to October — the same as the baseball season. Who on earth wants to sit outdoors for three uncomfortable hours at that time of year?
Tampa Bay bills itself as the lightning capital of the world. What's more, summer is rainy season; an open stadium could lead to so many "make-up" doubleheaders that Tampa Bay may be too worn out to produce a championship team again.
The young new management has probably never ridden out a furious hurricane, either. We've been lucky the worst storms have missed us in recent years. But, that's no reason for the Rays to tempt fate.

A regular columnist for Hernando Today, John Herbert lives in Spring Hill.

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