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Bob McClure
Spring baseball is a metamorphosis
By BOB MCCLURE
Article published on Tuesday, March 4, 2008 |
If you are a baseball purist, this is the time of year that is seemingly always sacred.
Spring training has a way of making us forget the grand old game’s many fielding errors. It wipes clean our memories of things like the steroid controversy, mismanagement in the commissioner’s office and escalating player salaries.
Spring is the new beginning each year. Every team in Major League Baseball has the same record. Everybody, in theory, has an eye on playing in the World Series.
Those of us that are Tampa Bay Rays fans even get a little excited at this time of the year. For the past 10 years or so, it has been an annual ritual to see what improvements the Rays have made over the winter and speculate on what their fortunes during the season will be.
This year is a little different, though.
This year there is actually reason to believe the Rays might be in the running for a .500 season or better. There’s a new bounce in the players’ walk. There’s a new attitude from top management down to Raymond.
It’s called baseball fever and now, almost a decade later, it’s beginning to show signs of sprouting in the Tampa Bay area.
I’ve always said, give the fans something to get excited about and they’ll explode out of the woodwork. The Trop, which has sometimes in the past resembled a morgue, has the potential to become a very exciting place.
Imagine, if you will, a crowd of 35,000 or more going nuts over a ninth-inning rally capped by a walk-off home run. Imagine the excitement that would become contagious if this ball club can manage to string together nine or 10 consecutive wins.
Win streaks, craziness, excitement. It’s all baseball at its finest and what makes fans out of folks who were not previously followers of the game.
And yes, the Rays can control who attends these games once a little tradition gets started.
The dark days of the 1980s come to mind involving the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Back then, it was not uncommon for fans of the Chicago Bears and Green Bay Packers to buy all remaining tickets to games in Tampa. Bears and Packers fans more often than not outnumbered Bucs fans in the stands.
Sound familiar?
Twenty years later its the fans of the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox that cram into the Trop and outnumber Rays fans quite often.
This, obviously, is a thorn in the side to the Rays but it can be reversed – just like the Bucs did in the mid-1990s under Tony Dungy.
All we need is a reason to get excited and the Rays will permanently take over The Trop.
The Pit, as Joe Maddon likes to call it, could become a 10th player for the Rays.
But first things first. The Rays must crawl before they walk and walk before they run.
With a little luck, we could see some of that this season.
Bob McClure is editor of the Seminole Beacon.
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Article published on Tuesday, March 4, 2008
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