Rays Of Hope

I have to be honest -- I haven't been much of a baseball guy for quite some time now.

It kills me to write that, because baseball was my game, from Little League to high school to my freshman year of college. In my first semester at Cornell, I walked on to the Big Red squad, made it through three rounds of cuts, plunked a homer off a parking garage in practice, and then hung up my spikes in favor of a broadcasting career. Yes, I was a ballplayer, once.

Then, in 1994, Major League Baseball cancelled the World Series. Something about the '94 strike rubbed me precisely the wrong way at precisely the right time. In my idealistic 20-something view, any league stupid enough to blow its own championship wasn't worth my time (this was also way before the NHL blew an entire season). I washed my hands of the game, at the professional level, and eventually lost interest in baseball as a whole.

Time passes. I have two kids now, one of whom has already taken his shot at Little League. His mother, I may have mentioned, is a manic Red Sox fan. Baseball comes up in conversation at our house more often than ever, although the NBA, golf, even tennis is a more frequent topic.

A curious transformation is taking place, however. I find myself scanning the sports pages for information I previously ignored. I'm searching the channel guide on my DirecTV for broadcasts that, well, I'm surprised I'm searching for. Funniest dang thing has happened this summer:

The Tampa Bay Rays have made me like baseball again.

Yes, the Rays, the team that has finished DFL in its division in nine of the last ten years. The team once known as the Devil Rays, perhaps the single worst nickname ever chosen for a major professional sports franchise, with awful uniforms that matched. The Rays, who play in the dimly lit, awkwardly located, yet oddly attractive Tropicana Field (the former Thunderdome, Florida Suncoast Dome, or whatever else they've called it). The Rays, the franchise that has spent more than a decade waffling between embarrassing and irrelevant. Those Rays.

Except, they're not Those Rays. Not embarrassing, not irrelevant, and not even the Devil Rays. Not anymore. They're the Tampa Bay Rays, thank you. And they're for real.

I've been to St. Pete several times this season, in various roles -- filling in for Todd Kalas as the Rays host on FSN Florida, shooting interviews for a couple of shows we have in production, even checking out a game or two as nothing more than a fan. And these Rays, these young, impetuous, confident Rays, are making it fun again.

You can check the stats yourself. They can pitch, for one thing. They play defense. They're fast. They're aggressive. But more to the point -- they believe.

After Evan Longoria drilled a walkoff double to complete a three-game sweep of the Orioles last weekend, I asked him in a postgame interview, "can you believe you're 10 games over .500 at this point in the season?"

I loved his answer: "You know what? Yeah, we can."

The Rays are winning, and the cool part is, they're doing it with a collection of young, intensely competitive, preternaturally mature ballplayers.

One guy makes a great catch, the other guys try to match him. One guy turns in a clutch pitching performance, the rest of the staff bust it to hold up their end. Success breeds confidence; that confidence leads to friendly competition among teammates; the cycle strengthens. And there's manager Joe Maddon, he of the refined tastes and California-cool demeanor, pushing buttons with phrases like "the information is all out there." He presents his players with opportunities to win, and they accept. Simple, but it's taken this franchise over 10 years to get to this point.

This is no fluke. I've been there, I've seen it. They may not win their division, but this is not smoke and mirrors. It's too bad that the attendance is still so abysmal -- although if I were a Tampa Bay baseball fan, I'd be just as suspicious, fatigued, cynical, what have you. It's been a long decade over there. If the Rays are still contending at the All-Star Break, fans in that region have no excuses whatsoever, traffic or no traffic, history or no history. This has the potential to be the best baseball story of the last ten years.

Just the other day, I stood along the first base line at the Trop, waiting for Maddon to speak to the media. The Rays were taking batting practice. In the outfield, Carl Crawford and BJ Upton shagged fly balls. In the infield, Aki Iwamura worked on his pivot with Jason Bartlett. Coaches like Dave Martinez and George Hendrick kept everyone loose, getting in their digs. The atmosphere was charged, professional, relaxed. The atmosphere of a winning team.

I guess I was rocking back and forth, or maybe just staring, but one of our producers looked over and said, "you look like you're jonesin' for baseball."

Well, whattaya know. Perhaps I am, for the first time in years.

The Rays have made it fun again.