A fan's sour notes
By PETER GOLENBOCK
Published June 26, 2005
ST. PETERSBURG - For me, baseball is a religion. The baseball, with 256 stitches holding together a perfectly designed orb, is a holy object. The field is a sacred place, the three bases oases of safety. Home plate is a site for deliverance and joyous celebration. I find fascination in any game I watch, whether it is Little League or Major League, because inevitably I will see something I have never seen before. Winning or losing doesn't affect my love of the game. As a baseball purist, my interest is in seeing the game played right. The team that plays the game right, of course, usually wins.
When I moved here from Ridgefield, Conn., in 1989 to write a book about the St. Petersburg Pelicans of the Senior League, eight teams in Florida with rosters of former major-leaguers, my chances of ever watching major-league baseball in person ever again seemed remote. I was 1,200 miles away from my first love, the New York Yankees. (Four of my books - Dynasty, The Bronx Zoo with Sparky Lyle, Number 1 with Billy Martin, and Balls with Greg Nettles - were about the Yankees.)
The closest big league team was in Atlanta, a nine-hour drive, too far to watch boring National League baseball where they let the pitcher hit. The Suncoast Dome, which sat 10 minutes from my Allendale home and which was built to house a baseball team, was mostly a curiosity item, hosting Monster Truck competitions, the largest garage sale ever held in America and a Halloween party for my then 4-year-old.
Almost a decade later, Vince Naimoli and the boys from Outback Steakhouse led the ownership group that was awarded a franchise in the American League East. You talk about miracles!
The team didn't exactly get off on the right foot when they called themselves the Devil Rays, but we adapted. Why Devil Rays? The teams at St. Petersburg High School, which my son attends, are the Green Devils. What was this fascination in Bible Belt Florida with Devils?
The Devil Rays won 69 games in their first season. Last year, their seventh season, they won 70. At this rate, we will win a pennant in the year 2034. (By then I'll be as nutty as the Red Sox fans used to be.) When Lou Piniella was hired as manager, the party line was that the team was about to make a great leap forward. Then the reality of 2005 set in.
We're terrible on the road, and our pitching staff is the worst in major-league baseball. While the team is on track to lose 100 games again this year, ESPN is blaming Naimoli, and Piniella is blaming the new minority investor, Stu Sternberg, for not spending enough money on the team.
I personally don't care if they never win another game. I loved the Rays when I was writing articles for their yearbook and magazine in their first few years, and I still do. Despite their many losses, I will continue to attend most of the games anyway. Like I said, the game of baseball is fascinating every day, win or lose.
Having said that, let me talk about some of the things that do bug me greatly.
My biggest peeve is that the Devil Rays management has a policy that no one who goes to the games is allowed to have any fun. I am certain this is true. Perhaps this has something to do with fun being the work of the devil.
Because the team has been crushingly bad for so many years, the 7,000 or so die-hard Rays fans who religiously show up at the Trop have found small pockets of enjoyment over the years. The first was the devotion to rightfielder Bubba Trammell. I'm not sure why - maybe it was his name - but Bubba had a fervent, loyal following. His fans all sat in a section of the stands right behind him and rooted for him like a son. It didn't take long for Devil Rays management to decide those fans were having too much fun. They traded Trammell and Rick White to the New York Mets for Jason Tyner - one of those favored good-field, no-hit journeymen who never made it - and pitcher Paul Wilson.
No one ever had a fan club for Jason Tyner, though the Devil Rays did make 15,000 Jason Tyner bobblehead dolls just days before sending him to the minor leagues. He's still in the minors, with another organization. A bobblehead collector, I wonder what happened to all those dolls.
The next impromptu nightly celebration came from an unlikely source: groundskeeper McArthur Church, who would walk onto the field in the middle innings with a broom to sweep the infield, then would break out into a dance routine that would thrill the fans. For several years, Church's nightly performance was the highlight of the game. But then Church was accused of stealing used baseballs, and he was fired. Management didn't care that he brought all this joy to the fans. Rather than give him a second chance, they summarily banished him forever from the field. He is missed to this day. Where have you gone, McArthur Church?
With Church gone, yet a third entertainment highlight appeared one evening, when a group of ushers spontaneously walked onto the roof of the home dugout and spelled out the letters YMCA with their arms while the song blared on the loudspeaker. This was unadulterated fun, and it inspired the crowd to sing and dance along.
Then one day YMCA was no more. Someone in the killjoy Devil Rays organization decided that it had to go. Ushers relayed to me several reasons, all of them stupid: The song went on too long. The Devil Rays don't want any entertainment unless a product is being hawked. It was distracting to the players.
Whatever the reason, the Devil Rays have gotten their wish: All fun has fled from Tropicana Field. You'd think the Rays were handing out Ritalin and Prozac before the game, the fans are so subdued. The Kiss Cam is now the highlight of the game, perfect family entertainment, though when the two gay guys who were pictured on the Jumbotron to get a laugh actually kissed each other on the lips, I thought the Kiss Cam would be history as well. I understand the spot is taped now to keep spontaneity from ever breaking out again. Too bad.
Whenever unruly fans begin to carry on in the box seats, ushers rush over to tell them to keep the noise down. Fans who want to sit near the field in the ninth inning are summarily returned to their seats with stern admonitions. If the Trop is a church, it's a Puritan church.
Instead of spontaneous outbursts of fan exultation, we are treated to a series of orchestrated corporate promotions, some of them so idiotic it makes you wonder. In one, if a Devil Rays pitcher strikes out 10 batters, every fan at the game is invited to go to Kane's Furniture store, where you will be given a coupon for 10 Hooters' chicken wings. A person has to be awfully desperate for chicken wings to traipse up and down the highways and byways of St. Pete searching for Kane's and then drive across town to Hooters to get his wings.
Why couldn't Hooters give away its wings without having to drag another company into the deal? Why couldn't Kane's just give away a Barcalounger to one lucky fan?
Another Rays promotion gives each fan at a game a free 10-inch burrito at Tijuana Flats restaurants when the Rays amass 10 hits. The only problem is that the promotion is good only at locations in Hillsborough County. Since maybe 50 fans drive over from Lutz or Temple Terrace to see the games, what's the point? If I won't drive to Tampa to see Bob Dylan, I'm sure as hell not driving over the Howard Frankland for a free burrito.
The Rays management has a reputation for trying to pinch every penny it can. That happens after you pay pitcher Juan Guzman $10-million to pitch an inning and a third. But their cheapness goes way behind the ordinary. They have beaten up on the local business community, and today they are paying the price.
I have a good friend, Joel Goetz, the owner of Jo-El's. He makes a great corned beef sandwich. The Devil Rays called him up a few years ago and suggested he put a stand in the food court of the Trop. But when Joel read the contract, he discovered that 40 percent of all gross sales was to go to the Rays.
When he told them he couldn't make a profit, he was told that all he had to do was open another store in town and the publicity would be phenomenal. Goetz passed.
It is not an isolated story. I have another friend, Kim O'Brien, a talented artist who thought it would be fun to produce and sell Devil Rays puppets. Kim had two hurdles in her way. She not only had to deal with the Rays, she also had to deal with MLB Properties, which is famous for keeping all the money for itself.
The Rays said they would sell her puppets, but only at their WestShore Plaza store and at the Trop. If she sold them anywhere else, she'd be in breach of contract. The Rays also set the price of the puppets and what they'd pay her. Kim sold 4,000 Rays puppets - and lost 50,000 big ones.
When she was asked to renew her contract, she passed. "The contract was so odious you couldn't continue," she said.
"How can anyone make money?" she asked the exec at Volume Services, the company that ran the stores. "You don't," she says she was told. "It's prestigious to work with us. It's good for your product line."
But Kim O'Brien didn't have a product line. The Rays made out just fine, and she was out $50,000.
Two years ago, the talented man who played Raymond, the fuzzy-giant munchkin mascot, was fired. The day after he was gone, I could tell immediately it wasn't the same person inside the suit. The guy who was fired had been exuberant, theatrical. He had made himself into a come-to-life character, and the fans loved him as he would rush from one section to another, patting kids on the head and sitting in the laps of beautiful women. His replacement was demure, toned down.
I was curious, so I asked one of my usher friends whether the Raymond guy had been replaced. My informant said he had been fired and confirmed that a young woman had taken his place.
He must have been bringing the fans too much joy, I thought to myself. But another usher friend said the original Raymond got in trouble with Rays management because he spent too much time performing at nursing homes. The people in nursing homes don't buy tickets, he was informed.
Subversive Forbes magazine didn't make the fans feel any more charitable when it reported that the Devil Rays last year had the second-highest operating income ($27.2-million) in all of baseball, something Naimoli stoutly denies. But whether it is true or not, the perception is that rather than take the millions he gets each year from the Yankees and Red Sox via the luxury tax and spend it on a decent pitching staff, Naimoli puts the money in his pocket.
The Rays' image problems are compounded by the fact that Tampa Bay fans have already lived through the regime of Hugh Culverhouse, who for years ran the Tampa Bay Bucs football team the same scummy way. We really resent feeling like pawns of Rays management, which every year says that improvement is coming - next year. And now that Piniella has boldly challenged the new man, Sternberg, to do something to make the team better, Devil Ray fans are holding their collective breaths - not in anticipation that the team will improve, but in the fear that Lou, the one guy who brings fun and hope to the fans, will flee or be fired.
If you were looking for answers at the end of this piece, I'm sorry to disappoint you. My advice is still the same: Baseball is the perfect game, and Devil Rays baseball is the best brand of ball you will see around here. Even if nothing changes, you will still be able to find me at the ballpark. Tell Lou he should bunt a little more with runners on first and second and nobody out. We'll have a better chance of staying out of the double play.
Three of Peter Golenbock's books were published this spring: Idiot, with Johnny Damon; Red Sox Nation; and the first reprint of The Bronx Zoo in 25 years.