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Major-league loss with minor-league team

By SHARON BOND

© St. Petersburg Times, published August 27, 2000

Minor-league baseball is the beginning and the end. St. Petersburg saw both last week.

Minor-league baseball can mature a young pitcher, like former St. Petersburg Devil Ray Bobby Seay, now on his way to the summer Olympics. He moved up from St. Petersburg's Class A team last season to Double A in Orlando this season.

Minor-league baseball also can be the place where the comeback for an injured major-leaguer turns to tragedy. When a career ends on the field, as it did Thursday night for Tampa Bay Devil Rays pitcher Tony Saunders, minor-league baseball is one of the saddest places on earth.

St. Petersburg is losing this pure and very personal form of baseball. Monday night marks the last minor-league game at Al Lang Field. With some gaps in years, minor-league teams have played there since 1920 when the St. Petersburg Saints began. The St. Petersburg Devil Rays end the tradition, and the city will be the poorer for it.

St. Petersburg lost the St. Louis Cardinals after the 1997 spring training season. They were here for 57 years but left when the city finally got its major-league team, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. That was the first heartbreak of being in the big leagues.

To accommodate a realignment, the Rays sold the Class A "Baby" Rays to the minors, which will move the franchise to another city. The point is to make sure every major-league team has a farm team at each level of minor-league baseball. While that is good for the majors, it is heartbreak No. 2 for St. Petersburg.

For years, minor-league baseball was all fans in Tampa Bay had during the regular season. We got to know players well enough to holler down their first names. Some folks became established fans. Their comments to players were personal, and not always encouraging. We played bingo, cheered the silly games played between innings and drank too much beer on Thursdays, 50-cent beer night.

Walking up the ramp to the concourse, hearing the chirpy organ or Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock and smelling hot dogs on the grill, fans entered a carnival atmosphere at Al Lang.

Nature almost always played a part, too. Al Lang Field, sitting on the edge of Tampa Bay, is the best place on earth to watch a baseball game. There's a water view from the seats behind first base. Sea gulls sometimes sat in the outfield during spring training. Heat and humidity soaked the hair in the summer, and sweat ran down your face making the breeze off the bay feel cooler than it really was.

Thursday night the weather turned nasty, adding misery to tragedy when Saunders again broke his pitching arm in the third inning. He only had just begun to pitch again in the past few weeks. He broke the same humerus bone at Tropicana Field in May 1999.

At first the sky was a beautiful indigo and as it began to sprinkle, a rainbow arched out over the bay. Lightning flashed way beyond rightfield, sending the 300 or so fans up to the top seats. Then Saunders fell on the mound and trainers ran out. The rain started pouring and an ambulance pulled onto the field.

The St. Petersburg Devil Rays and some of the visiting Clearwater Phillies ran from their dugouts into the rain and lifted a tarp meant for the mound over Saunders as medics wrapped his arm and tried to ease his pain. When he was lifted onto the stretcher, the players holding the tarp sidestepped along, covering him all the way to the ambulance.

Minor-league baseball can be one of the sweetest places on earth.

All these years, we wished for a major-league team, and we got it. Having the Devil Rays is fantastic, but it doesn't compensate fans who loved minor-league baseball in St. Petersburg.

Maybe baseball fans in St. Petersburg paid too much for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Not in dollars, but in tradition.

- Sharon Bond is a business editor at the Times.

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