Why Does This Team Exist?
On the Tampa Bay Rays, LIV Golf, and why you can't manufacture a soul in sports.
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I.
A strange thing happened last weekend inside the most embarrassingly retrograde stadium in baseball, and it led me to ponder a number of weighty ideas, including A.) The pending downfall of a renegade golf league, and B.) The nature of reality itself. But before we get into all of that, let’s begin with a simple visual: A towering fly ball off the bat of a San Francisco Giants outfielder named Heliot Ramos.
The ball soars into deep center at Tropicana Field, the home stadium of the Tampa Bay Rays. It appears to be a home run, and given that the Giants’ hitting prowess this season can accurately be characterized as “Pedro Serrano trying to measure up a curveball,” it would be a desperately needed boost for a team that’s sinking fast in the standings. But then comes the Rube Goldberg twist, the kind of ground-rule disruption that might lead to a fistfight in a backyard wiffle ball game. And it served as a potent reminder that the Rays have now spent three decades subsisting in such an odd baseball purgatory that it’s easy to forget they’re still here at all.
Instead of continuing its trajectory into space, Ramos’ ball takes a sharp, physics-defying turn and comes tumbling back toward earth. The center fielder for the Tampa Bay Rays—whose name I don’t recall, because I cannot ever recall the name of anyone who has ever played for the Rays, even when I am actively watching the Rays play baseball—backs up and then ambles forward, which is not something that tends to happen at Tropicana Field, given that balls don’t often get caught up in the wind inside a domed stadium. The center fielder catches the ball, and the umpires rule it an out, and even after a review, no umpire seems to notice (or is willing to acknowledge) that the ball had almost certainly struck a random catwalk high above the field itself and then caromed back into fair territory, which should have made it a home run.
Now, all of this was very stupid on its face, though it got progressively dumber, because an umpire named Hunter Wendelstedt—having blatantly fucked this all up—apparently used the opportunity to insult the Giants for hiring a manager who emerged straight from the college ranks. (This is odd, because Hunter Wendelstedt is not only a product of nepotism himself, but also one of the worst umpires in baseball.)
But mostly, it’s just remarkable, in an era of artisanal baseball stadiums, that something like this could happen in the first place. Why is a major-league baseball team still competing in an arena that looks as if it could be situated on the surface of the moon? I know that the Rays are once again attempting to build a new stadium after literally getting the roof blown off this one, but it’s been a long time now, and there is still uncertainty about when or if it will ever happen. And in the meantime, they continue to play Major League Baseball inside the bounce house at a seven-year-old’s birthday party.
Even after all this time, the Rays still feel more like a construction of a baseball team than an actual baseball team. How is that they have been around for three decades—and made two World Series—and yet they still resemble an opposing team conjured from a low-budget B movie starring Mickey Rourke and Josh Lucas? I mean, look at this:
What in the hell is going on here? Is that a desiccated road runner on the helmet? Why is there an Izod alligator on the pants and an exploding emoji on the sleeve? The font and color scheme appears to be borrowed from the aesthetics of Florida’s least distinguished gentleman’s club. (I mean, how desperate did the hive mind at Nike have to be to throw up their hands and say, “Fuck it, no one’s gonna care, let’s just go with neon green and purple”?) The entire kit is reminiscent of Tampa itself, in that I’m not sure what the point of any of it is except to inspire Hold Steady songs.
Every time I am confronted with the fact that the Rays continue to exist, I mostly just find myself amazed they continue to exist. And I think I know why this is: It’s because the Rays have never taken on any true meaning. They are the closest thing baseball has to a ghost franchise, free-floating through their cavernous stadium and bouncing against their elevated catwalk like a loose molecule drifting into a black hole. They are enough to make you wonder just how it is that anything in sports takes on any meaning at all.
II.
It is worth noting that the Rays and Giants have an intimate history, given that the Giants almost moved to Tampa back in 1992. This now seems unfathomable, the notion that a baseball team would abandon one of America’s most picturesque cities for a place that brags about its wild chickens, but it’s true. That year, a miserly man named Vince Naimoli, a New Jersey native who, according to SABR’s Steve Rennie, “made his fortune buying struggling companies and then steering them to profitability by aggressively cutting costs and selling off assets,” agreed in principle to buy the Giants and move them to Tampa.
