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The Tampa Bay Rays: Baseball’s Timex watch
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They take a licking and keep on ticking. That was the catch phrase for the Timex watch company back in the day, but the little-baseball-team-that-could also chugs away as if Cinderella could care less about that pesky little thing called the stroke of midnight.
The Tampa Bay Rays keep losing players to injury yet still retain their lofty status atop the American League East.
So how does a franchise, known only for losing and empty seats at a warehouse-looking ballpark, overcome when the big spenders are scrambling to scrape the proverbial bottom of the barrel just to find healthy bodies?
Tampa Bay skipper Joe Maddon has preached “team” from day one and all the “I” folk were discarded like used St. Petersburg Times’ pages at the bottom of a bird cage.
The folksy Pennsylvania native doesn’t use the usual baseball clichés when talking about his club and therein lays the success of the Rays. If Ralph Cramden from the TV show The Honeymooners wore a Rays’ uniform, he would be a part-timer.
Maddon religiously talks about a different person driving the bus on nights where his team wins. Other than Rookie of the Year candidate Evan Longoria and surprising starter Andy Sonnanstine, no one is having the kind of drop-dead year you could point to as being the savior of Tampa Bay baseball.
Since opening day a total of 571 games have been lost to the disabled list and nearly every one of them from players who were to play a significant role in the Rays’ success. At this stage of the season losing a Carl Crawford and Longoria are devastating enough but now add Troy Pervical – again – to the sometimes-able-to-walk-around wounded and believe it or not, the hamstring is not the culprit.
Don’t cry for the Rays. After all, the tears being shed by fans of the Red Sox and Yankees are keeping Kimberly Clark stock high as there is so much Kleenex being purchased in the northeast.
The credit for Tampa Bay’s success can be spread from the top through the minor leagues. A new system, just three years in the making, is turning the baseball world upside down but Boston and New York get all the ink. That’s fine.
Whatever happens from this day forward, when the story of the 2008 season is written, it will be about the eventual champions and the Rays will have their fair share of the subtext.
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