The Rays, like any successful team, hunt for veteran bargains on the free-agent market and develop their own prospects, but they also trade aggressively, which is the hallmark of the team’s success. After slashing their stadium capacity from 31,000 to 25,000 this year, the Rays have (as of Thursday) drawn 14,552 fans per game in 2019, 293 more than 2018. He was also a 16-year-old Rays fan when the club won its only pennant in 2008. St. Petersburg commissioned the building in the 1980s during an unsuccessful attempt to draw the Chicago White Sox, followed in the early 1990s by an equally unsuccessful bid for the San Francisco Giants. Not only is St. Pete developing more regional continuity, the Rays have now been around long enough for a lifelong fan to grow up and (theoretically) become a season-ticket holder, or even play for the Rays himself. If he doesn’t transition to the mound full time, McKay is the closest thing baseball has to another Shohei Ohtani. It wasn’t too long ago that the Rays were built on a recognizable core of homegrown talent, as the modern-day Astros and Cubs are. Even in MLB, to a certain extent, the Indians, Brewers, A’s, and Twins have done this at one time or another in the past decade. While even a modest crowd can make a powerful racket in a dome, loud visiting fans are part and parcel of the Tropicana Field experience. It’s just a place you can’t take your eye off a pop-up.”. The Official Site of The Tampa Bay Rays: Tickets: Orlando Series, The Official Site of The Tampa Bay Rays: News: Tampa Bay Rays News, "Liriano pitches 7 innings as Twins beat Rays 4-1", 100 random things about the Red Sox, Rays, and Yankees, "Scott Kazmir: Leaving a legacy with the Tampa Bay Rays", Upton hits for first cycle in Rays history, "Live from Indy: Thursday morning edition, Soriano deal set", "Tampa Bay Rays' Sean Rodriguez continues strong spring with spectacular catch", "Rays complete big deal with Cubs for Garza", "Bartlett trade to Padres – finally – official", "Red Sox fire another salvo, add Crawford", "Manny retires due to "issue" with drug test", "Shields, Joyce team to top Angels in 10 innings", "Rays closer Fernando Rodney gets one out, sets record for relief ERA", "Joe Maddon opts out of contract, leaves Rays", "Cubs fire manager Joe Maddon before season finale against rival Cardinals", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_the_Tampa_Bay_Rays&oldid=981234781, Articles with dead external links from January 2020, Articles with permanently dead external links, Wikipedia articles in need of updating from October 2020, All Wikipedia articles in need of updating, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 1 October 2020, at 02:53. In three seasons in the ThunderDome, the Lightning never drew 20,000 fans per game. “Attendance has been getting higher and higher, and the stadium gets really loud. “That’s the fun thing about a team like this,” says right-hander Oliver Drake, who arrived on the Rays’ books in January after having been waived or sold seven times in eight months. (AP), Soaring after 10 straight losing seasons, the Rays made a one-year, 31-game improvement from 2007 to 97 victories this season. A few blocks from the stadium, the trees thinned out and over a row of condos I could make out the curved white fiberglass roof of Tropicana Field, nestled on a slant onto the giant beige cylinder of the stadium itself, as though Zeus had made chili but failed to put the lid back on the crockpot straight. Not so at the Trop. That 2013 roster featured a slew of familiar names: Price, Longoria, Archer, Zobrist, Alex Cobb, and Matt Moore, among others. The Rays won more than 70 games for the first time in 2008, when Longoria, Crawford, Shields, and Price led the club to its first and so far only pennant. And looking up and down the roster, it’s not clear who the Rays’ best player is. See the player salary for every Tampa Bay Rays player and total team payroll on ESPN.com The Trop, for all its New Wave–era architectural artificiality, fits in with the late-20th-century design aesthetic of its neighborhood just as seamlessly as Wrigley Field blends into its own milieu. But a healthy TV viewership has not translated to butts in seats, with geography the frequent scapegoat. Camden Yards is a cathedral, but almost every Populus-designed retro stadium that came after is an imitation of the original, which is itself an imitation of early-20th-century stadium architecture, and after a while, the retro parks ended up looking just as formulaic as the derided steel and concrete cookie-cutter ballparks they replaced. 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