Thanks to all the warm and wonderful reception of my first blog on here yesterday, I have decided to drivel drive through here once a day.

My adoring fans deserve daily sportsjack for their regurgitation.

Really, you guys are (largely) brutal and I love it.  This is how talkshow hosts like Duemig thrive.

Perhaps it is the start of something big for me in sports journalism, even at this late date in my awesomely inconsequential life.

*adjusts depenz*

Most of you now realize that I quadruple-spaced (between paragraphs) yesterday's virgin venture and can see that I am  only double-spacing between paragraphs today.

Some of the things you guys said really hurt me deeply.  I cried.  Then I crawled under my porch and licked my wounds.  But I turned it around by watching "Burn After Reading" for the 4th time.  This reassured me that someone is watching me and will avenge my virtual death at your brutal hands.

Besides, I'm a masochist who enjoys being beat up and licking his wounds.  I had a dog once who chased cars....you know what happened to Butch.....that's me....this was back when I was nothing but a Dodger fan.

I was a Dodger fan from the time I was five.  That was 1950.  Duke Snider,  Jackie Robinson, Carl Furillo, Gil Hodges, Pee Wee Reese, Johnny  Podres....all of those guys, along with Sandy Amoros (who died a bum in a fast food parking lot, as I recall)....became my heroes in 1955.   Now, most of you venomous punks  weren't even born then.  And most of you couldn't wear my jock, er, depenz....of course, who WOULD want to wear someone else's jockstrap?  I never understood that claim to fame:  "You couldn't wear my jockstrap!"  LMAO

I followed the Dodgers ever since.  Now, the Dodgers, by one name or another all located in Brooklyn, go 'way back as a baseball franchise......'way back to the 1800s......

The DRays/Rays, on the other hand, go all the way back to when most of you were little boys playin' with your peepees, without a clue, and thinkin' you were Tom Thumb or somethin'.

I moved to Forida from the West Coast, where my kids grew up (THEY are older than most of you) and came to the Tampa area, for a woman, two years ago.  I suffered through another bad half-season watching the Rays, enjoying the free parking, and the space around me when I went to the games at the Trop.

And I saw something that intrigued me: potential.  Potential to be winners.

That first (for me) off-season sealed the deal, as the Rays made some key trades and I heard that EL was comin' up and that he was the second-coming of Mike Schmidt and Brooks Robinson combined, or, at least Ryan Braun (who broke in at 3rd the year before) offensively.    And I predicted that the Rays would win the AL East...in that offseason of 2007-2008....in 2008. 

And I published it to my friends and on ESPN (in a blog)...that prediction that the Rays validated in one of the most awesome seasons I've witnessed since my Dodgers won it all in 1955.

Except the Rays did not win the most fouled-up World Series, weather-wise, I've ever witnessed.  They probably would have lost if the weather had been o.k. because they were just a year or two of experience short.

So many things have to come together to make a champion.  But that year will stand out to me as the year I became a solid Joe Maddon and Rays fan.

Because, regardless of what Steve Duemig says, Joe Maddon is a huge part of the reason the Rays are now winners and in the hunt for the second first time in a row.  (parse That, numbnutz)

Of course, I know that Duemig, who called for a physical assault on B. J. Upton last year on his radio program and I called him out on it both "officially" and publicly (by blog) and he curbed his act, hates Maddon for the same reason that all white trash in Florida hates people from California:  because they are from the Left Coast or have a Left Coast "way" about them.

Duemig is a coward which is the real meaning of "conservative" anymore.  A whimpering, badass coward who thinks his chit don't stink and he's the gods' gift to sportstalk.  He also revels in the failures of others, the mark of a bad person.

So that might not qualify as "insight", dear bile-blower, but it IS how I feel and what I have acted on.

The Rays are winners and are establishing a "family tradition" here under Maddon and I'm a fan of the Rays.  But, I've noticed that a lot of the Rays fans really suck and that a lot of peope who attend their games aren't Rays fans at all, understandably, but they almost all qualify as Somewhere Else's rejects from where I sit....

And every damn one of them could use a does of Left Coast openness and honesty and hipness.

Oh boy!  I can't wait to hear the jaw-slapping on this one!

Did I just start a culture war?  LMAO

*scratches where his depenz used to be*

GOTO out.

---Steve Pipkin-Savage, Clearwater