Guess who's back....

Hello RaysBayheads, your favorite displaced Rays fan has been a bit busy as of late. Moving into my own place, working insane amounts of hours and going to baseball games

It's great to see the Rays playing as well they have and setting a standard for small-payrolled teams.

Hopefully there will be more to come soon from me.

Have a great september, Rays fans! It's been awesome, thus far...hasn't it?

With my job, days off are few and far between. However, when I do get them...they're used to their full advantage. I'll usually have yesterday's game on MLB.tv on my computer while I have ESPN on my tv.

Well, I managed to wake up early enough to watch ESPN's First Take(Formerly "Cold Pizza") and the intelligence(or lack thereof) and bandwagon-ism showed me why it's put at such an early timeslot and on ESPN2.

Rob Parker(not sure what he's ever done in sports to deserve a radio show, let alone in New York) said that the Rays winning like they are "is not good for baseball because baseball thrives when teams like New York and Boston are winning."

Classy, Parker, classy.

We all know that baseball fans love arguing about ratings and money, forgetting everything about why we truly watch baseball. Not love of the game or following good stories, but cash and tv ratings.

While I carry alot of venom towards Skip Bayless, I agreed with him saying that it gets tiring to hear "Yankees, Red Sox, Yankees, Red Sox" all the time and the Rays playing fun and fundamental baseball is a good thing.

Why should we listen to a crummy Detroit Sportswriter? Why doesn't ESPN wake up and give Keith Law and some of the other Scouts Inc. guys their own 1 hour show, it'd be fun to watch scouting vids and get real perspective about athletes that sportswriters know nothing about. We all must remember that Bill Plaschke got Paul DePodesta canned in LA, so we know how bad sportswriters talking out loud can be a bad thing.

What does Rob Parker know about Tampa Bay sports? He's a Detroit sportswriter whose New York love ranges on the Buster Olney level. He thinks that the Rays are a small media market, yet he forgets that we have an NFL team(with a championship and some good players), a NHL team(with a championship and some good players, as well) and now our MLB team is starting to show that it's good as well. Think again, Parker, we're a middle-market run by smart people. Rather than overspend on name recognition, we rather depend on cohesiveness and building from within to win. When a 40 MIL payrolled team wins 50 games through 82 games, it shows alot more to baseball fans than 150+ MIL payrolled teams doing the same. Yet chuckleheads like you continue to show biased ideas and use the money issue as a reason why we won't and shouldn't win.

What have New York-based teams shown for themselves in the last decade, again?

Tonight's game was record-breaking, to say the least.

-This 43rd win surpasses the former record of most wins(42, in 2004 when we won 70 games) going into the All-Star Game. We didn't reach 43 wins last year until August.

-First time that we've ever been 14 games over .500, breaking the old record of most games over .500.

-With tonight's sweep of the Cubs, it's the most series sweeps of 3 or more games ever in Rays History.

-First time all season that the Cubs have lost 3 consecutive games(remember this, Cubs fans)

-2nd Career Grand Slam by Carl Crawford(1st was Vs. Mike Myers and the Yankees)

-Most facetime that the Rays have been featured on Baseball Tonight on ESPN(hahaha, I had to).

If you didn't already know this, I am a resident of IL. Not by choice, but that is where I've spent my entire 25 years of existence. When you're from IL, you're either a Cubs fan or a Sox fan. I was never a fan of either. I really don't sway towards either, to appease either fandom...both, to me, are run by idiots(Hendry, Williams, Guillen and LOU).

The Cubs/Rays series is a match-up of perennial losers, of sorts, who have become 2 of baseball's "hottest" teams. The Cubs haven't won a World Series in 99 years, longer than they've played in Wrigley Field. The Rays haven't reached the playoffs, let alone 71 wins, EVER in their 11 year existence.

Like every Cub fan that I run into daily, "THIS COULD BE THE YEAR!!!" which usually turns into "WAIT TIL NEXT YEAR" by September/October for most Cubs fans.

The Cubs fans are so confident with their team nowadays, I see most looking at schedules and starting to guarantee wins against teams to almost a sickening extent.

So, you'd think that Cubs fans would be kinda conservative in regards to playing the Rays?? Nah, I've heard just about every Cub fan guarantee a 3-game sweep on our home turf.

Why, I ask, why would one perennial losing teams' fan do that?

Well, it's simple....overconfidence, lack of intelligence and not knowing this team. White Sox fans that I know have correctly tried to try to walk these overconfident fans off the edge, stating that there's something to this Rays team that isn't like the old teams of the past.

Let them think what they think, like the teams that have come in Tropicana thinking they're going to sweep us....let them fall and get their necks stepped on by a team that plays the same "NL Style" of run-manufacturing, but know how to make it work in the AL.

Let them think that Lou is a good manager, when we already know that he's horrible with youngsters and a horrible strategist.

Let them overlook us, so we can knock the winds out of their sails....

**Warning: The statements in this post are those of Jacob Larsen and do not represent the thoughts and opinions of staff of DRays Bay. Viewer Discretion is advised. -Jake**

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Josh Hamilton is in town, a former prodgical son who has found glory in the 2 years since we made a now-apparent 40-Man roster snafu and left him unprotected and eligible to be picked in the Rule 5 draft. "The Hammer," is a legitimate contender for baseball's near-impossible Triple Crown feat and isn't succombing to the demons the once almost ruined his career.

"What if we would've kept him? How many games would we be over .500 with his bat added to an already decent team?"

Questions like that, regretfully, make me angry. Yeah, it puts a bad taste in my mouth and makes me wonder if some fans can never see the brighter side of things or just are so screwed up by past humongous failures by the former ownership that they just find ways to not believe in the current product. That's another story for another day, so I'll just explain why Josh Hamilton may not exactly be what this team needs or wouldn't have turned out to be what he is today.

Putting his dominating stats aside, Josh Hamilton needed to be left off the 40-Man roster and become Rule 5-eligible. It's kinda like nature, where young animals are left to fend for themselves without a safety net. Andrew did the right thing for Josh, he got Hamilton back on track, getting him cleaned up and back into playing baseball again. Friedman basically could only get him from Point A-to-Point B, Josh had to put the rest of the work in to become successful.

However, I don't believe we gave up on Hamilton as much as people have been led to believe. We could've not spent all the money that we did, rehabbing him in various programs and pushing for his reinstatement as much as we did. We made a gamble, which turned out to be wrong, but when it happened...we didn't have any real worries. Hamilton was barely hitting close to as much power in short-season as he had shown in the past and he had to undergo knee surgery. We had Delmon Young too, who was believed to be our franchise RFer. We had solid outfielders all around, at the time.

Who were we to know that Delmon would be traded?

Who were we to know that Rocco would have a rare blood disorder?

Who were we to know that Dukes was a raving lunatic?

Outside of  Dukes,  nothing was really foreshadowed and we were alright with the risk that we may lose Hamilton.

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The following comments are that of Jacob Larsen and do not represent the thoughts and idea of the staff and management of DRays Bay. -Jake

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When I read the anti-stadium rumblings of fans and their reasonings for being so against moving out of Tropicana Field, I kinda laugh to myself. Nothing is more ironic than a Floridian complaining about weather, seeing as Florida experiences some of the best weather in the US. It's not called the Sunshine State for giggles.

However, it irks me that lack of on-site parking would become such a focal point and possible "deal-breaker" when it comes to the referendum needed to be passed to allow the demolishing of Al Lang Field and the building of what I dub "The Ark". Not sure what people have against walking, especially when basically the stadium is being bought and paid for without a single dime is coming from in-state taxpayers. I realize that people have grown accustom to the Trop, but it's pretty bad when our last series included us taking 3 out of 4 games versus the Yankees and barely drew over 50% capacity in any of the games, with half the series the Rays were playing the role of being the "best team in the AL"(winning percentage-wise) and "division leaders".

Why complain about the walks or the weather, when it's apparent that Tropicana isn't a place where fans want to be seen at either. "The Ark", however is at least innovative and asthetically pleasing?

Here's my gripe, from an out-of-state fans' point-of-view.

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I wonder if Stu knows that, somehow, "Chico's Bail Bonds" has appeared on the Rays' jerseys.

Not so long ago, when the Angels, Red Sox and Blue Jays came into town...It was bad news for the Rays. As a matter of fact, things in a good third of those games would probably get ugly and unwatchable.

However, it's starting to appear that fortune is starting to change in our favor and we're giving teams the fits that they used to give us.

While we're not completely perfect, however we're starting to get that killer instinct against teams and learning to put teams away rather than allow them to stay late in games. I don't remember how many games that I've watched in the previous 10 years in which we'd put decent amount of runs on the board, yet we'd get careless or lazy and just manage to lose games.

Gone are the days that we put a pitcher in from the 'pen and we groan and say "Ugh, (insert player's name) is in....we're toast!" I'm sure that I'm not the only one, but I'm sure some of the most loyal Rays fans have a smile on their face due to that.

5 Games over .500 is uncharted waters for the Rays, but why stop there? The earth isn't flat and we're not going to fall off if we surpass 5 games over. Let's hope that our team plays with chips on their shoulders, rather than listen to ESPN/Fox or any other fairweather media outlet who have started to toot Tampa Bay horns because the Rays have a better record than the Yankees. Last time out, when we had our 3-game sweep of the Red Sox, we had a day off and my only guess is that the team listened to all the BBTN positive remarks and they were quickly brought back down to earth on the Tuesday game.

I know a few posters here were alive when the original "Bad News Bears" movie was out in theatres, or was played on TV, and Walter Mathau's character was reading the schedule of the games up ahead.

Next up is the Yankees, what does it mean for the Yankees??

Bad news for the Yankees!!!

From Baseball Prospectus' Monday Morning Ten Pack

Jeremy Hellickson, RHP, High-A Vero Beach (Rays)
Hellickson’s full-season debut last year produced outstanding numbers, but many classified him as a good-not-great prospect because of his smallish stature and the sense that his command and pitchability allowed his admittedly above-average stuff to play that much better against less advanced hitters. The command and pitchability remains, but the stuff has improved this year, as the Iowa native is consistently touching the mid-90s with his fastball these days, including on Sunday, when he whiffed 11 over six innings but allowed one run, which raised his ERA to 0.93 in five starts. In 29 innings for the affiliate that still has the guts to put the ‘Devil’ in front of Rays, Hellickson has 41 strikeouts and two, count 'em two walks, and just like that, the Rays organization has another great prospect.

Montgomery is going to have a nice 1-2-3 punch in less-than-a-month,  hopefully(sure seems that way)

Want more, click for the "jump"

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