You Aren't Fooling Anyone Tampa
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by Tyduffy
With an earth-shattering announcement today a glorious era came to an end, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays are no more. The Tampa Bay franchise will now be known simply as "The Rays."
The club will also change it's color scheme, replacing the dominant green and black with navy blue and light blue.
The announcement came in front of a celebrating crowd of 7,000, no word on the ratio of "Rays" employees and coerced homeless men.
"I think this gives us an organization an identity," principal owner Stuart Sternberg said.
Two points.
First, this most certainly does give them an identity, as complete fools. How does this give the team an identity? The name doesn't even make sense. The logo has both sun "rays" and the tail of a sting "ray." They took a bad team name and made it simultaneously nebulous and meaningless.
Second, they stole the dark blue from the Padres. The freaking Padres! Why, of all the teams to blatantly rip off would you choose them? This is a team that wore shit brown as their primary color for much of their existence. This is a team that feels that it is completely acceptable to wear camo uniforms! Why of all teams would you choose the Padres as the paragon of fashion and taste?
If you want to change the identity of the franchise, build a team. The "models" that the Devil Rays brought out were their bench coach and two retired stars (who made their name elsewhere and chose Tampa as a destination for early retirement.) That should say something about how disgustingly putrid they have been.
There are many reasons the "Rays" franchise has struggled. Their potential market is mostly retirees with loyalties to their own teams, their stadium may be the worst in baseball, and their awful team has been consistently irrelevant in the toughest division in baseball to win.
The change of nickname and logo only glosses over these inherent and crucial problems that will plague that franchise for years to come. Like a sweaty man who douses himself in aftershave, the acrid stench of the Devil Rays will still linger.
Originally Posted at the OddsandSods
