Tampa Trip Trumps Tropicana

By David Mast
Special to Krukster.com

On my recent vacation to Sarasota Florida, I had the privilege of taking my three sons and my beautiful wife to a pair of Tampa Bay Rays games at Tropicana Field in Tampa. The first was a scintillating match-up against their rival, the hated Boston Red Sox. The second was a matinee affair against the lowly Kansas City Royals.

In between, was a one-hour trip from Sarasota to Tampa to see the series finale between the Rays and Sox, in which we couldn’t get tickets from the box office (sold out) and wouldn’t pay $50 for the exact same seats we had watched the two teams from on the previous night, only for $10 each.
However, for the two games we did get in to see, we experienced a wonderful outing at the ballpark, watching hardball at its best.

Obviously, the Red Sox game was outstanding, since the Rays (at the time) held a slim lead in the AL East.

It was a terrific pitching dual, and the Rays eked out a 4-2 win, with Grant Balfour closing the door in the 9th by striking out the side, much to the joy of a thunderously enthusiastic crowd.

The Royals game wasn’t as exciting, but was a win nonetheless.

Any time you can get into an MLB game to witness the greatest players on earth playing the greatest game on earth, it’s a good time.

I talked situations with my boys, we wandered the corridors of the Trop, and even got to pet the dozen pet stingrays floating around in the stadium’s giant aquatic tank.

Normally a staple of the East cellar, the Rays have an abundance of young talent who have turned the fortunes of the team around this year.

The atmosphere was electric, and we found ourselves magically transformed into Rays fans immediately.

However, despite the tremendous ball being played, live animals and play-off type atmosphere, nothing could cover up one stark fact: Tropicana Field is a horrid baseball stadium.

It reeks.

There is nothing attractive about the place at all, especially when some buffoon leaps to his feet and spills his beer all over the floor around you.

The Trop is a dank, ugly lifeless shell of a dome, in which even the artificial grass somehow looks diseased.

And as for the parking, it’s okay if you like to walk eight blocks along destitute, dark streets at night. There is really no large parking lot to speak of, and its appeared to us as though any business within a half-mile radius of the park was sending their employees out to make a quick $5 or $10 on a carload of fans by allowing them to use their lot.

I can only imagine what the scene will look like should the Rays actually make their way into the playoffs.

The entire stadium looks like something that was the brainchild of a 13 year-old who was assigned an art project which mandated him to create a model baseball stadium out of clay.

To call The Trop ugly would be a huge slap in the face to all that is truly ugly in the world.

Yet despite this mammoth zit on the face of Tampa Bay’s landscape, there we were, enjoying ourselves immensely.

And no, not even reptilian-like curmudgeons Mike Reno, Paul Dean and the rest of hair-band of the 80’s rock group Lover Boy could destroy our joy of the game of baseball (My wife said no old man should be gyrating around on stage like Reno was in a leather vest with arm flab swinging violently to-and-fro).

Why?

Because it was Major League Baseball we were watching — the greatest game on our fine planet.
It was deciphering whether Carl Crawford would run on a 0-2 pitch with two outs in the fourth inning; how to get a bigger jump off of a left-hander; how the Red Sox couldn’t hit a ball out of the infield while Ben Zobrist can triple and homer in the same game; and how some dude named The Cowbell Kid can captivate a crowd with his wildly insane and extremely vocal antics — and not get thrown out of the stadium on his gigantic yellow afro.

It’s what makes baseball at that level so much fun.

And now, as a special tribute to my family, won’t you all sing along with me, the song of The Cowbell Kid, who belted out this doozie each and every time Rays’ first-baseman Carlos Pena strode to the plate.

“Olé, olé, olé olé ... Go Rays, Go Rays!
“Olé, olé, olé olé ...” (Repeat several thousand times).

ola
Jarvis Tatum