The Tampa Bay Rays have been dogged in their pursuit of excellence without extravagance, a process that has now lasted two decades and has seen enormous success, provided that October and November are missing from your wall calendar. They mastered the technique of buying low, selling cheap, and then rebuilding by buying low again, so well that they convinced many other owners around the league that their only true path was theirs. They beat baseball’s mythical salary cap by staying below what it would be through simple discipline — like refusing to pay big league salaries at market rate — and industry-leading player development. Good for them; they win a lot of football games most summers and the owners get together every winter. The ring for this must be huge.
But the Rays got a tough education in this World Series, and not just in being wiped out in five games by the Milwaukee Brewers. Aside from the 12th inning of Game 4, the Rays left no mark on the series; in every round played before midnight in the Eastern Time Zone, they were the inferior team. They were overwhelmed by the Brewers’ superior bullpen, the off-brand heroics of Cooper Pratt and Sal Frelick, and the more predictable heroics of William Contreras and Jackson Chourio. The difference between the best team in baseball and the best team in the American League was exactly as advertised.
That’s not the problem the Rays face today, however. There’s no shame in losing like they did, because the Brewers were the better team both at the start and end of the series. Every year someone finishes second. We know it. We checked.
The introspection comes now, when Rays management must consider the more ethereal issue of civic ambiance. The Rays were as improbable as the Brewers, and their story was just as compelling in that they too were seeking their very first championship. They had blithely rinsed the biggest spending team in their league to get there, just like the Brewers. They also benefited from the same larger narrative as the Brewers, and it’s the one we, as a culture, pretend to love: the plucky underdog who escapes being ripped off by others, the little guy who becomes big.
And yet the Rays played all five of their World Series games in front of strangers. Tropicana Field was, even by the most modest estimate, half-filled with Brewers fans willing to pay the same amount of money for tickets as their Florida counterparts before adding a few million on plane tickets, gas and hotels as a personal tax on fans. Milwaukee fell in love with this Brewers team and the broader Brewers story, and then came to prove it, price be damned. This is not the case for the Florida Bay Area. In one of the most important moments in the history of both franchises, the Brewers resonated, but the Rays did not. And in the case of the Rays, the “no” can be enhanced with the damning adjective “yet.”
Before you start turning purple, this doesn’t prove that baseball-loving citizens of Wisconsin are inherently better people than those of Florida. This is patently absurd. In fact, if you go to a Rays game, you clearly care in a way that Dodgers fans or even Brewers fans don’t, because you’re not riding a wave of local feeling along the major highway to the ballpark. You care about yourself, regardless of peer pressure, and good for you. You deserve this beer.
But it suggests that in the 18 years dating back to 2008, when both teams enjoyed demonstrable highs — Milwaukee’s first playoff appearance since 1982 and Tampa’s first playoff appearance, and fairly frequent comebacks thereafter — Rays owners, first Stuart Sternberg and now Patrick Zalupski, Bill Cosgrove and Ken Babby, have failed in arguably an owner’s most important task, which is to convince customers to consume the entertainment they present.
Earning money and acquiring real estate is the easy part; all it takes is weak civic government and an understanding of who greases the wheels and how they are greased. Creating the kind of civic connection between the team and the city that the Brewers have and the Rays don’t is something different and more difficult. Although owning a sports team is a great business, we judge not by mere obscene profits but by maximizing those profits. Much of the appeal of owning a team lies in the unique power these properties have when it comes to the love and incidental fortunes of your neighbors.
The question of the Rays’ ballpark and its location is no reason for fans to remain apathetic about a World Series. This argument resonates every day, because the Trop is not in Tampa, and people who know the area will tell you that Tampa is where the park should always have been. But as an owner/entrepreneur, you’re selling the World Series as the rarest and most satisfying perk for years of fan (and taxpayer dollars) forbearance. If that doesn’t work, what else do you have to offer in exchange for their money? Why are you here exactly?
Did the Brewers’ energy in the Trop change the series? No. This is not a question of competition. The Brewers were able to use Aaron Ashby and the Rays couldn’t find a way to use Bryan Baker. Chourio hit .458 and Junior Caminero hit .211. The Brewers had Jacob Misiorowski on regular rest and the Rays had Drew Rasmussen on short rest. Baseball was baseball, and it happened the way it happened. The Rays were a very good team that came up against a better one. It happens.
But it’s hard not to wonder what the Rays’ new owners will take away from this series. If their answer is, “We’ll have a new stadium, in a better location, and then you’ll see,” that implies that Rays fans are just there for better parking and wider concourses. Maybe they’re right, but it still begs the question: Is the World Series worth more than three or four extra dates at the park? That’s not a question they ask in Milwaukee.
Gn sports
