They're a bit sensitive about all this down there. It's kind of embarrassing to be the last people in the galaxy to know when your own team is, like, you know, really, really, really good.
They're full of excuses, most of them centering on the fact that the team's original owner was a joke. Vince Naimoli really was a horrible owner, and a combative one to go along with it. So you cut those people a little slack and allow them to wallow in a small pool of self-pity. It is tough when a team that came into major league baseball the same time yours did is pouring world championship champagne while your miserable team is 62-100 and going backward in its fourth year of existence. That, of course, is what happened in 2001 when Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling and Luis Gonzalez, proud veterans all, led the Diamondbacks past the Yankees.
Of course, the Devil Rays, as they were known in those days, had veterans, too. They just happened to be the wrong ones. The 1998 expansion Devil Rays provided Wade Boggs a safe haven in which to hit No. 3,000 (a homer, no less). In the first four years of their existence, the Devil Rays opened their arms and, to some degree, their checkbook to such aging luminaries as Fred McGriff, Jose Canseco, Julio Franco, Vinny Castilla, and Greg Vaughn. They were supposed to hit home runs, win games, and have fans engaging in fistfights to secure the best seats at Tropicana Field, the indoor monstrosity that had been constructed in the hopes a Tampa/St. Pete group could pry the Giants away from San Francisco.
They lost an average of 99 games a year between 1999 and 2002. By the end of 2002, the team having lost 100 games two years in succession, the average attendance had slipped to 13,158, or slightly less than the number of women waiting to enter the ladies' room in the late innings of a game at Fenway Park.
