dem amazin' Rays

I've had a love-boredom relationship with baseball all my life. Growing up in Clearwater, the Spring Training home of the Phillies, I tried hard to be a Phillies fan. I saw Robin Roberts pitch. I got a cap with a funny-looking P glued to the front. The P eventually peeled off and so did my interest in baseball.

Fast-foward a long, long time. When our kids were little they started collecting baseball cards, featuring players I'd never heard of. We started watching games on TV, and when a player I never heard of came to bat, we all checked to see if we had his card. My interest in baseball began to perk up.

I bought a history of the rules of baseball and learned that the game goes 'way back. If you could resurrect your great-grandfathers and take them to a game, the game would look to them a lot like it did back when. Soldiers played baseball during the Civil War. The National League was started in 1876, the year Custer and the Seventh Cavalry were wiped out by the Indians.

I decided the history of baseball was more interesting than current events starring the Phillies and our hometown team, the Tampa Bay Rays. The Rays' franchise is going into its eleventh year and for ten years, they never had a winning season.

Until this year. Boy, this year! At the moment, they are the winningest team in Major League Baseball. If they hold on to their lead tonight against the Red Sox (5-2, top of the ninth), they will be 1 1/2 games ahead of the Red Sox.

Can the Rays make it to post-season play? Sure they can. Even a blind old hog can find an acorn now and then. But this year they have the talent to surprise everybody.