Over the course of the history of this weblog and my blogging in general on the Internet, I’ve had some problems with the Tampa Bay professional baseball franchise. I’ve had some problems with the mainstream coverage of the team when moves were made (blindly) to improve the team in 1999. The gaffes, the laughs, the horrors… Larry Rothschild, Hal McRae, Lou Pinella, Chuck “Chuckles the Clown” LaMar and some of the beyond-bizarre moves that he made as GM, and of course Vincent J. Naimoli who rounded out the ills and the thrills and the chills of the first few years of Tampa Bay baseball.

I’ve also lashed out blindly and ignorantly - trying to connect the dots that just weren’t there - to current Rays managing general partner Stuart Sternberg. I thought something sinister was afoot and recalled recent ill-conceived notions of contraction by Major League baseball.

I don’t have the links right now to all this “goodness”. And I don’t really want to spend time researching it. No.

Why? Because in their 11th season, almost 11 years to the day of the 1997 expansion draft, the Tampa Bay Rays ballclub will be participating in game one of the 2008 World Series.

That’s not a misprint.

That’s not a typo (and I should know, I make many).

I day I did not expect once again is here. Through all the squabbles I have been through both this season and in seasons past, I never really expected to see this day. I didn’t expect this team — the Wunderkids of St. Pete — to get thsi far though I could very well see them making a pennant chase.

And still ghosts haunt me. While I revel in Carl Crawford, Evan Longoria, Scott Kazmir, Andy Sonnenstine, Akinori Iwamura, Carlos Pena and the rest of the Tampa Bay roster… The unease of days past still linger. Brian Kelly, Greg “Toe” Nash, Jose Canseco, Gregg Vaughn, Wilson Alverez, and so on and so forth. The names are malignancies that have not been wiped out just yet.

So while I revel int he impossible — the Rays getting this far — it seems surreal to me. It will undoubtedly remain unreal to me for a long time to come. This is the apex of Tampa Bay’s baseball history. A quest that spanned decades and routinely pulled up disappointment.

And the question that stands out in my mind isn’t “How will it end?” No, it’s how much higher to the top? Because that’s where a Ray shines from — the top. And all this team has done this season is shine.

Shine on, Rays.

Congratulations to the 2008 Tampa Bay Rays.

From out of no where, having never won more than 70’s games, to League Champions… That is a huge hill to climb.

And it ain’t over yet!

The blogosphere is teeming with posts about the Rays win, but I’ll just link to a select few threads:

• Sticks of Fire
• DRaysbay
• Rays Index
• Sports Talk - Tampa Bay Sports Blog

Technical and off topic mumbo jumbo here…

I’d like to point out that, for a year or so, I have had in my ownership a domain name of a site that I thought went dead… Tampa Bay Sports Net (the domain name is tbsports.net). I snatched the domain up when it expired and have held onto it for safe keeping and possible use in the future. If you visit the domain, it currently points here (as does Raw Lightning)

While doing some research on Friday for a friend, I happened across… well? Tampa Bay Sports Net — the same Tampa Bay Sports Net that had previously owned said domain name. I’ve attempted to contact them through email and through their site (contact form is broken) because I had no malicious intentions when I snatched up this domain name. I was and am hoping to return tbsports.net to it’s proper owner.

So let me publicly request someone at TBSN1.com get in touch with me if they’d like their domain name returned to them. Thanks.

Very much off topic…

I grew up a Mets fan, living in a small village on Long Island in New York. I can remember, as a young kid, how everyone was going nutso for the Amazin’s of 1986. I didn’t truly grasp it, but in the following years I grew to love and cherish baseball — in general and New York Mets baseball. It followed me to Tampa Bay through the early 1990’s as I had access to WOR telecasts through local cable. All of this while I was drawn into the local quest for Major League Baseball.

So it doesn’t come as a surprise that I’ve been aware of New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon’s long sought Ebbets-Field inspired successor to Shea Stadium for more than a decade. My recollection may be wrong, but the first time in national print that I saw reference to the famed model of Shea’s replacement, it was a Sports Illustrated article that focused on former Mets general manager Joe McLlvane and the building-with-youth Mets of 1995/96 or there abouts. Two years before it’s public unveiling.

But the point of this post isn’t supposed to be about the previous version of what is now known as CitiField, nor about CitiField itself which contains the “Ebbets-Field inspired” architecture and a uniqueness that I can’t quite imagine.

That’s partly because I hold fondness for Shea Stadium.

The above should be looked at as the most absurd statement someone can make about Major League Baseball. Yet having been a fan of the Mets and having read about and reveled in some of Shea’s storied eccentricities and history (Yeah, yeah, yeah and so much more) I’m hurt and saddened about it’s in-progress demise.

Yeah, in progress.

15 days after the last public event at William A. Shea Stadium in Flushing Meadows, New York, the deconstruction of the Mets home field has begun in earnest. Stadiumpage.com has a few snap shots and I am sure that there are more out there on the web.

It seems surreal to see Shea with all seating removed, with the lamps ringing the stadium removed. And imminently, it’ll start being torn apart. 44 years of baseball (some of the worst and most miraculous in Major League history), of musical performances, of airplane derived annoyance and other landmarks and eccentricities will be coming down. And like many of the stadiums that have gone before it — pulled down in order to make space for parking.

For more on the end of Shea, visit Mets.com / MLB.com.

Rays / Red Sox about to get underway on TBS (why the hell did MLB approve putting all playoff games in the first two rounds on basic cable?!) but I wanted to bring up MSNBC trying to milk everything out of Tim Wakefield’s start tonight in an online column.

I’ve got loads of respect for Wakefield and can remember him from his early days with the Pittsburgh Pirates (when he wasn’t just a knuckleballer but one that would throw it fast). Between longevity and tenure, he gets a nod from me…

But Joe Maddon brought up a great point in the milk-this-drama-to-the-max article:

“When (the knuckleball) is righteous and on, nobody hits it on any given day.”

Nine innings of baseball… Don’t get cocky, don’t get complacent and don’t get frustrated if the Knuckleball is on tonight, Rays fans. At least two more games — starting right about now.

Update: 8:57 PM EDT: I stand corrected. Tim Wakefield chased after 3 innings. We go to the top of the fourth — Rays lead 5-1.

…which doesn’t mean I will be blogging more often but I was tired of the old design, big time, for Boltsmag.

As it stands, it’s not easy to find comments unless you visit the permalink for the post. That should be corrected with time.

BUMP AND UPDATE 10-07-2008: Some aspects of the site are still not working and I can’t quite remedy them until next week. I’d appreciate it if people can either use the contact form and report errors on the site or try to leave a comment (I can’t guarantee comments will get through with thanks to anti-spam software).

Shane O’Brien is history, along with Michel Oullett. While Michel never worked out, I had and continue to have high hopes for Shane. The system here in TB has changed — and it remains to be seen if for the better - and his return to the western conference may pay off big dividends for the Canucks.

Pretty soon, last years roster will be completely turned over — let alone any remaining bright spots from the previous administration.

One of Boltsmag’s longtime readers introduced me to a game that he and a few local bloggers up north put together for Washington Capitals fans and Toronto Maple Leaf fans. It’s called Pick SPG and it’s a pick’em game but not of the traditional sort where you pick the winner of games…

Nope, you’re picking production:

SPG is an online game where you predict which players on your favorite NHL team will get the first shot on net, take the first penalty, and score the first goal for each period in a game, including overtime & the shootout.

There’s more information about the game on the SPG website. Gary would love to add more teams (the Lightning specifically) but there has to be enough interest in order to do it… That and someone dedicated to administrate additional teams.

A joke thread was started over at Calgary Puck over the summer. I’m partly to blame for it but not as much as the ticket rep with the Lightning who sent out the mailer in question that was reposted over on those boards:

Don’t miss out on the hottest tickets in town, since the Lightning have welcomed their new owners, there has been nothing but excitement over here at the Forum. In just one week we have added Power forwards Ryan Malone, Radim Vrbata and Gary Roberts. We have also drafted rookie phenom Steve Stamkos and signed Goalie Olaf Kolzig. This team has gone from being in the basement of the NHL to one the best teams in the league, and maybe one of the best teams in NHL history!! Now is the time to come on board in our luxury seating areas.

…

Emphasis added by me and the remainder of the ticket offerings snipped.

Now, we’re 2 games into the 2008-09 season but is a 19 shot effort at all living up to the hype that this ticket rep put out? How about the 21 shot effort the day before, where Vincent Lecavalier was the only player able to put up more than a pair of shots on goal?

Right now, that ticket rep email looks even more like a joke to me. Maybe that’ll change after Saturday’s game versus the Hurricanes back in North America? Or perhaps we’ve been introduced to what will be one of the longest seasons for TB fans since the late 1990’s?

Opening day for the Tampa Bay Lightning and you know what?

I had no clue it was today.

I had no clue start time was before noon here in the Tampa Bay television market. I had no clue what station it was goign to be broadcast on — nationally!…right?! This is an international game after all and… what? Sun Sports? Oh…

It’s the perfect storm for the Tampa Bay Lightning in the Tampa Bay sports market. An offseason of upheaval, a roster converted, a new coach whose claim to fame is television and the mullet he sports. Huge contracts, huge egos, new front office personnel and of course an entirely new roster. That was the events of this summer — it’s a long way away from the hype of “Seen Stamkos?”.

And even with all the changes, it got lost in the mix of the news. Presidential election politics (yeah, that’s a sport too — just look at any partisan supporter online and you’ll see someone not objective but a homer of one political bend or another), the Farve fiasco and continuing stupidity at One Buccaneer Place; and that little baseball team in St. Petersburg… I heard they are doing quite well too.

And where do the Lightning fit into all this? How much do you know about the enw members of the roster? How much extra exposure have you seen to new cogs on this team? Odds are, you haven’t seen shit besides billboards touting Vincent Lecavalier around the Tampa Bay area. That’s a far cry to a team competing for fans in a marketplace.

All these distractions in the news, and O.K. Hockey not doing much in the way of marketing to get their name out… And what else has happened? The Bolts have to open the season in Europe. So while the coverage has been muted in the sports section of each local rag (with thanks to the Rays, the Buccaneers and college footbal), there is a further lack of exposure to roster moves, camp hype, position battles and all that jazz.

The puck dropped, the season has started. Now who in this marketplace is aware? Surely the die hards, but beyond that?

There is a lot of noise in local sports right now and everything that has led up to this moment from the summer past has been drowned out, passed over or flat out forgotten. And that’s a failing that will reverberate at one degree or another as the season goes on.