Tropicana Field

A few weeks prior to my move to Portland, I visited my grandparents in St. Petersburg, FL to catch the Red Sox – Rays series at Tropicana Field (located in St. Pete and NOT Tampa Bay). This isn’t the first time I caught this particular series in at the Trop and hopefully won’t be the last (though the trip is much longer now). Of course, maybe “hopefully” is too strong a word. While I love seeing my grandparents, I somehow completely forgot how horrible it is to watch baseball at the Trop. It’s like pregnancy: the mind blocks out how terrible it is to keep you going. After two games of head-pounding awfulness, I decided to take notes on the experience. For those of you who’ve only heard rumors about Tampa Bay home games, this is for you, with the hopes that you’ll never experience it first-hand.
It’s truly difficult to know where to start. I don’t want to talk about the stadium itself because that is well-trod territory and I don’t want to feel like I’m piling on. Perhaps the first thing one notices pre-game is the “Ray Girls” running all around the field. I’m by no means a “good old days” baseball fan, but there really isn’t a place for cheerleaders in baseball. Maybe this is because they don’t have any choreographed routines and simply generically dance on top of the dugouts, but they offer little to cheer about. They are frequently accompanied by some Ryan Seacrest wannabe who acts as MC to the between inning entertainment. Why the actual team announcer can’t do a similar, but less annoying job of it is beyond me. The Rays appear to be marketing to a younger demographic, but latching onto trends in an entirely different media isn’t the answer. This aspect of Rays games feels like the worst parts of going to minor league baseball games.

The game starts, and I’ve got to give the Rays organization credit, they had some pretty neat National Anthem performers (a cappella quartet, trombone group, though, with the MLB essentially drawing players from all around the globe, the National Anthem seems a bit unnecessary unless we play all of the represented nation’s national anthems and I don’t think anyone wants that). However, there is no one at the stadium (17,000 to 20,000 tickets sold) and the Rays were still in the Wild Card race that was being led by… the Red Sox! And this is a year removed from a World Series appearance! Then comes the spine-tinglingly bad “Here Come the Rays” song that sounds like Kid Rock, but stupider and we’re ready for the line-ups.

A quick aside: bad music is just a part of sports. I acknowledge that I’m sort of a music snob, but you will never hear worse music played than at a sporting event. It is the arena where “Who Let the Dogs Out” and “The Macarena” still thrive. And the players perpetuate this with their at-bat music. The only player who used a somewhat interesting song was Evan Longoria. On the other hand, it is funny to see a bunch of middle aged and older men and women dancing around to hip-hop and the like.

As for the Rays line-up, I’ve never heard more booing for one’s own team than I have in the Trop, especially for B.J. Upton (a Rays fan actually cheered when Upton got hurt making a play) and Pat Burrell (can’t Burrell get a break anywhere?). My grandparents are as bad as anyone. While they don’t openly “boo,” they do nothing but talk about how horrible players are, and their whole section is in general agreement. I spent more time defending the Rays while wearing Red Sox gear than I think anyone else in the stadium. At least anyone else in the section. Which brings me to:

Everybody has an archaic view of baseball. I understand some of the reluctance to new statistics, but they are designed to better gauge how effective players are, so why wouldn’t one at least try to learn some of the more basic stats? VORP is Value Over Replacement Player and tells how many more runs a game the player adds to the team over a replacement level player. Pretty useful for seeing if a player is good or not. RBIs, batting average, wins, and ERA aren’t so good. It’s this view that makes everyone hate Joe Maddon because he does things a bit differently, but the Rays have never been as good as they have been under him (though I don’t believe the manager has too much responsibility for that, the fans still shouldn’t hate him like they do).
One special bit of fan hypocrisy was when high and tight fastballs knocked Sox batters to the ground. It’s generally accepted that it’s never OK the bean a batter on purpose, and while the pitcher may not be trying to hit that batter, the fans were certainly out for blood. Amidst the chants of “steroids” for Papi’s at bats (a subject for a later post), I wondered what happened to pious protectors of the game who suddenly started crying out for blood. Also, I never understood how fights started in the stands until a gloating Rays fan slapped my Red Sox hat off of my head. Fortunately, my grandparents were there for me to not want to lose my temper.

The Rays aren’t the only fans that act this way and some of my observations extend to other teams, but the worst is yet to come.

Generally, I like for the fans to take it upon themselves to start cheers for the team and not the sound operators. Sadly, this isn’t the case in Tampa. Doubly sadly, the prompting calls for the incessant rattling of cowbells throughout the stadium. Yes, the Rays hijacked the “gotta have more cowbell” SNL sketch and turned it into a weapon. Seemingly, Rays fans are too lazy to scream and clap like normal people and shake the shit out of cowbells causing headaches for everyone without a cowbell filter. Add to this the giant plastic horns and it’s worse than a hundred thousand Thunder Sticks. I almost had to leave the first game I went to due to a headache. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is why the Rays can’t draw fans. God forbid you sit in front of one of the horns. You may never hear again. The very least the stadium could offer is some sections devoted exclusively to obnoxious noise making toys.
And in case you forget, the Trop is a dome. There is nowhere for the sound to escape to. It bounces off of every surface and right back at you. Even the sound system is cranked to the clichéd eleven. The environment is positively oppressive. I understand home field advantage, but I cannot fathom the Rays players enjoying this racket. I’ve never been more aware of how afraid of silence people are until I experienced Rays’ baseball. Even when I went to the Tigers – Rays game, I couldn’t root for the Rays because that would be rooting for noise. At least when they are losing, the sound stops for the most part and the “fans” leave early.

To cap off all of the obnoxiousness, the Rays don’t even have a full scoreboard! You have to wait for games to cycle through on a giant screen that can easily fit at least one entire league’s worth of scores. And on the last night there, it wasn’t even cycling through American League games.

I’m in no positions to say Tropicana Field is the worst place to see a baseball game, but it can’t be far off.
One final general observation: people do weird things when the Jumbo-tron camera is on them.