ESPN will still on occasion tear itself away from the subjects and sports leagues with which it shares bed space, and so it was with Alden Gonzalez' 2,800-word free-weight on the newly innovative (wait for it, and don't spit out your coffee when you see it) Miami Marlins. Whether or not this story is a compelling argument for the resuscitation of this largely cursed and generally ignored franchise, it is at least an acknowledgement that most of what Miami has been doing for the previous three decades has amounted to buying 30 calendars and taking the rest of the year off.
Meanwhile, a team that truly changed baseball to its great competitive benefit is closing in on twenty years of mostly consistent success with only two holes in their CV—a World Series, and anyone else giving a damn. Now there's something for the Marlins to reflect upon as they talk about re-imagining baseball, perhaps by doubling down on their stolen base fixation by hitting more inside-the-park home runs.
We are referring, of course, to Miami's brother without a mother, Tampa Bay. As the day dawns the Rays are preparing for a weekend series with the New York Yankees; the Rays, not the Yankees, come into this series with the best record in the American League, thanks to a run of 21 wins in their last 25 games that staked them to a four-game lead on New York. It is not a fluke—the Rays have the third highest success rate in the sport since they stopped trying to do everything everyone else was doing in 2008. True, that was also the year they shortened their nickname from Devil Rays at the behest of some religio-whackjobs who thought the franchise was invoking Beelzebub rather than a charming bit of local aquatic fauna, but that's not how they turned things around, and it sure isn't how they've kept everything pointed in the right direction. That was done mostly through innovations in roster, rotation, and game construction that bother some folks even today, and through a dedication to keep messing around with what works to see if it could be made to work better. This hasn't won them a World Series, but it has had a measurable impact on the game as we understand it.
That said, it hasn't made the Rays any more nationally noticeable; even locally, they have not drawn two million fans since their first season. We are still a nation of label-sniffing snobs, especially in sport, and while the Rays have won their share of grudging admiration, they never been declared to be cool even in passing. They're not remotely cool even today. Unless you are in a very deep fantasy baseball league, speaking of things that are not cool, you probably can't name five Rays. Most fans probably can't name their manager, even though he has the longest tenure in Major League Baseball. When the idiot on the next stool wants to complain about money in baseball, the Rays will not come up. The Rays are the third winningest team in the sport since 2008, while having spent thirty percent as much (or $2.8 billion) as the two teams above them—the Yankees and Dodgers, as you might have guessed. They have won 264 more games than Miami while spending roughly the same amount of cash.
In other words, if the Rays are capable of surprising you, that moment is now. But if you've bothered to notice them at all during their nearly two decades around the top of the table, they are not capable of surprising you; you'll already know that this is their MO. They have been a success in plain sight while remaining spectacularly anonymous through it all because the national audience, or the people selling the game to that audience, somehow want it that way. Junior Caminero? Who's Senior Caminero? Yandy Diaz? You mean the Astro? No, that's Yainer. Chandler Simpson? You mean that smarmy guy from Friends? Nick Martinez? You sure it's not Angel, Justin, Omar, or Seth Martinez? What if we used his nickname, which Baseball-Reference claims is Tricky? No? Damn it.
This is not to convince you that the Rays need to be a focus of your lives, or even a sliver thereof. We are just reveling in the notion that there is a highly decorated America's Team specifically for folks in witness protection. There are hundreds of teams and thousands of athletes, and if your taste in players runs to more familiar names like Shohei, LeBron, Nathan, Caitlin, Jhostynxon or Ildemaro, fine. If you like your team but hold a special place for your satisfying hatreds, you already have the Patriots, Thunder, Yankees, various Inters, Reals and FCs, or Golden Knights.
We are merely here to remind you that the Rays represent that rarest and most remarkable of American phenomena—a team that wins without casting a shadow. Every other team you have no opinion about has a reason for that lack of opinion, whether it be having no exceptional player, existing in a small market, or indifferent results. Hell, we find time to notice the New York Jets, Colorado Rockies, New Orleans Pelicans, and Vancouver Canucks, mostly because they routinely stink. But the Rays are a different matter entirely. Their biggest moment this decade was watching the roof get torn off their stadium by the ridiculously named Hurricane Milton. Their most famous All-Star ever was Jose Canseco, and you never even knew that he was a Ray. Their highest paid player this year (and ever) was the erstwhile super-prospect Wander Franco, whose latest achievement was being granted a new trial in the Dominican Republic on Tuesday in hopes of overturning his conviction and two-year sentence for sexually abusing a minor.
And all of this is possible, and in Franco's case condemnatory, because for 18 years the Rays have been American sport's greatest secret. Undeserved? No. We as customers regard success as a secondary or even tertiary reason for tithing some portion of our dwindling attention spans to athletes or the teams to whom they are currently attached. We say we like equality but are as hooked on often-inbred dynasties as the Brits. We say we're sick of the Dallas Cowboys but watch them in greater numbers than any other football team. We say we want new young faces in the NBA but maintain our fealty to LeBron and Curry and Giannis, and argue about Larry Bird and Michael Jordan whenever the conversation dims. Sports is not the most hypocritical American pursuit, but this is only because there is so much competition.
All of which is to say that the Tampa Bay Rays are this year's most fascinating story because, if they sweep the Yankees this weekend, and if they continue to hold the best record in the game into July and August and September, and if they continue to behave as they have the last month, it will still be interesting to see when they get noticed by anyone for anything short of going 20-7 in September while playing in the nude. And when we say "interesting," we of course mean "of no particular interest to anyone," no matter how many new things they try. We can hope to be wrong all we like, but the smart money culturally is always on the status quo, as unedifying as that might be. That should be an educational development to the cutting-edge future-forward Marlins—sometimes the same numbers have different values depending on their owner, and sometimes life is just going to be a beige-colored tablecloth no matter how much blood you shed at dinner.
