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Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Thursday, July 03, 2008
Okay, you swept us. And while I do question a few moves made by the Glorious Teets—such as not pinch hitting Casey for Tek in the ninth last night, when it is painfully apparent to all that the Captain has become the Craptain in any situation that requires him holding a bat—I’m man enough to say that you guys came out of this series looking spry and hungry. We just look like a team that desperately needs a steak and a triple shot of Papi.
But instead of just taking the high road, letting your performance on the field speak for itself and figuring a sweep of the defending World Champs would be message enough to send to the rest of the world at large, you had to go and do it.
You played “Sweet Caroline” after the final out of last night’s game.
That’s a play right out of Smug Upstart Wannabes 101—the mark of a team that’s so confused by its own success, it feels it has to take these opportunities to step on the 600 pound gorilla’s nuts when he’s down, because it’s not sure it’ll ever have another chance to do so. It was sophomoric—instantly recalling the “1918” chant that was popular ‘round Tampa Bay before our 2004 heroics—and frighteningly lame. But it doesn’t surprise me.
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1. Hang down your head, Tom Foley Posted: July 03, 2008 at 09:18 PM (#2842291)Thankfully for fans of baseball karma, there's this:
I agree the Rays will finish ahead of Baltimore.
win it, and they will come.
you have to build something positive before the fans come, and I do doubt that Tampa will ever have the base that other teams enjoy regardless of their success, but they will have plenty of people on their side in September.
Harvard Debate Team's
Just another case of a Sux fan showing why they're the biggest losers of the baseball universe even in the midst of the team's winning ways.
I'm not like incredibly vocal about it, but I can pitch in with the snarking. Just as soon as I'm sure this isn't all some beautiful dream.
Seriously, though --
this.
There should be a name for the Rays worst to first season, like the Red Sox had with the Impossible Dream.
They don't make nicknames like they used to
Also, it's not like Scott Kazmir or B.J. Upton played the song. It was some guy in the press box. I'm not sure how that reflects on the players.
When I heard that, I started laughing my ass off.
No fake. "Waaah, the attention and love isn't on us anymore. PAY ATTENTION TO US!!"
Yes, because elderly bandwagoneers are central to any sustainable fanba... hey, the game starts late enough that if we get the early bird special we can still make it in time for the first pitch!
The Sweet Caroline thing was clearly aimed to needle the Red Sox (or their fans in attendance). It's the sort of thing the winning team get's to do (at least if they don't have their own traditions), so if the Sox don't like it they should win.
Rays are aquatic creatures, so how about "The Wet Dream"? It would work better if they didn't play in a dome.
Their park looks kind of like a blue turtle, anyway.
Yeah, but if you use that, Motoko will never be a fan...
The impossible dream is the name of a song, not the whole album (or musical).
So a more appropriate Sting based nickname for the Rays season would be "The Children's Crusade"
No. I never cared either way who won the last decade's Red Sox-Yankees battles because I'm a Pirates fan; just wanted to see good baseball. Then I moved to Tampa where, surprisingly, the Sox fans were WAY more obnoxious than the Yankees fans. The majority of Yankees fans are casual people who like the Yankees because they classically win all the time. The majority of Red Sox fans, like University of Florida fans, employ more homerism than Dick Vitale (also a Tampa guy, big Rays fan) on Duke baseketball.
All that being said: I like Remy and O-Dog on NESN. There's my disclaimer.
It is not that kind of pretentiousness that bugs some of us.
I think this was a pretty good needle, and BoSox fans should take it with a chuckle. When other fan bases hate you, it means your team kicks ass.
Unsurprising that Battery Commander kevin has no concept of "nouveau riche".
No, that's not what it means.
When other fan bases hate you, it means your team kicked ass at one point, thus leading to
A) resentment and envy from other fan bases
B) the development of hordes of arrogant bandwagoneers who inspire personal loathing from other fan bases.
But it doesn't mean that your team kicks ass at this very moment. For example, most fan bases hated the Dallas Cowboys even during the Quincy Carter era.
The only exceptions I can find to this rule is when a team's image is spoiled by a number of players turning out to be criminals or cheaters or something. But even if the Bengals of today, or the Trail Blazers of ten years ago, are hated, their fans aren't.
In fact, generally having a fan base at all indicates that your team has been successful recently. I live in Pittsburgh and it's unusual that I see a single person in a week who I'd be comfortable identifying as a "Pirates fan". The fan base has melted away, leaving no target for potential hatred or even scorn.
Hasn't Vitale always been a Yankee fan? Just another example of bandwagon jumping.
when did the Rays have a worst to first season? all i see is one year they went from worst to second to worst. j/k, i see what your saying and if they pull it off they deserve some cool nickname, either for the season or the team.
umm, what? where is there anything here about Sox fans not liking fans in other ballparks? i didnt RTFA, but I thought it was just some guy trash-talking about the Ray's PA music? Am I missing something?
and if other team's fans dont like us coming to their home games, fill the place up with your own damn people.
agreed, i thought it was a nice little touch
Wrong, because Cubs fans are second only to Red Sox fans in levels of D-baggery and their team hasn't kicked ass for a long long time. Some groups of fans simply act like idiots a great majority of the time. Not all, but some.
No, they should lose. Lots and lots of games. Fall into dead last. Then when the Mighty Rays sweep them they won't do anything special, just act like it was expected all along.
Right. That's why there are millions of people complaining about the arrogance of Rockies and Padres and Rangers and Mariners fans.
The Cubs are an exception.
You ever lived in a transplant city? I am sure part of what triggered this was Rays "home" games against the Yankees and the Red Sox being full of transplants and tourists and band wagoners being loud and in some cases obnoxious in their team gear. It gets old in a hurry, and the "fill the place with your own damn people" line--which I have heard from loudmouth east coast guys who'd moved to SoCal since I was a kid--would resonate a little better in cities with different demographics. Rays fans--and there are some--have been watching Red Sox and Yankee fans come into their ballpark and crow and yap since 1998, and have been looking up at the Yankees and the Red Sox since their inception. They finally get a little payback, and you get a guy on a blog whining about a needle.
You do of course have a point--the only way to shut them up is to win--but unless you have been on the other end of it, you don't get it. When I have watched my teams on the road, I have never talked smack or call attention to myself, based on seeing/hearing guys in Cub/Yankee/BoSox etc stuff in SD and Anaheim for years.
The Rays' music coordinator is Nelson Muntz. The Red Sox humiliated themselves (or were humiliated by the Rays), after which the PA system blared the equivalent of a "Ha-haw" aimed squarely at them. Classless, but inconsequential and a little funny.
Though the stakes were a lot higher, I don't recall any whiny "open letters" about the frighteningly lame low road to sophomoric bad karma. Nor the classless mistreatment of the Yankees' gorilla nuts.
My tipping point for most disliked baseball franchise is close at hand.
Though the stakes were a lot higher, I don't recall any whiny "open letters" about the frighteningly lame low road to sophomoric bad karma. Nor the classless mistreatment of the Yankees' gorilla nuts.
Joe Torre, I think, and possibly some of the players, complained about this in post game interviews, but from the point of view that it was disrespectful to New York as a City so soon after 9/11, rather than because it was disrespectful to the Yankees.
Jealousy woes.
Oh please.
At least the Yankees and their fans earned the right to this much obnoxious condescension.
My tipping point for most disliked baseball franchise is close at hand.
This one is beyond "oh please". More like uproarious gales of laughter.
Why, is there some kind of plane crash sound-effect in "Celebration"?
well fenway is a tourist haven so there is always visitors, especially for weekend yankees games. and when the Cards were there for interleague (03? 04?) they came out in full force, but no i've never lived in a transplant city.
i've been in the yankee stadium bleachers during the ny-bos lcs w/ a B cap on, so ive been to hell and back. I've also been to sox games in seattle/bal/philly and i'm not the loud obnoxious type, although some of me brethren are. I cant help but feel that some of the annoyance is on the sox road fans' sheer numbers more than their behavior but i might be wronmg and drunk. if we have enough numbers on the road to start a chant, i think its more fan-gamesmanship than obnoxiousness. Ive had to put up with yankee fans cheering Jeter hits at fenway but I have to admire their cajones doing it but also try to non-violently intimidate them into thinking twice.
Probably from overheated sports writers who were dying to tell us, in the same column, It's Just a Game and 9-11 Changed Everything.
There are more evil people on the planet anyway like Paul Collingwood...(sorry Richard - couldn't resist!)
This is from a distance, but I doubt that's been much of a problem for the Red Sox or Yankees in the last many, many years.
All of you, go back to where you are from.
The Rays' PA person needled the Sox after sweeping them at home. A long-standing Sox blogger needled them back. Ergo, the Sox have a loathsome and obnoxious fanbase? Seems to me that the bulk of any whining going on here is emanating from the increasingly teeming Boston Backlash Bandwagon. Must be standing room only on that wagon these days.
They keep adding new cars as folks get trampled and fall off the jam-packed Red Sox bandwagon.
Good thing you didn't read the Game Chatter last October when we bashed Lackey.
Found that amusing. Wasn't as cool as seeing Manny's 500th, but still pretty cool.
As a Sox fan, I couldn't have cared less that the Rays played Sweet Caroline after the series. Good for the Rays. They kicked the Sox' asses in every way in that series and the Sox embarrassed themselves on the field with disgraceful relief pitching and horrid situational hitting. Let the Rays do anything they want after that series; they deserve to have a little fun and the Sox deserved to have been humiliated by the shiitshow they put on down there.
Christ, I can't believe anyone was really upset by that stunt. It's entertainment and for the first time in their history the Rays fans are being entertained by a good baseball team kicking ass and not merely by the lovable antics of Raymond the Mascot. Let them have their fun after 11 years of suck.
No kidding. Surviving Grady comes across as awfully thin-skinned. It's kind of cool to see the Rays generating some excitement for the first time in their history. (And despite the "karma's a beeyotch" bit, it's pretty clear he feels threatened by the Rays, as well he should. They may not maintain the best record in baseball, but they're legitimately good, especially at the Trop.)
I was at the Manny 500th game, and they did that as well. Problem was, the did it in the inning break after Manny went yard, so they started playing the song and the Sox fans went nuts, and then Manny came out of the dugout to go to LF and the Sox fans went even more nuts, and no one paid any attention to the PSYCHE on the scoreboard and continued cheering Manny. Probably not the effect the O's were going for.
I swear I didn't hallucinate it.
Yeah, I know--I was at the same game with the BTF folk. That was my point--I got to see both!
Point taken about the timing, but I suppose you can't very well pull that gimmick at any time other than the 7th inning stretch.
As I said above, I really doubt that Red was sincerely "upset" by it. I think he just latched onto that as a subject for a blog post that was pretty much a tongue-in-cheek riff on the old saw about waking sleeping giants. "Oh no you didn't..."
I will admit that the entry certainly leaves itself open to being interpreted as candyass whining, but given the history of Surviving Grady I am happy to give Red the benefit of the doubt and assume that's not the spirit in which it was intended.
I was there with about 25 folks from SOSH. Maybe we could have had a rumble between boards after the game, heh.
So, in other words, the Yankee "fans" don't care that much and just like to win and the Sox fans are, you know, fans?
Seriously, though, Sox fans are obnoxious. Most sports fans are, in my opinion, and Sox fans are way up there in the obnoxiousness contest.
Also, I think we all need to genuflect before the great Pedro Jaime Martinez for laying the foundation for this rivalry. He always got those guys worked up. (See, especially, MLB regular season, 2000.) Man, he could start a rivalry with anyone. Smaller tips of the cap to Gerald "the Iceman" Williams, Worcester's own Tanyon Sturtze, and Trot Nixon.
I love the Rays, and think the PA guy deserves a round of applause. But I'm still pissed at the owners for removing "Devil" from the team name. I think we should call them the St. Pete Hell's Satans.
That's the worst part of it. They fill out your stadium and tell you variations of "deal with it/have more of your own fans show up/etc." but step one foot in Fenway with the visiting gear on and they act like it's the world's greatest insult- and proceed to let you hear how they feel about it.
I think I heard "OAKLAND SUCKS" "A'S SUCK" "SWISHER SUCKS" or something along those lines at least a dozen times yelled in my direction when I went last summer- which I'm fine with. Just don't get all whiny about it when the opposing teams/fans throw back shots your way when the pink-hat-brigade fills up some other park.
Getting smacked around for nearly a century by the Yankees would tend to sharpen one's senses when it comes to jealousy.
No need to rank Sox and Yankees. Huis Clos.
Apologies to Yankees/Sox fans who aren't jackasses. (See #68)
And don't forget Tampa's strong pro-union campaign, when they repeatedly targeted Brian Daubach in their retailiatory strikes.
And count me among the Red Sox fans who thinks the PA announcer's dig is pretty funny.
Ditto. I'm sort of happy for the Rays. I'd rather see them doing well than NYY or Baltimore. Wakefield and Varitek were on the Sox bak in '00. The longest tenured Ray is Crawford who didn't get called up until '02.
Okay, thank you. I was beginning to think I was crazy since I was the only one here with that interpretation. This doesn't mean I'm not crazy, but at least now I've got company.
I thought Baldelli had been called up before him, but it looks like that's not true. Guys on the 100,000-day DL might not count anyway.
Of course, at any moment they could call up a guy who played for them on April 2, 1998.
Okay, thank you. I was beginning to think I was crazy since I was the only one here with that interpretation. This doesn't mean I'm not crazy, but at least now I've got company.
No sale here. Read this again:
This is a common riff in fan culture, when an upstart knocks off a bigdog: You're a bunch of losers, and so when you do win, you can't handle it. The guy compared it to the "1918" chant--that does not seem like good-natured fun to me. The only tongue-in-cheek option that I see is the guy parodying a stick-up-his-ass Red Sox fan. Seems doubtful for a guy whose blog is called "Surviving Grady." I think he was pissed about the sweep and wrote a pissy entry to vent.
You ever had to put up with 15,000-20,000 or so of them in Fenway?
Also, one other reason that SoCal stadiums get invaded is that in SD and Ana, there is very little of this that I have seen:
Yes indeed. During the Angels' down period in the late 1990s, LA Times stories would run that as an angle--how the opposing fans outnumbered Angels' fans. Being next to Disneyland of course adds an element to it we do not get down here. Now that the Angels have been good for awhile, it is better.
Yes, I recall that you are A's fan attending college in Boston. Your last sentence encapsulates my point: if RSN is going to aggressively take its act on the road, it has to expect a little blowback. I have read several references to Sox fans breaking out "Sweet Caroline" in opposition ballparks.
I actually dislike the Red Sox now less than I used to. Now that the Curse BS is dead, they are just a big-money, winning team, which is fine with me. And, many of the Red Sox fans here at BBTF are great posters and seem to be good guys.
For what it's worth, these are overwhelmingly two different groups of people.
A tale of two Nations? FWIW, there's more bandwagoners living near me now. I think that they should make these people take a citizenship test. If they are over 40 and don't know who Stan Papi is, they are out! They also better know what pitcher was pinch hit for in Game Seven of the 1975 WS. 30-somethings need to know who would've been the 1986 WS MVP had it ended with Game Six. 20-somethings need to know what two-time All-Star replaced Wade Boggs at third base.
Scott Cooper. He was a default All-Star pick because every team had to be represented, and the Red Sox were crap back then.
All 16,000 of them?
He's been a Rays season ticket holder since inception, front row seats. He and Brian Knobbs are the resident celebs.
The other day it finally his me that the Rays have come of age. I've lived on and off in NYC for the past 7 years as a Rays fan. Normally, it was something more of a curiosity to people, and even when I went to games at Yankees Stadium, the Yankees fans would usually just playfully poke fun at me, since I was just a fan of the pathetic Rays. The other day I was walking around and started getting all kinds of dirty looks. It took about 10 minutes for me to figure out it was the hat - people in New York are actually pissed at the Rays. Kind of nice, for once.
Anyway, nobody has a right to complain that someone is co-opting your tradition when the tradition is only 5, maybe 10, years old. If they want to get revenge, the Sawks faithful should bring cowbells at their next home series against the Rays. That way they can steal our dumb, short-lived obnoxious tradition.
I hate a lot of Red Sox fans right now. Before 2004 if you saw somebody in Sox gear you assumed they were a big fan. Now you assume they hopped on the bandwagon. It feels like having gone to house parties in Aberdeen and then having some meathead tell you how great Smells Like Teen Spirit is.
Nevermind.
I cant begin to knowin
But then I know its growin strong
Was in the spring
And spring became the summer
Whod have believed youd come along
Hands, touchin hands
Reachin out
Touchin me
Touchin you
Sweet caroline
Good times never seemed so good
Ive been inclined
To believe they never would
But now i
Look at the night
And it dont seem so lonely
We fill it up with only two
And when I hurt
Hurtin runs off my shoulders
How can I hurt when Im with you
Warm, touchin warm
Reachin out
Touchin me
Touchin me
Sweet caroline
Good times never seemed so good
Ive been inclined
To believe they never would
Oh, no, no
Sweet caroline
Good times never seemed so good
Ive been inclined
I believed they never could
Sweet caroline
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