“Embarrassed”

Longo Angry

Evan Longoria and David Price didn’t take the field for the Tampa Bay Rays on Monday night, but after a 4-0 loss to the Baltimore Orioles, they did make the biggest statements.

Longoria and Price are embarrassed and disheartened, and not because the their teams struggled against the 94-loss Orioles. They’re embarrassed because on a night when the Rays could have clinched a playoff spot with a victory, attendance at Tropicana Field was 12,446, the fourth-smallest crowd of the season.

“For us to play 155 games and go a full season of playing really good baseball, it’s kind of like, what else do we have to do to draw fans into this place,” Longoria said. “It’s actually embarrassing for us.”

Price chimed in on his Twitter account saying: “Had a chance to clinch a post season spot tonight with about 10,000 fans in the stands…embarrassing.”

Most people will start to read this and complain about how often this topic is brought up. Well, there is a reason why the topic is brought up so much and that’s because it’s freaking bizarre.

While re-gaining their position as one of the best teams in baseball, the Rays have somehow managed to see attendance drop from a 2009 season when they were largely irrelevant. People have been trying to make sense out of Rays’ attendance since the team finally became a winner in 2008. But it’s an endless battle because Rays’ attendance is unconditionally consistent.

What do I mean by that?

I mean that Rays attendance remains steady regardless of the magnitude of the game. Weekday attendance is not good. It isn’t good when they’re playing the Royals and it wasn’t good when they had a 2009 World Series re-match with the Phillies that was played out in front of 20,000 empty seats.

Cue the Whitney Houston.

Weekends are better, but that means that for every 25,000 fans they’re getting twice a week, there are five weekday home games in front of 12 to 15,000. It doesn’t matter if they’re winning or losing, or if it’s a playoff-clinching game or a mid-July sleeper.

There’s also the shallow brand-recognition of opposing teams. I’m almost convinced that a weeknight game against Texas could never sell-out under any circumstances. Because in the strange, droll minds of Rays’ fans, Texas games are not allowed to have any more than 14,000 fans in attendance [see Price-Lee showdown].

This is strange because this is such a bandwagon community. The Rays just assumed that the same people that suddenly became Bucs fans in 1997 and Lightning fans in the early 2000s would suddenly become Rays fans too, but it hasn’t happened and it probably won’t.

Sure they’ll be there for the playoffs. They’ll be wearing shirts with tags on them and probably sporting mohawks because they were cool the last time they were Rays’ fans. I have no problem with bandwagon fans. Every fan base in America is in a way bandwagon because eventually a team wins something or else it fails to exist. I’d just like to see them take up going to a couple of regular season games. The existence of “your” team depends on it.

Longoria spoke his mind, something he said he’s been wanting to do for awhile. The result has been pretty bad for him. The immediate backlash has ranged from bitter St. Pete people blindly defending their apathetic support through angry posts on the Twitter accounts of Price and Longoria and blog comments to the more reasonable economic response of Nicholas Carlson of BusinessInsider.com.

But the economy is bad everywhere. Detroit is basically a third-world country and the Tigers are averaging over 30,000 as an average team. Don’t want to compare the Rays to a team that’s been around 100 years? How about comparing them to the Arizona Diamondbacks(est. 1998), the last-place team in the NL West that is averaging over 25,000 per game.

Economy: Bad everywhere. Attendance: Not.

Everything about Monday night screams “get us the hell out of here.”

Attendance sympathists are quick to point out that the Rays have some of the best local television ratings in all of baseball. The Marlins have been claiming the same thing for years, but that doesn’t change the fact that their low attendance forces them to have one of the lowest payrolls in baseball.

Rays supporters can defend those that don’t make it out to the ballpark as much as they want, but they also have to remember that it is largely their fault when the team’s marquee players start leaving town.

There will be something of a fire sale after this season. That’s what happens when you need to cut payroll by $21 million because you’re over-spending in hopes of a championship spark in town. But owner Stu Sternberg won’t be the villain. It will be the people who asked for a winner and then ignored it.

Try arguing that people are making too big of a deal out of attendance if the scheduled minor leaguers that are set to take over don’t pan out.

And don’t expect Longoria’s outlook to be anymore cheerful or polite when he’s surrounded by the Durham Bulls, and watching Carl Crawford steal bases for the Anaheim Angels or Rafael Soriano close out games for a team that can sell-out important games.

Longoria and Price are bound to be here for some time because of lengthy contracts. That doesn’t mean they have to be happy about it.

Longoria and Price’s comments surely won’t help the cause any. Millionaires telling people in one of baseball’s poorest markets that they embarrassed them by not shelling out for tickets isn’t usually a great motivator.

But in the happy-go-lucky world of the Rays where players dress funny for road trips and wear plaid hats during batting practice and enjoy playing to empty blue seats, it’s nice to see somebody play hardball.

Attendance will almost certainly be low again tonight with Price on the mound and champagne bottles waiting in the clubhouse. In plenty of cities, they’ll look on with envy. This team has three-winning seasons in a row, two playoff appearances in three years and nobody seems to care. Some of those cities have baseball teams that have been terrible for decades. Some of those cities don’t have a baseball team. Those are the cities that the  Tampa Bay area should be worried about.

Nashville could be a nice baseball town.

As a Rays fan, I’ve bounced back-and-forth on this issue time and time again. But last night, it was pretty simple. Get this team out of here.

Go Rays, you deserve better than this.

-Bryan