It’s been a devil of a ride for Rays fans

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It’s finally safe to come out of the closet. The reason for ridicule and pity is gone. For the first time in my life I can admit, in polite company, that I am, and have been for some time, a fan of the Tampa Bay Rays.

Whew! That felt good. Amazing what one American League title can do.

But to appreciate the good times, you had to have lived through the bad times. You had to have sat through games in the Trop, a ballpark that looks like an orange juicer from the outside and like an erector set from the inside. You had to have been there to watch the 2006 team lose 59 games in which they led. (Things were so bad that summer a Rays’ minor leaguer was suspended 50 games for hitting an umpire with a bat.) You had to have been there for the 10 summers in which the Rays averaged more than 97 losses a season.

Oh, excuse me. Make that the 10 seasons in which the DEVIL Rays averaged more than 97 losses. They’re the Rays now. They changed the team colors from green to blue and exorcised any references to Satan over the winter.

And lookie here, a trip to the World Series was heaven sent! If they had only known it was the name and the colors that were holding them back, I bet they would have changed them a long time ago.

But back to the old days.

I remember being in manager Hal McRae’s office during a streak in which the Devil Rays lost 15 out of 16 games. After yet another tough loss, a frustrated McRae appeared to be on the verge of tears as he ripped through a profanity-laden meeting with the media.

Suddenly a radio reporter burst into the room and asked McRae brightly what he thought of Chris Gomez’s performance. Although Gomez hadn’t homered in a week, the radio reporter apparently figured out that, with seven home runs, he had broken the franchise’s career record for home runs by a shortstop.

McRae burst out laughing. And now the tears did come. ‘I played with shortstops who hit that many in week,’ McRae said.

Then there was the time the Rays won eight of nine games during a late-June road trip and came home to find the local papers running the American League wild-card standings -- even though the wild-card standings weren’t officially calculated by baseball until Aug. 1. There was even talk of a victory parade with more than three months left in the season.

Still, that was the closest Tampa came to pennant fever until this year.

This, after all, is a franchise that once traded an All-Star outfielder, Randy Winn, to the Seattle Mariners in exchange for the right to negotiate with outgoing Seattle Manager Lou Piniella. A Tampa native, Piniella was enticed to come home and save baseball in his hometown. But after three seasons in which he lost 90 or more games, he decided to save his sanity instead and headed to Chicago to take over a franchise that hadn’t won a World Series since 1908.

It seemed like a good move at the time.

But through it all, the Rays were as exciting as they were clueless. Watching Joey Gathright, the fastest man in baseball, run the bases were breathtaking -- even if he did occasionally wind up on the same base as one or two teammates. This was a franchise so starved for talent it made Jim Morris a legend by promoting him to the majors as a 35-year-old rookie. Dennis Quaid later played him in the movie, marking the only time anyone in Hollywood has ever worn a Rays jersey in public.

For years, it was easier to get Yankee games on TV and radio in the Tampa Bay area than it was to find the Rays. And the color man on their Spanish-language broadcasts is legally blind, which probably made it easier for him to sit through all that bad baseball.

You want history? Wade Boggs got his 3,000th hit as a Ray, Jose Canseco, his 1,800th strikeout. One year the Rays didn’t have a pitcher with more than eight wins -- but they had four with at least 10 losses.

And now here they are, the only team in baseball with less history and tradition than the Florida Marlins (a lower annual attendance average, too) in the World Series.

So it doesn’t really matter what happens in the World Series because the Rays have made it there. They’re no longer baseball’s doormats. Rays Nation can finally holds it collective head high. Even if it is still hard not to laugh while doing so.

-- Kevin Baxter