Tampa Bay's Mike Brosseau homered off Aroldis Chapman to break a 1-1 tie in the eighth inning, Diego Castillo pitched a 1-2-3 ninth and the Rays eliminated the Yankees in the decisive fifth game of their ALDS on Friday.
To make a geopolitical comparison, this was marginally less dramatic than if Grenada had repelled the U.S. invasion in 1983.
Tampa-St. Petersburg is home to the most remarkable team in North American pro sports, and that's not the Lightning, which this month won the Stanley Cup inside the Edmonton bubble.
The Lightning is owned by Jeff Vinik, a legend in the financial investment world and so committed to his team that he is basically surrounding Amalie Arena with its own village off the water in Tampa.
The Rays? Money's so tight they had to lay off people early in the pandemic shutdown. They went 96-66 in 2019, reached the postseason for the fifth time (now sixth) since 2008, and sold 1,178,735 tickets to Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg.
Sports fans in Tampa look at the Frankland Bridge to St. Pete as East Germans did the Berlin Wall.
The business model doesn't work for CEO Stuart Sternberg and his partners, not with the paltry revenues inside a dump of a stadium, but two regimes — first, Andrew Friedman/Joe Maddon; now, Erik Neander/Kevin Cash — generally have made it work on the field.
The Rays continue to have front-office personnel raided, must move top players before they near free agency, but they keep inventing new angles for survival in the standings.
