Here begins what I hope to make an occassional feature on my blog--brief commentary on events that almost nobody would have thought possible if it had been suggested prior to it happening. I'm inaugurating this feature in honor of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays 12th straight victory, something which no sane person would have predicted a month and a half ago.
Really, who would have thought that while nobody was paying much attention, the Devil Rays, the horrible joke of a team that is the Devil Rays, quietly went about becoming the hottest team in baseball. In the process, they've won not just easy games, they've won the sort of game that, in the past, they would have rolled over and given up on. The question is, what exactly caused this sudden turn around? Some of the credit has to go to Tino Martinez's influence in the locker room starting to pay off--he's one of the few players on the team who actually knows how to do something other than lose, and players have referred to him in the media as their Dave Andreychuk. Speaking of Dave Andreychuk, one has to wonder if the fact that a bunch of Rays players jumped on the Lightning bandwagon and spent the last two months watching the Lightning on their championship run, if maybe some of that rubbed off on them and they realized how to be winners. It probably didn't hurt that in the days after the Cup Finals ended, the media kept saying that it's the Devil Rays' turn to be the Tampa Bay team to pull the worst-to-first routine. In any case, while the Rays' winning streak can't continue forever, they aren't thinking and acting like the same team that they were when the season started, and I'm starting to think they have a chance to do something.
In another who woulda thunk it, I never would have expected a player from the Buccaneers, Tampa Bay's only team that's been respectable for any length of time, say that the Buccaneers needed to look to the Lightning for an example of how to play as a team. If someone would have told me three years ago that, in 2004, a Buc was going to say that they needed to be more like the Bolts, I would have suggested the person seek psychiactric help.
And finally, who would have thought, back in the '80s, that a former Soviet leader would be on hand in Texas to watch a former American president jump out of an airplane to celebrate his 80th birthday?
Posted by kathryn at Junio 23, 2004 02:44 AM | TrackBack