Rays Of Hope Radiate On Bay Area Baseball – And Yet

There was a lot to like about the Tampa Bay Rays’ recent rollout of their new sunburst-complementing, traditional-looking uniforms and newly exorcised name.

For openers, not much this side of Monte Carlo surpasses the early evening, fall ambience of Straub Park fronting St. Petersburg’s rapturous downtown waterfront. An overflow crowd of 7,000 would bear witness. Video screens accommodated those who chose to watch from picnic blankets.

Busby Berkeley couldn’t have orchestrated it any better:

*A parade of Rays – from crowd favorites Jonny (“I can’t wait to get this dirty”) Gomes, Carl Crawford and Scott Kazmir to Manager Joe Maddon, Hall of Famer Wade Boggs and venerable coach Don Zimmer – was a well-timed, well-directed marketing success.

*Kevin (“Field of Dreams,” “Bull Durham”) Costner accepted an invitation and performed with his 7-piece rock band, Modern West. “We made a cold call that was warmly received,” explained Rays’ president Matt Silverman.

*The crowd queues were longer for new Rays’ paraphernalia at the Champs Sports tent than they were at the chicken fingers and beer concessions combined.

*Dads and sons maxed out at the interactive stations.

*Retirees enjoyed anything that was free.

*The unfashionably surly Delmon Young actually flew in for Project Rays Runway.

*Rocco Baldelli threw out souvenir baseballs without hurting himself.

*Elijah Dukes was safely sequestered in the Dominican Republic playing winter ball.

And yet.

Everybody knows that ultraviolet Rays and new unis are merely symbolic of a new identity and a new beginning. And after a decade of bad baseball, symbols only work in the first off-season. Then the team MUST start winning.

As a Penn State alumnus, I know of uniform symbolism. When the Nittany Lion football team wins, the uniforms are classically plain and cool. When the Lions lose, especially on the road, the look is boringly plain and dull. Nobody loves a uniform loser.

And then there’s the ill-timed stadium scenario.

The Rays barely enjoyed 24 hours of radiating in their new identity, including big crowds for a Tampa road show and St. Petersburg City Council members sporting new Rays’ jerseys. Then they found themselves in the frustrating position of upstaging themselves. Details of plans for a new stadium on city-owned, bayside land downtown were leaked by the St. Petersburg Times at least a month before the Rays were geared up for a formal announcement accompanied by one of those imposing, populace-stirring renderings.

Oops. Cue the “Field of Schemes” rhetoric.

The Rays, we learned, propose a 35,000-seat, $450 million facility on the site of picturesque Al Lang Field at Progress Energy Park. Funding would involve the sale of the Tropicana Field site, some $60 million in state sales-tax rebates and a direct Rays’ contribution of $150 million. Whatever the merits of a state-of-the-art, nautically-themed, destination facility, there’s no lack of skeptics – from politicians who aren’t Charlie Crist to win-starved fans. And, yes, a vote will be required.

Moreover, any stadium talk ultimately devolves into a conversation about the uniquely challenging marketplace that is Tampa Bay. The population is dispersed and parochial. A sizable chunk is on fixed income. There are too many transplants with too many allegiances elsewhere and too few corporate headquarters.

Inevitably, the obvious issue of St. Petersburg – anywhere in St. Petersburg – as the best place for a Major League Baseball franchise is revisited.

The best place is still Tampa, with much easier access to what’s east of Hillsborough County – including Orlando. Not one where due west is the Gulf of Mexico and Corpus Christi, Texas.

But there’s that all-but-impossible-to-break Rays’ lease with the city of St. Petersburg that runs until 2027.

But, hey, how ’bout them new Rays?

Commission-Council Contretemps

*Hillsborough County Commissioners have no right to bristle over references to their well-earned “dysfunctional” and “yahoo” reputations. Most recent example: Ousting Commissioner Rose Ferlita from her seat on the Tampa Port Authority and replacing her – by an outrageous 5-2 vote – with Brian Blair. If anyone should “apologize,” it should be those five – or everybody but Ferlita and Mark Sharpe.

Ferlita, a former Tampa City Council member, is smart and familiar with port issues. Blair is neither. The port is also in Ferlita’s district.

The port, for those commissioners who need reminding — or minding — is very, very important to this region — from economic as well as security standpoints. Much too important for the obtuse likes of Blair, whose credentials include being a ham-handed, inarticulate chairman of the county’s Environmental Protection Commission.

Couldn’t Blair have been, say, permanent chaplain? That way he could formally thank God every week for having been elected to something.

* May cooler heads yet prevail on Tampa City Council. The flap over who speaks for Tampa, a city with a classic strong-mayor form of government, is petty, ego-driven and unworthy of either council or the mayor.

Best bet: Let Charlie Miranda mediate. He’s got just the right qualifications on this one: old-school smarts — and no longer wants to be mayor.

Root For Kansas

As the college football season heads toward the climactic BCS national championship game, there isn’t the same intense interest for Florida teams as previous years. Defending champion Florida will likely settle for a prominent New Year’s Day bowl and upstart USF, of course, eventually played its way out of contention. FSU and Miami were never factors.

So root for Kansas to win it all.

Undefeated and ranked in the top three, Kansas could find itself in the national championship game. And if the Jayhawks win it all, they will come to Tampa early next season as the defending national champion. KU is scheduled to play USF on Sept. 13, but ESPN would like the game moved to Aug. 29, the Friday of the opening weekend.

Regardless of the date, this means even more national exposure for USF – and an opportunity to start off by undoing much of the frustrating, unfulfilled promise of 2007.

Year Of The Bull Became Year Of the Bull’s Eye

We’ve long since said good bye to those Horatio Alger and “Little Engine That Could” references to USF football. Was it barely a month ago that the Bulls were undefeated, ranked second in the BCS and the talk of this and many other towns?

What happened? Were they, as some skeptical pundits had been smugly predicting, finally “exposed” for the gate-crashing pretenders they were?

Not really.

A couple of points.

In the parity round-robin that is today’s college football rankings, USF is as good – and as vulnerable – as most of the brand name schools: the South Carolinas, Alabamas and Penn States. It is arguably better than the Georgia Techs, Miamis and North Carolina States. It is much better than the Nebraskas, Minnesotas and Notre Dames. And it has beaten the West Virginias, Auburns and North Carolinas.

The Bulls are a major player, and that won’t change. They are here to stay. And the top deck at Raymond James Stadium will be in play more often than not for USF games from here on out.

As the new grid kid on the block, they surprised most outsiders with their early results and talent level – and their seemingly instant inclusion among college football’s elite. But sheer ability wasn’t enough, as it turned out, to trump growing pains. The kind that lose you games you should win.

USF’s problem has been composure. Make that lack of. When the Bulls were not expected to win, they played with abandon – and won. Think: Pittsburgh, Louisville and West Virginia in the past few years. They were having fun – an underdog’s exemption from stress and nerves. Overtime at Auburn, at night, in front of 85,000 heavily imbibed Tiger faithful – what pressure?

But with the Bull’s eye of national recognition, USF has been playing not to lose. Not to lose the game, not to lose that exalted ranking. Not to lose to underdogs.

And it’s a top-down issue. Questionable play-calling, clock management and sideline deportment were signs of a team wound too tight. There was an increase in dropped-passes, missed assignments and poor decision-making. Penalties attributed to lack of discipline and concentration rose. A few key injuries hardly helped.

In unprecedented fashion, USF had fast-forwarded from a nobody to a major college force. But what they haven’t done yet is make the transition from the hunter to the hunted. That’s the part that does take seasoning.

And may this be the final season for that. Because after this year, the grace period accorded a quintessential upstart ends. Lack of composure will be unkindly labeled “choking.”

It comes with the territory – talent, success and the expectation of more success.

Geo-Political Irony

It was about as ironic as a geo-political week can get.

For the 16th straight year, the United Nations General Assembly voted in favor of urging the U.S. to lift its four-decade-old embargo against Cuba. Once again the vote was one-sided: 184-4-1. Once again, Israel, Palau and the Marshall Islands voted with the U.S. Once again, Micronesia abstained.

Once again the U.S. was made to look petty, inhumane, arrogant – and counter-productively stupid in front of the rest of the world.

A few days later, U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez led a trade mission to – Vietnam. He met with Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung and President Nguyen Minh Triet. He was accompanied by representatives of 23 U.S. companies, including, Ford, Dow Chemical, Northwest Airlines, Marriott and Alcoa.

Recall that the U.S. used to have a trade embargo against Vietnam. That ended in 1994. Recall that the following year diplomatic relations were normalized. And recall that both Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush have visited Vietnam.

And recall that the U.S. lost more than 58,000 troops in the Vietnam War.

But that was then — a tragic, misguided venture borne of Cold War delusions.

But Cuba is different. Cuba is close, and the enmity is personal. This Cold War relic remains the third rail of politics to too many feckless and intimidated American politicians and administrations who self-servingly hide behind the selective use of democratic mandates and criteria. Vietnam, si; China, si; Egypt, si; Saudi Arabia, si; Pakistan, si; Uzbekistan, si; Kazakhstan, si; Cuba, no.

And if blatant hypocrisy and cruel travel and remittance policies aren’t enough, there’s always this. At last count, the Cuban embargo was costing the U.S. an estimated $3 billion-$4 billion in lost exports per year, a huge chunk of it at Florida’s expense.

And at last count, no politician in Florida – from a populist governor to this state’s congressional delegation — has shown real moral courage or geo-political guts on Cuba.

It’s beyond deplorable. It’s bad for America at the worst possible time.

Forecast: More Weather Teases

What are the odds that even though this is mid-November and the Gulf water temps are barely hitting 70 degrees, we still haven’t seen the last of the hurricane TV teases?

Technically, as we know, hurricane season doesn’t end until November ends. And for those of you scoring at home, you doubtless still need your tropical updates, including the latest on non-tropical systems near the Azores that still look massively formidable from overhead.

From the standpoint of weather as news commodity, we know, of course, that there is still a ratings-driven need for file footage of high winds and flooding intersections that hasn’t yet run its course. And when you call yourself Vipir Forecast or Storm Team or Weather Apocalypse, you probably don’t want to mothball those Cones of Armageddon prematurely.

And, truth be told, does anyone over-hype the weather better than a meteorologist in suspenders?

But before long, the storm teases inevitably will morph into those about cold snaps and freeze warnings, and file footage of citrus icicles will be recycled.

But that’s still a month away.

Actually, right now — Florida in the late fall — should be the boring part of the weather-news cycle.

Enjoy.

Rosa Rio Still A Big Draw At Tampa Theatre

There are a lot of well-chronicled reasons to go to Tampa Theatre. I found two more over a recent weekend.

One was to escape football. The agony of defeated USF, UF and Penn State had taken its toll, and I had a premonition about the Bucs gift-wrapping another opponent’s victory.

The other was to catch the Rosa Rio show.

She’s the 105-year-old Wurlitzer icon, who still performs before and during Tampa Theatre’s periodic showings of silent films. Most recently it was the Sunday matinee featuring that hauntingly creepy, 1922 classic, Nosferatu , the first screen version of Dracula.

Nearly 900 showed.

“Rosa is a rock star,” explained Tara Schroeder, Tampa Theatre’s programming director. “She has her groupies. They wait for her in the lobby afterwards. They want her autograph and they buy her CDs.”

The audience was an eclectic mix. From high school students curious about silent films and a legendary centurion to Sun City Center seniors coming to see one of their own. Although “senior” can seem a bit too junior for a 105-year-old. For one who played her first silent-film gig during the Howard Taft administration. Aunt Tiquary, anyone?

Given that this was the Sunday before Halloween, Rosa’s entrance was thematic. After her skeleton-bedecked Wurlitzer had slowly and eerily ascended amid plumes of smoke, she arrived separately – in a coffin.

Macabre? More like incongruous.

After doffing her red cape and hood, Rosa revealed a stage presence that was spunky and funny. She knows her way around a one-liner and can obviously work a house. Her voice was strong yet genteel; her New Orleans’ roots still apparent. She played “The Funeral March of the Marionettes” (still “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” to me) with gusto. Then she inimitably implored the audience to participate in Nosferatu .

“Feel free to applaud or hiss,” she instructed, “but don’t drown out the music.”

She settled in at the Wurlitzer — at orchestra-pit level, so she could see the movie as well as the music. And for a guy on the lam from all things gridiron, Tampa Theatre was once again a transporting experience. It was another era, another art form. One where the accompanist deserved her top billing. One where the experience was anything but silent.

At the conclusion, a beaming Rosa was accorded a standing ovation and presented with a bouquet of red roses.

“She’s a very positive person, and she loves what she does,” says Schroeder. “She is passionate about it. Her life is fulfilled if she can share her gift. We all just love her.”

Richt-er Scale

After a few days of awful publicity, Georgia football coach Mark Richt finally offered up an apology for his role in his team’s notorious group-celebration penalty against the Florida Gators. On the Richt-er scale of classlessness, the premeditated choreography was off the charts.

But call it what it really was: A surrender flag to standards in the name of motivating the kind of player you recruit.

Interestingly enough, most of the outrage came from the media and non-Georgia fans. For the most part, the coaching fraternity, which has a self-serving agenda, saw it differently. Typical example: former Auburn coach Terry Bowden.

“I just wish I had thought of it first,” said Bowden. “I thought it was pure genius

Halloweird

Call me old-fashioned, old-school or just old, but can we take Halloween back?

As in back from parents who sign off on their kids’ cultural-slut-du-jour costumes and older teenagers sans costumes slouching in late for some free stuff.

And didn’t Guavaween used to put a premium on clever and irreverent, as well as outrageous? The last one I saw had turned trite and trampy. Every other costumed reveler was a flasher or a French maid. And then there were those who came dressed as perimeter-cruising street punks.

Halloween night is about young kids indulging in fun, young-kid fantasies. And, frankly, those are the ones who got the good stuff at our house. That’s right; not everybody gets the Snickers.