The Tampa Bay Rays just finished their season with a gigantic thud. And by Thud, I mean the sound of another fast ball hitting Mike Napoli's glove. Actually, that would've been poetic, but unfortunately we have to live with a pathetic grounder to Ian Kinsler. Oh well.

This brings us to moments after the game when owner Stu Sternberg once again decided to call out the fans for not supporting the team. Well, Buc you Stu, you gigantic prick!

When Sternberg took over the team, he made some gigantic improvements. He painted the stadium, did a multi-million dollar renovation on the inside, brought in Matt Silverman and Andrew Friedman to run the team, and fired Lou Pinella and replaced him with the quirky Joe Maddon. Opinions on Maddon and the way he runs things aside, Sternberg was going in the right direction compared to the abortion that was the Vince Namoli era. 

However, what people didn't understand at that time was that Sternberg was not a saving grace. He was not the Glaziers (pre-ManU), he was not Jeff Vinik. He was Stu Sternberg, a stereotype wall street executive completely cut off from the real world. Sternberg made his fortune working for America's favorite company, Goldman Sachs and interestingly enough retired right before the economy took a dump on itself. I'm not here to start conspiracy theories, but that's just always been funny to me.

So he buys the team, completely revamps it with a new logo, new GM, new Manager, and essentially a "new" stadium. Everything was looking up. The product on the field? It's 10 times that what it used to be. Well, the pitching is at least. Our hitting has actually become worse since Sternberg and his group took the team. Maybe that reflects on Friedman and Silverman' ability to scout hitting, but that's irrelevant.

In let's say late 2008, Sternberg began to push for a new stadium. He was shot down. What people need to realize is that locals like the trop. The New Stadium was not supported at all and no one had any interest in publicly funding the project. Our summers (baseball season) consist of 99-degree heat, 100% humidity, and thunderstorms. There's no such thing as a beautiful summer day in Florida where you aren't in the water. It just doesn't exist. The dome provides an escape for us. It's 72 degrees, lets a lot of light in through the roof and has pretty good lighting. Inside, anything you can imagine you can do. There's a booth where you pitch to video of major leaguers and they try to hit you in a simulation game. There's another where video pitchers pitch to you and you try to hit the ball back. There's a wiffle ball home run derby out in left field. There's a 2k Sports room where you can play the newest edition of 2k Baseball on any gaming system you could think of. There's the Rays tank, a shop to make your own baseball card, and basically anything else. The Trop is not the problem. Just because the National Media hates it doesn't mean it affects things here. It doesn't.

So the stadium thing has been essentially dropped except for Sternberg occasionally subtly threatening the city to get a new one. When it comes to PR savyness, he makes Frank McCourt look awesome. Well, he would, except our Rays columnist, John Ramano, likes to kiss Stu's butt in his columns.

The threats come under the preface that we don't support the team. Damned if I don't agree with him. This area is HORRIBLE with supporting teams, absolutely horrible. The Bucs won 10 games last year and needed a Monday Night game against the Colts to break a 10 game (14 if pre-season counts) streak of blackouts. 

However, Sternberg has completely mishandled things. For starters, he just doesn't get it. We have only four Fortune 500 companies in the area. I know one is Jabel, but I don't know the others off the top of my head. Stu has done a terrible job getting those companies involved. Besides that, he doesn't realize that because of that, this area is based on commercial business. We have restaurants, shops, and other businesses that are smaller in scale and don't produce executives living around every corner. This area was killed by the recession. Oh, even with that, the Rays increased attendance in a year where attendance dropped in Major League baseball and that includes the Yankees and the Red Sox. We weren't producing 30,000 a night, but we were growing while other teams were shrinking. Stu got overly aggressive in spending and ballooned the payroll to around 75,000,000. Well, the team faltered a little and the economy got worse and well, surprise surprise, we still weren't selling 30,000 tickets a game! What a shocker!

That leads us to this year and the completely ignorant attack once again by our owner. This year, the team started 1-8 or 1-9 or something awful like that. They went on a huge tear for about a month afterwards but then came down to Earth and were about 4 games out of first when I left for Canada in late June. When I got back in late August, it was about 8 games out of the wild card. I'm going to take a guess and say that ratings dropped and attendance dropped because the team was not competitive. Lightning season starts soon, the Bucs start soon. I'm guessing that people were saving what little "sports budget" they had for a more competitive product. In any other year, an 8 game deficit by the end of August is a death sentence. 

And it's not just about winning. This whole "win, and they will come" does not apply. It does not apply in attendance and it certainly does not apply when it comes to television and media publicity. It's about entertainment. At the end of the day, sports are entertainment. Why do you think Penn ST never gets air time but the media is always ready to jump on the next great spread offense QB or something of that nature? Entertainment! Love Joe Pa, but his style is old and his team is boring. The Rays this year, they were boring. Even when they made their historic comeback, more attention was paid to the Red Sox collapse. Why? Aside from sweeping the Yanks to end the month, the Rays were only 13-8 during that stretch. But even that doesn't translate into boring.

What's boring is having the 5th worst hitting team in Major League Baseball and the second worst in the AL. They had the third most strikeouts in the American League and ranked eighth in OPS. They were 8th in runs and 13th in hits. They also rank 13th in at bats. That's a lot of walks and not many total appearances. Translation: BORING BASEBALL. People don't want to come out and spend their money to watch 3-1, 3-4, 2-1, 1-0 games especially when the home team is striking out 20 times a game. The Rays have had more no-hitters or perfect games thrown against them the last four seasons than any other team. They can't hit. To make things worse, they cut all their hitting. They lost 18 home runs from the first baseman position; they lost 60 points on their shortstop batting average. I can only imagine the gap that was between Carl Crawford and the new left fielders' numbers. Let's also throw in that Evan Longoria hit about 50 points lower this year as well and there's the perfect storm of crappy baseball. 

Sternberg is disconnected. He himself doesn't even go to games. Game 162 against the Yankees? Yeah, he wasn't there. Yet he screams and yells at the fans for not going? PUH-LEASE! Stu, market your team, don't alienate the team from the fans. Get corporate support; don't belittle the area that puts money in your pockets. Leadership starts at the top. Maybe if the fans saw an owner who cared enough to go to a handful of games, they would too.