The Tampa Bay Rays are an amazing team. Too bad they're killing baseball.

 

So the Yankees have compiled 30 straight winning seasons. The team breathing down their necks for the last month—the team that yet may pass them, regardless of this weekend just past—will have run up 11 winning seasons out of the last 15 by the end of this year. 

The Rays will have also won at least 4 division titles and 2 pennants, and have made 3 other wild-card appearances in that time—with another wild card almost certainly in hand (or whatever that weird little, knuckle-y thing instead of a hand is that rays have). 

All, as we are constantly told, on a small fraction of the budget that your New York Yankees enjoy.

They are exceedingly admirable. And almost impossible to watch.

Don't take my word for it. Ask their fans. It will be easy enough to reach them at home.

The Rays, despite the third-best record in the American League, rank 14th out of 15 in attendance, averaging just under 14,000 fans a game—and many of those who do show up can be clearly heard rooting for the visiting team. 

This situation is often attributed to the Rays' dreary, domed stadium, Tropicana Field, where a tarpaulin now covers the upper deck and a "full house" is considered to be 25,000 fans.

Sorry, but people have always turned out to see great baseball, even in the most dismal of ballparks. Just look at all those cookie-cutter, all-purpose parks in the 1970s. Or Shea Stadium. (From time to time.) 

Attendance at the Trop is down to almost half of what it was at the start of the Ray's run of success. So what gives?

The packaging ain't the problem here—it's the product.

There has been an enormous variety of entertaining overachievers in baseball history. Just look at some of Billy Martin's underdog teams, running and bunting the opposition silly. The 1965 Dodgers, with that great starting staff...and Dick Tracewski. The Whiz Kids and the Hitless Wonders, the "Orange October" Giants and that Royals team that rings around the Mets a few years ao.

The Rays...are just boring.

Tampa Bay does almost nothing especially well. They don't bash and they don't run, and they don't flash a lot of leather. The Rays are 11th in the AL in home runs, and 6th in stolen bases, with just 81. They are 10th in slugging, 9th in getting on base, and 6th in fielding.

They are a team permanently stuck in neutral.

The only thing the Rays do well is pitch. TB is 3rd in the AL with a 3.29 ERA. But even here, no individual stands out. No one on the Rays has more than 11 wins or 8 saves. No one has pitched a complete-game shutout. Or a complete game.

It's the same with the individual hitters. Nobody on the team boasts as many as 20 home runs or 77 RBI. No one who could qualify for the batting title is hitting above .300.

This is, for the most part, an endless assemblage of Ji-Man Chois and Taylor Wallses, Brandon Lowes and Brett Phillipses.

Nothing stands out and no one is truly outstanding. Celerino Sanchez was reminiscing recently about the Yanks' old showdowns against Red Sox teams bristling with Hall-of-Famers. Nobody on this Rays team is going to the Hall, unless they buy a ticket. 

Nor did this just start. The Rays have been boring fans everywhere for years now. It's not a coincidence that the very lowest TV ratings for a World Series contest—ever—were for a game between the Phillies and Tampa Bay, in 2008.

To see a typical Rays game is to see a masterpiece—of general managing. It's like watching a man try to solve Rubik's cube. The Rays are simply a bundle of interchangeable lug nuts. Sure, TB is adept at developing exciting young talent—which is then traded off for still younger prospects before it can ever develop.

Even worse, like some terrible tree fungus, Raysball is infecting and destroying the rest of baseball. Never forget: this is the team that gave us the opening closer, which the Yankees resorted to on Sunday, an entire game pitched by the bullpen. And it's only getting worse.

In both leagues, there are going to be just 6 or 7 guys who hit over .300 this year. It's unlikely than anyone is going to steal 40 bases,, or win 20 games, or save 40. Aaron Judge's season is so compelling in part because he is nearly 20 home runs ahead of the next slugger.

A cynic might conclude that the owners of that soulless corporate entity known as MLB are delighted by this sort of parody parity. After all, no superstars, no super contracts. But never underestimate the role of stupidity in human affairs.

Baseball rolled out its big rule changes for next year, during the Rays' visit to New York. These included a ban on infield shifts, a pitch clock, and—rather weirdly—bigger bases.

Far from fixing what's wrong with the sport, all of these changes are likely only to worse what fans already hate most about it. They ignore what's wrong with the way the game is played and taught, in favor of superficial "fixes" that only double down on baseball's worst trends.

Don't teach batter to hit to the opposite field or bunt—just ban fielders from playing where the balls are hit. Don't teach pitchers to pitch to contact or pitch swiftly so they keep their fielders in the game—just put a clock on the game famously played without a clock.

(The base-size change promises to be the most disastrous "fix" of all, throwing off the game's meticulously calibrated mechanics in ways that we can barely anticipate. Expect a slew of new injuries and furious protests.)

What major-league baseball, with all its Raysplay and its Three True Outcomes and its Moneyball has once again lost sight of is the game's real appeal: it's a unique combination of an individual game being played inside a team game.

Make it so pitchers struggle to throw as many as five innings or batters can't hit .225, remove all the individual heroics and savvy from the game...and you won't have baseball anymore, just a bunch of superb athletes doing their best imitations of an algorithm. Good luck selling that, even in the Bronx.