The Rays/Boston game was on local TV last night. (An oddity. Must’ve been because they were playing Boston. Rays won 9-2.) What jumped out at us was that when the Rays took the field in the bottom half of the inning we knew all of the players. We’d seen every one of those Rays on the field in Boston in a Bulls uniform, many of them this year.
The only Rays to see action in the game who had not worn a Bulls uniform were DH Johnny Damon and relief pitcher Juan Cruz.
Seven of the twelve Rays who came to bat and three of the five pitchers played for the Bulls this year, including Dan Johnson, Russ Canzler, and Alex Torres who joined the Rays in the last couple of days.
Doesn’t pass the “So What?” test? Well, maybe it does. It says that if you go to a Bulls game you’re going to see a lot of current and future major leaguers. Also, it says a lot about the ability of the Rays organization to grow their own ballplayers.
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IronPigs fans filled the ballpark, but the Clippers won a key game last night. The Columbus team now leads Lehigh Valley in the Governors' Cup series 2-1.
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The game was nationally televised on MLB Network, they appeared to pick up the NESN feed. We saw that game on DirecTV here in Durham. It was indeed nice to see so many of our former Bulls doing well!
ReplyDeleteI'm thinking that the Rays are missing a big bet by not pushing really hard to get more Rays games televised in this region on free-ish TV. Apparently the Gods of TV-land have decided that we are in the Baltimore/DC "region". Seems to me to be a win-win for the Rays since so many Bulls are there and it's fun to watch them play.
ReplyDeleteRays/Red Sox on MLB again tonight. I see it over Time-Warner for the Raleigh region.
MLB is very regimented with regard to their TV regions. The regional split between Atlanta and DC/Baltimore comes somewhere just west of the Triangle, but it causes confusion.
ReplyDeleteCase in point - perhaps five years ago we bought MLB Extra Innings on DirecTV but found Orioles games were all blacked out. DTV told us that the Orioles were our "home" team but as they were not on our "home" regional sports network, we would have to buy an additional package to receive those games. We aren't primarily Orioles fans, but games that they played against other teams would be blacked out otherwise. As it would have added another $60, we cancelled Extra Innings and have not been back.
Since then the number of national games has increased and we get MASN. All that is trumped by our increased interest in the Bulls, full season tickets at DBAP is a lot of baseball!