"It was Supposed to be our Year"

Let's repeat it again----------
It was supposed to be our year.


As a sports fan of any team every once in a while you will start a season with high aspirations, high expectations, and the heavy thirst for the championship. But there’s nothing worse than not meeting those expectations. There’s nothing worse than watching your talented team not deliver---and with baseball it’s even worse because the season is so long.

In my case, we have the current Tampa Bay Rays roster lingering in fourth place---in the toughest division in all of sports. Now granted it’s been a lot of bad luck with over 10 players on the DL at one point, and currently a half-dozen players still roaming the disabled list, we still don’t look like the Rays organization that eeks out wins and finds a way to frustrate their opponents.

Our luck with rookies has definitely run its course as we see the likes of Jennings, Moore, Cobb not really provide the firepower upstart rookies in the past have provided. And our luck with pickups have faded this season as Matsui, Pena, Scott, Lobaton, and especially (especially) Molina have not really helped out much of anything throughout this season. Even worse Molina’s supposed abilities as a catcher have not been on display yet, as our starting pitching’s numbers have not been as strong as last season. Our defense has gone a few steps down with our apparent abilities of making errors in costly moments, and even our clutch small ball abilities have not been as good.

Someone at ESPN jinxed us because they picked the Rays to be in the lower end of the division before the season started because they believe their luck with the pickups, rookies, and has-beens was eventually going to run out. And this is what is occurring as injury after injury plague us, and close loss after close loss continues to hamper us. Do we still have time to turn things around? Oh most definitely, but with this always-competitive division you can only fall off the track for so long before you lose the chance to ever catch up to the rivals. The Yankees are killer, the Red Sox are finding their steps, and even the Orioles won’t be backing down anytime soon (I predict August).


Watching the Rays this year has been frustrating not just because we are low, but because this was supposed to be the time that our recent rookies started improving, that our new rookies were supposed to be fresh off the gate, and our pickups were going to provide the extra oomph we needed to take control of the division and reach the playoffs again. And as of now, none of this is really happening. We aren’t playing Tampa Bay Rays baseball, and it hurts. But hey, as a baseball fan, there’s still hope. Every season is a marathon, not a sprint.

A marathon we are currently losing.

The thought still lingers:

“This was supposed to be our year”