Hardy Vision: Dropping the ball at The Trop

EDITOR'S NOTE: Gregory Hardy's column, Hardy Vision, will be posted on SPiN every Thursday for your reading pleasure.

If you're a contributing author for a thesaurus, let me illustrate why attending a Tampa Bay Devil Rays game will inspire some new entries to list under "futility."

Devil Rays baseball: MLB's version of purgatory. (Getty Images)

It's a Friday night at Tropicana Field. Kansas City arrives on a seven-game losing streak to pit its 19-35 record against the D-Rays' 22-29 mark.

This is how K.C. scores its first run on the way to a 4-1 victory: Mike Sweeney starts the second inning with a stand-up triple to deep right. Four pitches later, he crosses the plate thanks to Scott Kazmir's wild pitch.

Here's the D-Rays' idea of a ninth-inning rally: They get a gift of having Dioner Navarro and Brendan Harris on base because Octavio Dotel needed 10 pitches to walk them. Then it's Elijah Dukes fouling out, B.J. Upton striking out looking and Carl Crawford flying out to center.

I don't subject myself to Devil Rays home games very often. It's easy to avoid baseball's version of purgatory in St. Petersburg, Fla., mainly because I live in Columbia, S.C.

I was in the Tampa Bay area for the weekend to throw my youngest brother a bachelor party. He was to fly in from D.C. on Saturday, but brother No. 2 (who lives in Omaha, Neb.) and I came in early, so Dad treated us to a Devil Rays game. Of course, this is the same man who made us mow his lawn in Florida's 100-degree heat, so maybe even in our 30s he had some underlying character-building motive.

The area is, if not a home town, at least a home base. My brothers and I were born and raised in New York in the '70s, but moved to Florida's Gulf Coast in the '80s. For the next decade-and-a-half, thanks to the Buccaneers and then the expansion NHL Lightning and MLB Devil Rays, we were subjected to the worst professional sports known to man or beast.

Interesting and colorful signage has improved The Trop's concrete hangar ambiance. (Getty Images)

The Trop has all the ambiance of a concrete aircraft hanger. I've always said that if I had to watch 81 games a year in that warehouse, I would kill myself. Fortunately, enough interesting and colorful signage has cropped up that now if I were to kill myself it would be at about the 65- to 70-game mark instead of about the 40-game mark.

Attendance for the night was listed as 12,032. As far as crowd size goes in the state of Florida, that's a little less than quorum for the weekly Tim Tebow Fan Club meeting in Gainesville. Capacity is listed as 43,772, meaning we had room for another 31,740. Then again, if that many more people showed up, I'd have to wait a lot longer in line at the bathroom.

There was at least one silver lining for the D-Ray true believers. Because Kazmir, Shawn Camp and Casey Fossum surpassed the 10-strikeout mark by combining for 11, each paying customer was entitled to a free 10-inch pizza from a particular pizza chain. But here's the catch: You have to visit a chain of furniture stores to acquire the coupon that can be redeemed at the pizza chain.

Now that's definitely more legwork than any of the D-Rays base runners had to perform. Anyway, it seems a free pizza is as close as most D-Rays fans will come to the underlying premise of the theme song to The Jeffersons -- "We've finally got a piece of the pie."

The Trop's insufferable dome deserves to be mercilessly mocked, but it serves its purpose -- when we left the game, it was to a downpour outside. Without a cover, that game would have been delayed until who knows when. And the only thing worse than delaying a Devil Rays game would be to have delayed an appointment to have your teeth pulled out by Warren Sapp with a pair of rusty pliers.