Table of Contents
Stadium Guide by Baseball Tripper
History
The Tampa Bay Rays are the youngest team in this division starting their franchise career in 1998. This is nearly 80 plus years younger than the Boston Red Sox, New York Yankees, and Baltimore Orioles. Although they are the youngest official team in this division, Tampa Bay was trying to get a professional baseball team in the city for nearly three decades prior to this team.
As you can imagine with the expansion teams they did pretty poorly at first coming last in their division for nearly 10 years after their founding. It was not until 2008, ten years later when they actually had their first winning season as a franchise which also included the first AL East championship and later on the first American League pennant in their history. This means they made it to the World Series but unfortunately they lost to the Philadelphia Phillies. They have been in and out of the playoffs ever since for a total of 5 times within the past 13 years including this past season when they made it to the World Series again but failed to win against the Los Angeles Dodgers. As you may have guessed it this means that there are no World Series titles within this franchise’s history so far, but we look forward to this potentially being broken during the 2021 season.
A fun fact about this team is that they actually began their MLB career under the name Tampa Bay Devil Rays which was soon shortened to simply be the Tampa Bay Rays instead. They have gone through a few logo changes throughout their time and with a mascot and name of a manta ray you can imagine there have been some pretty cool designs in the past. Some would argue that they have had the coolest logos in Major League Baseball even though they are one of the younger franchises in the league.