The Extra 2% (20 page)

Raymond stressed getting multiple generations into the ballpark. Unlike their division rivals in New York, Boston, Baltimore, and even Toronto, the Devil Rays hadn’t been around long enough to convert a generation of kids into avid fans and adult season-ticket-holders. He played up the upstart team’s growth, how it could become better than its bigger rivals and convert fans of the Yankees, Red Sox, and other teams who’d moved to the area. The D-Rays strived to make the team an attraction for the whole region—by becoming more involved with local charities and building ball fields in poor neighborhoods.

Those somewhat nebulous goals began to yield tangible results. The team invested some $20 million in the first two years after the takeover, making upgrades ranging from fixing the aging bathrooms and interior paint job to installing a 10,000-gallon “touch tank” beyond the outfield wall where fans could pet cow-nose rays. Where Naimoli-bullied ushers once used Gestapo tactics on anyone in the stands who so much as nibbled on an unapproved sandwich, employees now stopped hassling fans with outside food. The D-Rays sent employees to Disney World to observe the nearby theme park’s customer service methods. Silverman also hired Tom Hoof away from the marketing department of Disney’s Wide World of Sports complex, installing him as the team’s new VP of marketing and community relations. From there, the team started RAYS (Ready At Your Service) University, a mandatory program designed to encourage friendlier customer assistance during games. Ushers got raises,
had their traditional uniforms replaced with team jerseys, were rebranded as “fan hosts,” and received financial bonuses for outstanding performance.

Meanwhile, Silverman and company kept generating little publicity stunts that built goodwill and grew into (minor) national stories. In February 2007, blogger Manny Stiles decided to auction off his baseball fandom to the highest bidder. Stiles had never rooted for any particular team, and the proceeds of the eBay auction would go to pediatric AIDS research. The popular sports blog Deadspin jumped on the story. “What Would It Take to Get You to Blog About the Devil Rays for a Year?” the headline read. The auction topped out at $535, the high bidder winning the right to have Stiles blog about whatever team that mystery person commanded.

Following the auction bid by bid on his blog, Stiles wondered aloud who that person might be. “I don’t know yet. I am at work and have no access to my personal e-mail. The winning bidder is located within the vicinity of Tampa, FL. Uh oh … I don’t think that means they are
definitely
a Devil Rays fan, but??? I guess I’m getting what I asked for!!! hurray!”

The winning bidder was indeed a Devil Rays fan—Matt Silverman. Tampa Bay’s team president bought his team its own blogger and donated another $1,000 to AIDS research for good measure.

“We have to say, this is the most proactive move we’ve seen the Devil Rays organization make,” wrote Deadspin’s Will Leitch. “We now have a new favorite baseball exec … though we’re not masochistic enough to follow the Devil Rays any closer because of it.”

Leitch’s snub notwithstanding, the changes—big and small, systematic and spur-of-the-moment—worked. The D-Rays won six fewer games under Sternberg and Silverman in 2006 than they’d won under Naimoli in 2005. Yet attendance jumped 20% in that 2006 season. And despite the new policy of allowing outside food in the stadium, concession sales actually rose on a per-fan basis; the team negotiated new deals with vendors and also found ways to keep fans in the stadium and engaged for longer periods on game day. Nationally, the team began to earn some modicum of respect—in
the form of a few flattering profiles and less abuse—even as the losses kept piling up through 2007.

Still, the team had only begun its drive to lure more fans to the ballpark and raise its profile. When Sternberg took over, employees began carrying Rays Rewards Cards around town. Stroll through downtown St. Pete on a random Tuesday afternoon wearing a Devil Rays cap and you could end up with a Rewards Card, redeemable for free game tickets. In 2006, the team rarely found fans decked out in D-Rays gear, gave away just a few cards, and quickly nixed the promotion. Locals weren’t quite ready to embrace the team to the point that they’d dramatically alter their dress habits. By 2010, though, the entire Tampa Bay region was swarming with men, women, and children walking around in Rays caps, T-shirts, and jerseys. As it turned out, fans just needed time to get to love the new Rays. The 2008 season would bring seismic changes on the field and off, driving much of that transformation in fans’ attitudes.

Changing the team’s name, logo, and brand was one of Silverman’s first, and biggest, mandates after the franchise sale. Rebranding any company can take a long time, hog the schedules of entire divisions, and cost some bucks too. Jumping through Major League Baseball’s hoops and getting the “Devil” out of Tampa Bay would prove even tougher. Becoming the “Devil Rays” in the first place had seemed an almost random occurrence that required a long series of random events.

Whenever a major league team wants to design a new logo, plus the uniforms and various marks to go with it, that team must go through Anne Occi, MLB’s VP of design services. In 1995, Occi flew to Tampa Bay to meet with then-prospective owners vying for an expansion team. Occi thought the team’s name should involve some derivation of Rays. The cartilaginous fish were abundant in Florida, so much so that the Florida aquarium in downtown Tampa featured a big statue of a giant ray right out front. Occi’s choice echoed the locals’ preference: a “name the team” contest had been
held, and Sting Rays was the name that drew the largest number of submissions. After further discussions, all parties agreed on a name: Tampa Bay Sting Rays.

Unfortunately, a team in the Hawaii Winter Baseball League, the Maui Stingrays, got there first. Major League Baseball has extremely strict rules when it comes to trademarks. When Denver won its own expansion franchise, everyone was thrilled with the team’s name: the Colorado Rockies. Everyone except an apparel company called “Rockies Jeans.” No one had noticed. The fledgling baseball team struck a deal where it could sell clothes stamped with “Colorado Rockies” … but nothing that carried only the word “Rockies” on it. After that incident, baseball wanted absolutely no confusion or ambiguity in its trademark deals. If Tampa Bay’s new team wanted to call itself the Sting Rays, it would have to buy the name from the tiny franchise in Hawaii. The cost? A pittance: $35,000.
Less
than a pittance. Naimoli, ever the stubborn skinflint, flatly declined. He liked the name, Major League Baseball liked the name, the marketing people like the name, and the community liked the name. But he sure as hell wasn’t paying for it.

Occi didn’t like the idea of simply dubbing the team the Rays, arguing it was too short and weak a name. Ultimately, all parties instead agreed on Devil Rays as a compromise. The next step was to pick the team’s logo and color scheme. The ’90s saw a move toward a bunch of new designs and colors. Several teams, for instance, adopted teal as a component of their uniforms. Occi wanted something even bolder: a rainbow grading pattern featuring teal, light blue, dark blue, shades of green and yellow, and … it was a mess, the kind of logo that even the most ironic, retro-loving hipster would struggle to wear today. When the new name and logo were unveiled, the community nearly rioted. Religious types objected to the satanic reference. Most critics simply thought the name was dumb. One restaurant on Kennedy Boulevard, a major east-west artery in Tampa, put up a big lettered sign, the kind you would normally see outside a high school or hotel. The sign read:

Naimoli was furious that people didn’t like the name. He ordered the team to conduct a phone poll, where people could vote on one of two names: Devil Rays or Manta Rays. The team was pulling hard for Devil Rays to prevail, having already printed boxes full of jerseys with the name and logo on it. Naimoli tried to hedge his bets even before the votes were tallied. Newspaper ads told readers that if the Manta Rays name came out ahead, they should make sure to buy up all the existing Devil Rays gear, since they would become collector items. When the poll started, Manta Rays surged to a big lead. But in the ensuing few days, Devil Rays started to catch up—or so the team claimed. As soon as the vote supposedly got close to 50–50, the team stopped the count. Tampa Bay Devil Rays it would be.

By the time Phil Wallace joined the Devil Rays as special projects analyst in the fall of 2005, the team was working on its second logo, having taken the nearly unprecedented step of scrapping its first one after just three seasons. Darcy Raymond was charged with leading the effort to change it yet again, while also finding a new team name. Right before opening day 2006, Raymond got sucked into overseeing ushers and other customer service matters. That left Wallace, less than two years out of Columbia undergrad with a degree in political science, to shepherd the project. The D-Rays hired the global branding consultancy Interbrand to lead the effort on their behalf. Despite Interbrand’s big reach and strong reputation, the firm didn’t mesh well with MLB’s specific demands. The D-Rays quickly dropped Interbrand and hired Frederick & Froberg, a small New Jersey firm that had worked with the Pittsburgh Pirates and San Diego Padres and other projects and learned to deal with the league’s quirks. The lag time for approving and implementing
a new MLB logo was huge, so much so that a hard deadline was given: get this done in a few weeks (by late May 2006) or we won’t be able to unveil the new identity by November 2007, as planned.

The team flipped through reams of other ideas: Aces, Bandits, Cannons, Dukes, and Stripes. Sternberg’s favorite was the Nine, a takeoff on the Mudville Nine. Though Tampa Bay Nine offered the path of least resistance, Sternberg preferred the Florida Nine, as he hoped to become Florida’s team (excepting south Florida, Marlins territory). Combine Tampa Bay with Orlando, Gainesville, Jacksonville, and Tallahassee and he’d control one of the five biggest media markets in Major League Baseball. But the Nine faced trademark conflicts, and the Florida name never got off the ground owing to objections from the league and the Marlins.

Back at the drawing board, the team leaned on both Occi and Frederick & Froberg, hoping to find a workable idea in a short time frame. Sternberg and Silverman visited MLB headquarters and laid out their case. They wanted a design that was timeless and traditional, a look that could hold its own with longtime marks like the New York and Boston logos found on the road uniforms of the Yankees and Red Sox. That is, they wanted the polar opposite of what the Devil Rays had worn on that first opening day.

“They wanted to go from a fish to a feeling, to ‘this is where I want to be,’ ” said Occi, who headed Adidas USA’s marketing department before joining Major League Baseball more than two decades ago. “They felt that a ray of sunshine represented everything good about Florida, the happiness, fun, and warmth.”

To shift from fish to feeling, the team turned to Bill Frederick, Frederick & Froberg’s cofounder and partner. It took several tries for Frederick to find a new logo and mark that would last. The initial designs blasted the sun out in a way that was too flashy for Sternberg’s taste. The final version featured a more subtle ray of sunlight beaming from the jersey. The color scheme also took a while to finalize before everyone agreed on navy blue, gold for the sun ray, and some light blue. Just as the NHL’s Mighty Ducks of
Anaheim, some years earlier, had called on Frederick to chase away the ghost of Emilio Estevez, the Rays asked him to help them rid themselves of the Devil for good.

A year after Tampa Bay staged its exorcism, the Rays claimed the American League pennant.

The newly renamed and newly successful Rays became more aggressive in pushing their product. Sales and marketing expenses jumped 17% in 2008 and continued to rise thereafter. Monetizing the team’s success on the field played a big role in driving that increased spending. But so did the Rays’ awareness of their weaknesses, and those of the market in which they played. Attendance soared 31% in 2008 as fans started turning out to see the eventual AL champs. But per-game attendance remained weak relative to the rest of the league: just 22,370 fans per game, twelfth out of the fourteen American League teams.