Young Rays fans have become accustomed to watching good baseball, but before the 2008 turnaround, we old timers “enjoyed” two decades of devastatingly disastrous debacles from the 1990s and early 2000s.
Perhaps the best known “oops!” of early Rays history was ‘The Hit Show,’ when the organization brought in a quartet of the top sluggers from the early 1990’s to lead the team into the 2000s: Fred McGriff (who had been with the Rays since their inception); Jose Canseco (who joined in 1999 and was seemingly on a record pace until his back gave out), and Greg Vaughn (who joined in 2000 and had totaled 95 home runs over the previous two years).