Not All Sympathetic Toward Rays' Cause

ESPN's Buster Olney compared the Rays' attendance problems to a bagel shop owner complaining about his lack of sales:

Can you imagine if the owner of a bagel store -- and I worked as a baker in bagel stores in West Lebanon, N.H., and in Nashville during my college years -- in St. Petersburg were to talk like Longoria?

"You know, I've never made bagels as well as I'm making them now," the bagel man would say. "The lineup of sesame seed, cinnamon raisin and pumpernickel is the deepest I've ever had. We have more speed in our counter service than ever before, and the bakers -- that is a group that has been clutch all summer.

"For us to go a full season of baking great bagels, it's kind of like, what else do we have to do to draw customers into this place? It's actually embarrassing for us."
...
A bagel-store owner who says something like that would be laughed out of town. Folks who run a business -- any business -- put a product up for sale, and would-be patrons have the right to decide whether they want to buy the product. Nobody is obligated to buy the product, just as the Rays are not obligated to commit to staying in St. Petersburg forever.

And NBC Sports columnist Bob Harkins writes there are plenty of good reasons why fans didn't go to last night's game at The Trop:

1) It was a Monday night game against the Orioles, and there was football on TV!
2) Unemployment in the state of Florida rose to 11.7 percent in August. People just don't have as much expendable cash as they used to.
3) The Trop, by all accounts, sucks.
4) The Rays are almost certain to be in the playoffs anyway. So if you're going to spend your hard-earned dollars on baseball, why not save up and spring for playoff tickets?