By Brendan T. Gleason
Mark you negative-image pushing, bad-role-model endorsing, punchline explaining bozo. There is a time for subtlety, and it can even come when paying tribute to a team of yesteryear. Now granted, there are worse things that happen in our day to day lives than seeing a cigar on a baseball uniform for one throwback regular season game, but that doesn’t mean we have to celebrate and glorify every bad habit that the people who came before us made.
- If the Rays are going to wear throwback Little League jerseys, they are going to wear these Belmont Heights jerseys from the back-to-back World Series participants that featured Derek Bell and Gary Sheffield (pictured)they were in, and I couldn’t tell you one player who played for the franchise. (Can I call it a franchise? It seems kind of like calling Church’s Chicken a “restaurant”) So if the argument is “we should keep it the same for history’s sake”, then it seems a little ridiculous. This isn’t the LA Dodgers wearing the old Brooklyn uniforms or the
First of all, I have no idea who the Smokers were. I don’t know what years they played, I don’t know what league Oakland A’s wearing throwback jerseys of the Kansas City(or Philadelphia) Athletics. This isn’t even the Nationals deciding to don Expos attire for a game this summer. I just looked this up, the Smokers were a minor league team that won the international league in 1951. If a team plays in the middle of a century, and there’s no one there to witness it…does it make a sound? Obviously it does. This just in, the Rays are going to wear the uniforms of my little league team from 1991 next year.
Secondly, do we really need a picture of a cigar on a jersey that says “Smokers” across the chest? Would they need a picture of a guillotine if they were paying tribute to the Nottingham Executioners? Would they need a picture of moonshine embroidered on the throwback uniforms of the Dodge City Drinkers? Would we need a picture of a whip if we were honoring the Bradenton Crackers? Not only would those pictures be unnecessary, they would, for the most part, be wrong.
I’m all for paying tribute to the smokers. I’m all for Tampa being steeped in cigar making and smoking. Hell, I’m all for taking part in smoking a stogie from time to time. What I’m not for, and this is my final point, is beating a dead horse. We’re paying tribute to the smokers, right? That’s not a word that needs to be explained to people. Adults know what it means, kids over the age of 10 know what it means, and kids under the age of 10 will only know what it means if we decide to make it a cartoon. Let the kids today keep a little bit of their innocence.
I think it was the correct move by the Rays. No one remembers the smokers, no one needs to see the picture to know what smokers means, and no one needs to choose this as their battle.
Smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em.
I wish we would just bust out the old purple devil rays equipment for the throw back game, it isn’t like the Smokers morphed into the Devil Rays at any point. As far as I am concerned we shouldn’t be affiliated with a minor league team from the middle of the last century. Like it or not, the Devil Rays are our history, however brief that history may be. If we must wear the jersey, then at least keep it original. Maybe the players should be required to put a tennis ball size of chewing tobacco in their lip for the game to, perhaps that would be too far. In all seriousness, there is no harm in leaving it on there. I take it you were happy when cigarettes were edited out of classic Tom and Jerry cartoons a few years ago? This whole attempt to make everything PC sickness me sometimes.
i agree there is no harm in leaving it on there. I also see no harm in taking it off. no one would remember if there was a cigar on the smokers’ uniform if people like us didn’t talk about it on the interwebs. it’s not like trying to watch Goodfellas on TBS when you know you’re missing out on quite a bit.
They wore the Devil Rays’ uniforms in a throwback game against the As last year.
I think we should just wear totally blank uniforms. If we didn’t exist in the year we are throwing it back to, we should come out all white. Just names and numbers. White hats, white jerseys, white pants, white socks, white shoes. How funny would that be?
i like it! or maybe just have a bunch of stickers all over the plain white uniforms of other things that didn’t exist in the middle of last century like “facebook” and “smart phones” and “equal rights”.
Trying to imagine what kind of “man” would view a cigar as such an evil vice that it shouldn’t be shown on a baseball jersey… who took your balls?
Did you ever read 1984? When history was rewritten if it didn’t fit what was convenient at present?
Tampa is a major city only because of its cigar heritage. We should embrace it.