Outs Per Swing

Rays FanFest

By Erik Hahmann | February 25th, 2008

For my second post on MVN I’m going to talk about FanFest, but first I thought I’d introduce myself a little. As you can see my name is Erik, and baseball is my passion.

Football is nice, basketball is neat, but there’s nothing better than baseball. I grew up a St. Louis Cardinals fan because they held their Spring Training in dowtown St. Petersburg and the Rays weren’t born yet. Since the Rays inception, I’ve been hooked. I’ve lived in St. Pete all my life, about 10 minutes away from the Trop. I try to go to as many Rays games I can and I’ll be in the stands when the Rays host their first playoff game in 2010. Now, on to FanFest.

The Rays FanFest was yesterday at the Trop and turned out a pretty big crowd. It looked to be about double the amount of people that attended last year. That’s a good sign for the Rays as they move forward with their new name/color scheme.

However, it’s going to take awhile to phase out all of the green shirts and jerseys, as 90% of the fans were wearing them. The lines for autographs seemed to extend out of the building, with Carlos Pena and Carl Crawford’s lines seeminly the longest. When Pena was interviewed on the JumboTron he received a round of applause and everyone stopped and looked on in awe. The team may also want to consider changing the Devilrays.com sign. Also, someone may want to tell the guy in the Ben Grieve jersey that it’s not 2001 anymore. I spent most of my time by the Baseball Prospectus table talking to Will Carroll, but I had enough time to walk around and take pictures. Here’s some of the pictures, enjoy.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 2:20 pm and is filed under FanFest. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.