Continuing my work of attempting to gather data on all (Devil) Rays-affiliated teams, we now have the St. Petersburg Devil Rays of the Florida State League. I'm starting here with their inaugural season, 1997.
The St. Pete D-Rays had the earliest real success for the franchise, winning the FSL's Western Division in the first half of the season (42-26), and coming in second in the second half. They beat the Lakeland Tigers (led by none other than Gabe Kapler, who set an FSL record for doubles that season) in the Western Division playoffs, 2-games-to-none, and then went on to beat the Vero Beach Dodgers for the League Championship, 3-games-to-2.
Now maybe it wasn't really that the St. Pete club was all that much better than the rest of the FSL that season. It may have been that since they were the D-Rays' top affiliate that year, as the players got better they couldn't be promoted elsewhere, and they played together as a unified group with a lot less turnover than most A+ teams.
This was also the team where Rolando Arrojo made his pro debut in the U.S., after signing a "Big League" contract with a team that wouldn't even field a big league team until the next year.
You can see the spreadsheet
right here.
As always, there are games missing or that need clarification. However, it's not too much compared to the other teams I've been through so far:
- 7/12/1997
- 7/21/1997
- 8/15/1997
- I have known results for 131 of the 137 regular season games played, plus all postseason games.
- Adding in the 3 games (listed above) that I know I am missing information for, that leaves 3 other games totally unaccounted for. I'm guessing that they were un-/mis-reported double-headers.
Do you have any information on the missing games? Box scores for others? (The spreadsheet indicates the games with boxes available and from which paper.) As always:
Any additional help is always very much appreciated!
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