I liked "Devil Rays" better. "Tampa Bay Rays" sounds awkward and the Rays comes out too short sounding.
For today's battle it's Brian Bannister (4.88 ERA) versus Edwin Jackson (4.33 ERA) o the 4th of July. Why are so many young Rays good now? I thought that was supposed to take years? Evan Longoria is hitting .275/.348/.528. While I'm pulling hard for the Rays in the AL East, I'm also a bit resentful than they became good before the Royals ever did, and in fact look much much stronger. Just thinking about it informally, the Royals are probably three good no-miss draft picks away from where Tampa is right now.
Since my research area is American poetry 1770-1800, nearly all of which is essentially patriotic propaganda, I really wanted to post something from one of my guys today on RR. Unfortunately, I'm just too overwhelmed by all the nearly identical choices, most of which are actually fairly long and hard to quote in a short snippet. Oh, well. A good book on the history of patriotic celebrations and festivals in the United States is David Waldstreicher's In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes- The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820. (Amazon link) Fetes describes the battles between the Federalists and Republicans/Anti-Federalists to define and claim various early national holidays, parades, odes, toasts, etc. My loyalties, of course, are with the guys who lost, the Anti's. Although the Federalists did get a nice beat-down in 1800, with the Jefferson landslide.
But we have Rays-Royals, so none of this matters.