<table> </table> ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. | They bring cowbells to baseball games that are played indoors under a dome that looks like it&#8217;s slanting toward the Bay.</p><p>Inside and out of the Florida humidity, Tampa Bay&#8217;s flavor of the summer is ready for the most important game in franchise history &#8212; at least until the next one. A man in a shirt that looks like the tags have just been removed leans over to a boy wearing a hat with a brim flatter than the Tropicana Field turf.</p><p>&#8220;Here, son,&#8221; says Gary McFarland, a Tampa insurance salesman, &#8220;I&#8217;ll teach you how to keep score.&#8221;</p><p>The easy thing is to make fun of the fans here, and they invite it upon themselves for taking their cheering cues from a &#8220;Saturday Night Live&#8221; skit. Most of the Rays players are sporting Mohawks these days &#8212; they call &#8217;em <em>Rays</em>hawks.</p><p>They need all the help they can get now, with the first-ever playoff run depending on the Rays beating the defending champion Red Sox at Fenway Park.</p><p>Some women buy wigs with blue Rayshawks, and it&#8217;s exactly as attractive as it sounds. There&#8217;s even a local seventh-grader who rocked a Rayshawk to school and got in-school suspension for violating a dress code.</p><p>Sigh.</p><p>You can&#8217;t blame the people here that they&#8217;re new to baseball. Their team is 11 years old, and it&#8217;s lost more games over that span than any other team except the Royals and Pirates.</p><p>They averaged just over 22,000 fans per home game during the regular season &#8212; that&#8217;s 26th in baseball &#8212; and if the people in this area were slow to catch on to the Rays, they still managed to slide in well ahead of the national curve.</p><p>The popular opinion seems to be that the Rays are somehow bad for baseball, but the truth is just the opposite. The Rays&#8217; success is bad for Fox executives, sure, but it is the sport&#8217;s most recent and convincing proof that winning baseball can be built without blowing AIG-type money on free agents.</p><p>There is something for everyone here, from the housewives learning a new Longoria to love, to the seamheads and baseball operations folks all around the country thinking, <em>Damn, now THAT&#8217;S how you put together a franchise</em>, to some legitimate social implications.</p><p>No, the problem isn&#8217;t that the Rays are bad for baseball. Maybe it&#8217;s just that their story hasn&#8217;t been told enough yet.</p><p>&#8226; &#8226; &#8226;</p><p>This is something personal, something only baseball fans in places such as Kansas City and Pittsburgh care about.</p><p>But these Rays are enjoying low-budget prosperity without the <em>Moneyball</em> gimmick of the A&#8217;s or inevitable and silly cost-slashing of the Marlins. The Twins are the closest thing baseball has seen, but even they have to admire what the Rays have done in the AL East &#8212; home of $342 million of payroll between the Red Sox and Yankees alone.</p><p>It&#8217;s the dream of baseball operations folks everywhere, and the new talking point for fans of perennially struggling teams to demand that money and TV market size stop being used as excuses.</p><p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t want to say I root for them,&#8221; says J.J. Picollo, the Royals&#8217; assistant general manager in charge of scouting and player development. &#8220;But I&#8217;m glad and happy for the game to see those types of things happen.&#8221;</p><p>Some have written off the Rays&#8217; success as merely the product of picking so high in the draft all those years. That&#8217;s partly true &#8212; left-hander David Price, third baseman Evan Longoria and outfielders B.J. Upton and Rocco Baldelli were all top-six picks by the Rays &#8212; but ignores the team&#8217;s more important moves.