When Tampa Bay Rays fans greet each other, eventually they ask, “How many weeks have you been a fan?”  Wait, no, I’m sure there are some actual long-suffering Rays fans, fans who paid money to watch Fred McGriff do whatever crap Fred McGriff did, or convince themselves that Wade Boggs, Jose Canseco, Vinny Castilla and Greg Vaughn were a good idea.

Those are the fans I feel kind of bad for today.  Because whether or not you believe in curses or omens, if you were a Tampa baseball fan, the sight of Chuck LaMar on your TV during the sixth inning had to make you wretch as though you’d eaten the fish like Captain Oveur.

At the time, to a casual observer it all seemed innocent enough.  LaMar, who was the GM of the Rays for an inexplicable 11 years of suckitude, is now the director of scouting for the Philadelphia Phillies.  As you may have heard, right after the National League cancelled their playoffs before they started this season, they picked the Phillies to hang around in case they decided to have a World Series.

So, LaMar was there scouting his old team, and I’m sure he was confused by their suddent bout of competence.

Craig Sager of Turner Sports sat down next to Chuck and they two chatted about LaMar’s connections to the team that won the NL pennant and the team that had a 5-0 lead (at the time) in what could have been the deciding game for the AL championship.

Sager kept asking LaMar about how proud he must feel about where the Rays were, and LaMar kept saying he was, and talking about what a great job the people who were with him in Tampa (some of whom still are with the organization) did to build the franchise.

Except, of course, it’s all bullshit.  Chuck LaMar did more to hold back that franchise than any other carbon dioxide exhuding creature on the planet.  He was notoriously terrible when it came to negotiating contracts, he was unreasonable to work with when other teams tried to make trades, and while he drafted talented players, most of them didn’t pan out or had personal issues or both.

In fact, at the time Sager was interviewing LaMar, the Rays had the following players in the game:

1b – Carlos Pena
2b – Akinori Iwamura
ss – Jason Bartlett
3b – Evan Longoria
lf – Carl Crawford
cf – BJ Upton
rf – Gabe Gross
c – Dioner Navarro
dh – Cliff Floyd
p – Scott Kazmir

That’s ten players.  LaMar acquired three of them.

He drafted Crawford and Upton and traded for Kazmir.  He’s only been gone for three years, so you can see how much turnover there had to be for the Rays to actually turn themselves into a winner.

LaMar wasn’t around when Joe Maddon was hired as the manager.

Only six of the 25 Rays on the roster were acquired by LaMar.  Now, to be fair that includes three fifths of the starting rotation (Kazmir, James Shields and Andy Sonnanstine) so that’s something.

But the interview ignored all of the crap that current GM Andrew Friedman had to shovel out of Tampa.  Number one overall pick Josh Hamilton became and crack and heroin addict in his days with Tampa, Elijah Dukes kept punching men and women in the face, Delmon Young threw a bat an umpire, even Upton has been a whiny little bitch most of the time.  The franchise was a mess, and it didn’t start to turn around until LaMar left.  But there he was, sitting in the stands, yukking it up with Sager for a good five minutes.

The only good part of the interview was that Chip Caray was silenced for the duration of it.  By the time the bottom of the seventh rolled around the Rays lead had grown to 7-0.

But what the players and coaches didn’t know, but the few Rays fans with any history with the team did, was that the Curse of Chuck LaMar has been reawakened.

Just imagine if during game six in 2003, Fox had sent Chris Myers to interview Ed Lynch.  You wouldn’t have even needed a nitwit in a turtleneck to play patty cake with Moises.  The damage would have already been done.

Let’s just hope the Rays show more sac than the Cubs ever have.