Matt Joyce

The Tampa Bay Rays are a Major League Baseball team based in St. Petersburg, Florida. The Rays are a member of the Eastern Division of MLB's American League. Since their inception in 1998, the club has played at Tropicana Field. Having finished in last place in nine of their first ten seasons, the... Rays' first season with a winning record was 2008, when they won their first division title and proceeded to win the pennant. Since 2007, the Rays have had four straight winning seasons and three playoff appearances, including two AL East championships. In November 2007, majority owner Stuart Sternberg made significant changes to his franchise's image, changing the club's name from the Tampa Bay Devil Rays to the "Tampa Bay Rays", which he described as "a beacon that radiates throughout Tampa Bay and across the entire state of Florida." The teams' primary colors, formerly black, green, and blue, were changed to navy blue, Columbia blue, and gold, and the team's symbol was changed from a devil ray to a ray of sunlight. The devil ray symbol, however, is still used on the sleeve of their jerseys, and there is still a tank of cownose rays in the outfield.
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Tampa is a city in the U.S. state of Florida. It serves as the county seat for Hillsborough County and is located on the west coast of Florida, on the Gulf of Mexico. The population of Tampa in 2010 was 335,709. The current location of Tampa was once inhabited by indigenous peoples of the Safety... Harbor culture, most notably the Tocobaga and the Pohoy, who lived along the shores of Tampa Bay. It was briefly explored by Spanish explorers in the early 16th century, but there were no permanent American or European settlements within today's city limits until after the United States had acquired Florida from Spain in 1819. In 1824, the United States Army established a frontier outpost called Fort Brooke at the mouth of the Hillsborough River, near the site of today's Tampa Convention Center. The first civilian residents were pioneers who settled near the fort for protection from the nearby Seminole population. The town grew slowly until the 1880s, when railroad links, the discovery of phosphate, and the arrival of the cigar industry jump-started Tampa's development and helped it to grow into an important city by the early 1900s.
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