By Tim Robertson

The baseball stadium stands as a church filled with overwhelming and exuberant nostalgia. Nothing bests the feeling of arriving from under the tunnel to a view of the bright, very well trimmed grass, the perfect chalked white lines and the smooth dirt infield.

Each park is idiosyncratic. A historic-looking white facade lines the outer ring of Yankee Stadium. The Green Monster towers over Fenway Park. Wrigley and the ivy, the hotel and the Blue Jays’ home and the apple and Shea.

One stadium’s noticeable characteristic, however, isn’t something as momentous as the monster or Monument Park, it’s a giant orange in right field. It’s no church, in fact, it’s just a cement warehouse. Tropicana Field, home to the world infamous Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

With a gigantic straw poking out the side of the orange, the stadium’s namesake advertises its most legendary product. The enlarged fruit, however, isn’t the only unusual quirk of the dome.

Understandably, the Rays don’t draw nearly as well as Boston or the Giants. I’ve been to some empty ballparks before. Montreal each of the three seasons before Bud Selig moved the team to D.C. and Baltimore after the seventh inning. But, nothing compares to the Trop.

Of the 41,315 seats available for a game, just a wee over 12,000 fans came out to a Wednesday night affair between the Rays and Detroit. A decent chunk of the 12,000 weren’t sporting a TB hat, but rather supported the visiting Tigers – and non-competing teams.

Usually the road team brings a strong following, but not one of this size. When the boos of a wrong call taking away a Tiger home run in the first can drown out the cheers, something’s awry.

It’s hard to think of any park without varying allegiances among fans, but the fans in Tampa represent a sliver of what makes “The Juice” distinctive from all other stadiums.

Take the team name, for instance: Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Besides the unusualness of the nickname, why did I have to sit through roughly 25 extra miles of rush hour traffic after I drove past Tampa? It isn’t the city of Tampa Bay that welcomes fans to games under the centerfield orange scoreboard, but the city of St. Petersburg. Shouldn’t this team undertake a new name? Perhaps the St. Petersburg Devil Rays of Tampa Bay. SPDRTB could represent the team’s new abbreviation.

To the left of the older scoreboard sits a cigar bar. That’s right, men and women can puff on their favorite cigar while watching the ballgame. When most stadiums in the MLB and every other sport have a strict no smoking policy, the Rays encourage the unhealthy activity.

Some good comes from the uniqueness of the Trop. Red Sox tickets in the bleachers: $40. A beer at Fenway: probably close to $8. Parking: priceless because it’s impossible to find and not cheap. Again, the Rays differ from opposing stadiums. For the 2007 campaign, fans park free inside the friendly confines of Tropicana Field. That’s right, as if the tickets weren’t cheap enough, the food reasonably priced, Tampa has free parking! Talk about encouraging. Some stadiums, cough Shea cough, charge an outrageous rate of $15 (non-refundable, even due to a rain out) to park, which makes the cost of going to a ball game substantially inflate the cost of watching a game.

There have been but just a few nights when Tropicana has had to worry about a full parking lot, and it hasn’t been this season. Despite housing the Tampa Bay Lightning, hosting the 1999 NCAA men’s basketball Final Four and serving as the home of the D-Rays for 10 seasons, the largest crowd hasn’t been at a sporting event.

Instead, the dome, once called the Florida Suncoast Dome in 1990, drew an impressive 47,150 for a concert. What’s not so impressive is the musical group who performed for the record crowd: The New Kids on the Block. Note: no fact checking needed. That is not an outlandish typo.

Baseball fans who really want that nostalgic feeling when entering their church, may not find it at Tropicana. There is no grass, no historical or important idiosyncrasy. The seats aren’t filled with riled up hometown fans, let alone filled with much of anybody. What the Trop brings to the table is a place for the cigar smoking, frugal baseball fan to enjoy a game that never can be rained out.