Tampa Bay Rays
Buying something Rays related to give another Rays fan isn’t as easy as picking up whatever has the logo on it. Rays fans are the type of fans that care. They’ve been there through the bad years, they know what it’s like to root for an overachieving club and they can spot bullshit from a mile away. If it feels cheap when you touch it, it doesn’t matter how official it looks.
That’s not us being defensive, it’s us understanding who we’re shopping for. We’re shopping for that one person. Not the person that watches a game on ESPN during the season and considers themselves a fan. We get that person, too. We have family members just like that. Instead, we getting this gift for the person who mails in their schedule so they never have to miss a game.
This is a die-hard kind of group. They aren’t the largest market in baseball by fan count, but the fans that make up that fanbase care. They wear that light blue proudly. They speak about the roster in a way that makes you know they’ve spent the time to read up. Those kinds of people deserve gifts that fit the bill. Because when you give that person something, they will know when you didn’t get it right.
So what you’ll find here is stuff we would 100% gift ourselves. Items that sit on your desk or get worn to the Trop or help you feel like a Saturday morning. We could have padded this list to several pages with stuff that simply had the Rays wordmark slapped on it, but why should you suffer through that? You’ll find plenty of other sites that will do that for you. We narrowed this list because narrowing it down means you’ll find better stuff for a person that actually knows who their team is.
We also took into consideration what times of the year you might be shopping. Someone’s birthday who plans their summer around the Rays schedule. A Father’s Day gift for the dad that has watched EVERY GAME since Year 1. Something to celebrate a season that may have meant something special to you both. These are real occasions for real people that we all know. Heck, we picked with some of these people in mind the whole time.
You’re already here which means you know a gift like this matters. You’re not about stuffing a bag with stuff just because it looks like a jersey when you’re ten feet away. You want the legit stuff, stuff that is going to elicit a legitimate response when they open it. That’s what we set out to find.