Team colors: Rays

Look at that fog looming in the background. Did Topps get the Rays out at 6 a.m. to take photos?

Anyway, as you know there's still a wild-card race going on in the American League East. The Rays are trying to catch the morbidly inept Red Sox.

I know there are a lot of fans snickering over the Red Sox's demise. And there are a lot of Red Sox fans covering their eyes.

I'm doing neither.

The sole reason I am paying attention to this thing, outside of the "general interest in baseball" reason, is that I need to know: which team has the best chance of eliminating the Yankees in the postseason?

This is all I care about. Which team is going to take care of that problem of watching Teixeira, Martin, Swisher, A-Rod, Gardner, Posada, Burnett, Pajama Hamburger, gag, vomit, retch, puke, barf, spew, heave ... bleah. ...

Excuse me for a second.

....

...

OK, I'm back. Sorry. Automatic reaction.

Anyway, which team is going to take care of that problem of watching the Yankees in the postseason? Who's going to make it quick and painless for me?

Honestly, I don't think it's either the Red Sox or the Rays. But I want to see a glimmer of hope in one of those teams, just in case the Tigers or the Rangers can't hack it. My suspicion is it might be the Rays.

So, let's do this team colors thing for Tampa Bay in hopes that it will spur the team on to postseason success.

The Rays have had an interesting team color history in the few short years they've been in existence. First they tried out the day-glo yellow, green and purple thing. Then they went with green as their primary color. A daring choice. Now it's mostly a couple different shades of blue. The purple is long gone, the green is just about gone. The Rays don't seem to stick with one color for very long.

Here is the rundown of which color Topps used with the Rays for sets in which it determined its color choice based on the featured team:

2000: purple
2002: green and blue
2003: green
2004: green and blue
2005: green and blue
2006: green and blue
2007: green and blue
2008: green and blue
2009: light blue
2010: blue
2011: blue and light blue

Rays' team colors: navy and columbia blue.
What Topps says are the Rays' team colors: blue and green.

Topps is a little behind, but it's coming around.

Now, somebody please, go and beat those Stinkees.