• The Tampa Bay Rays went 3-6 on a road trip before returning home and taking a series (2-1) against the Florida Marlins over the weekend. I wondered how a losing road trip might hurt attendance when the Rays returned home.

Turns out, not so much. The Marlins series drew 79,393 fans to the Trop. That’s pretty respectable for a Major League baseball club, damn near remarkable for the Rays (there wasn’t even a post-game concert).

Has attendance at Rays games crossed over the tipping point? Let’s hope so. The Chicago Cubs — who’ve never played at the Trop — come in for a three-game set starting Tuesday, so that should help keep folks coming through the turnstiles. If the Rays can sweep out the best team in the majors, or win the series, the momentum picks up even further.

…The Ray are getting a lot more love from national media, but in today’s New York Times, in a complimentary story about the Tampa Bay club, the writer referred to pitcher “Scott Shields.” It’s James Shields.

• I don’t watch a lot of golf but tend to tune in during the major tournaments, just to see if it’s close and might end up in a playoff (which is what happened yesterday at the U.S. Open, when Tiger Woods hit a putt on the 18th hole to force a showdown today with 45-year-old Rocco Mediate. [Go Rocco.)

Watching golf on TV, I’ve noticed that certain members of the crowd —gallery, in golf-ese — tend toward strange behavior.

This article appears in Jun 11-17, 2008.

Eric Snider is the dean of Bay area music critics. He started in the early 1980s as one of the founding members of Music magazine, a free bi-monthly. He was the pop music critic for the then-St. Petersburg...