Bucs camp starts Saturday and I don’t care.

Well, I care a little, I guess, but not like I used to in the past. I picked up the sports section today and there was the obligatory story about keen areas of competition expected in camp — running backs, receivers, etc. — and I barely skimmed it.

Last year, and the years before, I would’ve been all over it.

Why? The Rays, man.

Until this year, I, like so many Tampa Bay sports fans, slogged through late June and July — with the NBA Playoffs over and our baseball team already 20 games under .500.

Football training camp represented a rebirth. Throw me a crumb about the battle for who’s going to return kickoffs, or the human interest story on the 127th kid who’s overcome adversity, and I am on it.

Hey, I’ll probably still read those stories, but they won’t be the lifeline they’ve been before. And I’ll read the Rays stories first.

This article appears in Jul 16-22, 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...