The devil has a place in American baseball lore, thanks to the classic 1955 musical “Damn Yankees,” in which a beleaguered baseball fan named Joe Boyd sells his soul to Satan in return for the batting chops that help his beloved Washington Senators finally vanquish the Yankees. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t work.
The devil never helped the Tampa Bay Devil Rays either. After ten years of existence as the Devil Rays, the former expansion team dropped “devil” from their name this year. The change was reflected in new uniforms for the team, in which a sunburst replaced an abstract icon of the locally abundant fish.

Needless to say, the Rays promptly leapt to the top of their division. You can choose to believe that the teams’ fortunes have followed their logo up from the watery depths to the sunny Florida sky. To this writer, and to any reasonably superstitious baseball fan, the turnabout is solely the result of the exorcism of the word “devil.”