I don't know where they found this -- probably ripped it straight from the bowels of hell -- but on DRaysBay one of the regulars unearthed an old "Hit Show" jingle promoting the 2000 (Devil) Rays. You remember the Hit Show, right? This was the year Chuck LaMar lost it and signed Vinny Castilla and Greg Vaughn to go alongside Jose Canseco and Fred McGriff, bloating the payroll to an astounding $62.7 million. The four of them were heavily marketed because chicks dig the long ball. Then LaMar sat back and watched the whole thing blow up real good. Castilla had a -1.8 WAR in 2000 and was so awful he was derisively nicknamed Vinny Cashstealer. Castilla, Vaughn, and Canseco missed a combined 210 games. The team lost 92 games and the Hit Show finished dead last in the American League in all three parts of the offensive slash line (.329/.399/.728). Early the next season, Larry Rothschild was fired, the team started rapidly shedding payroll, and everyone in Tampa Bay realized that the people running this franchise were pretty horrible at it and stopped showing up to games.
Anyway, back to the song. All I could remember about it from 11 years ago was the late, great Chris Thomas singing it sarcastically on his show when the team did something bad, so it needed to be heard again. Holy cow.
Hit show!
Tampa Bay's hottest plays!
Hit show!
Devil Rays center stage!
Now I know where they got the money for all that payroll. The video was just guys hitting home runs and how to order tickets. The lyrics make no sense at all. There's this weak bat-cracking noise every time someone says the word "hit." The music might have been borrowed from a USF basketball commercial from several years before, and then hurriedly tweaked as the musicians were on their way to the studio. DeWayne Staats does his best to make extremely generic copy sound interesting. Then the music and lyrics are repeated at the end, maybe because no one could think of any more phrases that rhymed. (Note that "Rays" and "stage" don't really rhyme, so they were only 1-for-2 to begin with.)
Oh, and if you really want to get mad, try to figure out what Andrew Friedman might have been able to do with $62.7 million in 2000 dollars. Adjusted for inflation according to this calculator, that would be over $80 million in 2011. See, told you it would make you mad.