As Matt Joyce stepped into the batter’s box and directly into the harrowing glare of unhittable Yankee’s set-up man – and former Tampa Bay Rays All-Star - Joyce paused and looked up at the scoreboard in right field.

With Tampa trailing 3-2 in the bottom of the seventh inning of game 161 of 162 Tuesday night, Joyce replayed in his head a conversation he had with his father earlier that day.

It was mid-afternoon when Matt Sr. broke the news to his son that he couldn’t make it to the game. Joyce was relentless in his pursuit to convince his father otherwise but was having no luck.

Matt Sr. has a dreadful back problem which made the thought of traveling from Tampa into St. Petersburg seem agonizing at best.

“But I always hit better when I know you’re there,” Joyce insisted.

Finally, Matt Sr. gave in.

Under one condition.

“He told me to hit a bomb for him,” Joyce said after the game. “I said, Yeah. Right. We’ll see how it goes.’”

Soriano threw his first pitch, the only pitch Joyce hit that night, and belted it over the right field wall.

As Joyce was being interviewed on the field after a 5-3 Rays win, he noticed a familiar face in the crowd wearing a Joyce jersey and waving – Matt Sr.

These are the everyday stories of a Rays team that entered the season after losing its eight highest paid players. Not to injury, to free agency.

Coming off the franchise’s first and only World Series appearance in 2008 and the league’s best record in 2010, the Rays were forced to enter 2011 with a depleted roster and a faltering, apathetic fan base with low expectations.

But that’s only where the script started, not where it could end.

If you are scripting this one,” said Rays owner Stu Sternberg, “you script it to the end.”

Whether tonight’s game results in this season’s script reading ‘Monumental Comeback’ or ‘Historic Collapse,’ what the Rays have done this year, how they have battled, scrapped and clawed with everything they have– which is less than a college kids CD collection – has been nothing short of improbable and amazing.

Why?

Not because the Rays have used a late season surge to overcome a nine-game September deficit to a Boston team that could buy the Rays roster four times if they so chose, but because of far greater implications.

It is no secret – and I have touched on this subject before - that globalization is making the world’s biggest cities incalculably richer, but also divided and unequal from those in smaller proportion.

Best-selling author and innovative economist Richard Florida is able to simplify this complicated notion.

“We make a big mistake when we look out across the peaks of privilege from our eyries in London and New York and tell ourselves that the playing field is level,” Florida said. “This dynamic is not just unique to London, but is at work in many of our world’s biggest cities. Instead of reducing and flattening economic distinctions, globalization has made them sharper.”

With each passing year, sports appears closer and closer to a mirror image of society.

Tampa’s payroll is only $41 million, the second lowest in the league and a fraction of what big city perennial powers such as the Yankees, Red Sox and Phillies have to work with.

This reality bequeaths the notion that parity truly exists in baseball and that globalization has not affected how franchises in smaller cities must operate not just to be successful, but to stay alive.

When was the last time a team in any professional sport entered a season without it’s eight highest paid players from the previous season?

Bet the bank on never.

Where’d they go?

Rafael Soriano hopped on the first flight to New York (highest payroll), Carl Crawford chose Boston (2^nd highest payroll), and Carlos Pena and Matt Garza were reluctantly shipped to the Chicago Cubs (6^th highest payroll).

“For a team always scrambling from behind, moving a boulder a half roll at a time, such memories are the important part, it’s what they rely on,” said Gary Shelton of the St. Petersburg Times. “Every day, it has to be somebody different. It has to be Desmond Jennings or Matt Moore, B.J. Upton or Ben Zobrist. Somebody. Anybody.”

Excuse me, Desmond who?

Can somebody, anybody, please tell me what a Zobrist is?

The Rays have been able to survive this era of globalization and the big city attraction with their own version of “Moneyball,” or as Eric Eidon of Yahoo Sports calls it, “Maddonball.”

On top of regular and radical changes to the Rays lineup, manager Joe Maddon has decided to change the culture of the team as well.

Themed dress-codes on road trips and team/family gatherings have become a regular part of the Rays playoff push.

Since implementing this little league strategy, the Rays have stopped acting out the script of The Walking Dead, started writing their own script and have climbed their way out of a nine game hole in a little less than a month.

Now that’s what I call Oscar material.

“It’s like a game of clue,” Shelton said. “This time it was Joyce in the seventh with a bat.”

Who will it be tonight?