Earlier this week The Professor told you about the first ever Spots Illustrated cover to feature the Tampa Bay Rays (and it was not making fun of the Rays!).

Yesterday, Roger Mooney of the Bradenton Herald got the reactions of a few of the Rays, and oh so subtly dropped this little bomb on us:

It is the first time Sports Illustrated used a cartoon-themed cover in its nearly 54 years, and the idea isn't exactly a winner inside the Rays clubhouse.

Oh really?

You would expect Mooney to then provide us with a quote from Crawford or somebody else as to why the cover "isn't exactly a winner inside the Rays clubhouse". Nope. He then immediately goes into a quote from Carl Crawford on how "nice" it was to be on the cover.

So, the Rays are on the cover of Sports Illustrated for the first time ever, in a historical issue (first ever cartoon cover) and yet some of the Rays didn't like the idea and Mooney doesn't tell us why.

Crawford, Rays happy to be on cover of Sports Illustrated [Bradenton Herald]

You can imagine our surprise when we opened this weeks Baseball Preview issue of Sports Illustrated and we see the name of our little site right there amidst the Devil Rays preview. But don't worry, we won't let it go to our heads. In fact we won't even write a post about it, nor would we ever permanently display the cover of the issue in the sidebar to the right, and we will definitely not push you to vote in the POLL from sportsillustrated.com that asks "Which blog or fan site has the best Devil Rays info?" in which we are getting our butts kicked by two sites that are clearly cheating. Hey, at least we have received more votes than DevilRaysNews. What? DevilRaysNews hasn't updated in almost a year? They still have Mark Hendrickson listed on the Rays roster? OK, well at least we aren't losing to THIS BLOG.

(editors note: we are just kidding about the "cheating")