Audrey Mahoney has tracked every Tampa Bay Rays pitch since the franchise's first season in 1998, and on Monday night the 94-year-old Palmetto woman will watch her team try to claw back into the World Series from a seat behind third base at Tropicana Field. She won't be alone. Her granddaughter, Sarah Bolin, surprised her with the tickets after flying into town unannounced following five years of living away.
Mahoney and Bolin have bonded over Rays baseball since the team's inaugural season, attending countless games together while Bolin was growing up, according to FOX 13 Tampa Bay. When Bolin's husband joined the Army and the family moved around for postings and deployments, the shared hobby shifted from stadium seats to long-distance phone calls and frequent text messages. “We text back and forth when something goes on,” Mahoney said, describing messages about Yandy Díaz home runs and pitchers who, in her view, failed to do their jobs.
The surprise took some convincing. Bolin said she hinted to her grandmother several times that they were headed to the World Series, telling her six times before it registered. Mahoney initially thought her granddaughter simply meant the Rays were going, not that the two of them would be sitting in the stands together. Bolin then handed over a Rays jersey and told her grandmother she'd wear it to Game 3.
A Reunion Rooted in Decades of Rays Baseball
The pair will sit in Section 124 along the third-base line, watching current favorites Taylor Walls and Chandler Simpson while remembering franchise greats Kevin Kiermaier, Evan Longoria and Wade Boggs, the station's report notes. Bolin said she wouldn't choose anyone else to share the moment with, and that this season's conversations with her grandmother ran the gamut from frustration over in-game decisions to pure excitement whenever the Rays won. Mahoney has her own family history with the Fall Classic: her mother attended a World Series in Cincinnati back in 1940.
Game 3 is the Rays' first home game of this World Series, and it arrives with the team facing elimination pressure. Tampa Bay returns to Tropicana Field trailing the Milwaukee Brewers two games to none after dropping Game 2 by a score of 5-4, according to MySuncoast. Ten teams in MLB history have overcome a 2-0 World Series deficit, but the last to do it was the New York Yankees in 1996 against the Atlanta Braves, three decades ago, per the same outlet.
Cheap Seats, Low Turnout, and a Team Chasing a Title
The homecoming comes against a backdrop of thin crowds at the Trop. The Rays ranked 14th out of 15 American League teams in attendance this past season, and the ballpark drew just 19,704 fans for a 2023 American League wild-card game, the lowest turnout for a playoff game since the 1919 World Series outside of the fan-limited 2020 postseason, as reported by The Athletic. That history is part of why tickets for Game 3 were running so much cheaper than those in Milwaukee: the average get-in price for Game 1 there was $2,338, compared with an average of $556 at Tropicana Field as of Sunday afternoon. Brewers fans told the outlet it was significantly cheaper to fly to Florida and buy tickets than to attend a World Series game at home.
None of that changes what Monday night means for Mahoney and Bolin. For a grandmother who has followed the Rays through losing seasons and playoff runs alike, and a granddaughter who kept the connection alive one text message at a time across years apart, Game 3 is less about ticket math than about two generations sharing a seat behind third base while the team they've always rooted for chases a championship.
