Founded on blackmail and appeals to pity and housed in a mausoleum, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, who have lost at least 90 games in each year of their existence, should not be playing baseball in New York City this week. In cranky moments, I think they should be quarantined along with the Padres, the Diamondbacks, and every other team whose marketing staff has ever convened a focus group and solemnly asked their opinions of sandstone, turquoise, and teal. During the same moments I also think opening week should be reserved for teams that have true lineages and offer their loyalists basic human dignity. No man wearing a fish on his shirt can, after all, truly tell himself he’s the heir to Christy Mathewson and Ted Williams, and no man cheering on a man with a fish on his shirt can truly feel that blood tie to an industrial America that even the lowly Cubs fan can claim as his inalienable right.

Perhaps it is the insufferable fish, or at least the sheer rootlessness and fakery it represents, that is to blame for the string of catastrophes that has marked the Devil Rays’ sad existence. Or perhaps it’s the complete abdication of the barest sense of responsibility on the part of a team brought into being by a buyout specialist who made his fortune purchasing aluminum and glass concerns and figuring out how to make these homely companies turn a profit. Where are our idle rich, bootleggers, and gangsters? They built teams worth tying on to.

In 1999, with the first pick in the amateur draft, the Devil Rays chose Josh Hamilton, a 6-foot-4-inch god whose left-handed batting stroke and outfield instincts were so perfect he had to play the field despite breaking 95 with his fastball. Hamilton ended up a crackhead, squandered his $4 million signing bonus, and failed so many drug tests he was suspended by baseball a year at a time. He only made his major league debut this week, and it was his 24th game above A ball.

Three years later, the Devil Rays drafted high school shortstop B.J. Upton second overall. He couldn’t miss. He was the best player on a touring team that boasted, among others, David Wright and came from a family so endowed that he wouldn’t even prove to be the best prospect in his own family — his brother was picked first overall in 2005. Upton, despite showing no signs he was capable of routinely making plays at shortstop, made the majors at 19 and hit a respectable .258 in 45 games, inspiring his blustering manager, Lou Piniella, to compare him to another prodigy he’d managed — Alex Rodriguez. After Upton’s successful debut, the Rays helped him develop the confidence in his own manhood every ballplayer needs by housing him in exciting Durham, N.C., to work on his defense. He continued to make on the order of 50 errors a year, the Rays continued to keep him where he was, and, shockingly, the wealthy young man began to show signs that he was sick of the provinces and perhaps a bit unsure of his own talent. Last year he was arrested for drunken driving, and now he’s a second baseman, looking to make a comeback at 22 after having played all of 97 major league games.

That same year, the Rays drafted Elijah Dukes. As good at football as he was at baseball, Dukes was the son of a man who had killed another man for trying to pass off counterfeit crack to his wife. Twice, Dukes was arrested for battery. His development into a potential batting champion would be a heartwarming story of redemption through competition if not for his dual habits of getting arrested (five times since signing his contract) and suspended (five times last year). A lot of young ballplayers get into the idiotic scrapes typical of men their age but have to endure far more sniping about embarrassing messes of the sort anyone with red blood gets into when they’re 21; Dukes, by all appearances, is the rare real deal. One of his suspensions came for beating up a teammate.

The year after the Rays’ drafting those two, the fish was affixed to the chest of Delmon Young, first overall. The younger brother of the esteemed Dmitri Young, the player and his short, nasty stroke and brick physique had everyone who saw him in high school comparing him to Albert Belle. You’ll have heard that he did the comparison some justice by throwing a bat at an umpire in the middle of a game last year.

It’s a repulsive litany of failure, with everything from truly criminal behavior to the mismanagement of one of the game’s great talents at the hands of inept bureaucrats. At absolute best you can say that the Rays have proved poor judges and cultivators of character, here defined as those aspects of personality that prevent a player from doing something so obviously stupid he risks ruining his career.

So why should you, the Yankees fan, care about this wretched crew? Why would I urge those among you who can swing it to leave the office at noon, catch the train up to the Stadium, and get the best tickets the city’s finest scalpers have on offer? Simply this: For all the horrors that have beset the team’s player development system, the Rays have as obscene a collection of young talent as has existed in my lifetime. Upton, Dukes, and Young are playing in the major leagues, and they’re far too talented not to expect that everything that’s gone wrong for them will, 10 years from now, be anything more than vaguely remembered urban legends attached to the early careers of a lot of swaggering superstars. They aren’t even the best young players on the team. Carl Crawford hits and runs like Jose Reyes, and Rocco Baldelli crushed the ball into the gaps and ran like a horse last season after not having faced live pitching for a year.

The Devil Rays, as a franchise, may be an ongoing tribute to sheer, voracious expansionism without purpose; some among their players may uniquely embody everything risible about the modern athlete, and the Rays’ indecisive, cavalier treatment of teenagers who entrusted their careers to them may be infuriating. But none of this is anything new. You might even have said it of the Mets 20 years ago, when their obscene collection of young talent looked little different from what the Devil Rays’ does today.

Baseball is played by teams with fish on their aquamarine jerseys, the modern athlete is risible in direct proportion to how much more thoroughly covered he is than his equally risible antecedents, and this whole, young lot is going to be facing Andy Pettitte in his return to the Bronx. It will be raw, lively talent and instinct against craft and hard-won experience, and the spectacle of some of the game’s brightest futures taking their trial by fire. It will be baseball fully worthy of opening week.

tmarchman@nysun.com