field->raw problem with date in views-view-field.tpl.php (add classes to day and year in date)
This looks like a "feature" in views, for some reason the entity_id is returned in the "raw" property, instead of anything related to the date.
So you will have to work with the "content" property and just make sure you get what you need there - in the view fields settings, set formatter to "plain" and in style settings HTML to none. This way the content will be just the date value from the database.
Check what type of a date field you are using - some of them are stored in the database as the integer timestamp, some as the textual representation of the date. If you want to work with the timestamp, you will have to either change the type of the field, or convert it in the template (probably not very good performance).
For the formatting, you can use the DateObject from the date module, it even has the handy to_array which might be of help :).