Baseball Is Just a Game for These Tampa Bay Rays

The Rays’ success has not exactly flown under the radar, what with a record-tying 13-game win streak to begin the season, the franchise’s longest winning streak in its 26-year history. Over the course of April, they rattled off another six-game winning streak and extended their opening home win streak to a modern major league-record 14. After taking the first two games of a home series against the unexpectedly dangerous Pirates, Tampa has found itself four games ahead of baseball’s next-best team at 25–6 — an incredible .806 winning percentage — along with far and away the league’s best run differential at +113, good for a margin of +3.6 runs per game. And the Rays are playing with the playful swagger of a team that knows just how good it is.

For a little context on what the Rays have achieved so far: their 23 wins through April were two more than any other team in the Modern Era (since 1901) before May — an accolade helped by modern scheduling, but impressive nonetheless. On a percentage basis, their .793 clip was the highest pre-May winning percentage since the 2001 Mariners went 20–5 (.800) to kick off their record-setting 116-win campaign. In the Modern Era, just five teams have managed higher winning percentages in March and April in at least 20 games.

Winning 25 games in any 31-game stretch is pretty impressive in its own right; just three teams managed such a stretch in 2022, and only two others had done so in the four prior seasons. But few clubs have ever come out of the gates that fast. The 2023 Rays are just the 13th team since 1901 to win as many as 25 of their first 31 games and just the third in the last 65 seasons. For what little it’s worth given the extremely different eras and playoff formats, 10 of the previous 12 went on to play in the World Series, with eight winning. There’s a long road between now and October, but the Rays are putting themselves among some pretty good company to start:

Scheduling has again lent a slight hand, to be fair. Despite MLB’s more balanced schedule unveiled this season, the Rays have a harder-than-average schedule thanks to their spot in the only division with five true playoff hopefuls in 2023. But much of that challenge still awaits; the Rays swept the Red Sox in a four-game series and dropped a three-game set in Toronto to start 5–2 against the AL East. Their only other series loss has come against the defending champion Astros; meanwhile, they’ve gone an absurd 17–2 against the Tigers, Nationals, A’s, Reds, and White Sox — five of the bottom seven teams in the league by FanGraphs’ projected standings. Tampa’s rest-of-season strength of schedule rose from .504 to .509 on May 1, matching the Orioles for the largest increase over that time. This month will be a legitimate test, featuring series with the Yankees (twice), Orioles, Mets, Brewers, Blue Jays, Dodgers, and Cubs.

Still, the display of talent to this point has been impressive on both sides of the ball. Through April, the Rays slashed .281/.351/.528 with a .376 wOBA in over 1,100 PA, or roughly what Austin Riley hit last season when he ranked eighth in the majors with a .377 wOBA. Their 61 home runs before May set a new MLB record. They outpaced the rest of the league in just about every stat, leading the next-best team by 14 home runs, 29 points in wOBA, 29 points in wRC+, and a remarkable 79 points in slugging. The last team to slug higher through the opening month was the 2001 Rockies in what was not only a vastly different hitting environment, but also one boosted by Colorado playing 15 of its 24 games that April a mile high in the sky.

Heading into May, Tampa Bay had a 148 wRC+ as a team. That’s a lineup full of 2022 Julio Rodriguezes. To be nearly 50% better than league average is a wild level of lapping the competition; the next-best team was Texas at 119. In over 20 seasons of plus-stats from the start of the season to the end of April, no team has been within 10 points of that mark:

To hit that well, it has to come from all over the lineup. Yandy Díaz entered May ranking third among major league qualifiers with a 185 wRC+. Randy Arozarena was seventh at 173, Wander Franco was 17th at 156, and Brandon Lowe was 30th at 142. Among those with too few plate appearances to qualify, Josh Lowe led the team with a 191 mark in 83 PA, Harold Ramírez had a 186 mark in 81, Taylor Walls posted a 175 clip in 73 PA, and Luke Raley recorded a 150 mark in 70. In Tampa, 14 hitters came to the plate before May 1; 11 were above league average at the dish.

The Rays’ pitching staff has also been among the league’s best. They lead baseball with a 2.96 ERA, ranking third with a 3.56 FIP and seventh with a 4.06 xFIP, and have given up just 20 home runs — less than a third of what the offense has hit. Shane McClanahan and Drew Rasmussen have looked particularly strong in the early goings, as did Jeffrey Springs, who had allowed just one run on four hits over his first three starts before suffering a season-ending elbow injury.

Springs is hardly the only Tampa Bay arm to get bit by the injury bug this spring, joining Shane Baz and Andrew Kittredge on an already crowded Tommy John recovery list. Tyler Glasnow is still recovering from his spring oblique strain, and newcomer Zach Eflin already served a stint on the IL with a back issue. Shawn Armstrong continues to deal with a lingering neck problem that emerged before Spring Training. Pete Fairbanks and Josh Fleming just went down in the last week. The depth will continue to be tested, but the Rays, who added righties Chase Anderson and Javy Guerra via trade in recent days, still have an enviable cadre of capable pitchers, and Kevin Cash will be damned if he can’t patch together nine solid innings out of that group on any given day.

For fun, let’s see what that type of two-way success looks like compared to the field in that first month-plus leading into May. See if you can spot the Rays, with their league-best .376 wOBA and .274 wOBA against:

Here’s that same chart with 21 seasons worth of team performance:

That’s some serious separation from the competition. No other team in that time has posted a wOBA over .365 and allowed a wOBA of less than .290.

The “it’s April” caveat we’ve been dutifully including in each of our pieces at FanGraphs finally does not apply, but hey, it’s May. It’s still early, and regression is sure to come for these Rays. But my colleague Dan Szymborski tweeted last week about a phenomenon that applies here, too: the idea of “banked” wins and losses. Just as Dan pointed out how the White Sox have banked enough losses to make their road ahead particularly hard, the Rays are a quarter of the way to 100 wins in under one-fifth of the season, and no regression to the mean can take those wins back. If the Rays, who have played at an absurd 131-win pace so far, play at a 95-win pace the rest of the way, they’ll finish with 102 wins and, in all likelihood, the AL East crown; at just an 85-win pace, they’ll still end up with 94 wins and an almost certain playoff spot.

As Boston Bruins fans would tell you — or Dodgers fans, for that matter — dominating the regular season will only get you so far; dominating April, even less. But ours is a sport in which we particularly like to recognize excellence by putting it in the context of history, and to stop and enjoy the completely exceptional before the regression demons come and make it fade into the merely great. As far as that practice goes, the 2023 Rays are a marvel.