If you follow baseball, you probably have a rough understanding of the way Tampa Bay builds their roster. They assemble a ton of complementary pieces, put them in the best position to succeed, and build an offense that seems like more than the sum of its parts. Just as importantly, they do it without any true superstars.

In 2018, they finished with baseball’s ninth-best offense when Tommy Pham went incandescent for the last two months of the year. The best hitter on the team who made at least 400 plate appearances was C.J. Cron, and his 123 wRC+ won’t blow anyone’s socks off. In 2019, they had the 11th-best offense led by Austin Meadows with a 142 wRC+. This year, they finished with the eighth-best offense, with Brandon Lowe the headliner. Many pieces, no truly gamebreaking talents; it’s starting to feel like the Rays way.

None of those players, however, have actually been the best hitter in Tampa Bay this year. Pham is plying his trade for the Padres, Meadows was injured and ineffective, and while Lowe is a borderline MVP candidate after a great season, he’s not who I want to talk about today. The best hitter on the top seed in the American League is — well, crap, it’s Brian O’Grady, who batted .400/.400/.600 in five plate appearances. After him, though, it’s Randy Arozarena, who hit .281/.384/.641 in a still-tiny 76 plate appearance sample for a 176 wRC+.

The Rays seem to believe the hype. In the first game of the Wild Card round, Arozarena batted third in the lineup. In the second game, with the platoon advantage against Hyun Jin Ryu 류현진, he batted second. Tampa Bay is treating Arozarena like one of the best hitters on the team. Let’s take a quick look at how this can be the case for a player who wasn’t even in the Tampa Bay system or on any Top 100 prospect lists before this year. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the things 2020’s expanded playoff format robbed us of was a real American League East throw down. The Rays earned bragging rights, winning 13 of their 15 games in late August to turn a two-game deficit into a four-and-a-half-game cushion, ultimately taking the division by an impressive seven games and whomping the Yankees by an 8-2 margin in their head-to-head matchups. But the Yankees never really acted as if their season was in serious jeopardy because in the end, it never really was. After all, the stakes for winning the division versus finishing in second place have never been lower. With the pennant race defanged, a Yankees vs. Rays postseason matchup brings real electricity where their other 2020 matchups did not. The winner will be just one series away from a trip to the Fall Classic; the loser will be sent home to make plans for 2021.

What makes this matchup fun isn’t just that the results actually matter. There’s also a real contrast between how the teams are run. The Yankees may not spend with the same unchecked aggression they did 15 years ago, but they still agree to massive contracts when the right opportunity arises; Gerrit Cole isn’t being paid in exposure. New York is a standard modern juggernaut: big payroll, big power, and big plate discipline, but with an interest in developing players from within rather than cashing every top prospect into veteran deadline help.

If the Yankees are a 21st century Goliath, no team better personifies David than the Rays. There’s no denying that Tampa Bay’s tiny payroll includes a healthy chunk of parsimony, but most observers agree that the team lacks the revenue — and the possibility of such — to realistically challenge the luxury tax threshold. Whatever you attribute the club’s low payrolls to, the Rays have to be careful and clever. And as low-spending teams go, their record matches up with that of bigger payroll clubs exceptionally well. Since they dropped the Devil from their name before the 2008 season, the Rays have won 1081 games, the fifth-most in baseball, despite playing in one of baseball’s toughest divisions.

And the contrasts don’t stop at payroll. The Yankees have the name-brand superstars, while the Rays always seem to find a multitude of average-to-above-average players out of nowhere with almost paranormal ease. Back when we thought the season would be 162 games long, ZiPS projected four Yankees hitters to be worth at least three wins; only a single Ray (Austin Meadows) was projected to eclipse that mark. But the computer also projected 17 Rays position players to put up at least one win if used in a full-time role compared to just 11 Yankees. No Tampa Bay starter was projected to equal Cole, just as no Rays reliever was expected to be as dominant as Aroldis Chapman, but ZiPS saw the Rays as having 38 better than replacement level pitchers in the organization, the most of any team in baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

Postseason baseball is supposed to be nonsense, a combination of drama and chaos that results in the best laid plans and prognostications of men and metrics being ruined with ease. Every now and then though, you get a game or series that plays out on the field the way it should on paper. Such was the case in Tampa, where the No. 1 seed Rays did as everyone expected and swept the eighth-seeded Blue Jays out of the way with a comfortable 8–2 win in Game 2 to advance to the Division Series.

There was a chance, before things began, that the scrappy young Jays could maybe steal one off the Rays and force things to a winner-take-all Game 3. But the deck was arranged so heavily in Tampa’s favor that those odds were low from the start and plunged as it went on. The Rays had a better and more flexible lineup. They had a better rotation. They had a better and deeper bullpen. They had a better defense that was always in the right spot at the right time. They had home field advantage (for whatever that’s worth when the official attendance is just the few dozen Rays employees and team family members who were sitting in an otherwise empty Tropicana Field). Toronto’s best selling point was that anything can and often does happen in a short series, and the Rays snuffed that out so quickly that, by the time the third inning of Game 2 rolled around, it was hard to see how anyone at all had talked themselves into a Jays upset.

The best hope Toronto had was the man on the mound, left-hander Hyun-jin Ryu. After excelling in his first regular season with the Blue Jays, the rock of the rotation had been pushed to Game 2 to get him some extra rest. That decision didn’t work out. With his team’s season on the line, Ryu needed 25 pitches to get through the first inning, in which he loaded the bases with none out and somehow allowed only a single run. He couldn’t escape his doom in the second, however. A Kevin Kiermaier single and a Mike Zunino homer made it 3–0. Six batters later, with the bases again loaded, Hunter Renfroe lofted a high cutter into the left-field corner for a grand slam. Just like that, it was 7–0 Rays. Ryu’s day was done, and so were the Blue Jays. Read the rest of this entry »

Tampa Bay Rays left-hander Blake Snell’s start in Game 1 of the AL Wild Card Series against the Toronto Blue Jays began so well it may have made even his own manager sweat. Snell hadn’t thrown more than 5.2 innings in any of his 11 starts this season, and he wasn’t expected to pitch far beyond that point on Tuesday. But then five innings came and went in the blink of an eye, and Snell looked untouchable. After just 65 pitches, he had eight strikeouts against just two walks and hadn’t allowed a single hit. Every projectile hurled from Snell’s left arm seemed to send shivers down the Blue Jays’ spines, but every impotent whiff also threatened the always-scientific Kevin Cash with a serious conundrum: How long could the Rays manager allow himself to stick with his starter in a 1-0 game before interrupting a playoff no-hitter himself, a sin many of his team’s fans may find unforgivable?

Alas, that breaking point never arrived. Rookie sensation Alejandro Kirk lined a single through the right side of the infield to lead off the sixth inning, and two batters later, Cash got to remove Snell more or less right where he wanted to — after 5.2 shutout innings and 19 batters faced. Snell finished with nine strikeouts for his troubles, a Rays playoff record, and his bullpen turned in a typically strong performance en route to securing a 3-1 victory. Top-seeded Tampa Bay can advance to the ALDS with a win in Game 2, which begins Wednesday at 4:07 p.m. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball’s playoff format has always thumbed its nose at analysis. Five games in a divisional series, five piddling games, to determine which team is more worthy of a championship? Those teams might be separated by 20 games in the standings, and still, three hot starts by so-so pitchers could send either squad home.

This year, that arbitrary nature is in overdrive. The Blue Jays and Rays will play at most three games to settle who moves on and who goes home. Blink, and the Rays could be a game away from elimination despite winning eight more games in the regular season, the equivalent of a 22-game gap in a 162-game season.

Don’t mistake the fact that three games feels short, however, for some statement that this series is a toss-up, a 50/50 proposition. The Rays are favored, and they should be! They’re better, and while better might not mean as much over three games as it does over 60, it’s not meaningless. Tampa Bay is a full-blown juggernaut, while Toronto is an exciting team that still has more work to do to build a year-in, year-out contender.

Statements that the playoffs favor offense or defense are short-sighted. The playoffs favor outscoring your opponents by any available means. The Rays aren’t favored in this series specifically because their pitching is better — but make no mistake, their pitching is better. In fact, they’ll inarguably have the advantage in all three potential games of this series, after accounting for starters and the bullpen. Read the rest of this entry »

With less than a week to go in the regular season, writers will soon vote on end-of-season awards, and the shortened season makes for some very tight races. That’s certainly true for American League MVP. Through play on Sunday, here’s the WAR Leaderboard for American League position players:

That’s a fine list of players, to be sure, but it doesn’t include one of the top players by AL WAR at the moment. Shane Bieber has made 11 starts and pitched 72.1 innings good for a 2.13 FIP, 1.74 FIP, and 2.9 WAR. He’s struck out 41% of batters, given up three runs in three starts, two runs in two starts, one run in one start, and no runs in five starts. He pitched at least six innings in every start but one, when he threw five frames against the Brewers on September 6, striking out 10 against one walk, giving up a single run. Given Bieber’s runs’ allowed, there is no real difference between his FanGraphs’ WAR and his mark at Baseball-Reference. He also leads the league in xwOBA over at Baseball Savant. Read the rest of this entry »

The Chicago Cubs added another bat to the lineup on Sunday, acquiring designated hitter José Martínez from the Tampa Bay Rays for two players to be named later.

Chicago, with few spare bats to be had from their increasingly thin upper minors, was one of the many National League teams that rolled into the season without a clear full-time designated hitter option. The team has generally used the position to either rest Willson Contreras without losing his bat or to get Victor Caratini’s lumber in the lineup. Larger active rosters in 2020 have facilitated this, giving the Cubs room to carry Josh Phegley as the “break in case of emergency” catcher; teams are usually quite resistant to having their backup catcher as the designated hitter due to the possibility of injury.

Martínez is a limited player, with his defensive abilities at first base and either corner outfield spot both weak points on his résumé, but it’s unlikely the Cubs use him in a role that involves much use of a glove. Phegley was designated for assignment as the corresponding roster move, another sign Chicago sees Martínez taking over a good chunk of the DH job. He’s had fairly large platoon splits in his short major league career, with a .946 OPS against lefties and a .773 against righties, so he’ll at least grab most, if not all, of the starts against southpaws. Those splits are more even in 2020, but you should take platoon splits over a single month about as seriously as you take Pittsburgh’s 2020 World Series chances (read: not at all). Read the rest of this entry »

Because they have had so many pitcher injuries, it was a bit of a surprise to see the Rays make a trade for an outfielder, let alone one who hasn’t been able to crack the starting lineup on a last place Royals team. But today, the Royals sent Brett Phillips to the Rays for prospect Lucius Fox.

It’s hard to say what Phillips will bring because he hasn’t been given much of a chance to do anything in Kansas City. Only twice this month has he gotten more than two plate appearances in a game, leaving us with an insufficient 2020 sample to evaluate him. He has historically struggled to make consistent contact in games but plays the outfield well and has elite arm strength. He appears to have slightly altered his swing this year, changing where his hands begin and how early his leg kick starts, but because he has barely played I don’t know if this has made a difference on the contact end of things. I still have him as a fifth outfielder type.

Phillips is not an easy roster fit for Tampa Bay. He is on the 40-man, so this move does not help to clear the small 40-man crunch the Rays will deal with as the Rule 5 roster deadline approaches, and Phillips has no options left. He’ll be on an active roster with several other outfielders who run well and have big arms, Phillips’ two most notable traits. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve followed FanGraphs the past few years, you know the Yandy Díaz story by now. As an Indians prospect, his contact and on-base abilities marked him as a potential major league contributor, but his physique hinted at more: Díaz excelled despite a plethora of groundballs, and he also had elite bat speed and exit velocity numbers at times. If he could just aim up a little more, the thinking went, he could be the next launch angle success story.

When the Rays acquired him in a trade before the 2019 season, it wasn’t hard to connect the dots. The Rays acquired an already-usable player with a fixable flaw? We’ve certainly heard that story before. Indeed, Díaz spent 2019 putting balls in the air at a rate he’d never approached before. His fly ball rate spiked, his groundball rate dropped, and he hit double-digit homers for the first time in his professional career.

All of those balls in the air made Díaz a different hitter, but they didn’t change the core of his approach at the plate: wait patiently for a pitch he liked, then try to hit the snot out of it. As FanGraphs alum Sung Min Kim detailed, he mostly accomplished it without a swing change; he simply focused on finding pitches to drive rather than spraying grounders.

The evidence was there if you wanted to look for it. His air pull rate, the percentage of line drives, pop ups, and fly balls that he sent to left field, jumped significantly. At the same time, he started hitting fewer grounders; his GB/FB ratio dipped to heretofore unseen lows:

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Through Monday night, major league baseball teams have played 415 games, the same number of games they had played on April 28 of last year. Back then, Cody Bellinger, Christian Yelich and Mike Trout were the top three players by WAR. Also in the top 10 were Matt Chapman, Marcus Semien, Pete Alonso, Anthony Rendon, Javier Báez, and Paul DeJong, who all went on to have good-to-great seasons. Elvis Andrus, on the other hand, put up 1.5 WAR through most of April and was replacement-level the rest of the way. Moving one month forward, a stretch equivalent to half of this season, Pete Alonso was replacement-level in May. Marcus Semien put up an 80 wRC+. All of which serves as a good reminder that in this shortened season, it’s best not to make too much of one month’s worth of performance when looking forward. That said, though, let’s take a look at the current WAR Leaderboard for position players:

Over the last month, Ben Clemens has written about Mike Yastrzemski, Mookie Betts, and Ian Happ; Jay Jaffe has added his own piece on Betts. Fernando Tatis Jr. has been featured in posts from Jaffe and Dan Szymborski, and ranked very highly in our Trade Value Series. Jake Mailhot has written up Kyle Lewis and Trent Grisham. While Anthony Rendon, Nelson Cruz, and Bryce Harper have all been great and perhaps deserve articles of their own, their greatness isn’t too far removed from our general expectations for them. That just leaves Brandon Lowe, whose start definitely merits attention. Read the rest of this entry »