When the Tampa Bay Rays took to Tropicana Field this afternoon to play a do-or-die third game in this ALDS against the Astros, it had been almost six years to the day since they’d held a lead in a postseason series. That was in Game 4 of the 2013 ALDS. They had dropped the first two games in Boston, dominated by Jon Lester and John Lackey, sunk by two terrible starts from would-be aces Matt Moore and David Price, hammered by Jacoby Ellsbury, Shane Victorino, and David Ortiz. From the start, the Rays hadn’t been favored to win the series, a second Wild Card team that had outplayed their Pythag by five games; after their performance in front of the hostile Fenway masses, their outlook seemed grim.

But in Game 3, things took a turn. In front of the Trop’s biggest crowd of the season, the Rays finally got a good starting pitching performance, with Alex Cobb going five innings and allowing three runs (two of them earned). Meanwhile, the offense kept it close with one pivotal swing: Face of the franchise Evan Longoria, with two on and two out in the bottom of the fifth, went deep off Clay Buchholz, preventing the Red Sox from holding onto their lead. Tampa added another run in the eighth. And after Fernando Rodney blew the save, with two out in the bottom of the ninth, Jose Lobaton walked it off. It was the kind of moment that, when teams manage to turn around a postseason series, people look back on–a hinge moment, a moment where hope really returns.

In Game 4, it was Jake Peavy for the Sox and anyone who had an arm for the Rays; for five and a half innings, the two teams traded tense zeroes. Then came a leadoff double in the bottom of the sixth for Yunel Escobar. An out later, a single from David DeJesus drove him in. The Rays, once again, had the lead. Their fate was in their hands. They had a chance of pushing the series back to Boston for a decisive Game 5, and as the Wild Card team, they knew as well as anyone that in an all-hands-on-deck, winner-take-all contest, anything can happen.

Of course, that anything never got a chance to happen. The Rays promptly lost that slim lead. They lost the game, and the series, 3-1. The Red Sox went on to be World Series champions; the Rays didn’t play October baseball again until this year. Read the rest of this entry »

I haven’t conducted a study or anything, but I suspect that baseball fans assume themselves to be capable of playing at the highest professional level more than fans of any other professional sport. It’s not surprising; basketball players are 20 feet tall, all elbows and shoe-squeaks and legs, and football players have such obvious size. The line between civilian and non is clear. But baseball players exist on a continuum that has room for José Altuve and Ji-Man Choi, players who are by turns relatively small and squishy, and it creates the illusion that major leaguers are, or could be, just like us.

Only they aren’t. They are human beings possessed of feeling and ambition and meanness, of course, and someone, somewhere cares for them, but their smallness and squish aren’t like ours. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the postseason, when the small and the tall and the relatively-soft of middle remind us who they are, and thus, who we are. It’s easy to fool yourself into thinking you could trade places with some sad-sack on the 114-loss Tigers; it’s much harder to pull off the same con when faced with the Astros, however diminutive. Last night, Houston beat Tampa Bay 3-1 to take a 2-0 series lead, and in their dominance, forced us to recall just how great a distance there is between our beer-league softball teams, and the majors’ green fields, a lesson delivered in three parts.

On Futility
Every job has bits that are unpleasant. First, you have to get out of bed, which, wouldn’t you rather not? And then you have to drink coffee; you aren’t even sure if you like it, but you have to drink it, because, as we’ve established, you’ve been forced from your bed and now have to drive somewhere. Also, the coffee will give you heartburn. This will start when you turn 30, and I assume continue until you die, but before you do, there are expense reports and bad break room birthday cakes and staring at a screen or else lifting very heavy things, and to do all of that you have to be awake and away from your bed. I quite like my job, and I have stuff I wish I didn’t have to do in order to buy coffee, which again, I’m not sure I like! Read the rest of this entry »

The Rays’ path to building a 96-win playoff team is about as unconventional as you can imagine. They aren’t active in free agency, although both of their offseason signings worked out great. They don’t have a lot of homegrown players, but one is a former Cy Young Award winner and another was an All-Star as a rookie in 2019. They’ve filled out nearly 70% of their roster through trades that mostly didn’t include top prospects going elsewhere. While the constant turnover might not help in growing their fan base — they averaged fewer than 15,000 per home game this season — it’s been a recipe for success on the field.

Here’s how every member of the Rays’ 2019 ALDS roster was originally acquired. The team’s full RosterResource Depth Chart and Payroll pages are also available as a resource.

Homegrown (6)

• Kevin Kiermaier, CF: Drafted 31st Round 2010
• Blake Snell, SP: Drafted First Round (52) 2011
• Yonny Chirinos, RP: Amateur Free Agent (Venezuela) June 2012
• Diego Castillo, RP: Amateur Free Agent (Dominican Republic) March 2014
• Brandon Lowe, INF/OF: Drafted Third Round 2015
• Brendan McKay, RP: Drafted First Round (4) 2017

Total WAR: 10.0

Signed in Free Agency (2)

• Charlie Morton, RP: December 2018 (HOU) — Signed to two-year, $30 million contract ($15 million vesting option in 2021).
• Avisaíl García, OF: January 2019 (CHW) — Signed to one-year, $3.5 million contract.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tampa Bay cruised past Oakland in the Wild Card game and enters the divisional round for the first time in six years. Their reward is a best-of-five date with the Houston Astros.

The Rays aren’t exactly limping into the postseason. Tampa Bay won 96 games in what passes for a competitive division these days, and they’re solid in all aspects of the game. In Houston though, they’re meeting a 107-win behemoth, a club that looks like one of the two or three best teams we’ve seen this century.

You may have noticed something weird in the “Edge” column of the table above. Ultimately, the yearly totals don’t adequately reflect how dominant Houston’s rotation is as currently constructed. After all, the Rays won’t be facing Collin McHugh or Corbin Martin or Brad Peacock out of the gate. Instead, they’ll get Justin Verlander (73 FIP-), Gerrit Cole (59 FIP-), and Zack Greinke (66 FIP-). No American League club can unleash a better rotation this October, and even if the Astros only let their horses gallop through the lineup twice each start, they’ll still have an advantage in that department. Read the rest of this entry »

In a postseason field dominated by the league’s foremost home run-hitting teams, the Tampa Bay Rays are one of a couple outliers. With 217 homers during the regular season, they ranked ninth out of the 10 playoff teams, and just 21st across all of baseball, one of just three playoff teams not to rank in baseball’s top eight in dinger-mashing prowess. But on Wednesday, they proved to be as capable as anyone of leaving the yard.

Yandy Díaz smashed a pair of solo homers, while Avisaíl García launched a two-run shot and Tommy Pham added a third, solo bomb as Tampa Bay silenced Oakland 5-1 in the American League Wild Card game at Oakland Coliseum. The Rays will face the World Series favorite Houston Astros in the ALDS beginning on Friday.

The home run heroics got started before many fans in Oakland were probably able to find their seats. Leading off the game, Díaz worked a 3-1 count against A’s starting pitcher Sean Manaea before getting a fastball high and outside, and hammered the pitch over the opposite field fence in right to push the Rays in front. Manaea settled in to strike out the next three hitters, but he wasn’t able to hold off further damage for long. He surrendered a leadoff single to Matt Duffy to start the second, and after falling behind García 2-1, attempted to even the count once more with another fastball out and over the plate. García punished it.

With an exit velocity of 115 mph, Garcia’s homer was the hardest-hit ball by a Rays player ever recorded by Statcast. And they were just getting started. Díaz made his second plate appearance of the game leading off the third inning, and made it look exactly like the first one. Read the rest of this entry »

Talk of low payrolls and stadium issues will be afterthoughts when MC Hammer throws out the first pitch before Wednesday’s American League Wild Card tilt between Tampa Bay and Oakland. Both teams created necessary distance between themselves and Cleveland to take a bit of a breath in the season’s final days, though Tampa’s late-September gauntlet (they played consecutive series against the Dodgers, Red Sox, and Yankees, then flew from Toronto to Oakland for this game) seems fairly exhausting. The reward for winning Wednesday is a Friday date with a juggernaut in Houston.

Oakland has yet to officially announce their starter (10 AM Wednesday is the roster deadline) though it’s expected to be lefty Sean Manaea, who will be on an extra day’s rest after throwing in Seattle on Thursday. Righty Mike Fiers threw on Friday and is also a possibility to start. Tampa Bay has already announced that 6-WAR righty Charlie Morton will take the ball. Let’s take a look at our starters (**denotes out pitch**).

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This is the fourth installment of this year’s Team Entropy series, my recurring look not only at the races for the remaining playoff spots but the potential for end-of-season chaos in the form of down-to-the-wire suspense and even tiebreakers. Ideally, we want more ties than the men’s department at Macy’s. If you’re new to this, please read the introduction here.

The final weekend of the 2019 season is upon us, and while five of the divisions and all of the super-complicated tiebreaker scenarios are off the table, with three games to play, each league has multiple scenarios that could result in at least one tiebreaker game. Seven hundred or so words is worth a picture, so first, behold this:

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Far from the bright lights of the pennant chase, history was made last August when Oliver Drake came in to pitch the ninth inning of an 8-2 Twins victory. That appearance marked the fifth major league team Drake had appeared for in 2018 alone. He wasn’t done there; Drake changed teams a further three times in the offseason, with some of the transactions just seeming silly:

Drake was good-natured about the whole ordeal, appearing on Effectively Wild to talk about his odyssey. Still, he was clearly eager to put the past behind him and find a home on a single roster. No one gets into baseball in hopes of endlessly bouncing between teams, good enough to play in the majors but replaceable enough to frequently be a roster crunch casualty.

If you haven’t been following closely this year, you might not have heard anything about Drake. Did he slip off the edge of major league relevance, stuck in the purgatory of Triple-A Durham? Nope! Neither did he continue his travels across the major leagues. Instead he got better, and he now figures into the Rays’ bullpen plans for the rest of the regular season and beyond.

How did a reliever who had previously defined the word journeyman turn into a key cog in one of the best bullpens in baseball? For lack of a better way to say it, Drake essentially took every part of his game and made it better. In a world of nonstop player development and video-aided pitch design, no player is ever truly a finished product, and even marginal ones are seemingly a tweak away from being effective; Drake is the perfect example of that. Read the rest of this entry »

With just over a week to go in the regular season, Justin Verlander and Gerrit Cole are running neck and neck as favorites for the American League Cy Young award. Verlander leads the league in innings (212) and ERA (2.50). Cole has the lead in strikeouts with 302 with Verlander 19 behind. Even after accounting for Verlander’s 34 homers, his 3.28 FIP is still one of the best marks in the league. On Cole’s side are the strikeouts, a league-leading 2.78 FIP and a 6.7 WAR half a win clear of Verlander. Several other pitchers, like Charlie Morton and Lance Lynn, boast strong resumes, and with five slots on voters’ ballots, many pitchers will receive down-ballot consideration worthy of discussion.

While awards voting is a mostly objective process, when trying to differentiate between a group of very good pitchers, personal preferences are likely to play into the selections. When voters rely on particular stats, be it FIP, ERA, or some other metric, they are making decisions about the importance of defense, park, opponent, and how much talent a big league pitcher is expected to exhibit when it comes to contact quality. Before we get to all of those issues, let’s identify the candidates. There’s a fairly clear top seven among AL starting pitchers (Liam Hendriks might deserve some consideration as well) with Eduardo Rodriguez also included due to his rank based on Baseball-Reference’s WAR.

Here are the eight pitchers under consideration, with some traditional and more advanced statistics:

A look above shows Gerrit Cole leading in the more advanced statistics, with Verlander gaining the nod from traditional metrics, and Lance Lynn and Charlie Morton sort of splitting the difference between the two Astros. Shane Bieber and Lucas Giolito are a bit behind, with Giolito unable to add anything to his file after being shut down for the season. Mike Minor’s case is made by his low ERA combined with his difficult park, as his strikeouts and walks lag behind the other candidates. Eduardo Rodriguez is the poor man’s version of Minor.

If we looked at FanGraphs WAR, we’d see Cole as the leader due to his incredible strikeout rate and ability to limit homers, at least somewhat. Though he has a 20-inning deficit compared to Verlander, the strikeouts and homers make enough of a difference for Cole to take the day. Verlander and Lynn are in a dead heat when it comes to WAR, with the huge difference in home runs balancing Verlander’s lead in strikeouts and walks and Lynn’s more difficult park in which to keep balls in the field of play. Comparing Lynn to Morton, we see Morton with the homer advantage, but the innings deficit, combined with Tampa Bay being a hard park to homer in, gives Lynn the edge. Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Madison Bumgarner, Emilio Pagan, and Jacob Waguespack— on how they learned and developed their cutter/sliders.

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Madison Bumgarner, San Francisco Giants

“I pretty much find myself saying ‘cutter-slider,’ just so there’s no confusion. I originally wanted to call it a slider, but it ended up with most people calling it a cutter. Movement-wise… in relation to my fastball it’s kind of like the speed of a cutter, but it moves a little more like a slider. Sometimes it will be a little shorter, though.

“I started throwing it 2010. I’d just got sent down from spring training and there was a guy named Horacio Ramirez, a left-hander from Mexico. He was there. He was an older guy who knew how to pitch, and he threw a cutter. I didn’t really have any off-speed pitches at that time; I basically didn’t throw anything all through the minor leagues, and then … I threw an actual slider, but it was no good at all. When I got to the big leagues in 2009 I threw it some, but it wasn’t no good. Read the rest of this entry »