Taylor Walls, pinch-hitter. Pinch-hitter Taylor Walls. I keep turning the words around in my head, like a mantra. Taylor Walls, pinch-hitter. Walls, Taylor: hitter, pinch. Sometimes it makes more sense to me, sometimes less; over enough time, anything you repeat enough seems to lose all meaning. It’s called semantic satiation: your brain starts to perceive anything as gibberish if it’s repeated frequently enough.

In this case, I’m not even sure the phrase made sense in the first place. Taylor Walls, pinch-hitter? This guy? The one who hit .172/.268/.285 this year? In the game to hit? It sounds strange right from the jump. Maybe I started from a faulty premise somewhere. Maybe pinch-hitter Taylor Walls only exists in my head. Maybe this is all a strange fever dream.

Only, it’s not. There’s box score evidence of it, right on MLB.com:

There he is, pinch-hitting in a playoff game. He’s hitting for Isaac Paredes, a right-hander, which gives us our first piece of evidence. Walls is a switch-hitter. Surely, then he came into the game to bat left-handed. Indeed he did: he faced off against Nick Sandlin, a right-handed reliever, in that initial plate appearance. Read the rest of this entry »

The Tampa Bay Rays’ season came to an end yesterday, and as a result, so did Stan Boroski’s coaching career. An underrated part of the A.L. East club’s success for over a decade, Boroski joined the staff prior to the 2010 season — he’d previously tutored pitchers in the Houston Astros organization — and became the bullpen coach in November 2011. He announced last month that he’d be retiring at the end of the season.

I recently asked members of Tampa Bay relief corps about their highly-regarded coach. What’s made him so good at his job?

“I really think it’s his presence,” said Pete Fairbanks, a mainstay in the Rays bullpen for the past three-plus seasons. “It lends itself to the environment that we’re in down there. It’s a very loose and unfocused group, and Stan does a great job of managing that. There is also his ability to put across our message of attacking the strike zone, and just how valuable that is. That’s something he has preached all of the time I’ve been here, It’s like beating a dead horse, but it’s a horse that needs to continue to be hit, over and over again. It’s that important.”

The message has resonated well. Rays relievers walked just 2.79 batters per nine innings this year — only the Dodgers were better — and their 2.96 walk rate since 2018 is the lowest in either league. In order to reach base against Boroski’s bullpen, you’ve typically needed to hit your way on. Read the rest of this entry »

A day after playing the fastest postseason game since 1999, the Rays and Guardians combined for a game more than twice as long, lasting 15 innings and four hours and 57 minutes. Dominant pitching was the name of the game as both teams were held scoreless until the 15th inning — the longest scoreless postseason game in major league history. The decisive blow came when Oscar Gonzalez blasted a Corey Kluber cutter deep into left-center field for the walk-off win.

Between the two teams, 16 different pitchers combined for 39 strikeouts, eight walks, and 11 hits. They threw 432 pitches, 68% of which were strikes. Just 15 of the 58 balls in play were hard hit. No matter how you slice it, it was simply a masterclass in modern pitching by both teams:

Read the rest of this entry »

The Wild Card Series opener between the Rays and Guardians was quick-moving from the beginning. Rays ace Shane McClanahan worked around a few weakly hit singles in the early innings. Cleveland starter Shane Bieber’s only baserunner in the first four frames — Ji-Man Choi, who walked — was quickly erased by a Manuel Margot double play. The first five full innings were completed in just an hour and nine minutes despite playoff-length commercial breaks, largely due to the lack of offense and Bieber’s ridiculously quick pace on the mound. The matchup of two premier starters — the AL’s fifth- and seventh-best qualified pitchers by ERA — seemed to be everything fans were hoping for.

Bieber’s start was masterful, matching his MO from the regular season: steal strikes with four-seam fastballs, then get hitters to chase his cutter and slider off the plate. The Rays’ righty-heavy lineup couldn’t figure it out for the entire game, coming up empty on 17 of their 27 swings against those two pitches. Unsurprisingly, every single one of those swinging strikes was located down and to his glove side. Bieber’s impeccable placement of pitches on the outer half was especially noteworthy against the chase-happy Christian Bethancourt and Randy Arozarena, who went a combined 0–6 with five strikeouts, four of which came on breaking balls off the plate. Bieber’s 7.2 innings of one-run ball made for the longest playoff start by a Cleveland pitcher in 15 years and will likely be among the longest starts of any pitcher this postseason. That’s a continuation of the impressive volume he put up in the regular season; he was one of just three AL pitchers to cross the 200-inning threshold. Read the rest of this entry »

Of the 12 teams in the playoffs in 2022, only one was projected by both ZiPS and FanGraphs in the preseason as a sub-.500 team: the Cleveland Guardians. But this lone Cinderella in a sea of mean stepsisters toppled the White Sox handily this year, pulling away from the pack late to finish with an 11-game cushion in the AL Central. As the league’s No. 3 seed by virtue of winning the division, Cleveland now hosts the Tampa Bay Rays in the three-game Wild Card Series.

Broadly speaking, there are broad similarities between the Guardians and the Rays. Both play in smaller markets and, depending on how you look at the issue, have a payroll attitude somewhere on the spectrum from admirably thrifty to Ebenezer Scrooge on tax deadline day. However they got there, these teams embraced modern analytics early on, long before it was de rigeur in baseball, and have seen advantages. The Rays were the league doormat during the early, very non-sabermetric days of the franchise, but after an abrupt change in direction, they have the fourth-most wins in baseball over the last 15 years. The Guardians are not far behind.

Despite both teams regularly making the playoffs, they’ve only met in the postseason once before, in the 2013 AL Wild Card Game. Things didn’t go Cleveland’s way then, as Alex Cobb and Tampa’s bullpen combined for a shutout, causing a quick exit from October. Now Cleveland has a three-game series to get its revenge. Read the rest of this entry »

Injuries are always unwelcome, but the pumpkin spice season is perhaps the most unfortunate time of year to lose a player to one. A surprise malady at this point in the season can shut a player out of some, if not all, of the postseason, and with no ability to make trades and playoff eligibility freezing at the beginning of September, it’s especially challenging to fill holes on the big league roster. This weekend featured some particularly bad injury news for playoff teams, as a number of players who can’t be easily replaced saw their postseason outlook take a turn for the worse.

Let’s take stock of what these injuries might mean come October, beginning with the Tampa Bay Rays, who got the worst bit of news. Shane Baz needs Tommy John surgery, and since we’re so late in the season, 2023 is off the table for his return as well. Until this setback, Baz’s recovery from his most recent elbow problem seemed to be going well, and the team had held out hope that they’d be able to get him up to speed enough to at least pitch in relief. With Baz out, the Rays will have to rely more on Tyler Glasnow, who is expected to be activated on Wednesday in his return from a Tommy John surgery of his own.

The bad news in Tampa didn’t stop with Baz. Brandon Lowe’s back problems have ended his 2022 season early. While (hopefully) not as significant as Baz’s injury, Lowe has struggled with back pain for most of the season and recently had a cortisone injection. As with Baz, the hope had been to get him back on the roster in time for the playoffs. Even with his struggles this year, which were due in large part to the aforementioned injury, ZiPS still thinks Lowe’s bat has the most upside of nearly anyone on the team, and the Rays will take a small but significant hit in the postseason projections in his absence. Without Baz and Lowe, ZiPS thinks of the Rays as a .547 team rather than a .553 one, with their solid depth keeping things from being far worse. The full version of ZiPS projects Lowe’s primary replacement, Jonathan Aranda, at a 105 wRC+ for the rest of the season, a significant bump from his 90 wRC+ projection before the season. Read the rest of this entry »

Kyle Manzardo was one of the best hitters in the minors this year. Among players with at least 300 plate appearances, only San Francisco Giants prospect Vaun Brown logged a higher wRC+ (175 compared to 173) or wOBA (.464 compared to .450). A 22-year-old first baseman in the Tampa Bay Rays system, Manzardo put up his numbers over 397 PA, a hamstring injury having kept him out of action from mid-April until mid-May. Playing with High-A Bowling Green and Double-A Montgomery, he slashed a combined .327/.426/.617 with 22 home runs.

Manzardo began honing his hitting skills in a state that has produced just 32 major leaguers. Born and raised in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, the 6-foot-1, 205-pound left-handed hitter went on to play college ball at Washington State University, where he did what he does best: square up baseballs. In three years with the Cougars, Manzardo batted .330 with an OPS north of 1.000. That he lasted until the back end of the second round of last year’s draft was both positionally predictable and unexpected.

“I was a little surprised that it was the Rays,” admitted Manzardo, who went 63rd overall. “I hadn’t had a ton of contact with them, although I did do a Zoom meeting right before the draft. I was kind of expecting to go towards the end of the third round. That’s kind of what I’d been hearing.” Read the rest of this entry »

I think we could all use a little more positive reinforcement in our lives. Imagine typing away at your desk job (c’mon, it’s not that much of a stretch to guess that you’re reading this at work) when your boss sends you a message. “Hey there,” they say. “You just set a record! You contributed positively to 13 meetings in a row. I’d like to take the webcam you were using for those meetings and put it in the Hall of Fame.”

Wouldn’t that feel great? Sure, it’s kind of meaningless, but let’s assume your job is important enough that people actually go to this Hall of Fame. It would be awesome! Look, the suspenders that a manager wore while suggesting casual Fridays for the first time. Behold the napkins left behind from the first successful working lunch. I’d enjoy getting credit for random records once in a while. It feels good to do something no one else has ever done.

Setting a record, any record, is inherently cool. But setting a record for something that everyone who does your job is always trying to do? That’s an entirely different level. An example: J.P. Feyereisen is out for the remainder of the year, which means that he’ll set a modern record at the conclusion of the season. Read the rest of this entry »

Dave Raymond has fond memories of June 13, 2012. Then in his final year as a broadcaster for the Houston Astros, the now TV play-by-play voice of the Texas Rangers got to call a historic pitching performance — and it wasn’t even his biggest thrill of the day. Prior to the game, he was in the presence of a legend.

Raymond had an inkling that the season would be his last with the Astros. He was in the final year of his contract, and an ownership transition was resulting in numerous changes throughout the organization. With his future up in the air, Raymond decided that he was going to “hit all the high notes,” making sure to enjoy aspects of his job that can sometimes be taken for granted. That’s how he met Willie Mays.

“In San Francisco, Willie was always down in the clubhouse, just available to chat,” recalled Raymond, who graduated from Stanford University before becoming a broadcaster. “I’d never wanted to bother him all those years, but I decided to make it a point to talk to him, whether that was for five minutes, 10 minutes, or whatever. So I went to the ballpark early, hoping to ask him some questions and hear a few stories. For instance, he’d hit his 500th home run at the Astrodome, and they’d brought him a cake afterwards.”

The hoped for five-to-10 minutes ended up being far longer. Mays held court for hours, to the point where Raymond had to tell the iconic Hall of Famer that he needed to head upstairs, as the game was about to start. As he was getting up to leave, he added that the Astros would be returning to San Francisco right after the All-Star break, and maybe they could talk again. Mays responded by saying, “Well, you’ve got to come over to my house then.” Read the rest of this entry »

Tampa Bay Rays Software Developer

Location: St. Petersburg · FL · Open to Remote

The Tampa Bay Rays are looking for an experienced Ruby on Rails Developer to help the Baseball Systems department build the best software and analytics solutions in all of Major League Baseball.

What is Baseball Systems?

• As part of Baseball Operations, our team builds the innovative tools that our players, coaches, analysts, scouts and front office personnel use to do their jobs, make decisions, and win ballgames.
• Our team consists of several data engineers, backend developers and frontend developers and coordinators.
• Every line of code we write — and feature we ship — has a direct impact on the field, helping us compete for the postseason year after year.
• Working within the most innovative and collaborative front office in MLB, your ideas will be welcomed and heard.

We are looking for someone who:

• is an experienced Ruby on Rails developer.
• is proficient creating front-end views using HTML, CSS and Javascript. Don’t worry, we have designers who make things look great!
• has experience with relational databases.
• is familiar with Git version control software.

It’s not required, but would be awesome if you:

• have experience with one of the popular front-end Javascript frameworks. We use Vue.
• are proficient in a language other than Ruby. We use several different languages depending on the task.
• are familiar with NoSql databases like Redis or Elasticsearch.
• have an understanding of baseball.
• have an interest in sabermetrics and statistical modeling.

What will you do each day?

• Build new features or maintain existing features in our proprietary software application.
• Identify and correct bugs quickly.
• Document code and support procedures thoroughly. 
• Meet with Baseball Operations staff that have requested a new feature to gather requirements and help with feature planning.
• Train non-technical users on new features or applications.
• You might take half a day off from time to time to watch a baseball game.
• Help our data engineering team ingest data from new data sources.

Why work for the Rays?

• A top notch development environment with a company provided laptop, Github Enterprise, frictionless CI/CD, bug tracking, top project management and documentation software, and automated testing to minimize bugs to keep you focused on new features.
• Opportunities to choose and work with new technology. We strongly believe in choosing the right tool for the job even if it isn’t part of our current stack.
• Exceptional benefits including: 
  • health, vision and dental coverage at VERY competitive rates. 
  • an enhanced 401k where the company contributes even if you don’t! 
  • free tickets to baseball and soccer games (We also own the Tampa Bay Rowdies) for you, your friends and family. 
  • flexible PTO options and monthly paid volunteer opportunities. 
  • generous family planning assistance and parental leave.
  • annual continuing education assistance.
  • healthy and free lunch right in the office. 
  • in-office yoga and many other other wellness benefits. 
• You’ll be working with some of the sharpest minds in all of baseball.
• You are a good teammate and like working with other driven and caring teammates.
• Your office is in a baseball stadium! Or your office can be remote, your choice!
• We are an organization that prides itself on coaching others so please apply even if you don’t meet every one of the requirements above.

Our Interview Process

1. A ~30 minute phone call to get to know each other and discuss the position in more detail.
2. In some cases, we have a second ~30 minute phone call with one of our recruiting staff.
3. A small take-home coding project. We don’t do coding tests or coding on a whiteboard.
4. Two or three small panel interviews. In addition to covering technical skills, you will also meet other members of Baseball Operations you’d be collaborating with.
5. Make a decision!

All offers contingent on a satisfactory background check.

Statement: All applicants for employment are required to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 prior to commencing employment. Applicants who receive a conditional offer of employment will be required to produce proof of vaccination status prior to their first day of employment. Applicants with qualifying disabilities or bona fide religious objections, or who are pregnant, may be exempted from this requirement or otherwise accommodated if they are unable to be vaccinated.

Acknowledgement by applyingI understand that if offered a role and by accepting a role with the Tampa Bay Rays or Rowdies, I will be participating in COVID-19 community risk mitigation practices.

We are an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, disability, gender identity, marital or veteran status, or any other protected class.

Job Questions:

1. In addition to your resume and cover letter, please describe your level of Ruby on Rails experience in 100 words or less.
2. Where did you originally hear about this posting?

To Apply:
To apply, please follow this link.

The content in this posting was created and provided solely by the Tampa Bay Rays.