Archive for Rays

With one week to go in the regular season, the playoff field is nearly set in the National League, though it’s anything but settled in the American League, with two of the three division leaders — two different ones since I last checked in — ahead by just one game and those races spilling over into the battle for the third and final Wild Card spot. We’re not going to get any tiebreaker games due to the fun police and the playoff format change put into effect by the 2022 Collective Bargaining Agreement, but it’s entirely possible a playoff spot — and perhaps even a division title — will be decided on the basis of MLB’s tiebreaker procedures.

Since the situation is simpler in the NL, I’ll start there. The Brewers (98-58) lead the Dodgers (96-60) in the race for the top seed, and own the tiebreaker there on the basis of a 4-3 season series advantage. According to our Playoff Odds, as of Monday at 9 AM, the Braves (92-64) have just a 0.9% chance of bypassing either Milwaukee or Los Angeles. The Brewers — who have a magic number of one to clinch a first-round bye — finish out with a visit to the Phillies (86-70) before coming home to face the Cardinals (76-80), while the Dodgers host the Padres (87-69) for three and then travel to the Giants (62-90), with the Braves hosting the Reds (72-84) and then visiting the Marlins (76-80).

The Padres have taken advantage of a soft spot in their schedule — series against the sub-.500 Nationals, Giants, Rockies, and Marlins, after taking two out of three from the Yankees — to win 13 out of their last 14 games. Not only did that push them past the Diamondbacks (now 82-74), whom they trailed by half a game before the start of the surge, but they’ve tied the Cubs (87-69) for the top NL Wild Card spot, with the Phillies a game behind them. The Phils have been phlailing lately, going 8-10 in September and failing to win a series since beating the Diamondbacks at the start of the month. Their slide gave the Braves enough room to clinch the NL East title on Sunday. Read the rest of this entry »

With the passing of Labor Day, the 2026 regular season has less than three weeks remaining. While neither league’s playoff races are as turbulent as the AL Wild Card race appeared to be just a couple of weeks ago — to say nothing of the Before Times, when Major League Baseball used actual tiebreaker games instead of math to settle ties, and rooting for end-of-season chaos was a whole lot more fun — it’s time for a check-in to outline what’s at stake.

Right now, in four of the six division races — all but the NL Central and NL West, where the Brewers and Dodgers both have comfortable margins — the first-place team leads by four games or less. That said, the hill that the Phillies (81-64) have to climb to catch the Braves (85-60) is steeper than it appears, because Atlanta clinched the season series with a 5-4 win this past Sunday and owns a 7-3 advantage, with the two teams set to play their final three games starting on Friday at Truist Park. Thus, if the two teams finish the regular season tied, the Braves would be the division winner and the Phillies a Wild Card team. Philadelphia has to overtake Atlanta to claim the NL East flag, something our Playoff Odds suggest has just an 8.2% chance of happening. Read the rest of this entry »

Every September, there are three different versions of baseball being played in the majors. For a number of teams, the year is all but over, and the last month is about hitting some personal milestones, playing spoiler, and working on next year. For another group – seemingly half of the American League this year – September is about fighting for a spot in the playoffs. And then there’s a final group, teams that are already headed to the postseason. For them, the last month of the season is about jockeying for seeding and hoping like crazy that none of their pitchers gets hurt.

With 100.0% odds to make the playoffs, the Rays fall into that final group this year. Sure, the AL East race isn’t over, but we give them an 80% chance of winning the division, and that title would come with a first-round bye. That “jockeying for seeding” part is going very well so far, in other words. But hoping for pitcher health? That ship has unfortunately already sailed. On September 4, the team placed co-ace Shane McClanahan on the 15-day IL with forearm tightness. A day later, middle reliever Garrett Cleavinger hit the same IL with the same injury.

The Rays have felt approximately one starter short for the majority of the 2026 season. Though they’ve put up excellent numbers as a group, the composition of that group has varied massively. Nick Martinez has provided enviable bulk. Drew Rasmussen is in the middle of the best season of his already very good career; he’s set a career high in innings pitched, and he’s on course to flirt with a top-three Cy Young finish. McClanahan, on the other hand, had been atop the starting hierarchy in Tampa Bay for years, health permitting — a caveat that is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

After missing the entirety of the 2024 and 2025 seasons, McClanahan returned with no ill effects and was one of the best pitchers in the AL during the first half of this season. He hit the IL on July 31 with lower back tightness, but truthfully, the team probably wasn’t terribly broken up about it. His workload was already in question given the aforementioned two years of injury recovery, and a back injury notably isn’t an arm ailment. McClanahan returned only days after the minimum stint and made four starts on a normal schedule. Read the rest of this entry »

Database Engineer / Database Administrator

Location: St. Petersburg · FL

We Have a Data Platform to Build. Want to Help?
We have a set of important problems we need to solve. Some are immediate; some are transformative. Some require deep expertise, while others are opportunities for someone to learn and grow, and we’re looking for people who want to help us solve them by owning the health, performance, and evolution of our enterprise data platform.

This role will primarily support and optimize our Microsoft SQL Server environment while helping design and implement our future cloud data platform in Snowflake. The ideal candidate has strong SQL Server administration and database engineering experience, enjoys building reliable data infrastructure, and is excited to help modernize our data ecosystem. This individual will work closely with Data Engineering, Baseball Systems, Research & Development, and other departments to ensure our databases remain secure, scalable, high-performing, and capable of supporting critical business operations.

This position is focused on database engineering, administration, and platform modernization. While occasional support for reporting or one-off SQL requests is expected, analytical, reporting, and statistical modeling responsibilities are minimal.

You don’t need to be an expert in everything below. Tell us what you can own today, what you can contribute to, and what you want to learn.

The challenges we’re solving
🟢 I can own this today

SQL Server Reliability & Performance

• Keep production databases healthy, secure, and highly available  
• Improve performance and query execution  
• Develop indexing and partitioning strategies  
• Manage backups, restores, disaster recovery, and database growth  
• Improve monitoring, alerting, and operational reliability  

Database Engineering

• Keep critical data workflows running reliably  
• Build automated processes for data imports and exports  
• Troubleshoot failed jobs and integrations  
• Create repeatable, auditable data-loading processes  

Subject Matter Expertise

• Own the dataset for a specific Baseball Operations department  

🔵 I can help build this

Our Future Data Platform

• Help design our Snowflake architecture  
• Develop a roadmap for moving from SQL Server to Snowflake  
• Design data movement and migration strategies  
• Establish standards for security, governance, and performance  
• Help us operate a hybrid SQL Server/Snowflake environment during the transition  

Modern Data Engineering

• Build ETL/ELT pipelines using Python, SQL, Dagster, or similar tools  
• Automate monitoring and recovery  
• Improve our data orchestration and workflow management  
• Modernize legacy processes   

🟣 I want to grow into this

Maybe you’ve spent years as a DBA and want to become a data platform engineer; Maybe you’re a strong data engineer who wants to learn production database administration; Maybe you’ve worked with SQL Server but want to deepen your Snowflake expertise; Maybe you’ve built Snowflake platforms but want to take ownership of a production environment.

Tell us where you want to go.

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Instead of asking you to just submit a resume and hope we guess what you’re capable of, we’d like you to tell us how you see yourself in this role by using the survey link below to complete your application.

All offers are contingent upon a satisfactory background check.

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.

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

I generally find discussions of the most underrated player in baseball to be tedious. Whose rating are we using? Relative to what? Does being the most underrated player in the game two years in a row imply something uncomfortable about our own ability to update our priors? Heck, does repeatedly earning the mantel of “most underrated” render you ineligible for the title? How underrated can José Ramírez be when every single FanGraphs reader knows how underrated he is? Anyway, today’s article is a case of “do what I say, not what I do.” Because I’ll just say it: Drew Rasmussen is the most underrated player in baseball.

I know, I know! That whole intro paragraph tells you how silly this formulation is. But I was moved to look more closely at Rasmussen for two reasons. First, there was this tweet from Tom Tango:

Since 2021, among pitchers with 500+ IP, there are 10 pitchers in the top 15 in each of ERA, FIP and Statcast ERA (xERA)

From highest to lowest career WAR:

Kershaw
Sale
Cole
Wheeler
Fried
Skubal
Burnes
Woodruff
Ohtani
Rasmussen

Sale + Ohtani are only ones in top 5 in all 3 pic.twitter.com/jF7ZVUWmDs

— Tangotiger ? (@tangotiger) August 9, 2026

Not a list I expected to find him on. Second, this interview he did with our own David Laurila fascinated me. Rasmussen doesn’t look much like he did when the Brewers traded him to the Rays for Willy Adames back in 2021. This guy has remade his entire arsenal and approach, and he’s become one of the best pitchers in baseball by doing so. Read the rest of this entry »

With apologies to Tarik Skubal and the Dodgers, for my money the most eye-catching deal ahead of Monday’s trade deadline was the Red Sox acquiring Adley Rutschman in a six-player blockbuster with the Orioles. Not only did a switch-hitting All-Star catcher move from one Wild Card contender to another, but he did so within the same division — and he’s more than a rental, with one more year of arbitration eligibility before he reaches free agency. Though he’s currently on the injured list due to inflammation in his left wrist, Rutschman is reportedly nearing a rehab assignment, and once he returns, he should provide a substantial upgrade for a team whose catchers landed on my Replacement-Level Killers list a few weeks ago.

Rustchman wasn’t the only prominent catcher on the move to a contender on Monday, as the Marlins traded Liam Hicks to the Rays, but he’s a part-time backstop whose hitting makes him a useful DH and first base option as well. While the concurrence of his being dealt illustrates that trading for a catcher on the fly in the midst of a playoff race isn’t unheard of, such moves do stand out. They’re not to be undertaken lightly because of the weighty responsibility that falls on a catcher’s shoulders in terms of quickly having to build relationships with a new pitching staff to understand repertoires, situational preferences, and interpersonal dynamics. Odds are that those newcomers are also expected to provide more offense than the catchers they replaced, because offensive slumps often spur teams to make such changes. Read the rest of this entry »

I know, I know. I, too, wish the Tampa Bay Rays had traded for Tarik Skubal. But they didn’t, and it’s not in their nature if we’re being honest. The Rays aren’t the type to trade for one big hammer. They prefer to one-red-paperclip it, and that’s exactly what they’ve done this deadline. First, they traded for Freddy Peralta. Now, they’ve added some sorely needed offensive help by acquiring Liam Hicks from the Marlins in exchange for prospects Jacob Kisting, Adrian Santana, and Brayden Taylor, as Jeff Passan first reported.

The Tampa Bay side of this equation is pretty simple. Their catching duo of Hunter Feduccia and Nick Fortes hasn’t been good enough. Fortes has been reasonable as the righty half of a platoon, but Feduccia has scuffled to an 82 wRC+ even getting good platoon matchups. Catcher probably wasn’t the weakest part of their lineup – frankly, there are a lot of holes to patch here – but it was definitely an area of need. If the Rays are going to keep a hold on the AL East, they’ll have to score more runs in addition to continuing to pitch well, and playing a good hitter at catcher is a good way to start.

Hicks was a late bloomer who didn’t debut until last year at age 26, but he has a long track record of plus offense from behind the plate. He hit throughout his minor league tenure but never received a call-up because of questions about his defense. The Marlins took him in the Rule 5 draft in December 2024, plugged him in as the big half of a platoon, and let him cook. His defense was predictably weak – so weak that he ended up rotating between catcher, first base, and DH – but the bat played right away. Read the rest of this entry »

You and I might never know if the Rays could have outbid the Dodgers for Tarik Skubal, but with the no. 1 player on the trading block off the board, Tampa Bay swept into action within hours. For the cost of outfielder Aidan Smith, second baseman Émilien Pitre, and pitcher Gary Gill Hill, the Rays have acquired right-hander Freddy Peralta from the New York Mets. The Rays, in a departure from their habitual cheapskatitude, are assuming the remaining $2.47 million left on Peralta’s contract.

At the time of the trade, the Rays had a sizable-but-not-completely secure 3.5-game lead over the Yankees, both for first place in the AL East and the no. 1 overall seed in the American League. With the deepest farm system in the league to trade from, the Rays were wise to shore up their rotation, both for the stretch run and for the postseason itself.

The Rays have a pretty good staff already; they’re seventh in baseball in team ERA- and eighth in K-BB%. Their starters are fourth in ERA-. Tampa Bay sent not one but three pitchers — Drew Rasmussen, Nick Martinez, and closer Bryan Baker — to the All-Star Game last month. Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday afternoon, Tarik Skubal threw what looked for all the world to be his last pitch as a member of the Detroit Tigers.

Skubal fanned six Orioles — including his 1,000th career strikeout — and held the Orioles scoreless into the seventh inning. Tigers manager A.J. Hinch, wanting his ace to finish on a valedictory note, let Skubal pitch himself into some trouble in the seventh, but lifted him once Leody Taveras singled in Baltimore’s first run. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve written before about one of my favorite baseball traditions: The Rays make a run to the playoffs, and because they’re not the Yankees or Red Sox, and they turn over their entire 40-man roster every 24 months, they show up on TV with a bunch of guys the average sports fan has never heard of.

Come October, America is introduced to a weird reliever when he throws three perfect innings in the ALDS. “Who the frick is this guy?” America asks. “And how does anyone hit him?” Read the rest of this entry »