Projo Sports Blog

By Sam Mellinger
Kansas City Star

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. - Oh, sure, this one's easy. Here come the highfalutin Red Sox, with their championship rings, their $133 million payroll and enough history to fill Cooperstown twice.

And over there are the Rays, with their decade's worth of 90-plus loss seasons, the second-lowest payroll in baseball, and a few months' history highlighted by fans with cowbells and players with Mohawks.

So, yeah, this one looks as easy as a turkey sandwich. Except it's not stupid to think the Rays can beat baseball's powerhouse - unless you'd call Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn stupid.

"Yeah, I think they can win," he said. "And I think they will win."

If we can ignore the Big Papi aura around the Red Sox, and confine what you look at to 2008, the recent history actually favors the Rays. Seriously. And not just because they won the season series 10-8.

Forget everything you previously knew about a team that plays on fake grass in what is quite possibly the most awkward stadium in baseball in front of crowds that before this season you could often count by hand.

Hindsight being what it is, this Rays' run could be seen coming way back in spring training, when Jonny Gomes stood up for a teammate by going after Yankee Shelley Duncan for retaliation for a cheap shot.

Another sign came in June, when James Shields stood up another teammate by drilling Coco Crisp, setting off a benches-clearing brawl.

The final doubts should've been squashed when the Rays won two in a row in Fenway Park, taking charge of the AL East division with game-winning homers from Dan Johnson and Carlos Pena.

That's what convinced Gwynn.

"We all learned a lesson right there," he said. "We were all writing them off, like, 'OK, the shoe's coming off now.' But they competed and they fought and they won. This team's really good."

A national sportswriter went on ESPN the other day, the latest to say the Rays "are bad for baseball."

So maybe the message of Rays as a legitimate championship contender hasn't gone mainstream quite yet. But it sure has made its way through baseball circles.

Heck, just on Thursday, David Ortiz - who knows a thing or two about this - said the Rays have the best pitching in the American League.

"Everybody needs to give Tampa Bay a lot of credit," Ortiz said. "I can tell you one thing, if they keep themselves out of trouble, they're going to do a lot of damage. Because it's not just one or two guys, it's all of them. That's something you don't see every day."

This is all still just a little surreal, which is fitting for a team that plays in a dome where it's tough to tell whether it's night or day without a clock. The Rays have no Cy Young contender, nobody receiving MVP mention and only three All-Stars this season - fewer than the Rangers.

So maybe it's easy to let them become an afterthought.

But that kind of thing should have stopped in the second week of September, after Jon Lester and Jonathan Papelbon blanked the Rays and pulled Boston to within a half-game of the division.

This is the part that Gwynn is talking about, when writing off the Rays came back, and this is the part where Johnson - a September call-up who was zero for 15 as a pinch hitter - hit the game-winning, two-run, pinch-hit home run off Papelbon.

The next night, Pena won it with a 14th-inning homer over the Green Monster, and from then on, the Sox were playing for the wild card.

"We knew a big thing for us was going to be winning in Boston," B.J. Upton said. "We hadn't done it all year. That was a jump-start for us, actually going in there and winning a couple of ballgames. Everybody had questioned that."

The Red Sox may be staggering, too. Josh Beckett, their money playoff pitcher, is hurting. Their middle relief has been unreliable. Mike Lowell, their World Series MVP from last year, is left off the playoff roster. Daisuke Matsuzaka, their game-one starter, is susceptible to all kinds of pitch-count issues.

OK, this is the time of year where the baseball talk can go way overboard. So let's point out right now that the Rays are not replacing the Yankees as Boston's biggest rival - don't laugh, someone asked that question on Thursday - but it is more than the nonconference game it's been in the past.

Think of it in terms of Royals-Cardinals. The Royals (Rays) get geeked about the Cardinals and fill up their stadium and drum up as much passion as they can, while the Cardinals (Red Sox) mostly shrug their shoulders and think the whole thing's kind of cute.
But at least this is progress.

"Look," reliever Trever Miller said, "I love the fact we're talking about us being a rival with the Boston Red Sox. I love the fact we've taken an organization that was apparently awful, and made it a rival of one of the best organizations ever."

None of this is meant to say the Rays are the favorite here. They're not. Most Las Vegas sportsbooks have the Red Sox as a solid favorite.

But there does seem to be a perception by some that just because the Rays haven't been anywhere close to here before, that they don't deserve to be here now.

The argument actually could be made that the Rays deserve to be here more than any other team. They won baseball's toughest division and won the regular-season series against each of the four playoff teams they faced - 25-15 overall.

They've convinced much of the baseball world, including Hall of Famers like Gwynn. Here's their chance at everyone else, and to hear them tell it, it's only the first of many.

"We want to be doing this, not just this year, but for a long time," reliever Grant Balfour said. "There's a lot of young players here who plan on playing baseball for a long, long time. I can't think of any reason why we won't be here in the future."

 Tags  Boston Red Sox Joe Maddon MLS playoffs Tampa Bay Rays

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