The Rays came into the ALCS with a little rust on them, and the first two games showed it. After sweeping the Yankees, they had basically spent a week away from baseball, and the lineup - led by the pitcher - was also leaning on short-side platoon starters. Two games in, though, the expectation is that the offense starts to settle in when the series shifts to Cleveland on Thursday.
Game 1 delivered the kind of jolt a team can use in a best-of-seven. The Guardians waited until the final four innings to pile on all seven of their runs, handing the Rays their first postseason loss.
That kind of result can sting, but it also forces a club to wake up fast. Cash said the end of the winning streak could work as motivation, and that tracks.
Even a top seed has to stay sharp. And for what it’s worth, the 2008 Rays also dropped ALCS Game 1.
Game 2 had a very different feel, and it hinged on a bit of fortune. Junior Caminero benefited from a walk the Guardians did not challenge, a call that could have altered the inning in a big way.
In a scoreless fourth, the Rays manufactured pressure the old-fashioned way: speed, contact, and a little chaos with two outs. Chandler Simpson beat out an infield single, then José Ramírez’s fielding error on Ben Williamson’s grounder - the ball skipped through his legs on the turf - opened the door for the first run in Caminero.
Liam Hicks followed right away with a two-run single, and just like that it was 3-0. All three runs were unearned.
It was a very Rays-style inning, the kind that punishes defensive slippage, but it never happens without that walk.
The back end of the bullpen has been money, too. Bryan Baker added another save in Game 2 and now owns the franchise record for playoff saves. He also became the first player in MLB history to allow 0 hits and earn the save in four consecutive playoff appearances, according to Greg Harvey.
Freddy Peralta was the other big reason Game 2 went the Rays’ way. He looked fully dialed in after the team’s adjustments to his delivery, then fed off the moment and turned in a terrific six-inning outing.
His fastball got all the way up to 99.4 mph and sat at 96.9 mph on average, about two mph above his normal level. He threw that pitch 71% of the time across 99 pitches.
Beyond a couple curveballs, the rest was mostly changeups, and they were the kind that kept missing bats. It was an ugly matchup for the Guardians offense.
There was also plenty of noise around the crowd sizes. After plenty of chatter online about the Rays not selling out, Game 1 drew 35,000 instead of 42,000, and Game 2 brought in only 32,000.
The prices were part of the conversation, too, with a weekday 300-level ticket at the cavernous Tropicana Field listed at $80 instead of $180. That kind of pricing gap suggests some sort of floor tied to MLB and the Rays, and it raises the obvious question of whether the push to lure marginal fans would be better aimed at core fans who buy multiple tickets, through discounts or clearer pricing.
In Other News...
Blake Snell Just Reopened A Kevin Cash Debate Rays Fans Know Well
Blake Snells latest postseason outing brought back an old Rays talking point in a hurry. In a recent National League Championship Series game, the Dodgers left-hander worked deep enough to face the heart of Milwaukees order again, and Jake Bauers and Garrett Mitchell made him pay with back-to-back home runs in the seventh inning that swung the game to the Brewers.
For Tampa Bay fans, the sight probably felt familiar because the larger debate around Snell has never really gone away. The numbers have long pointed to the danger of letting a starter keep navigating an order too many times, and Snells career has been one of the clearest examples of that tension between trust in a frontline arm and the matchup realities that usually catch up to him. [Read more 🡒]
Rays Stadium Fight Nearly Took Another Brutal Turn In Tampa
The political fight over a new Rays stadium nearly went off the rails in Tampa before the night was over. City Council members were split on a bond measure tied to the project, leaving the vote deadlocked and the proposal temporarily stalled as the debate over the teams future played out in public.
A later shift changed everything when an absent council member rejoined remotely, turning the standoff into approval and keeping the stadium effort alive. The timing only added to the drama, since the council was making its decision while the Rays were in the middle of a postseason game, a reminder that the franchises on-field and off-field futures are still moving together. [Read more 🡒]
Junior Caminero Trade Still Haunts Cleveland For One Painful Reason
A few years after the Guardians shipped Junior Caminero to Tampa Bay in the 2021 deal that brought back Tobias Myers, the trade still lands as one of those move-the-pieces-faster decisions that looks harsher with time. Myers never pitched for Cleveland before moving on, and his emergence elsewhere has only sharpened the sense that the Rays came away with the more meaningful long-term asset, a familiar feeling for a front office that has seen its player-development bets pay off often enough to make rival evaluations sting.
The trade is back in the conversation now because Cleveland is also dealing with another bit of pitching news, with Colin Holderman undergoing wrist surgery after his recent issue. The encouraging part for the Guardians is that the procedure is not expected to keep him from his offseason throwing work or put his spring training availability in doubt, so the focus remains less on a lost winter and more on how Cleveland handles the next wave of roster decisions after another old transaction resurfaced in an unflattering way. [Read more 🡒]