The Rays’ season came apart in a brutal 10-1 loss to the Brewers, a game that felt ugly from start to finish and pushed Milwaukee to one win away from its first World Series title.
Freddy Peralta got the ball for Tampa Bay and couldn’t provide the kind of stabilizing start the Rays needed. In what could be his final Rays outing, he lasted 4.2 innings and allowed seven hits, five earned runs and three walks while striking out four. Like Rasmussen before him, he never made it through the fifth.
The trouble wasn’t limited to the mound. Tampa Bay’s defense wobbled again, with a few bobbles and several tough plays that simply didn’t get made.
One sequence stood out as the turning point: Walls had a chance to make a spectacular scoop and keep the score at 2-0, but the play wasn’t there. From that point on, the Brewers kept stacking hits and eventually poured in eight total runs in the inning stretch that followed.
There was one bright spot in the field early. Chandler Simpson made a phenomenal catch and collision to save a run when the game still carried a sliver of hope for the Rays.
Offensively, Tampa Bay had almost nothing going. Yandy Diaz opened the scoring for the Rays with a smoked line-drive single, his first hit of the series, but it was also the team’s last hit until garbage time in the ninth. The Rays managed just three of the hardest-hit balls in the game overall - Diaz’s single at 115.5 MPH, Nick Fortes at 107.4, and Ben Williamson at 106.6.
Robert Gasser was the other side of that story. He cruised through the Rays lineup and finished with six innings, one hit allowed, one walk, three strikeouts and no runs.
The Rays have now been thoroughly outplayed, and this game felt like the moment the dam finally broke. They’ve dropped far below the level they showed in the ALDS, the ALCS and the 162 games before that. The Brewers are on the brink, and the Rays are suddenly staring at a comeback that looks awfully hard to find.
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Kevin Cash made it clear afterward that the victory came with a price, because getting through an extra-inning playoff game meant leaning hard on pitchers the club may need again immediately. Game 5 now shifts from a simple elimination test to a planning exercise for Tampa Bay, with the staff having to sort through who can still answer the call and how far the Rays can push the group that just helped them survive. [Read more 🡒]
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The Rays were staring at the end of their season in Game 4 against the Brewers, and instead got the kind of chaotic night that can swing an entire World Series. With multiple lead changes and big relief innings from Nick Martinez and Bryan Baker, Tampa Bay kept itself close long enough for the game to spill into extra innings, where every pitch felt season-defining.
Ben Williamson eventually supplied the finish, lining the walk-off hit that sent the Rays home with a win and pushed the series to a Game 5. For a club that needed every out just to survive, the victory was equal parts bullpen grit and late-game nerve, the kind of escape that can change the mood of a series in a hurry. [Read more 🡒]