The 2023 Tampa Bay Rays would be terrible movie fodder. The Rays, who started the season with a record-breaking 13 straight victories and won an outstanding 99 games over the course of the season, bowed out with a whimper in an AL wild-card series win against the Texas Rangers on Wednesday.
They once again posed a threat to the series’ history, but in a less compelling way: The franchise narrowly managed to match MLB’s longest postseason scoreless streak by innings pitched. In the end, the Rays made a run in two games, with Jordan Montgomery and Nathan Eovaldi largely protecting Texas from having to use its weak bullpen.
In this series, the Rays failed to take advantage of their opponents’ weakness. They exited in October barely resembling the team that so boldly introduced themselves in April.
And it’s easy to see why. These Rays are not the same team that took over baseball discourse in April.
This embedded content is not available in your region.
The two most productive position players (Wander Franco and Brandon Lowe) and three most productive pitchers (Drew Rasmussen, Jeffrey Springs and Shane McClanahan) from that 13-game barnstorming campaign are not on the postseason roster. Four died from injuries and Franco is on administrative leave as authorities in the Dominican Republic investigate allegations that he had inappropriate relationships with underage girls.
When the Rays were on their way, they were already dealing with injuries to the pitching staff and made a point of recognizing the “next men up,” which at that point were Kevin Kelly, Braden Bristo, Ryan Thompson and Taj Bradley – all of whom were missing also on the postseason squad. The ability to continue to find useful players to become the next men is a hallmark of the Rays’ success – the success of any baseball team in the 2020s, but especially the Rays’ success.
Over the last five seasons, this franchise has never ranked higher than 23rd in payroll according to competitive accounting tax calculations, but it has posted the fourth-most wins in baseball, behind only the Los Angeles Dodgers, Houston Astros and Atlanta Braves, as well as the Rays have appeared in the World Series.
The turnover that occurs over the course of a 162-game season likely makes the Rays poor film subjects. But it doesn’t necessarily make them a bad baseball team — or a bad postseason baseball team. The Rays know this well. Randy Arozarena powered the pennant run in 2020 after playing in just 23 games for the franchise before his star appearance in the postseason.
A good lineup has a bad streak
Manager Kevin Cash, who refused to make excuses for the team’s disappointing exit in his postgame comments Wednesday, called the idea that the Rays don’t have the same roster as their dominant April team “an easy one.” Narrative”.
“We are who we are and we finished the regular season with the guys we had,” Cash said. “I still feel we could have performed better with the squad we had.”
And of course he is right.
The lineup the Rays fielded against the Rangers still had the theoretical power of five batters who were at least 25% better than the MLB average (by park-adjusted wRC+) in at least 300 plate appearances in 2023. They had two other consensus top-50 prospects in Junior Caminero and Curtis Mead, who undoubtedly have the talent to make an impact despite their lack of track record.
The Rays offered a mix of October experience – Arozarena and Yandy Díaz – and relatively fresh faces – Josh Lowe and Isaac Paredes. They had contact hitters and home run hitters. They had lefties and righties in a series where they faced a starter on each side.
No, there was no silver bullet that caught the Rays. Most of the time they fell short of their own standards. During the regular season, the Rays were one of the game’s most successful teams against breaking and offspeed pitches (fourth by WOBA), and they did so by being one of the most aggressive teams against them – a rate of 50.8% of the time surpassed only by the Rockies, batting .259 against such pitches.
However, their aggressiveness did not pay off in this wildcard series. They continued to hit Montgomery’s curveball and changeup and Eovaldi’s splitter. The result in these two games was disastrous. That meant they had fewer chances to fight back against the Rangers bullpen, which struggled mightily down the stretch, posting a 4.67 ERA after the August 1 trade deadline.
It meant the Rays were themselves, even if that didn’t manifest the way we expected.
What led to the demise of a 99-win team?
When we say that a baseball season has a “fairytale ending,” we do so because such clear-cut storylines are far outside the norm. However, recognizing that doesn’t help us understand everyone else, so we try to incorporate some foreshadowing or knowing patterns into the season.
In reality, it just doesn’t work. The final staccato notes that conclude every epic baseball season are unsuspecting representatives of the whole. The juggernaut 13-0 Rays are not the same as the 99-win Rays, which are not the same as the hitless playoff Rays.
There are many narratives one can try to emerge from a difficult loss. None of them will be satisfactory.
Could the addition of bolder stars allow the frugal Rays – who recently secured plans for a more accessible stadium for the future, posting historically low attendance this series – a more reliable attack in October? Maybe, but their regular-season strategies are pretty hard to criticize, and a similarly constructed team made it all the way to World Series Game 6 in MLB’s widest postseason ever in 2020.
Could the Rays have done more at the trade deadline to improve their chances of overtaking the Baltimore Orioles in the AL East and avoiding this best-of-three situation altogether? Almost certainly, but at the time they were focused on mentoring Aaron Civale to patch together a pitching staff that had lost two top starters. With the Rays trailing by 1.5 games on deadline day, even that low-key addition might have been enough had the team not lost McClanahan, a Cy Young contender, less than a week later. (Franco also left the team in mid-August when the allegations surfaced.)
After the trade deadline, the Rays – these Rays – were playing at a 104-win pace, while the Rangers – these Rangers – were playing 30-26 (an 87-win pace). But because of baseball’s playoff format, the Rays, according to projections, practically earned the coin flip of playing a similarly talented team.
Perhaps July 8-16, including a series loss to the Orioles, doomed Tampa Bay in the AL East. Or maybe it was the series split against the Orioles in September, where a win would have changed everything. Or perhaps it was the period of bullpen struggles that followed the team’s hot start and contributed to a 22-25 record in one-run games.
Whatever the case, the 2023 Rays have given us high hopes for good reason. This was a very good baseball team that will likely precede some more very good baseball teams. But this year 99 wins weren’t enough. In this particular series, the Rays bats weren’t good enough. The Rays played second fiddle in the crucial moments that determined first the division title and then advance to the playoffs.
They disappeared into the noise, a part of the backstory that needed to be known but not explained.