What’s Wrong with the Rays?

admin — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 19:12:52 +0000

Were you to up and ask any baseball manager what’s wrong with Tampa Bay’s team, you’d be swiftly greeted with a perplexing and a choice-word evaluation of your own baseball assessing talents. By many accounts, the Rays sport one of the most complete line-ups in baseball, featuring a rare top to bottom combination of speed and power. Complete with a spry selection of still-developing young players bolstered by the experience of savvy veterans, Tampa Bay really knows how to fill up a stat sheet even the Sabremetrics guys won’t scoff at, including the most important statistic: winning percentage. Close behind the Yankees atop the ever competitive AL East, Tampa is off to a very solid 45-32 start. So what then would dare cause anyone to assume the Rays have anything wrong at all?Delving deeper into the matter, this amateur diagnoses concludes the Rays currently suffer from what, for lack of an official medical term, we can only refer to as “Happy Gilmore Putting Syndrome.” Stuart Sternberg, the team’s principle owner, is probably just one more lethargic home-stand short of screaming, “That’s your home! Are you too good for your home?!” Tampa Bay has compiled an untouchable 25-13 road mark, tops in the bigs. While it is reassuring to know your team is resilient enough to win in unfriendly confines, the flip side of this impressive stat is their alarmingly average 20-19 home total. Looking up and down the standings, the Blue Jays, Athletics, Mariners and Nationals all boast better home records, and that’s just teams playing.500 baseball or worse. The Rays overall .584 winning percentage makes any comparison to such lowlife franchises an utter embarrassment, much less a comparison in which they’re on the losing end. Frustrated fans could only imagine the lead they might have if the team played halfway up to their potential in games the hometown crowd could actually attend. Baseball is a game of endless numbers and statistics, some prove significant and others trivial, but this jury is still out on whether Tampa Bay’s relative troubles at Tropicana Field could be indicative of larger team issues down the line.

Inside the Majors » Tampa Bay Rays

What’s Wrong with the Rays?