Rays will play Astros in ALDS after beating As in wild-card game
Very soon, the Major League Baseball postseason will belong to the old-money bluebloods and the new-money tech giants — teams such as the New York Yankees, the Los Angeles Dodgers and Houston Astros, with their upper-quartile payrolls and starpower. For at least the next week or so, and perhaps deep into this month, they get the prime-time television slots, and everyone else plays in sunshine and long shadows.
But on Wednesday night, from the opening moments of the American League wild-card game at Oakland’s RingCentral Coliseum, the national stage belonged to the Tampa Bay Rays, and if they were a revelation it’s only because you haven’t been paying attention.
We will be seeing more of the Rays, October’s ultimate underdogs, because a surprisingly easy 5-1 win over the Oakland Athletics in the wild card game sends them into the best-of-five Division Series with the Houston Astros, the top overall seed of the postseason. Game 1 will be Friday at Houston’s Minute Maid Park.
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It was a win that fit well within the contours of baseball in 2019: five innings from their starting pitcher (Charlie Morton), a parade of hard-throwing relievers taking it from there, and all five runs scoring on homers – a pair of solo blasts from first baseman Yandy Diaz, a two-run shot by right fielder Avisail Garcia and a solo shot by designated hitter Tommy Pham.
If the Rays were easy to overlook in this year’s 10-team postseason field, highlighted by four 100-win behemoths, it would be fitting. The Rays are always overlooked. But even if you believe they are destined to be annihilated by the Astros — and it says here they will give Houston a scare — they are worth a moment of admiration.
The Rays are making their first postseason appearance since 2013, but from 2008 to 13 they made it four times, with a World Series appearance in 2008. In going 96-66 this season, they reached the 90-win mark for the sixth time this decade. And they have done it without going through the sort of paralyzing, multi-year, full-scale rebuild that other successful, small- to mid-market teams have done.
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Perhaps more than any other team in the game — with the possible exception of the one they were matched against Wednesday night — the Rays epitomize the ideal of doing the most with the least. Their payroll this season, $63.1 million per Spotrac, was the smallest in the majors, and less than one-third that of the major-league-leading Boston Red Sox, whom the Rays beat by 12 games in the AL East this season.
“It’s a beautiful thing having the lowest payroll in baseball and having the success we did,” center fielder Kevin Kiermaier, the Rays’ highest-paid player at $8.17 million, said before the game. “It always feels good to stick it to the man any time you’re able to in this game.”
Mostly by necessity, the Rays are adept at drafting well, building through the farm system, identifying market inefficiencies and finding creative ways to gain small advantages. They are among the most aggressive defensive-shifters in the game, and on Wednesday night, against Oakland’s Matt Olson, they put on such an extreme shift — with four full-depth outfielders and two infielders in the grass just beyond the infield dirt — it took ESPN’s telecast several minutes to be able to position a camera to show it. Other than the pitcher and catcher, only first baseman Diaz was standing in the dirt.
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When the Rays spend on free agents, they can’t afford to be wrong — and they were 100 percent right about Morton, the veteran right-hander they signed to a two-year $30 million deal this winter and who became one of the steals of the off-season when he went 16-6 with a 3.05 ERA for the Rays. A slam-dunk pick to start the biggest game to this point of the Rays’ season, he delivered five sterling innings, allowing only an unearned run.
Diaz, the Cuban first baseman who smashed two of the Rays’ four homers, was an under-the-radar trade acquisition last December, at which point he had hit only one homer in 299 big-league plate appearances. But the Rays were attracted to him by his elite exit velocity — an average of 92.1 mph in 2018, one notch behind Mookie Betts and two behind Christian Yelich.
The Rays are as creative as any team in their deployment of pitching, popularizing the “opener” in 2018 and regularly toggling arms between the rotation and bullpen. But Morton was so good Wednesday night, in an old-school sort of way, Rays Manager Kevin Cash rode him for five — and as anyone who has watched baseball lately knows, when it comes to starters’ innings, especially in October, five is the new seven.
Cash only needed to dip three times into his well-stocked bullpen, getting six outs from Diego Castillo, four from Nick Anderson and the final two from Emilio Pagan to carry home the win — and leaving standout arms such as Tyler Glasnow and Blake Snell untouched and presumably available for longer stints Friday in Houston.
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As they depart the postseason stage — losing the wild card game for the second straight year — let’s spare a moment of appreciation for the A’s. With the 25th-highest payroll in the majors, they tied with the NL East champion Atlanta Braves for the fifth-most wins. Like the Rays, their small-revenue, small-payroll cousins, the A’s have avoided undertaking a major rebuild, and have remained not only competitive — but consistently successful, with this postseason appearance their fifth in the past eight years.
Winner-take-all wild-card games are inherently unfair, incongruous and grotesque — an intentional bastardization of the sport of baseball, which is designed to reward teams across the daily grind of 162 games and the four-week survivalist exercise of the postseason. A one-game playoff, in baseball, is little more than a glorified coin flip. Few would try to argue otherwise.
But for sheer spectacle and drama — and the biggest factor of all: television ratings — few things in baseball can rival these madcap, early October contests, which essentially compress a six-month marathon into a pair of frantic, nine-inning sprints.
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At their best, they produce something like Tuesday night’s classic, with the Washington Nationals beating the Milwaukee Brewers, 4-3, in the NL wild card game — with Max Scherzer and Stephen Strasburg “piggybacking” the start, and a harrowing, luck-infused rally in the bottom of the eighth inning turning what looked like a certain loss into a thrilling win.
And even at their worst, as when the Rays jumped the A’s early Wednesday night and never let them back in, every pitch is infused with the inherent drama of two teams’ seasons on the line.
Starting the postseason with a pair of win-or-go-home games isn’t everyone’s idea of fairness — including, of course, the losing teams. Major League Baseball’s standard answer to those complaints is: If you don’t like the wild card game, win your division so you can avoid it.
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And whether you love the one-game wild card format or not, television loves it unconditionally -- which means it is here to stay.
Read more on the MLB playoffs:
MLB playoff bracket and schedule
How the Nationals match up with the top-seeded, very scary Dodgers
Brewers rookie Trent Grisham says costly error in wild-card loss will ‘sting for a long time’
Houston’s mattress king bets $3.5 million on Astros to win World Series
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