A debeautiful start for promising lefty

Fleming, Curtiss give team reasons to smile

ST. PETERSBURG — The beer, milk and baby powder were flying freely around the shower room in the home clubhouse at Tropicana Field following Sunday’s 5-4 win over the Blue Jays.

For all the bad news there has been lately concerning Rays pitchers, including top reliever Nick Anderson becoming the ninth to be sidelined by injury, there were some things to celebrate, and they were going to do it up.

Or at least the way baseball players do, wheeling Josh Fleming and John Curtiss into the shower in laundry carts and dousing them with whatever was within reach.

“Very cold. Didn’t smell very good,” Fleming said. “Just a mixture of a bunch of things.”

Not that he was complaining. The 24-year-old lefty prospect, a 2017 fifth-round pick from Division III Webster University, had been called up to make his bigleague debut, filling one of the gaps in their rotation, and he worked five solid, impressive innings for the win.

Nor was Curtiss lamenting. The 27-year-old who signed as a minor-league free agent with the Rays in February — his fourth organization in a little more than a year — is getting an opportunity in different bullpen roles, and Sunday that meant getting the final five outs for his first major-league save.

“It is a good day,” Rays manager Kevin Cash said. “Anytime you see a young guy come up, debuts, pitches good enough, deserves the win, got the win, it’s pretty exciting. And the same goes for Curtiss on the back end.”

The individual accomplishments were certainly worthy of acknowledgment.

Plus, they were somewhat connected, as Curtiss and Fleming were paired as throwing partners in the Port Charlotte group of the July Spring 2.0 workouts.

“It was pretty special,” Curtiss said. “The only thing I thought about today other than really wanting to execute each individual pitch was in between the eighth and ninth [innings], I did think to myself, I wanted to make sure Flem got his first win.”

So, too, did reliever Pete Fairbanks, who worked the sixth, as he and Fleming share the same agent and worked out together in the St. Louis area during the shutdown.

But the Rays also had reason to thank Fleming and Curtiss for stepping in and stepping up, given the gaping holes that injuries have torn in their staff. Anderson is the sixth member of the planned opening-day bullpen to be sidelined, and the rotation is missing Charlie Morton and Yonny Chirinos, plus top fill-in Brendan McKay.

The win continued the Rays’ impressive 15-4 run as they improve to 19-10 overall and extended their American League