Sitting pretty as short season heads down the stretch
ST. PETERSBURG — The reasons the Rays had to put aside seeking revenge against the Yankees in Wednesday’s seasonseries finale turned out — thanks to an emotional 5-2 win — to be a great idea.
“Tonight was a big deal,” veteran starter Charlie Morton said Wednesday night before the team headed home. “We’re coming out of here with a lot of momentum.”
The Rays actually have been rolling for a while. After a miserable 0-5 first road trip that had some doubting them, the Rays have been the best team in the majors, with a 22-6 record since.
Combined with a 4-6 start, that has them sitting pretty — atop the American League at 26-12 and five games ahead of the second-place Yankees in the East Division with 22 to play in the pandemicabbreviated season.
And they’re getting somewhat healthier, whittling down what had been a team-record-tying 13 players on the injured list.
Morton returned Wednesday after missing three-plus weeks with a sore shoulder. High-leverage reliever Nick Anderson (forearm) is expected back this weekend, and bullpen mate Oliver Drake (biceps) and starter Ryan Yarbrough could rejoin the staff next week.
Still to be determined are timetables for the returns of infielder Yandy Diaz (hamstring) and catcher Mike Zunino (oblique), but both are expected back.
Plus, the Rays have what Elias Sports Bureau calculates to be the easiest remaining schedule for AL teams — only three games against a team over .500 as of Thursday morning, and those are in the final series at home against the Phillies. They have the added benefit of four off days in a 22-day stretch, which allows them to better manage their pitchers’ workloads.
With continued good play and some help from their friends, the Rays could clinch a berth in the expanded-to-eight-team AL playoff field by the middle of the month. Their magic number to make the postseason is 18 — a combination of their wins and losses by the Tigers, who are currently chasing the second wildcard spot held by the Blue Jays. (If the Rays remain the top seed, they face the second wild card, which is the No. 8 seed, in a best-ofthree first round.)
And what could be their third-ever AL East title a couple of days after that, with a magic number of 19 to eliminate the Yankees, who have played fewer games. Updated projections by fangraphs.com give the Rays an 86.4% chance to win the division and 100% to make the playoffs.
“We’re in a good spot right now,” infielder Joey Wendle said. “We’re playing good baseball, and that was part of the reason that we didn’t do anything [against the Yankees that could have led to injuries or suspensions].
“We like where we are, we like our team. We’ve battled through a lot of injuries and continue to play good baseball. That’s our focus. That’s going to be our focus for the rest of the season.”
Infielder Mike Brosseau said that biggerpicture thinking has been a guiding principle, no matter the injuries, no matter the issues with other teams, no matter what.
“We know what we do really well, and it’s been shown this entire season,” Brosseau said. “We’re playing really good ball. The last thing we need is for any kind of distraction to kind of take us off those rails and kind of kill our momentum.
“Especially these last three [or] four weeks of the season, we know what’s at stake. We know what we can do. We’ve shown what we can do.
That’s what our mentality going forward is — not letting any distractions, not letting anything from outside our clubhouse distract us from what we know we can and want to do.”