Big spenders meet bargain hunters in unusual clash
ARLINGTON — The shortest and strangest season in Major League Baseball history will finish with a clash of coasts and contrasts. The Los Angeles Dodgers and the Tampa Bay Rays — big spenders and bargain hunters — will crown one region with an unofficial title no one saw coming: inter-sports champion of the pandemic era.
The 116th World Series, to be played at Globe Life Field starting Tuesday, will be the third championship series for a big four North American sports league to be decided this fall. The Tampa Bay Lightning won the Stanley Cup on Sept. 30 and the Los Angeles Lakers took the NBA Finals 12 days later. Now, Tampa Bay or Los Angeles will add another trophy.
For the baseball teams themselves, though, a championship would be a long time coming. The Dodgers have not won the World Series since 1988, a decade before the Rays started play as the American League’s most recent expansion franchise. They dropped their original name, the Devil Rays, before the 2008 season, when they reached their only World Series, a five-game loss to the Philadelphia Phillies.
The Dodgers have reigned over the National League West for eight consecutive seasons — they were baseball’s best team this year, at 43-17, three games better than the Rays — but have always fallen short in the end. They lost the World Series in 2017 and 2018 and return now after rallying to beat the Atlanta Braves in the NL Championship Series after losing three of the first four games.
“From the moment that we were able to put a season together once they figured out the COVID
thing, everybody was expecting us to get to the World Series,” said Dodgers utility man Enrique Hernandez, who tied Game 7 with a pinch-hit homer in the sixth inning. “We were expecting to get to the World Series.
“Up to the point where we went down 3-1 in this series, we hadn’t really gone through any adversity at all during this season. So that was the one thing: It was time to get it done.”
Did they ever. The Dodgers had faced a 3-1 deficit seven times in their postseason history but had never managed to force a Game 7. This time, they won the pennant with a modern twist on a wellworn formula: pitching, defense and timely home runs.
They smacked three homers in Game 5, including two by Corey Seager, the series’ most valuable player, and a go-ahead three-run shot by catcher Will Smith. Seager and Justin Turner went deep in the first inning of Game 6, giving starter Walker Buehler and the bullpen all the run support they needed.
In Game 7, the Dodgers did a bit of everything: a home run-robbing catch in right field by Mookie Betts, a critical double play keyed by the whirling Turner at third, homers by Hernandez and Cody Bellinger, and six no-hit innings from relievers Blake Treinen, Brusdar Graterol and Julio Urias to finish the game.
“All season we’ve been controlling games and controlling series, but it seems like we were getting handled a little bit early on,” Betts said. “We were able to get ahold of
everything, get ahold of ourselves and start to fight back. It just shows the type of group we have. We’re never going to give up.”
The Rays followed their own distinctive trail to the World Series with a best-of-seven path never taken before: win, win, win, loss, loss, loss, win. The Astros were trying to join the 2004 Boston Red Sox as the only team to recover from a 3-0 deficit, but in the end the Rays made history of their own by ending a free fall.
To do so, they used the veteran moxie of starter Charlie Morton — who also closed out the Dodgers for Houston in the 2017 World Series — and the daily magic of outfielder Randy Arozarena. Morton worked 52⁄ 33 steely innings in Game 7, and a first-inning homer by Arozarena — his seventh home run of the postseason, a rookie record — gave the Rays a lead they
never lost.
“Randy Arozarena, I don’t have any words to describe what he’s done, what he’s meant to us this postseason,” Rays manager Kevin Cash said. “But for him to have a bat in his hand with an opportunity for a big home run really settled a lot of people in the dugout. It certainly did me.”
Arozarena, the ALCS most valuable player, hit .321 in the series while the rest of the Rays hit .183.
The Rays’ prorated payroll this season was just $28.2 million, higher than only Pittsburgh and Baltimore, according to Spotrac, which tracks teams’ financial data. The Dodgers ranked second, their $107.9 million trailing only the Yankees.
Both teams value roster depth, but they shop in different circles to get it. The Dodgers had 16 players who were scheduled to earn at least $4 million this season before the pandemic. The Rays had five: Morton, Snell, catcher Mike Zunino, outfielder Yoshi Tsutsugo and center fielder Kevin Kiermaier, whose eight years with Tampa Bay make him the team’s longesttenured player.
“It doesn’t bother me one bit that we’re not big spenders,” Kiermaier said. “I enjoy it, because I was a 31st-round pick back in 2010 and I always thought I was a lowkey, under-the-radar type of player coming up. I didn’t think enough people knew about me, but I knew I could do special things and I finally got my opportunity.
“Same with the Rays. We’re a small-market team, not the most popular team out there. But if you do all the little things right, consistently, great things can happen.”