Should the rest of the AL fear the Rays?
Forget the opener? Tyler Glasnow gives Tampa Bay a legitimate five-man rotation and the swagger of a team that won 96 games last season.
PORT CHARLOTTE, Fla. – The music is always loud and the mood perpetually light in the land of the underdog, and on this spring training morning, Blake Snell eases through the Rays clubhouse like Peter Pan with a $50 million contract.
In one moment, he is singing along to Post Malone, daring observers to join in with him. In the next, he is reaching into a drawer in his locker and removing his ping-pong paddle – the house models won’t do – and hammering the ball at a teammate with ferocity.
Hours later, the 2018 American League Cy Young winner is more reflective. He’s 27 now – “Twenty-sev-en,” he says disbelievingly, as if it were 50 – and coming off an injury-plagued season that forced the Fortnite aficionado to reconsider his sleep habits, his arm care, even his diet.
“I eat a lot of veggies, and I hate veggies,” he says somberly. “And I gave up candy, and I love candy.”
Perhaps Snell swapping his beloved Baby Ruths for spinach isn’t the perfect metaphor for his team’s hopeful pivot to consistent domination, but it’s close. Their startling 90-win season after a winter dismantling in 2018 was backed up by last year’s 96-win tour de force, which was followed by a wildcard conquest of the Athletics and an elimination-game loss to the Astros in the AL division series, which looked like an over match but nearly resulted in the toppling of a mini-dynasty.
Now, the famously low-revenue and tight-budget team is wondering how to close the gap on a 103-win Yankees squad that shrugged its shoulders and lavished $326 million on Gerrit Cole, who beat them in that decisive ALDS Game 5 and now will face them up to a half-dozen times in the AL East.
“Oh, I was thrilled,” majority owner Stuart Sternberg chuckles when asked about Cole’s move to his divisional neighborhood. “There’s certain guys who tend to follow you around. Look, you saw what he did to us in the playoffs and loved pitching against us. But by the same token, it will be that much sweeter when we beat him.”
Is that merely the hubris of an owner who’s also audacious enough to try to convince MLB, the Tampa Bay area and Montreal that his franchise should be carved up like Solomon’s Baby and shared with two markets willing to build him a stadium?
Not necessarily. Since resetting their minor league system in 2014, the Rays have been building to this moment, a point in time when their 40-man roster is bursting with matchupcapturing versatility, and their minor league system stocked with elite talent ready to bubble up to the majors, led by consensus No. 1 prospect Wander Franco.
In an ironic twist, the team chastised for employing the “opener” strategy in 2018 can potentially overwhelm opponents with a traditional rotation.
Charlie Morton struck out 240 in 2019. Tyler Glasnow punched out 11 batters per nine innings in his dozen regularseason starts. Yonny Chirinos and Ryan Yarbrough don’t break the radar gun like the other three but sported WHIPs of 1.05 and 0.99, respectively.
And these are the Rays, whose strength always lie in depth, a factor Sternberg is all too giddy to promote in 2020. “This group, top to bottom – 20, say – through and through is the