The GBT - The Good, The Bad and The Telling sandwich, where The Bad is nice and lean and the The Telling is ripe.
RAYS 4, Blue Jays 2 (boxscore)
THE GOOD: It’s early, but the Rays are 6-4 which is a lot better than most imagined. Even the most optimistic Rays supporters knew this season had little room for error and what the Rays couldn’t afford was a bad start. Pitchers who are supposed to be on the roster are pitching well which is promising for when the rest come back. Even some in the national media is starting to notice. Of course, the question mark is the offense. So far, the Rays are scoring 4.4 runs per game up from 3.8 a year ago. That’s a huge difference. But how much of it is real? A lot of the offense has come from the bench and we can’t expect that to keep up all season. At the same time, Evan Longoria and Desmond Jennings haven’t done much and John Jaso and James Loney have been hurt, so it is not unreasonable to think the starters will get better. But what the real offense looks like is still a mystery…Chris Archer is pretty good. Archer has made three starts this year. On normal rest he has pitched 14 innings and allowed just 3 hits with 3 walks and 16 strikeouts and a 0.00 ERA. On short rest he has 5.2 ip with 6 hits, 1 walk, 5 strikeouts, and a 4.76 ERA. Weird. It’s almost like you shouldn’t throw your young ace on short rest early in the season when one game doesn’t mean more than the next. The good news is that the short rest does not appear to have had a hangover effect…Kevin Jepsen. Bases loaded with no outs in the 8th inning with the tying run at the plate. Fly ball, fly ball, groundball and Jepsen got the Rays out of the jam having only allowed 1 run on one of the fly balls…Tim Beckham has only 1 pro season with more than 6 HR (12 in 2011). After his home run last night, he’d have 3 in 10 games if not for Kevin Pillar.
THE BAD: Hitting batters on purpose is dumb, whether it is the Rays or the other team. Hitting an opposing batter on purpose for something that was not intentional is just idiotic. So when the Jays hit Evan Longoria and knocked him out of the game, it was just idiotic baseball. And this wasn’t even the first time in this series. And then to add stupid on top of idiotic, when Kevin Jepsen hit a batter in the next inning, Blue Jays fans got mad as if the Rays really wanted to load the bases with no outs and with Jose Bautista on deck. I mean, come on. It’s so stupid it’s laughable. Thank goodness this series is over.
THE TELLING: The Rays signed slugging catcher JP Arencibia to a minor league deal and assigned him to triple-A. He averaged 21 home runs per year in his last 3 years with the Blue Jays but struggled last year with the Rangers in just 63 games. He was in Spring Training with the Orioles but was released last week…Kevin Cash was ejected for the first time as a manager when a replay ruled that a Blue Jays batter was hit by a pitch (replays showed he was hit by the pitch). Cash was ejected once as a player…Thursdays at the Trop are “Throwback Thursday.” Any chance the Rays will start wearing their 1970s fauxbacks for home-Thursday games? The White Sox wear throwback unis for every home game on Sunday, so there is precedence. It would also be awesome.
THE JUNKYARD DOGS WEBTOPIA…
- The big winner early in the season is Rays pitching prospect Burch Smith. He was supposed to make $82,700 this season. Instead, he will make more than $500,000 thanks to a season-ending injury and a loophole in MLB’s roster rules. [BI Sports]
- An in-depth look at new Padres pitcher James Shields, including a lot of background on his time with the Rays. [UT-San Diego]
- DOWN ON THE FARM [boxscores] Ryan Brett was 1-4 and Hak-Ju Lee went 2-4 with a double in Durham’s 4-1 loss…Austin Pruitt struck out 7 and allowed just 1 run in 7 innings for Montgomery in their 3-2 loss in 10 innings. Tyler Goeddel homered. Both Justin O’Conner and Richie Shaffer were 0-4…Alex Colome made a rehab start in game 1 of a double-header for Charlotte, striking out 4 but giving up 2 solo home runs in 3 innings. Willy Adames was 1-7 in the 2 losses. Andrew Velazquez was 1-8 with a double…Casey Gillaspie was 0-4 in Bowling Green’s 5-2 loss and Justin Williams went 1-4 with a double. 2B Riley Unroe hit his first home run of the season.
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20 Comments
On the minor league side of things, Lee has made 5 errors in 7 games played while hitting .154. As much as I like this guy, it's time to move on from this.
was hoping Lee could be a stop gap until robertson is ready....
Any word on Cobb? getting nervous!
Archer had ridiculous movement on his pitches last night. But Cash's dispute of the replay (to me) either indicated a lack of knowledge of the rules (inexperience) or some sort of truce in the bean balling going on (smart). Where is Dave L to add some insight?
Or he was giving Jepsen more time to warm up.
Or he's getting sick of every single replay going against the Rays this year....
Cause I'm out of the country all season and have yet to see any games. I just read the post mortems each day. From afar looks like we are in a division of 5 bonafide .500 teams
So no insight until after Tuesdays game at the earliest
They should wear Devil Rays jerseys for Throwback Thursdays and honor the team's short history instead of constantly trotting out those lame 70s fauxbacks. I don't care how bad the D-Rays were, the inagural black/purple "froot loop" uniforms and the pre-2007 greens were both awesome designs. It won't happen because Stu and the guys are way too obsessed with their "brand" and that God awful sunburst, but the early days of this franchise shouldn't be totally ignored just because the team lost a lot.
Also, Cork, I think this is the 14th time you've brought up the bit about Archer's short rest. I agree with your take completely, but at this point maybe we should continue to keep count and make a drinking game out of it. Take a shot every time Cork brings it up, we'll all be buzzin strong!
Nothing better than Julio Lugo styling the white vest with the green sleeves. Those were sweet, and for those of us around from Day 1 (and before that), it would mean something (which probably means they won't do it, since time began in 2007 or so as far as Sternberg is concerned).
I thought the tweets on Toronto's low attendance this week were pretty funny. I think we have a full on rivalry with the Jays now. The Rays owned them for most of the last decade; Toronto really thought they turned the tide last year and was taken aback by this undermanned Rays team sticking it to them this week. Now they've knocked Longo out with a ridiculous retaliation. Game on you bitter Canucks!
ditto on all counts
The beam on Longoria was a pathetic move done out of frustration of knowing they were going to lose the series at that point. With the Toronto series coming to the Trop in a week, also dumb on their part. Get ready to get beamed Bautista!
It was Geltz who hit Donaldson to load them up for Bautista. Cash mentioned in post game that Beckham's shot gave them a lead which they thought could allow them to avoid using some of their regular bullpen guys (like Jepsen), though it didn't work out that way. Jepsen was great. Very nice pickup.
All I can do is shake my head when I hear about short rest... why don't you give it a long rest.
So the first time Archer throws a stinker wherein his line is worse than the short rest game we should be sure to note that he pitched better on short rest to start the year.
I agree with Steve let's make it a drinking game, because it's obviously going to continue to be hammered home every 5 days.
As I said before, maybe the O's were just the better team that day or maybe Archer was just hyped up about starting on opening day. Archer had EXACTLY what he would have had in terms of pitches thrown in that last 2 weeks, it was just distributed differently. Obviously his arm is fine. If he'd blown it out on opening day, Cork might have a case.
Gelz hasn't been quite the same since he was used as a starter. Maybe too long of a rest? Hehe.
Cork, the short rest obsession has gotten pathetic. Though I don't want him to, Archer WILL have worse starts on normal rest than his opening day start. It's going to happen, but you won't obsess about it happening because he was on normal rest. And it's not even like the opening day start was bad. It just wasn't unsustainably incredible like his next two starts. It's almost like you think he'll have the best season in the history of baseball if he stays on normal rest all year. Weird.
You wrote more words in this comment than I did on the short rest. It would seem that you guys are far more obsessed with my observation than I am with the short rest.
Really? I went ahead and did some copy/pasting to help jog your memory on how many times you've mentioned Archer pitching opening day on short rest...
From this article... "Weird. It’s almost like you shouldn’t throw your young ace on short rest early in the season when one game doesn’t mean more than the next."
From another article.. "It’s almost as if Archer pitches better on normal rest. Weird."
From yet another article... "Was it because he had to alter his normal routine? We’ll never know."
Then there is this entire article on the subject... http://www.raysindex.com/2015/04/chris-archer-had-to-change-his-routine-in-order-to-start-on-opening-day.html
And this from yet another article... "But this means he will make his Opening Day start on 3 days rest. Still seems odd."
And this article titled "Joe Girardi nails it on why shuffling starting pitchers just for opening day is a terrible idea"... http://www.raysindex.com/2015/03/joe-girardi-yankees-rays-opening-day-starter.html
And this article with "Rays make weird move" in the title... http://www.raysindex.com/2015/03/rays-opening-day-starter-rotation-chris-archer.html
And then the article that started it all where you predicted Odorizzi would start on opening day because altering Archer's schedule would be a bad idea... http://www.raysindex.com/2015/03/alex-cobb-rays-opening-day-starter.html
So that's 4 pre-start articles, 1 pre-start comment, and 3 post start comments on the subject. But my little paragraph was more words and you're just making an observation.
You do realize those were written 2-3 weeks ago, right? Now, 2-3 weeks LATER, I wrote a few words with thousands of words written on other subjects in between. Hardly "obsession." But whatever you feel, that's cool. SMH.
It's not like you wrote something 3 weeks ago then made another comment 3 weeks later. You know what you're doing. You got mostly disagreement from your readers before the start, and your comments after his last two starts are very similar and transparent...
After start 3... "Weird. It’s almost like you shouldn’t throw your young ace on short rest early in the season when one game doesn’t mean more than the next."
After start 2... "It’s almost as if Archer pitches better on normal rest. Weird."
Weird. It's almost as if you should just write an article called "See Guys? I Was Right and You Were Wrong. Nani Nani Boo Boo."