NO MIRACLES IN BASEBALL? THE RAYS ARE 20-4 AND EYEING A NEW STADIUM

Rules changes could have buried a franchise built on data and algorithms, but the Rays are making history — and building momentum toward a $1.2 billion ballpark that would save the sport in Tampa Bay

     The place still resembles an empty soup can with the lid shut, a house of baseball kitsch, the Leaning Tower Of Piecemeal. Tropicana Field opened in 1990 with a slanted roof to reduce cooling costs, which connects to all things budgetary regarding the Tampa Bay Rays. Antithetical to the beauty of Dodger Stadium, pomp of Yankee Stadium and throwback charm of Fenway Park and Wrigley Field, it remains a brutalist eyesore, seemingly unfit to host an ongoing sports fairy tale.

     But here they are again, those darling Rays, rattling conventional wisdom in an otherwise sleepy downtown St. Petersburg. This time, they’ve authored the third-best start in the sport’s modern era with the usual limitations — the 28th-ranked payroll among 30 teams; a sparsely attended ballpark better suited to boat shows and rodeos — in a season when the front office’s traditional data-crunching and brainpower were supposed to be snuffed out. If one team stood to be harmed by Major League Baseball’s new, streamlined rules changes, the innovative Rays were front and center. Didn’t they invent the defensive shifts now banned? Didn’t they benefit from marathon games without a pitch clock?

     Well, the average time of game is down 31 minutes. Infielders are planting their spikes on the dirt. The sport is sleeker, faster, less about algorithms and Ivy Leaguers and more about instincts and fun and scoring runs.

     And the Rays are 20-4.

     When they finally lost, they forgot what it felt like. “It was a little weird,” manager Kevin Cash said Tuesday night. “Walking in there (the clubhouse) with no music or anything, but I’m guessing they’ll get the music back on soon.”

     This is a miracle in more ways than one. The prolific start is luring a few more bodies to the soup can — and just might save baseball on Florida’s west coast, where we can report legitimate progress on a new $1.2 billion stadium in a proposed entertainment district by The Trop. It wasn’t long ago when the Rays considered a bizarre split alliance with Montreal, if not a move to Canada altogether. Now they are the polar opposites of the Oakland A’s, who seek a move to Las Vegas after owner John Fisher practiced consumer fraud and tanked seasons in a godforsaken Coliseum. Give props to Rays owner Stuart Sternberg. He could have quit on his fan base, too, and sought a complete reset elsewhere after years of civic quarreling. Instead, the Rays have made the most of what they have and might enjoy a long future by the Gulf of Mexico.

     They also happened to win their first 14 games at home, where Dusty Baker absorbed the Rays mystique Monday and might be wondering if his Houston Astros will become the 23rd straight team since 2000 not to repeat as World Series champions. No one hits more home runs than the Rays, with 48 before May. No one has an OPS within 100 points. No one pitches and flashes leather better. Like the rest of us, Baker isn’t impressed by The Trop, saying, “It’s hard to see.” But the Rays have turned their dimly lit pit into a remarkable home advantage. Starting 14-0 was a modern-era MLB record, and to underscore how wonderfully preposterous it was, they were seven wins from the all-time mark set by the 1880 Chicago White Stockings, who became the Cubs. I worked 17 years in that city. I had no idea the Cubs were the White Sox before the White Sox, but the Rays have informed me.

     I know, the season is young, as the ball scribes like to say. But this story won’t get old.

     “The history of it is not lost on us, we can say that,” second baseman Brandon Lowe said. “We understand what’s happening. We’re not putting on added pressure or anything. We’re not staring at our schedule, staring at our record right now. We’re just a bunch of guys in our locker room going out and playing the game we love and letting things take care of itself.”

     “You look on the scoreboard, it seems like there’s a new record broke every day,” said rookie pitcher Taj Bradley, who has won his first three career starts with high-velocity stuff. “It means a lot. So, it’s like, what’s tomorrow?”

     What’s next could be another run at an American League pennant, if not the ultimate championship. Pandemic amnesia makes us fuzzy about 2020, but the Rays might have won the World Series if Cash didn’t pull starter Blake Snell when the Dodgers couldn’t touch him. Tampa Bay’s cultural formula has worked for much too long — better scouting and player development, an emphasis on athleticism and fundamentals, a knack for identifying and maxing out veterans, with no need or financial wherewithal for lavish free-agent spending — to dismiss the current rage as a fluke. Oh, they’ll come down to earth at some point, though they aren’t likely to crash as they did last season, when they hit .231 in September, forgot how to hit for power and scored one run in a wild-card series loss to Cleveland. They do happen to be in the AL East, domain of the Yankees and Blue Jays, and their schedule has been soft. But they homered in each of their first 22 games. Their run differential is plus-88.

     They don’t lose games. An opponent has to beat them. The other night, their best and most marketable player, shortstop Wander Franco, showed why he was showered with a rare $182-million contract when he caught a foul ball with his bare hand after overrunning the play. “I couldn’t believe it until I caught it,” Franco, all of 22, said through an interpreter.

     You won’t believe the Rays until you see them. In the offseason, while the Mets and Padres were pushing payrolls to insane heights and the Yankees were rewarding Aaron Judge, baseball operations boss Eric Neander signed only two players: handing $40 million to pitcher Zach Elfin for three years and landing Rule 5 reliever Kevin Kelly for cash. Some of the names we happened to know — Kevin Kiermaier, Corey Kluber, Ji Man Choi, Mike Zunino — are long gone, victims of the way Neander does business. He might be Tampa Bay’s latest front-office whiz to leave for a major-market team, following Andrew Friedman (Dodgers) and Chaim Bloom (Red Sox). But why leave? He’s the one showing the big boys how a team can win with limited resources. The Rays are oblivious to a Mets payroll that could push $500 million with taxes, with owner Steve Cohen giving 11 of his players contracts higher than that of Elfin, the highest-paid Ray. There is considerable pressure to win at Citi Field. There is none at The Trop.

     “We’re doing something that is pretty meaningful and impactful,” Cash said. “Pretty exciting, something that hasn’t been done in quite some time. We should be proud of that. The good thing about this club is, they win, they enjoy it, and they’re ready the next day. They hold themselves to a high standard.”

     “Truthfully, I don’t think we’ve talked about it. We’re just here to play our brand of baseball. ... We just have fun with each other, and go out there and have a blast,” said pitching ace Shane McClanahan, he of the 4-0 record and 1.86 ERA. “It’s fun to be in this clubhouse regardless of the streak, to be honest with you. ... Part of what we do is: No matter what, we have the same mentality out there.”

     We can dream of a postseason when the Rays — payroll: $73.1 million — blitz through the jungle of baseball’s behemoths. We can dream of a quirky home advantage leading them past the Blue Jays, Yankees in October and the Mets in November.

     Except, it might not be a dream.

###

     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.