The Cinderella season continues as the Rays managed to knock off the defending champs in seven games.
It appeared that the Tampa Bay Rays' Cinderella season was going to fall a game short. Thanks to a bullpen that was suffering through a crisis of confidence with inability to throw strikes with the season on the line.
In the end, manager Joe Maddon looked down to his relief corps and realized that the best arm he had down in the pen was his youngest. Waiting for the ball was a 23-year-old left-hander from Nashville, Ten. with just seven Major League games under his belt named David Price.
So, in came the youngster, just 19 months removed from pitching in the NCAA for Vanderbilt, to pick up the biggest four outs in the history of the franchise. And pick them up Price did, getting three Red Sox to strike out before Jed Lowrie's bad-hop groundball was finally corralled by Akinori Iwamura, triggering a level of bedlam never before seen at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg. (I'm thinking that a lot of folks called in sick or failed to roll out of bed in their trailers up and down Florida's Gulf Coast.)
So now it's off to the World Series for a Tampa Bay team that is a little light on players with experience this deep into October. But does it really matter?
I think not, as they have shown throughout these exciting playoffs.
The Rays, who exorcized the word 'Devil' out of their nickname before this season started, have been a team on a mission, both for respect and success.
The process began following the 2007 season when manager Maddon went to Andrew Friedman, the Rays' Executive Vice President of Baseball Operations, and asked for, check that, demanded changes. Most notably, Maddon needed a couple of bad seeds with me-first attitudes - Delmon Young and Elijah Dukes - removed from his clubhouse. Before the ship could be righted and the course changed towards respectability, all oars needed to be in the water and rowing in the same direction. With that Friedman dealt Young, along with a couple of other spare parts, to the Twins for three players. New everyday shortstop Jason Bartlett and young right-hander Matt Garza, who was named the ALCS MVP arrived in the Young trade. Five days later, Dukes was sent to the Nationals. Finally, Maddon would be able to get the full attention of his evolving clubhouse.
Rarely does a team have a season … make that franchise-changing moment in a spring training game but that was certainly the case for the '08 Rays. The change occurred during a pair of Grapefruit League games, four days apart. In the middle of March, the Rays showed the Yankees and the rest of the baseball world that their days of being a doormat were officially over. The bad blood began when Tampa Bay's Elliott Johnson steamrolled New York catching prospect Francisco Cervelli on a play at the plate, breaking Cervelli's wrist. Yankees manager Joe Girardi complained to anyone who would listen afterwards that plays like that were "unnecessary in a spring training game".
Four days later the two teams met again and were warned during the exchange of line-up cards to stay out of trouble. The warning was in vain as Yankees starter Heath Phillips drilled Rays' Evan Longoria in the mid-section with a fastball and was quickly ejected. An inning later, Yankees outfielder Shelley Duncan slid hard in second base, getting his spikes up on Tampa Bay's Akinori Iwamura. Right-fielder Jonny Gomes came flying in from the outfield to tackle Duncan, leading to a bench-clearing brawl. For the first time in franchise history, every Rays' player showed they had each other's back, something that carried over all the way through the regular season. A season where they brawled again this time with the Red Sox, and on into the playoffs, where they now sit four wins away from, arguably, the most unexpected World Series title in the history of this great game.
I'm not sure anyone, with a straight face, could claim that they saw this coming. The Rays front office had built for this, although to a man they claimed that they thought the team was good enough to be a contender in 2009. Now, they will see if the glass slipper truly fits, beginning on Wednesday night at home against a well-rested, veteran-laden Philadelphia Phillies squad.
