How Tampa Bay Rays managed to make such quick work of the Yankees

For the second consecutive season, the New York Yankees’ campaign has ended with a dispiriting loss in the American League Division Series.

It’s a result that will bring joy to a high percentage of baseball fans who consider the Bronx Bombers' status as one of, if not the most hated team in the majors.

It’s also not immensely surprising considering New York came up against a Tampa Bay Rays squad that were an AL-best 98-64 and had the luxury of avoiding the wild-card round.

At the same time, it’s worth asking how Tampa made such quick work of a New York club that had the AL’s best run differential during the regular season (plus-138) and the kind of intimidating rotation that can often carry the mail in a short series.

The absence of Aaron Judge played a role, but it was far from the whole reason Tampa Bay is four wins away from a World Series berth.

Winning the contact battle

The Toronto Blue Jays’ offensive ineptitude in 2026 didn’t help contact hitting’s brand, but there is something to be said for putting the ball in play. During the regular season, the Rays managed an MLB-low 18.8 per cent strikeout rate, and their ability to put the bat on the ball showed up in this series — particularly in Game 2, when the Yankees committed four errors, which led to two unearned runs and shortened ace Cam Schlittler’s outing. New York’s defence was below average this season in outs above average (minus-5), and continually putting pressure on it proved beneficial for the Rays. 

Not only did the Rays avoid Ks against a Yankees staff that ranked seventh in the majors in K/9 during the season (9.05) and struck out 19 Boston Red Sox hitters during a wild-card series sweep, but they also racked up the whiffs against New York’s hitters. The Yankees’ power-oriented offence wasn’t designed to avoid strikeouts, and it showed in this series.

The result was that Tampa Bay struck out just 18 times in three games and New York’s hitters went down on strikes 31 times. The Yankees could’ve won this series while striking out more than the Rays, but surviving a K rate over 30 per cent was going to be extremely difficult for New York unless its lineup’s balls in play were consistently clearing the wall. Tampa Bay’s exploitation of both the Yankees’ subpar defence and the holes in its hitters’ swings helped deliver a comfortable series win.

Getting the most from right-handed lefty-killers

Although New York’s offensive identity in recent seasons has been built around the right-handed power of Judge, the Yankees brought a lineup that skewed extremely left-handed into this series. In two of the three games, George Lombard Jr. was the only right-handed hitter who started for New York, and 78 of the team’s 99 plate appearances came from the left side.

All those left-handed trips to the plate resulted in a putrid .111/.179/.236 line. That’s not because the Rays countered with a parade of dominant southpaws. The team’s most prominent left-handed pitcher in the series, Ian Seymour, ran reverse platoon splits this season. Instead, Tampa Bay got a great deal of value from right-handers with a penchant for setting down lefties.

The most prominent example is Drew Rasmussen, who held lefties to .252 wOBA, the seventh-lowest mark among qualified pitchers during the regular season. Game 3 starter Nick Martinez ranked 19th on that list. Closer and finisher of all three games, Bryan Baker, ranked 14th among relievers. While matchup lefties such as Cam Boozer are valuable against the Yankees, right-handers such as Rasmussen, Martinez and Baker are arguably even better because they usually don’t cause opponents to pinch-hit or alter their lefty-heavy lineups significantly; they present matchups that seem palatable from a platoon standpoint but usually work out for the Rays. Those three all feature devastating changeups that work down and away from lefty hitters, and the Yankees had no answer for that pitch in this series.

Getting star performances from star players

Yes, this is a cliché, but it’s a cliché for a reason. Even in a short series where small-sample-size weirdness often rules the day and any player could become a team’s best player, it’s often the biggest talents who deliver at the highest level. Because the Rays are a small-market, low-payroll team, they aren’t always thought of as a group powered by stars, but they were in this series.

Tampa’s hitters overall combined for an unimpressive .205/.255/.344 slash line, but the two players with OPS numbers over .800 — outside of Ryan Vilade, who hit a home run in just two at-bats — were Jonathan Aranda and Junior Caminero, the duo that’s driven the team's offence over the past two seasons. Since the beginning of 2025, that pair has combined for 134 wRC+ while hitting 123 home runs — 35 per cent of the Rays’ total. They are precisely who Tampa Bay needed to come through in this ALDS, and they did just that.

On the pitching side, the Rays got an eight-inning scoreless gem from Rasmussen, who is coming off a 5.0 fWAR season where he pitched 172 innings of 2.67 ERA ball. Durability issues have prevented the right-hander from attaining the ace status his per-inning production warrants, but since 2019 he’s posted an ERA between 2.62 and 2.84 every year. His 2.76 mark over the last six seasons ranks third among the 133 pitchers who’ve tossed at least 500 innings since 2021, behind only Shohei Ohtani and Chris Sale. Rasmussen is exactly the type of pitcher who can steal Game 1 of a playoff series, and he proved it in his second career post-season start. 

Beyond Rasmussen, Tampa’s standout pitcher was Baker, who saved each game with a scoreless final inning. Baker hasn’t delivered star-level production year in and year out, but his 41 saves were tied for the MLB lead this season, and his ERA of 1.44 was second among qualified relievers (1.44). Only Louis Varland was better (1.27). Baker’s remarkable season raised expectations for the playoffs, and he delivered. Not every high-profile Ray had an outstanding ALDS (Yandy Diaz was fairly anonymous, for instance), but generally the team’s best players were game changers.