9=8x3=27!

Let's wind up the baseball season. Come on now, let's put some real thought into it. We're professional journalists, with a world of baseball resources at our fingertips, we can get some really unheralded story out there that offers a unique perspective. I mean, day after day we hear the same old stories, and that's fine, but this once, with the entirity of the baseball season now in the rear view mirror, let's dig deeper and find something really profound, original. Just this once, let's not take the easy way out and beat something even further into the ground than the mineshaft that it has become.

Sigh.

In a season of feel-good stories, no team shined brighter than the Rays

...alternatively.

NEW YORK - The baseball Story of the Year? The worst-to-first Rays, of course.

you were a fool to even ask, morons.

The team that never before exceeded 70 victories still leads the Red Sox, already has buried the Yankees and is basically guaranteed a playoff spot thanks to its young roster, an almost-as-young baseball front office and a can-do attitude that began in spring training and has carried throughout the long season.

not mentioned; 3.65ERA, tops in the AL, quite literally worst to first, a drop of 1.88.

not mentioned; .715OPSA, third in the AL, a drop this time of one hundred and eleven points. To put it another way, last year, every hitter facing Tampa was Derek Lee, this year, Mark Teahen.

not mentioned; 1.28WHIP, lowest in the AL, again, worst to first, a drop of three baserunners per game, which is quite amazing when you think about it.

not mentioned; 80 errors, third in the AL behind New York and Boston (didn't expect to see the Yankees there huh!), down by 37 from the previous year

and probably like a billion more advanced metrics that I don't quite understand or know where to find. In fact, not a single number, even runs scored or allowed appears in this paragraph. Wake up sleepyhead! The Rays have always had a young team, Joe Maddon and his "can-do attitude" (215-256 record with this team, an average record of 74-88, but don't let that stand in your way Jon) have been there for the last three years. Basically, Heyman is suggesting that the Rays just fucking decided to win this year and so they have. Ugh.

"It's crazy,'' Rays owner Stu Sternberg, a New York investment banker, agreed on Sunday at Yankee Stadium, where a sellout crowd came to say good-bye to a storied place and team, both on the way out, and generally ignored the story of the year.

and we come to the third point of this holy trinity of, apparently, inexplicable winning, the "almost-as-young" front office. Which is fucking stunned at the success. Never planned on it, shocked as anyone. Basically throwing it's hands up and going "fuck me...never thought we would actually win games!" Maybe Stu is like a male, less hot Rachel Phelps and assumed he could get some kind of buy-out or something. Yes, the Rays fans were wise to hitch their wagon to his star.

Rays players quietly went about their business so as not to anger or disturb their rich fourth-place sad-sack hosts while Rays' team hierarchy beamed in the hot rays.

I've discovered the secret behind journalism - use as many emotive adverbs/adjectives as humanly possible, forget about anything approaching analysis. Here is the same sentence with the emotive bullshit highlighted.

Rays players quietly went about their business so as not to anger or disturb their rich fourth-place sad-sack hosts while Rays' team hierarchy beamed in the hot rays.

Also, Jon, that "hot Rays" thing. Genius dude.

Sternberg, a native of Canarsie in Brooklyn, who grew up a fan of the Amazin' Mets and is old enough (barely, he's 49) to recall the Impossible Dream Red Sox of 1967, was looking for the one descriptive word to characterize his Rays. "If you can think of an adjective, let me know,'' he said.

finally, a job Jon Heyman is eminantly qualified for - finding adjectives, no issue with that at all.

Sternberg suggested the Improbable Rays. But that doesn't quite do it, not for me anyway. They are at least as impossible as the '67 Red Sox,no?

anyone else think people are going a bit overboard with the whole "no one saw the Rays coming!" angle?

In 2006, ESPN ranked them 22nd in the Majors despite coming into the season with the second worst record in baseball.

Yahoo Answers has a post from seven months ago asking who would be the surprise team in 2008, the answer was Tampa Bay.

The time? 2/4/2008. The place? The official website of Major League Baseball.

"Time to settle some scores? The rest of the AL East is concerned. In fact, Toronto general manager J.P. Ricciardi has frankly branded the Rays a team "no one will want to face."

...it could be graduation time for the guys who've endured growing pains together for years -- Carl Crawford, B.J. Upton, Jonny Gomes and, health willing, Rocco Baldelli. Ricciardi hits the nail. No team will eagerly enter a Tampa Bay series, knowing it is certain of seeing at least part of the top of the Rays' rotation, Scott Kazmir, James Shields or Matt Garza.

To tie it all together, Tampa Bay has brought in its own bullpen therapist (see: 2007 Reds). While trailing the Majors with 28 saves last season, the Rays lost 42 games in which they held a lead -- not too firmly, evidently. Enter Troy Percival, of whose 324 career saves 316 came in the presence of manager Joe Maddon, while he was an Angels coach."

Look, I know that the Rays were a surprise, but it simply isn't true that people weren't picking them this year, in fact, people had picked them as a sleeper for several years, eventually they had to deliver.

Manager Joe Maddon on Sunday agreed at least that the emergence was "a little bit of a surprise.'' But Maddon is the one who instilled a feeling of belief in the spring when he told the team "9 equals 8,'' a motto that became the clubhouse catchphrase. The saying suggests not only nine players working together for nine innings but also a team aiming for nine more wins via each of three categories: pitching, defense and hitting. For those scoring at home, that's 27 more wins, which is thought in most parts to be an impossibility.

wow, that's so retarded not even I know where to start.

The players seemed to catch on a few months into the season. Clubhouse leader Cliff Floyd said they "got that swagger'' in June and are now happily taking an "arrogant'' or even "cocky'' attitude into games for the first time in their mostly sorry history.

they actually started "pitching" better which "led" to them "winning" more "games".

Floyd said, "Everbody's stoked that 'postseason' is in our vocabulary".

hard on for quotation marks.

2. Cubs. The rise of the star-crossed franchise in the 100th anniversary of their last title will add intrigue to the postseason. Perhaps Carlos Zambrano's no-hitter was a sign of the magic to come. Rays-Cubs World Series, anyone.

yeah that's it. The no-hitter. What about the eighty-seven other wins Jon?

3. Cliff Lee, Indians pitcher. He's 22-2 for a losing team, not all that far off the unbelievable achievement of Steve Carlton, who won 27 games for the 59-win 1972 Phillies, as Mike Lupica pointed out in Sunday's New York Daily News. With the Giants' Tim Lincecum, we should probably have two Cy Young winners on losing teams. (Even if Brandon Webb should win in the NL, well, the Diamondbacks may have a losing record, too).

say what you will about wins in pitching, and I get it, really, but if you didn't go "holy shit Cliff Lee is 22-2" right there, I dunno what to tell you, this is pretty fucking amazing IMO.

5. Josh Hamilton, Rangers slugger. Recovering drug addict finally showed the world his talent, including on the big stage of the All-Star Game at Yankee Stadium, where he put on the greatest Home Run Derby display ever.

look, I mean this in the very best possible taste, but Josh Hamilton is to baseball what Ellen is to comedy. If he wasn't a recovering drug addict and she wasn't a lesbian, no one would give a shit. I'm not comparing the two on their own merits, I'm just saying that both careers are pretty "gimmicky". I'm impressed with Hamilton's season too, but I wanna see if this is a season and a half fluke or what. Juan Gonzalez etc.

6. K-Rod, Angels closer. Broke Bobby Thigpen's save record en route to free-agent riches.

quite literally a record that would not exist if his offense was better.

8. Dustin Pedroia, little Red Sox hitter. White Sox motormouth manager Ozzie Guillen called him a jockey, but as former White Sox minor leaguer Michael Jordan can tell you, height does not a hitter make.

I know readers, we've danced this dance before but still, fucking ridiculous, all of this, vomit inducingly bad.

14. Jamie Moyer, Phillies starter. He turned in a stellar season at age 45 (14-7, 3.68 ERA) and gave hope to all us older guys.

look, I don't wanna hang a guy with literally zero evidence, but we are generally aware now that steroids help more in recouperation than actual strength when it comes to baseball. And thus are generally more of a benifit to pitchers, who do far more damage in far more intense a way, to their bodies, than hitters. I'm saying someone like Moyer, with his stuff, posting an era a full run below that of his last sixty-six starts (hell, .41 below his career average)...let's just see how that plays out before worshipping it as a great "feel-good" story.

There's more, there's always more. We keep shovelling it away, they keep bringing it back in.