Well This Was Certainly Predictable

Let's get straight to it.

Rays play small ball to even Series

It was fun while it lasted for the Rays, all those home runs...

180 of them. Tied for fourth in the American League. It's adorable! Look honey, they think they're a major league team!

No, the real Rays are more like the team we saw in Game 2 of the World Series, a team that scrapes together runs however it can, pulls a surprise or two along the way, holds its opponents down with good pitching and decent defense and, in the end, usually wins.

Tampa Bay fiscal conservatives.

The Rays held off the Phillies in Game 2 of the Series on Thursday night, 4-2, evening the best-of-seven series at a game apiece in a small-ball lover's dream. Tampa Bay scored its first two runs in the first inning on groundouts.

if your dream in baseball is to see a groundout resulting in a run, I'd almost be willing to say you don't really like baseball very much. The execution is fine, but can we not get carried away?

And they saved their best for their last run, in the fourth, when manager Joe Maddon instructed his No. 9 hitter, shortstop Jason Bartlett, to lay down a safety squeeze with leaden-legged Cliff Floyd on third base. That might have been a surprising call to a lot of people. It certainly got the attention of some Rays in the dugout. "When I saw the sign," first baseman Carlos Pena recalled with a laugh, "I said, 'Please, Cliff, do this right.'"

But, in a lot of ways, it was typical Tampa Bay baseball, bold and unconventional, a kind of go-for-broke madness based in solid fundamentals.

solid fundamentals. Squeeze play with 35 year old Cliff Floyd. 1 SB in the past 188 games Cliff Floyd. Yes John, "some people" "might" have been suprised. This is a horrible decision, I don't care what happens, it's a terrible decision. Call me a dogmatic, stuck in the mud, big baseball loving, steroid taking, Barry Bonds adoring fascist, but I believe this is a horrible decision that goes against every fibre of logic in my body.

"It kind of gives us some momentum right there," Bartlett said. "The way Joe teaches it, anybody on third can score, if it's done correctly."

does Joe have a magic wand that can mak Cliff Floyd 30% faster? If not, he can't teach shit. My God Jason, that 9=8 shit has fucked you up completely hasn't it? You're mad as a hatter my boy!

Even Floyd, though, a 230-pound 35-year-old with a history of leg problems? A guy who admits it takes a while to get those old bones started, a guy who Bartlett swears he can hear coming down the line?

"Well, you know, he's not the fastest guy in the world," Thursday's starter, James Shields, said. "But when he needs to run, he can run."

yes, he can run, no one takes that away from him, but James, you are misconstruing my argument. Creating a kind of straw man, if you will. I don't insist that Cliff Floyd be, as you put it, the "fastest guy in the world", just fast, maybe in the top 10% of human beings, not a lot to ask of a professional athlete. I think I'm being far more reasonable than you are giving me credit for.

And on it goes until this whopper of a closing line...

"Big things happen," Pena said afterward, "when you focus on the smallest of things."

Pena immediately followed with "life is like a box of chocolates..."

Meanwhile, at the 'PN

Rays defy baseball logic with Game 2 win

Someday, many decades from now, historians will look back on the first World Series victory in Tampa Bay Rays history.

what did I say about not getting carried away?

...the Rays also could score runs the way they scored them Thursday, in the 4-2 win over the Phillies that evened the 2008 World Series at a win apiece:

By making outs.

Really.

You know, it's a funny thing. We'd be willing to bet that, before Thursday, we lived in a land of 300 million Americans who all believed, as one unified nation, that making outs was the one thing in baseball you would most want to avoid -- with the possible exception of learning that

Scott Boras had signed on to represent your cleanup hitter.
But then, along came this historic baseball event to teach us that we've had it all wrong -- that we've had it all wrong since birth, in fact.

Outs are good.

what about the walk? Or the infield single? Or the blooper? Not an out amongst them. If outs were good, perfect games would be a model of offensive genius. Why do writers feel forced to make ridiculous arguments, or characterisations of the situation? Just say the Rays were clever, creative, took risks down 0-1 at home, pitched extremely well, a point basically ignored in both articles, and got away with one. It shapes up to be a tight, tense series, with many exciting moments, great - this is not the plan of the Rays, the plan is to get hits, not to make outs, and you know this, so just say so.

"That's the cool thing about us," said Rays first baseman Carlos Pena, the resident voice of reason in this group. "We're multidimensional. Even when we're hitting the long ball, we're still thinking small...

this Pena quote is better, so far, so good...

We're mature enough to understand that big things happen when you focus on the smallest of things."

not true! Jut not true! You focus on hitting a bunt, or to the right side of the infield, or whatever, home runs don't just materialise! They don't! If that was the case, Bartlett's bunt would be in the thirty fifth row, but it didn't. When you focus on bunting, or getting the ball on the ground, you don't get extra base hits, no matter what kind of zen spin you want to put on it.

Home runs good.

Outs bad.

Are we clear?

And friends, things don't get much smaller in baseball than outs. So let's review how the Rays scored the four runs in Game 2 that changed this World Series:

• Ground ball to the shortstop.
• Another ground ball to the shortstop.
• A safety squeeze bunt built around a man who might have a tough time outrunning John Daly.
• And a hit that scored one run but got a second runner thrown out at the plate.
That, ladies and gentlemen, was the winning team's entire attack in a World Series game -- one it actually won.

It was all so thrilling, so electrifying, so downright inspirational

bold, conventional, go-for-broke, electrifying, thrilling, fucking inspirational. Go home Ryan Howard! You and your "being good at baseball" buddies have no place here. We have the tear jerking outmakers here and you're just ruining it. My God, these brave men, making outs, they're the heroes, our country thanks them.

"We have to play small ball," said the Game 2 winning pitcher, James Shields. "It's the World Series. That's the way you play the game. That's the way you win championships."

To be honest, other ways exist...

not in my America they don't!

And if the ultimate definition of "whatever it takes" consists of "flashing the squeeze sign twice, even with Cliff Floyd on third base," it's official: The Rays clearly will do anything to score a run.

except getting an extra base hit. What a mood killer that would be huh? Talk about violating team trust.

"To be honest," Pena said, "when I saw that sign, I said, 'Oh, Lord.'"

Why would he have felt a need to speak to powers higher than even Joe Maddon about a move like this? Well, for one thing, this team didn't execute a single successful squeeze bunt all season.

are you kidding me? Has this all been a lie? Is this some kind of joke to you Stark? I believed in these guys and their radical new method of making outs to win baseball games. It would revolutionise the game! And now you spring this on me, that they have been lying to us (effectively!) this whole time?

For another thing, Floyd was the runner on third base. And let's just say that nobody has mistaken him lately for Asafa Powell.

"Hey, I'm slow," Floyd said, at his earnest best. "Let's get that straight."

Said Shields: "I don't want to say he's as slow as a turtle because he did steal a bag this year. It'll probably be the last stolen base of his career, but he did steal one."

So any manager who was willing to give Cliff Floyd the green light to steal a base obviously would be a manager with no fear of giving Jason Bartlett the squeeze sign with Floyd at third base.

I stand by my "fucking idiot" theory.

"That's Joe," Floyd said appreciatively. "He'll do anything to score a run. If I was managing a team, I'd want to manage just like him."

he's 252-286 all-time Cliff.

One more, Danny Knobler (ha!).

After ALCS power surge, Rays return to their quirky, small-ball ways

I'd love to hear the argument that the "ways" they got to this position, AL Champs, was through grounders to second basemen.

The Rays were back to being the Rays. Just as in the ALCS against the Red Sox, they lost a so-so series opener, then bounced back to win the next night by looking much more like themselves.

they hit three home runs in that game, which is it? You can't have it all was. "Rays being the Rays", are we gonna do this for everything now? St.Louis beating Dallas by 20 last week, "well, that's just the Rams being the Rams". This isn't analysis!

Ugh, in the words of the immortal Murtaugh - I'm getting too old for this.