[Art Deco]

So the 2020 season. The TL;DR version is that the Rays went 94-68 and won the AL East, where once again they met up with the Houston Astros and once again were eliminated by them. This year's series was more frustrating as in all 3 games the Rays lost they took a lead of 2 or more runs into the 6th inning or later, only to lose. The only game they won was an epic 2-0 pitcher's duel between Blake Snell and Justin Verlander where Snell twirled a 3-hit shutout and Yandy Diaz supplied the offense with an RBI single and a HR. The bullpen, which had been pretty good all year, came apart in the series. But let's go back to the start.

With Snell starting the year on the DL, I went with Brendan McKay in the rotation along with Glasnow, Morton, Chirinos and Yarbrough. OOTP for some reason wanted to start me with Kevan Smith and Chris Herrmann as catchers, but I went to the more likely combo of Mike Zunino and Michael Perez. Choi, B.Lowe, Adames and Diaz were the mainstays of the infield, and in the OF I started with Renfroe, a Kiermaier/Margot platoon, and Meadows. At DH, I started with a rough platoon of Tsutsugo and Jose Martinez.

Despite the history of the starting rotation, they were a relative disappointment for the year with interestingly the most consistent of the batch being McKay, who ended up winning 15 games with a 3.80 ERA and 200 strikeouts. (It seems like OOTP likes McKay as I've seen him succeed in various sims I've read about already, probably due to his dominating K/BB numbers in AA/AAA last year as opposed to his pedestrian MLB stint). Morton suffered nagging injury after nagging injury and had an ERA a little over 5 (he had a winning record thanks to some fine run support). Glasnow was a rock, leading the AL in strikeouts with 233 although he too had a 4.25 ERA or so. And Snell when he came back was highly inconsistent, having such a bad stretch at midseason that his ERA for awhile was over 6, although he turned it on big-time in the second half culminating in that ALDS shutout mentioned above. Chirinos got hurt and missed a couple of months and Yarbrough was up and down (both in quality of pitching and the St. Pete-Durham shuttle). The staff savior turned out to be Anthony Banda, whom I started off in long relief and then started getting a few starts here and there, and he ended up 10-1 with a 2.09 ERA which included a Maddux thrown against KC (2-hit shutout with under 100 pitches).

Before the trading deadline, San Diego was shopping a healthy for once and very effective (sub-3 ERA with over a K per inning) Garrett Richards (a rental) so I took them up on it and sent A-ball pitchers Brian Shaffer and John Doxaxis to the Padres for him in order to try to get a decent 4th starter for the playoffs since at this point I couldn't count on Morton. Well after a brilliant debut against Detroit, Richards started getting Morton's disease, having to leave more than one start with a nagging injury. (Ironically I turned to Morton in Game 4 of the ALDS with the idea I'd piggyback him with G.Richards, but he pitched great for 6 innings up 5-1 then I let him foolishly start the 7th and things got out of hand after that).

Speaking of the bullpen, I went with the conventional wisdom and made Nick Anderson the closer with Diego Castillo and Jose Alvarado the primary setup men, with Drake and Roe in middle relief. They did quite well during the regular season, with Alvarado having a great comeback season after his lost 2019. Anderson was prone to the occasional blowup which left his ERA a little over 4, but he was good for 38 saves which was second in the AL. One memorable mishap of his was taking over with a 1-run lead at the Trop against the Angels with Trout leading off, and Trout hit the longest HR I'd seen in OOTP to dead center over the old Batter's Eye restaurant, a Pujols vs Lidge-like blast. But of course the pen came up short in the playoffs, a shortcoming I attempted to address in the offseason (more when I get to it). Just before the deadline I picked up veteran lefty Tony Watson from the Giants for another A-ball pitcher to add some depth, his contributions were negligible. Colin Poche also pitched in middle relief, and while he fanned 71 in 51 innings, he allowed 10 HR and a 5+ ERA.

Among the hitters, there was more good than bad. Renfroe was a revelation, ending up with 40 HR and 111 RBI in a full-time role. There was some bad with it (a .248 avg and 184 Ks) but he also played gold-glove defense in right. Meadows regressed a bit from 2019 but still went 26-85-.290 despite missing a couple of weeks with injury. B.Lowe was solid at 19-80-.267 and Choi emerged as a fixture going .292-22-85. The Kiermaier/Margot platoon was quite effective with latter hitting a robust .292 with 15 steals. There was one other exceptional standout which I'll get to in a minute.

The bad on the offense: well let's start with the $7 million man from Japan, Mr. Tsutsugo. Getting regular ABs through late May, he could only muster a .165 average with 2 HR. I finally couldn't take it anymore and sent him to Durham, where he the combination of disappointment and culture shock led him to stink there for quite awhile, before he started hitting AAA pitching at a decent clip. So he got brought back up a couple of times, only to continue to struggle and go back to Durham. Blowing $7M would normally be a disaster for the Rays but to the rescue came Jose Martinez, the man born to DH. Cafecito took the regular job and ran with it (or more accurately, hit with it), ended up the AL batting champ at .332 to go with 19 HR and 88 RBI, and his 4.4 WAR was second only to Choi's 4.6 among hitters.

However, the hitting disappointments came from the left side of the infield. Adames and Diaz had miserable first halves, with OOTP apparently skeptical of Yandy's 2019 power surge leading him to not hit his first 2020 HR until the July 4 weekend. He ended up with 6 although at least it was with a .288 average. With no real alternatives at 3B (Wendle?) the job was his to keep. Adames only managed a 12-74-.260 line and that was *after* he had a scorching August and September. I was thisclose to promoting Wander Franco and benching Willy in early August when Adames suddenly got hot and Franco tweaked something at Durham, causing him to miss a couple of weeks.

Speaking of Franco, the wunderkind, I started him out at AA Montgomery where he was OK but was only hitting .267-8-67 through July. I figured he was bored at AA so I moved him up to Durham, and he caught fire, hitting .400-3-15 in 20 games before the aforementioned injury. After Durham finished its playoffs (they lost 3-1 in the AAA championship round), I brought him up and played him at SS/DH for the final week where he went .429 with 2 HR and 3 SB in 21 AB, including a shot at Yankee Stadium. I added him to the playoff roster, although he rode the pine while Willy played SS (and DH was taken with Martinez). To shake things up in Game 4 he got the start and went 1 for 4 without incident.

The netural among hitters were the catchers. Zunino bounced back somewhat from his awful 2019 hitting .211-11-35, but broke his hand in early September, ending his season. Mikey Perez did a pretty decent job in his stead, and ended up .255-6-30, so the C position wasn't the black hole it was in 2019.

I'm not going to get into how the prospects did (I did have Joe Ryan and Riley O'Brien up briefly with mixed results and Randy Arozarena was terrible early when filling in during brief injury stints for Renfroe and Meadows but fared better in September when he was a roster expansion callup). Nate Lowe was up for a while and hit a couple of HRs but with Choi & Martinez having great years there were no regular ABs to give him.

So that's a wrap on 2020 and now it's on to the 2020-21 offseason.