Time for a trade:
Givens is someone I've had my eye on for a while now, at the moment he has 60 stuff and 60 movement with the potential for 70/65. Control at 45 is an issue but he's more of a power lefty than Saldana as you can see from their numbers above. Also Saldana being out of options kind of held me hostage to keeping him on the roster, while Givens has options so I have more flexibility. Villareal, acquired in the Bobby Witt Jr deal a couple of years ago, was expendable as he's not developed as I'd hoped so far and my scouting reports now talk about "a bench role".
May 24: Sent 1B Joe Barker on a rehab assignment to AAA Durham.
I get to kick the can of the Barker situation down the road a few days at least. Rivas is 3rd in AL in OPS so it would be kind of absurd to send him down. Therefore it'll probably be Hodges who goes to Durham.
Game 1: I've had the Rays hit 7 HR in a game in this save, but I'm not sure I've ever had 7
different players hit HR in a game but that's what happened today in a 12-3 rout of the Red Sox. Bobby Witt Jr and Gabriel Moreno were the only starters who
didn't homer. It was a 1-1 game in the 4th with Dayle Jenkins hitting #5 before the Rays broke it open. Rodolfo Rivas (#12) and Jhon Diaz (#4) each hit 2-run homers to make it 5-1 Rays in the bottom of the 4th and the dingers kept coming from there. Nate Clark (#17) in the 5th, Connor Kirkley (#7) with a 2-run shot in the 6th, Ricky Widmar (#7) in the 6th, and Jasson Dominguez (#12) in the 6th all went deep as Publix Park definitely continues to play homer-friendly. On the other side of the ball Rays pitching didn't allow any homers. Jack Leiter won his fourth straight start to go to 5-3 with a 6 7 2 2 1 5 performance which saw those 7 hits come in two bunches that each led to a Boston run, and Mike Mooney went the final 3 innings to get his first save and become the 7th Rays pitcher this year to pick up one. Elsewhere in MLB, St. Louis is now up to 19 straight wins.
May 25: Sent OF Victor de Jesus on a rehab assignment to AAA Durham.
Tried optioning de Jesus to Durham but discovered he's out of options, so he's going to have to make the team once his rehab is up. This is definitely going to create a roster crunch when Barker comes back as well, so I'm exploring the possibility of trading Jhon Diaz. de Jesus is that good, expected by the editor to have an OPS of 1.008 with 40-HR power and 114-walk ability. As good as Diaz is (not counting this season), de Jesus is even better.
Game 2: Walk-off drama at Publix Park as Ricky Widmar's 9th-inning blast (#8) gave the Rays a 6-5 come-from-behind win over the Red Sox, their 18th in their last 20 games. The blow was Widmar's second big hit of the day, as his 5th-inning triple scored two to help the Rays out of a 3-0 hole with Dayle Jenkins singling him home to tie the game. After Jordan Diaz gave up 2 runs in the 7th to put the Rays behind again, another triple figured into the comeback with Nate Clark's 3-bagger in the 8th scoring Jenkins before he came home on Rodolfo Rivas's single to tie the game. Jose Alvarado got the Sox in the 9th and grabbed his 2nd win of the year thanks to Widmar's homer, also lowering his ERA to 0.49 in the process. Blake Money got the start and was his usual mixed bag, going 6 6 3 3 3 6. After Diaz's rough 7th, Steve Givens made his Rays debut and it was the type of outing that led Earl Weaver to call Don Stanhouse "full pack" back in the '70s. Givens loaded the bases with one out on two walks and a hit but then proceeded to strike out the next two batters to get out of it, which took him 33 pitches in all. Gabriel Moreno had a tough game, whiffing all 4 times up, but he wasn't even the biggest breeze-maker as Boston's Ryan Mountcastle struck out all 5 times he was up which the play-by-play commemorated with "BAD DAY!". Also the Cardinals' 19-game winning streak was snapped by the Reds today 4-3.
Game 3: It was HR derby again for the Rays as they belted five more in another 12-3 shellacking of Boston. But it was almost all overshadowed by Christian Little having to leave the game in the 5th inning and rubbing at his elbow. It turns out that it's just a sore elbow and should only sideline him about a week. We'll likely err on the side of caution and IL him. He had started the game by giving up a leadoff homer to Luisangel Acuna, his 13th in 65 innings, but he was in control from there before leaving 4 2/3 innings in, allowing only one more hit, walking none and whiffing 10. Corbin Martin relieved him and picked up win #2, going 2 1/3, allowing 2 runs and striking out 4. Evan Godwin and Jasseel De La Cruz each pitched an inning to finish the game. But the day belonged to Isaac DeLeon, who blasted a pair of homers. The first came in the 1st inning with a man on and broke a 1-1 tie after Bobby Witt Jr's RBI single, and the second (#7) came as part of a 5-run 6th inning that saw the Rays break open a 3-1 game. Dayle Jenkins had the big blow in that 6th, a 3-run HR (#6). D'Andre Hodges (#4) and Carlos Perez (#3) also homered in the 7th as the Rays put up 12 runs & 17 hits with the likes of Nate Clark, Jasson Dominguez, Connor Kirkley and Gabriel Moreno all rested. Also Boston's Ryan Mountcastle continued his lost weekend by striking out in all four plate appearances today, on top of yesterday's five. Going to back to Friday night's game log I see he whiffed his final time up so that now gives him 10 straight PAs with a strikeout. This
might be an MLB record as some poking around Google seems to indicate Mark Reynolds was the most recent to tie the position-player record with 9*. If you count pitchers, Sandy Koufax as a batter struck out 12 straight times.
Team record: 39-12 (including 23-3 at Publix Park). Next up: We head north of the border for 3 games in Toronto.
*Further research shows this would be the MLB record for a position player, here's a blurb from a Baseball-Reference biography of Reynolds circa April 2020 which goes into detail on it:
Of course it's possible a streak of this length or greater has happened sometime else during the 10 1/2 seasons of this save as I only noticed this one because it came in games I was managing the Rays.