Record: 56-46 (14-10 for the month)
2nd place AL East, 2 behind New York; in 2nd AL Wild Card slot
It was a decent month for the Rays who moved into a playoff spot but fell a little further behind in the division, primarily thanks to dropping 3 of 4 in a series with the Yanks at the Trop. The hitting vastly improved this month but the pitching dropped off, resulting in several high-scoring games. The team defense has remained poor, so a couple of moves were made to improve it. We outlined the Austin Wells for
Mason Auer deal in the previous post and the other big change came on the infield where we moved
Wander Franco off of SS to 2B. Wander had a dreadful -8.3 ZR in 62 games at short but has a positive 0.7 in 12 games at 2B. He swaps places with
Masyn Winn. As the move was made at the break, Winn has now played 13 games at the position with a -0.4 ZR. While not great it's better than Franco's numbers.
The other move was putting
Jack Perkins in the rotation and dropping
Jeffrey Springs, who was terrible in May. Unfortunately Perkins was terrible as well in his first two starts, so the jury's out on that one.
Matt Canterino was called up to replace Zach Eflin in long relief. Here's where things stand around MLB as we head into August:
Outside of Minnesota (and somewhat Houston) nobody is really dominating in MLB right now so that leaves things open for the Rays after their slow start.
As mentioned the offense really picked up in July and we're now first in XBH as we seem to be hitting a ton of doubles. The pitching took a step back but it was mostly the starters as the bullpen has remained very good even with
Pete Fairbanks (who started a rehab assignment as the month ended) out. With the changes we've made I really hope to see those defensive numbers improve a month from now.
What an incredible July for
Christian Bethancourt. I can't believe he wasn't named AL Player of the Month but he's clearly taken the full-time C job and run (or hit) with it. He did win a Player of the Week Award durin the month.
Randy Arozarena looks like he's back, and Josh Lowe had a nice send-off in limited action.
Outside of
Ryan Pepiot it was a very rough month for the starters, but a lot of it had to with >.400 BABIPs. The relievers fared much better as it seemed most games we were down 3-0 or 4-0 early but came back to win a bunch of them thanks the offense and the pen holding the opposition at bay.
The updated prospect list after the trades and the draft although BNN was pretty unimpressed with our draft haul, only ranking Caminiti among the top 500. The last guy on the list above had quite the July:
