Things finally sorted out in the 3-way NL wild card tiebreak as Indianapolis lost both its tiebreaker games leaving Arizona and Pittsburgh to play the NL Wild Card Game.
No idea why the Yankees and Detroit never made up their game and whether it would have affected home field for the AL Wild Card Game if New York lost but I'm just going to ride with it.
Given the Pythagorean record of 91-71 this is probably a weaker Rays team than the one that finished last season as a Wild Card rather than a division winner, but nobody's complaining. Those might be the worst pitching numbers I've put up in this save but of course a lot of it is down to the extremely poor team defense, a familiar refrain. The fact that the staff was 2nd in WAR despite being 10th in ERA speaks loudly to that fact.
Jesus Avalos remains a star, and David Morales remains one of the game's better catchers, but despite putting up very good offensive team numbers, there were a number of bats that underachieved this year. Ezequiel Avalos dropped off from 287/347/524 with 30 HR and 5.6 WAR to the numbers you see above, Nesty de la Rosa was hurt for about six weeks and didn't quite deliver when he was healthy, and Sung-min Yang didn't really put the "H" into "DH" like he did the year before either. And of course we saw the sharp decline of the one-time top player in baseball Luis Barela in the final year of his contract with us. Fortunately some unexpected sources propped up the offense - Machado took the 2B job and moved Chinchilla to SS when Alex Brown went down and kept it, Kang-cheol Lee kept the defense from being even worse than it was by becoming the full-time 3B, and Brian Whittaker was very productive, especially in the month when J.Avalos was sidelined.
The bullpen was great, led by Berumen's season for the ages (any WAR season above 2.5 for a reliever is phenomenal) and Rose would have had an ERA closer to 3 than 4 had he not suffered a .326 BABIP behind him. The playoff rotation is a jumble beyond Rose and Villarreal with Mastropietro and the rookie Whitaker my leading candidates right now as I don't trust Lopez, Witten or Johnson.
Not the world's greatest farm system by far, but there are some guys who could help next year. Whitaker of course will be pitching for us in the playoffs but Mayes is a legit 3B prospect who could push Lee next year and Dominguez is probably MLB-ready for CF which could move Jesus Avalos to a corner where he'd be a better defender. Samuels is an interesting 2-way guy but his future probably lies in the field as he's a potential 80 contact/70 power guy but is still 2-3 years away.