A pathetic end to a pathetic series performance...
One of these teams won 101 games during the regular season and other won 89, and by watching this World Series you'd certainly have thought it was Cincinnati with the 101 if you didn't know better. The Rays were deserted by their bullpen and their bats in these 5 games, rendering their excellent starting pitching (outside of Bradley) largely moot. Today was more of the same as once again they got a first-inning run off Max Fried and once again they got absolutely zero thereafter. And this time I don't think anyone had the Reds getting 3 runs on 6 hits in the first inning off
Shane McClanahan on their bingo card. To his credit Mac shut down Cincinnati after that but the bats had no answer and then the failpen failed again, giving up 3 more runs to put the game out of reach. So again a dominant regular season fails to yield a championship and the Rays are now 0-3 all-time in the World Series, having won a grand total of 4 games across those three appearances. And it's going to be extremely difficult to get back to this stage next year as the likes of McClanahan,
Adley Rutschman, and
Jeffrey Springs are all free agents - this was the all-in year and they came up short.