It’s a weird, almost unfathomable, twist to this postseason: The Red Sox are being portrayed as the good guys, which leaves the Tampa Bay Rays as the bad guys.
This will come as sobering news to folks from New England, but many fans in the rest of Baseball America don’t much like their team. The Sox are looked upon as big-market, big-budget and possessed of big mouths, so much so that some baseball people — notably, Baltimore Orioles manager Buck Showalter — seem to take greater pleasure in beating them.
The Rays? With apologies to Red Sox president Larry Lucchino, who promised us in spring training that his team would be a collection of “spunky underdogs,” shouldn’t Tampa Bay be the annual recipient of that honor? The Rays will never be able to match the Sox and New York Yankees in payroll. Tampa Bay plays its home games inside dank, worst-park-in-the-bigs Tropicana Field, and on many nights the joint is half empty.
Yet the Rays made it to the postseason again, and they made it via an impossibly difficult trek that required them to win their regular-season finale against the Blue Jays in Toronto, followed by a play-in game against the Rangers at Texas, followed by the wild card game against the Indians in Cleveland, followed by a trip to Boston for Game 1 of the AL Division Series showdown against the Red Sox.
We should all be embracing the Rays. President Obama should be showing his support by wearing a Tampa Bay lapel pin at his press briefings. Hollywood should be mapping out plans for a movie about the Rays.
But everything is all mixed up. Tampa Bay manager Joe Maddon, a truly charming man, is getting painted as a full-of-himself know-it-all who gets mocked for everything from his infield shifts to his eyeglasses.
Maddon didn’t do himself any favors when, following his team’s 7-4 loss to the Red Sox in Game 2, he said that his boys were “out-Fenwayed.” It was a lame comment in that, just to use one example, there was nothing “Fenway” about those two towering home runs David Ortiz hit off Rays starter David Price.
When your team plays in a dump such as Tropicana Field, where crazy catwalks have the potential to alter the course of games (and have), you forfeit the right to suggest that the other team’s ballpark contributed to your team’s loss.
And what’s up with Price? So Ortiz styles a little after hitting a moonshot off him and after the game he’s whining to the media about it? He calls the writers a bunch of nerds, and then he takes to Twitter and, using that same word, goes after the TBS postgame analysts.
Going all the way back to the days of the old Tampa Bay Devil Rays, there’s always been a lot to like about this franchise. Without anywhere near the resources of other teams, they’ve always tried.
But the message has somehow been garbled. The Rays act like they’re entitled.
