BOSTON — The Rays made a move they felt they needed to make Thursday morning, acquiring reliever Bryan Baker from the Orioles to fortify their bullpen.
With the Trade Deadline looming at the end of the month, what else might the next three weeks have in store for Tampa Bay?
“We’re going to exhaust anything that has the chance to help us get better,” president of baseball operations Erik Neander said. “This was probably our most acute need, at least the way that we saw it, and the last few weeks ratcheted up the attention and the pressure that way.”
The Rays’ level of aggressiveness at the Trade Deadline typically rises and falls with their odds of winning the American League East. As a 100-win team in 2021, for example, they made a big move for the present and traded for Nelson Cruz. Unable to break away from the .500 mark last season, they dealt away a handful of key veterans to reshape their roster with the future in mind.
After Baker gave up a two-run lead in the seventh inning of a 4-3 loss to the Red Sox on Thursday night at Fenway Park, the Rays are 50-44. They’ve cooled down after a hot stretch that carried them from late May through most of June, but they are still only 4 1/2 games behind the AL East-leading Blue Jays and currently in position to make the postseason as the second AL Wild Card team.
More importantly, the Rays feel good about the group that they have. And after a mediocre start to the season, they’ve seen the team perform closer to their high expectations. That’s why they felt compelled to give up the 37th overall pick in this year’s MLB Draft for a reliever who they believe will help them over the next three months.
“This is a competitive group, and they have a chance to play postseason baseball and have a chance, if things break your way, to do some damage in the postseason,” Neander said. “You never want to take those opportunities for granted, and we felt like this was an area where we could afford to help this team and felt like there was an opportunity to do it in a way that was aggressively responsible and wanted to pull the trigger.”
That kind of vote of confidence from the Rays officials could also energize a clubhouse that has admitted to feeling some fatigue in the final week before a much-needed All-Star break. That appeared to be the case on Thursday, although they went on to lose for the ninth time in their last 13 games.
“We’ve been really competitive here for the first half, and we’ve put ourselves in a good position. I think we do have a very talented group, right? The fact that they’re looking that far in advance already is great,” starter Drew Rasmussen said. “It’s definitely a confidence-booster that that’s the way the front office is viewing things. And I think as a player, you feel as if you’ve earned their confidence because you’ve played really well here in the first half.”
The Rays expect to be even better moving forward.
They’ve seen some young or inexperienced players come into their own, headlined by All-Stars Jonathan Aranda and Junior Caminero (who hit his 23rd homer off Walker Buehler in the sixth inning) as well as rookies Chandler Simpson (who has a franchise-rookie-record 14-game hitting streak) and Jake Mangum. And 24-year-old starter Taj Bradley finished his first half on a high note, holding the red-hot Red Sox to one run over six innings while striking out five.
They now have a healthy Ha-Seong Kim, who ripped his first homer as a Ray off Buehler into the Green Monster seats in the fourth inning. They bolstered their pitching staff with Joe Boyle and his electric stuff. Rehabbing high-leverage reliever Manuel Rodríguez and ace Shane McClanahan are on the way back.
“We like the way they’ve come together as a team,” Neander said, “and felt it was in our best interest to do a little bit to help them out.”
Could they do more? That will likely depend on where the Rays stand at the end of the month. And they are not necessarily beholden to the same binary, buy-or-sell dynamic as other clubs, as they’ve shown in previous years.
They could, for example, shed some surplus starting pitching to address another area of need. They could make more aggressive additions. They could do anything, but they need to win in the meantime.
“We’ve got a few weeks to figure out how to make ourselves better, and we’ll explore those avenues,” Neander said. “Whether or not that leads to action or not, time will tell.”
