If the Rays are still tied with the Red Sox at the end of the day on Wednesday, the two teams will play a one-game playoff on Thursday night at the Trop. Tickets for that game will go on sale tomorrow morning at 9am.
To get tickets, go to RaysBaseball.com
This was the scene at The Trop within the last hour, via JB Long of Brighthouse Sports. Rays don’t look too uptight, do they? Marc Topkin adds that others were seen throwing around a football.
Over at Business Insider, we charted the American League Wild Card race and exactly how the Rays managed to make up ground despite going just 6-7 in their last 13 games. [BUSINESS INSIDER]
We have been hearing about expanded playoffs in Major League Baseball for a while. And now it is a reality.
Beginning in 2012 or 2013, MLB will add a second Wild Card team to each league. The two Wild Cards will then play a 1-game playoff game for the right to play one of the division winners in the Divisional Series.
On the surface, a one-game playoff sounds like an inherently unfair situation for the top Wild Card team, but there are good reasons for it… Read the rest of this entry »
The GBT – The Good, The Bad and The Telling sandwich, where The Bad is nice and lean and the The Telling is ripe.
THE GOOD: Ummm. The Rays had an opportunity to cut the lead to half a game. And we are supposed to come up with something “Good”? You try it.
THE BAD: Carpe Diem Fail. The Red Sox are serving up the Wild Card on a silver platter. They are begging the Rays to take it. The Rays have now lost 5 of their last 8 and are 4-5 on this 11-game road trip. Does that sound like a team making a push for the playoffs?
THE TELLING: The Rays have now scored 2 runs or less in 51 of their 155 games (32.9%). That is 3rd in the AL…Kyle Farnsworth could return Friday…For the second straight season, Rafael Soriano recorded the save to clinch the AL East.
THE JUNKYARD DOGS WEBTOPIA…
We all enjoy dumping on the Four Letter for their biased coverage. But remember, the E stands for “Entertainment,” not “News.” And unlike some others, ESPN has never pretended or even claimed to be “fair and balanced.” They are a business, and they want ratings.
That being said, we were shocked when we saw that David Schoenfield wrote a column in which he outlines why the Rays will win the Wild Card in the American League…
The Rays are 23-10 since Aug. 8. The Red Sox have lost five in a row and nine of their past 11. The teams have four games left against each other, starting Thursday at Fenway Park. The odds are still stacked against Tampa but I’m going to make the call: They’re going to win the wild card. Here’s why.
- Starting Pitching
- Evan Longoria
- Bullpen issues in Boston
- Pressure
Clearly Schoenfield didn’t get the memo for his superiors. There will be hell to pay.
Schoenfield goes into greater depth in his column, so feel free to head over there to get the entire scoop.
The Rays were so far back in the Wild Card race, that even a winning streak of epic proportions wasn’t going to be enough to change their fortune. Whenever we laid playoff scenarios, we always spoke in terms of the Red Sox playing .500 down the stretch as the best-case scenario. Turns out the Red Sox gave the Rays much more than that. [SPORTS CHART OF THE DAY]
Yesterday over at Business Insider I showed why it is so important to reach 94 wins. In short, if you can reach 94 wins, you will go to the playoffs no matter what the other teams do. If you fall short of 94, you will need some help.
So far this season, the Rays are 9-10 due in large part to some shaky hitting. On the other hand, the pitching staff has been solid. Prior to last night’s game, the starting pitchers were fifth in the AL with a 3.58 ERA and the relievers had the best ERA in the AL (2.57).
If the pitchers continue to pitch this well (which seems realistic), the offense doesn’t need to score that much, right? Well, sort of. They don’t need to score much, but they do need to plate more runs than they are scoring right now. A lot more.
To figure out how good the hitters need to be, we will work with the Pythagorean Win Percentage formula. This formula looks at how many runs a team has scored, and how many they have allowed and determines what the team’s winning percentage should be based on those numbers. Typically, we would use this formula to determine if is a team has been lucky or unlucky, with most teams usually falling within 2-3 wins of expected.
For this post, we will work backwards. We know what we want the winning percentage to be: A 94-68 record is a .580 win percentage. So working backwards, we just need to know how many runs a team needs to score (and allow) to reach that mark.
The result is the following chart…
The blue line represents a 94-win season. We can see that if a team only allows 500 runs (3.1 runs per game) over the course of a full season, they need to score about 600 ( 3.7 r/g) to win 94 games. At the other end, we see that if a team scores 1,200 runs (7.4 r/g), they can still allow 1,000 runs (6.2 r/g) and win 94 games.
In the case of the Rays, they are Read the rest of this entry »
We have been begging Major League Baseball to add a second Wild Card team for a long time. And now our wishes have come true. Yesterday, Bud Selig announced that the playoffs will expand to ten teams in 2012.
Under the new rules, each league will have the three division winners and two Wild Card teams. The two Wild Cards will meet, with the winner moving on to face one of the division winners in the next round. The only question that remains is whether the opening round will be a one-game playoff or a best-of-three format.
The beauty of this format is that it places the emphasis back on winning the division. Under the current system, there is little incentive for winning the division if the team is already guaranteed to be at least the Wild Card. But under the new format, especially if it is a one-game playoff, there is too much risk in leaving your fate up to an even shorter series, where just about anything can happen.
Of course, the new system also protects the Red Sox and Yankees. Because god forbid there ever be a third good team in the East that keeps one of the big two out of the playoffs.
If you have been around these parts for a while, you will hear us talk about the importance of 94 wins. In short, if the Rays are going to get to the playoffs, 94 wins will get it done. Get to 94 and it doesn’t matter what anybody else does. In the Wild Card era (1995-present), every American League team that won 94 games qualified for the playoffs. And only one National League team (1999 Reds, 96 wins) missed. You can see all that data in a pretty graph over at Business Insider. [Business Insider]
