Look, when your starter is scratched shortly before game time, your chances of winning go way down. Tonight ended up as a bullpen night for a team that hasn’t had a particularly effective bullpen.
Ryan Pepiot reported fatigue, and in a true sign that everyone knows this team is cooked they skipped his start, or at least pushed it back. So the Rays went with a parade of relievers.
They started with Griffin Jax, who was able to survive a double and a walk thanks to a double play.
Next man up was Mason Montgomery. Montgomery has been one of the perplexing disappointments of the season. He had had a lot of minor league success; excelled in his 2024 cup of coffee and earned a spot in the bullpen this year. And he’s been terrible. His FIP of 3.93 suggests he should be getting better results than his 5.67 ERA suggests, but then the ERA and FIP don’t account for inherited runners he’s let score when he’s come in with men on base.
At any rate, whether he’s been very bad or just regular bad plus unlucky is not germane to tonight’s game, one of his worst. He gave up five runs in .2 innings — you could tell that Cash really really wanted him to get through that second inning but even he couldn’t stand watching at a certain point. Montgomery came into the game with a 1-0 lead thanks to a Yandy Diaz homerun, but left with a 5-1 deficit, which increased to 6-1 just an inning later.
At that point I had more or less given up on the game, but the Rays offense at least made it interesting.
They drew within two runs in the fifth inning with home runs by Carson Williams and Junior Caminero. They then scored one more time in the next inning on the small ball: Richie Palacios walked and stole second, and came home of Hunter Feduccia’s single.
But while scoring five runs is often enough for a win, the overwhelming feeling of this game is one of frustration. The Rays had eight hits and drew seven walks. Yet they squandered scoring opportunities in most innings, thanks to grounding into three double plays and striking out 12 times. The Lowe “brothers,” just the guys we count on to get runners in, together struck out seven times.
Take the ninth inning: they seemed poised to score that inning. Gray and Feduccia both drew walks, and Simpson bunted them into scoring position (that we were all just fine giving up the out to move the runners is something of a sign of how much Chandler has been struggling). A runner at third with Yandy and B Lowe coming up seemed like a pretty good spot to be in for a team chasing a run.
But Diaz struck out, uncharacteristically whiffing on two pitches in the zone. Brandon Lowe followed suit. Game over.
A final note on pitching: kudos to Joe Rock and Cole Sulser who each pitched two scoreless innings. Sulser’s outing was helped by an outstanding Jake Mangum catch on a fading liner. Oddly enough, the Rays used six pitchers on “bullpen day” (Baker for just one out when Rock got in trouble pitching his third inning). The White Sox, who went with a traditional starter, used eight pitchers.
