The Tampa Bay Rays: Baseball's efficiency experts

The Tampa Bay Rays have the game’s lowest payroll, but they used their resources to the fullest advantage in beating Oakland Wednesday to advance to the ALDS.

With Major League Baseball’s lowest payroll, the Tampa Bay Rays have to be efficiency experts. That was the trait that got them through a 96-win regular season, and it was also the driving force behind their 5-1 victory over the Oakland Athletics in Wednesday’s American League wild-card game.

In a few tangential aspects, the Athletics had the better of the Rays Wednesday. Oakland had more base hits, more walks, and as a consequence more baserunners. The Athletics also struck out three fewer times.

But when Tampa Bay batters did make contact, the ball flew a long way. Of Tampa’s seven hits, four left the playing area, and those four home runs accounted for all five runs.

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Oakland’s only run scored on a three-base error and a sacrifice fly.

Last December the Rays traded for Yandy Diaz from Cleveland because they saw a power hitter where most everybody else saw a 27-year-old journeyman. On Thursday, Diaz demonstrated why the Rays had been sagacious.

Leading off against Sean Manaea, who had been virtually flawless in five starts since returning from an arm injury, Diaz worked the count to his advantage then got a belt-high fastball out over the plate. He hammered it against the back wall in right field for an instant 1-0 lead.

One inning later, Avisail Garcia worked the count to his advantage and drove the next pitch off the back wall in center. The lead swelled to 3-0.

It wasn’t that Manaea was awful. He did, after all, strike out six in his two-plus innings of work. His problem was the Tampa Bay Rays were too efficient to ever let him get away with anything. Diaz led off the third by picking on a letter-high 2-2 Manaea fastball and whistled it over virtually the same spot in right-center. That made it 4-0 and ended Manaea’s night.

Counting Matt Duffy’s base hit that preceded Garcia’s second-inning home run, Manaea had gotten four pitches up in the hitting zone, and the Rays had made souvenirs out of three of them. That’s efficiency.

For their part, the Athletics pursued their attack against Tampa starter Charley Morton with the efficiency of a sailor newly arrived in port on a Friday night. Their wastrel habits were established in the very first inning when they sandwiched a hit and two walks around a pair of strikeouts, then capped it off with a lazy fly ball off the bat of Jurickson Profar for the easy third out.

On the night the Athletics sent 15 men to the plate with runners on base – four of them with runners in scoring position – and got nothing more productive than Ramon Laureano’s third-inning sacrifice fly that brought home Marcus Semien, who had reached on the aforementioned three-base error.

Only one A’s hitter – Robbie Grossman in the fourth – managed a base hit with a runner on base. That continued a trend that had plagued Oakland during the final stretches of the regular season when they had just two hits in their final 49 at-bats with a runner in scoring position. On Thursday, the Athletics also stumbled into a pair of double plays.

The heart of Oakland’s order — Matt Chapman, Matt Olson, and Mark Canha — came to bat 10 times with one or more men on base and produced nothing more threatening than three bases on balls.

The Rays weren’t much better in the clutch department, collecting just two hits with a man on base. But one of the two was Garcia’s second-inning homer. Beyond that, they had fewer runners actually on base due in large measure to those four home runs.

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It was Tampa’s first four-homer game since mid-July, and that is the principal reason the Tampa Bay Rays, rather than the Athletics, are going to Houston.

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