The Rays scored three runs in Game 2 of the ALCS on Tuesday night and did not earn a single one of them. That was enough, because Freddy Peralta picked that night to throw the hardest baseball of his life.
Tampa Bay won 3-1 at Tropicana Field to square the series at a game apiece after losing Game 1 by a 7-3 score. Peralta gave the Rays six shutout innings on 99 pitches: four hits, all of them singles, two walks, six strikeouts.
Cleveland got five innings and 83 pitches out of Parker Messick, which was a perfectly useful night’s work. The Guardians lost anyway, and they lost it with their glove and their situational hitting.
99.4, and a career high above 97
The number from this game is 99.4. That is what Peralta put on a fastball to Jo Adell in the fifth inning, the hardest pitch he has ever thrown. His average fastball during the regular season was 94.3 mph.
He also climbed above 97 mph on about 30 pitches, more than he has ever managed in a single outing. Different outlets counted it slightly differently, landing in the high 20s, but the direction is not in dispute. In October, Peralta found another gear.
“He’s ‘Fastball Freddy’ for a reason,” Rays pitching coach Kyle Snyder said.
The fourth inning was a gift
All three Tampa Bay runs came in the fourth, with two outs, and none of them were earned. Ben Williamson hit a grounder that caught an in-between hop and skipped past Jose Ramirez at third base, and the Rays had their first run. Liam Hicks followed with a two-run single. 3-0, and that was the ballgame.
Kevin Cash called it “a very Rays inning,” which is about the most Kevin Cash sentence available. He also went out of his way to defend the man the ball got past. “Jose Ramirez is as good as any third baseman there is in the game,” Cash said.
He is right about that, and it does not change the result. Cleveland handed Tampa Bay a three-run inning on a bad hop, then spent the rest of the night refusing to take any of it back.
Cleveland left the game on base
The Guardians went 1-for-6 with runners in scoring position and stranded runners in six different innings. Chase DeLauter’s two-out double in the seventh drove in their only run. Brayan Rocchio is now 2-for-22 with seven strikeouts this postseason.
“We had our chances,” Stephen Vogt said. He also said the thing that should worry Cleveland most about the next three games: “When they smell blood, they take it and run.”
That is precisely what happened. Bryan Baker closed it out for the save, and he now has one in each of Tampa Bay’s four postseason wins. The Rays have a bullpen formula they trust and a Game 2 starter who touched 99.
Ramirez did take one piece of history out of the night. His fifth-inning single was the 49th postseason hit of his career, moving him into second place in Guardians franchise history.
Small comfort. The series is level heading back to Progressive Field, and the team that got outplayed Tuesday is the one that has to feel worse about how it happened.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.