Tampa Bay clinched its ALCS berth on Wednesday night. Game 1 is Monday at Tropicana Field. From the September 27 regular-season finale to that first pitch, the Rays will have had roughly eleven days off and three days of actual games.
And as of Friday they still did not know who they were playing. The White Sox and Guardians are tied 2-2 with Game 5 in Cleveland on Saturday night, so Kevin Cash said the club will not finalize a pitching plan until that game ends late.
How Cash Is Filling the Days
The team flew home Thursday, took Friday off, held a workout, scheduled an intrasquad scrimmage for Saturday and another workout for Sunday. That is a staff trying to manufacture competitive at-bats out of nothing, which is the only real tool available.
Drew Rasmussen is in line to start Game 1, as he did in the ALDS, though it has not been announced. The ALCS has only two scheduled off-days, after Games 2 and 5, so the rest advantage disappears quickly once the series starts.
The Staff Is Fully Rested
Tampa Bay used all five of its starters in a three-game division series. Ian Seymour and Griffin Jax worked in relief. Bryan Baker, Cam Booser and Kevin Kelly have been the primary bullpen arms.
“I would feel confident that we’re going to continue to lean heavily on those guys,” Cash said of the relievers. He added that the ALCS roster should be “very similar” to the ALDS roster.
In a seven-game series against a team that just played a Game 5 on Saturday night and has to travel, having five rested starters and a bullpen that threw a combined handful of innings is the single biggest structural edge in the American League bracket.
The Risk Nobody Can Quantify
Hitters do not get sharper watching intrasquad scrimmages. Eleven days between meaningful plate appearances is exactly how a lineup shows up flat in Game 1 and spends two days getting its timing back, by which point the series is 0-2.
Cash knows this, which is why he is scheduling live at-bats rather than light workouts. Whether that works is unknowable until Monday.
What Is Still Open
Rasmussen has not been named formally. Left-hander Shane McClanahan was left off the ALDS roster with left forearm tightness and was playing catch as of the October 7 injury roundup, not officially ruled out for later rounds; the Friday notes do not mention him, so his ALCS availability is unresolved.
What Erik Neander said about this group is the line that will follow them through the series. The Rays are “a team by every definition,” the president of baseball operations said, and he has “never seen anything like it.” Cash’s version to his players was shorter: “We’ve got two more bites, two more bites on the bone.”
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.