Tampa Bay Rays: Dying Cowbells

As we wrap up the second month of the MLB season, the Tampa Bay Rays look on the surface like the team to beat in the majors. Even after dropping a few games in the past week, they are 32-14, lead the tough AL East by five games, have the second best offense with 5.24 runs per game, and by far have the best pitching and defense with just 3.17 runs allowed per game. If one looks a little deeper, though, their impressive showing is based on unsustainable pitching, luck on balls in play and an offense that has demonstrated an extraordinary knack for producing clutch hits. Their sweep at home to the once-struggling Red Sox may seem surprising, but it should have been foreseen—and while they are a good team, their five-game lead in the AL East is likely to evaporate as their luck evens out.

Though they never really competed for a playoff spot after falling behind early, the Rays last year were a good team. They ended the season in the top half of the league in both runs scored and runs allowed, as poor seasons from B.J. Upton, Pat Burrell, and Dioner Navarro were offset by the breakout of Jason Bartlett and Ben Zobrist, while Scott Kazmir's decline was offset by David Price and Jeff Niemann's arrivals in the bigs.

This year, however, not only do the culprits of last year continue to hit poorly, but Zobrist and Bartlett have taken steps back and Carlos Pena has fallen off a cliff. This shouldn't be entirely unexpected either—Pena's career profiles along the lines of high-strikeout, high-power guys like Tony Clark and Cecil Fielder, whose careers ended abruptly, and neither Zobrist nor Bartlett had ever shown the kind of offense they put up last year previously in the majors or minors.

Even with these struggles, so far the Rays have been scoring runs—the second-most per game in the AL, as I noted above. This is because they have been lucky. Take a look at the following team rankings for Tampa:

On-Base %: .335, 6th
Slugging %: .409, 8th
Home Runs: 42, 8th

These are middle-of-the-pack, as you can see. But with runners in scoring position, the Rays are hitting .287/.367/.451 for an OPS of .819—a huge increase over their .744 overall OPS. With men on any base they have an .809 OPS. In high leverage situations they have a .798 OPS. It's not uncommon for an individual player to hit better than average in clutch situations over one or even a few seasons. David Ortiz did it from 2003-2007, for one. But for an entire team to do so is basically impossible, and unless guys like Carlos Pena start hitting soon, the Rays are going to have a lot more games like their last game against John Lackey, when they managed ten hits and five walks, but left 12 on base.

On the other side of the ball, the Rays have so far allowed an incredible 157 runs through 47 games, or just 3.34 per game. It should be obvious that they can't keep up that pace, as only one team has allowed fewer than 3.8 runs per game since 1992 (Toronto in 2008), but they are performing so much better than their underlying ability says they should that I don't think they will even come close. Now, their staff is certainly good. All five members of their rotation are legitimately good to great pitchers, and their bullpen has rebounded from the disaster that was last year (adding Rafael Soriano and Joaquin Benoit didn't hurt in this regard). But right now the team FIP is 3.88, while the team ERA is 3.09. If you're not familiar with FIP, it is a measure of the expected ERA of a team if they received average defensive play as well as average luck on balls hit in play and comes from the idea that once the ball is hit, the pitchers don't have much control over what happens to it. If you had the misfortune to watch some of Jon Lester's early starts last year when he was victimized by grounders that snuck past the minimal range of Mike Lowell and Julio Lugo, you have an idea why such a stat might be necessary.

It's not impossible for a team with good defense to outperform its FIP; in fact, it happens often. But the best defense in baseball last year (the Mariners) only outperformed their FIP by 0.52, and the Rays themselves played just about at their FIP. So either the Rays' defense is 60% better than the Mariners' defense was last year (which would likely make it the best defense of all time) and has improved by .8 runs per game over the same defense last year, while only changing one regular player, or the Rays are getting very lucky. I expect it's the latter, and I expect more balls to fall in as the Rays young starters have some unlucky games.

It's not impossible for the Rays to keep up their pace, but it would take improvement from their entire batting order outside Longoria and Crawford, continued fantastic defense (well above established levels for all the Rays fielders) and continued excellent pitching from a young pitching staff which is likely to endure some growing pains. Not to mention continued health—no Tampa pitcher has missed a start, and Zobrist, Bartlett, Upton, Crawford, Pena, and Longoria have played all but one or two games. Basing any predictions for the rest of the season on their raw stats so far is very misleading, as most are predicated on plain old luck.

*Photo courtesy of Eric Kilby via Creative Commons License