Rays 2, White Sox 9
Record: 56-44
Attendance: 16,971
The Rays got trounced Thursday night 9-2 by the lowly Chicago White Sox, a team that had lost its last seven in a row. It was another embarrassing display of bad hitting, bad pitching, and bad defense. It's one thing to be beaten senseless by the Yankees, who are "savages" in the batter's box, as their manager Aaron Boone likes to say, but they are supposed to snap back and begin beating the teams they are supposed to beat.
What we have here is the sound of the bottom falling out of the season. There are 62 games left, plenty of time to sort out the problems and make an assault on a wild card berth in the playoffs, but if Thursday's game is any indication, the season may be over. And if it is, the Rays front office will become sellers at the July 31 trade deadline, giving their best players to real contenders and stockpiling young, inexpensive talent.
That may have been their plan from the outset. Begin building a team that won't come to maturity until 2023 when Stu Sternberg's Tampa Bay franchise may be playing most of its games out of the country in Montreal, Canada. That is one way to understand the maddeningly slow effort to improve this team that had so much promise once upon a time.
Eleven days to go.
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