So I was playing with my SABR and thinking about TB who seems to be in the mood to drop some salary (Archer as we kind of discussed, Longoria mentioned briefly, Colome). Looks like they want to go ahead and stake out that fifth place in the AL East and dare Baltimore to be worse.
The new old adage in baseball is that Tampa always develops good starting pitching, which would I guess take the sting out of losing Cobb and Archer in the same year. I wonder...in the minors, they have the "Man of Many Pitches" Honeywell ready to go (nothing left to prove in Durham and if stays there much longer he will have nightmares of Susan Sarandon's gnarly, geriatric claws reaching out for him), so you have to believe he is one replacement. DeLeon is down there, but he threw about 41 IP last year so you gotta believe the Rays will stretch him out a bit in NC.
With Honeywell perhaps being broken in nearer the back of the rotation, the top kind of defaults to Odoreaters. Not necessarily a good thing. He is in the right park to be a fly-ball pitcher (though those visits to NY, Boston, Baltimore, and Toronto can be a bitch though his home/road splits were actually favorable to the road last year). After that comes Snell, who like Jake is pitching behind most batters due to an inability to find the zip code of the plate, especially early in AB (both with 54% first pitch strikes).
"Take it Easy" Andriese is also a lock I would think if he is back from his "right hip stress reaction". I am not really sure what that really is and I do not know how difficult it is to bounce back from (I assume the degree of difficulty is somewhere between a twisted nut and Monty Stratton). A host of less than desirable options for 5th/injury replacements are out there (Eovaldi, Faria, Pruitt).
Is that enough to keep the Ray pitching magic in place?
The offense is not good with Longoria, so I would not invest heavily in this team without. Matt Duffy should be back (cue duck calls), Brad Miller (can a deflated ball rebound), Hechavarria (will the raise due in arbitration cause the Rays to trade him too?) and whomever at 1B. Souza, Dickerson, Kiermaier and Smith are actually not a bad OF at all, so maybe there is hope.
If the Rays go full-on fire sale (which we will know when they get minor league prospects or major league ready talent for the pieces they trade), that would be good for Adames and Bauers and maybe even Justin Williams.
So the question becomes, if there is a rebuild and no one goes to Tropicana Field to see it, did it really happen?
Baseball is a slow, boring, complex, cerebral game that doesn't lend itself to histrionics. You 'take in' a baseball game, something odd to say about a football or basketball game, with the clock running and the bodies flying.
Charles Krauthammer