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Rays Living In Fish Bowl

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By MARTIN FENNELLY | The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 10, 2008

It was just two losses to the Yankees in about 19 hours.

It was just two games that, surprising as it sounds, were really much bigger for the team with 26 world championships than for the team with none.

At Election 2008 headquarters, we await hanging Florida All-Star chads in the Vote for Evan campaign, but don't underestimate the power of Daley Machine to bring home White Sox favorite Jermaine Dye.

Meanwhile, Madonna's favorite team, A-Rod and the material boys, just gave us some of that old-time Yankees religion to beat the Rays twice at the bulldozer-bound Stadium. And the AL East tightened.

The Yankees, now 61/2 games back of the Rays, suddenly feel frisky, to say nothing of the Red Sox, who've won two of the last four World Series and just picked up three games in three days. The Sox are two back, just like that.

Is there blood in the water?

Are the sharks circling?

Looking Forward To Cleveland

The Rays have no need to panic, though, in truth, a trip to Cleveland probably never seemed so good. Apparently every time a Ray looked up in New York, there was a New York media chipmunk, chirping the same question.

Can you keep this up?

Deep down, we're all chipmunks.

We're all asking that.

Wins are up, attendance is up, exposure is up. So is pressure.

After 10 years in the septic tank, the Rays live in a fish bowl.

Everyone wants to see what they do.

"I've always felt pressure was a good thing," Rays manager Joe Maddon said last week. "That means something good is happening."

Pressure can hit the most experienced clubs, and the Rays aren't. We're barely into the second half. The stakes will grow. The heat will gather.

I don't think a three-game losing streak (the team's first since being swept at Fenway Park in early June) is cause for real alarm. The pitching has been too good.

But the Rays did go far too quietly in the Bronx, with a single run in 19 innings, that Carlos Pena homer. Wednesday, the Red Sox hung 18 on the Twins.

Soon-to-be-uninjured Red Sox behemoth David Ortiz (another worry) thought out loud last week even as his team was swept by the Rays.

"There are a lot of games left. One way or another the Yankees know how to figure it out," Ortiz told reporters. "We know how to figure it out. I don't know. It's a long season. The Rays are playing good, though. I don't know. I'm not saying that they will drop, but if you go by the numbers, that's normally what happens. The guys with more experience at the end of the year take over."

There is nothing freakish about 55-35. The Rays have twice swept the Red Sox at the Trop, as well as the Angels and the Cubs.

It's the real deal.

But so is what's coming.

It will be fascinating to see how this team handles it.

They deserve straight A's thus far, rebounding from that sweep in Boston last month to retake the division lead - and then some. But this will be different.

"I still don't think people believe," Rays center fielder B.J. Upton said. "That's a little more fire for us the rest of the way."

On with the rest of the way.

Always The Underdog

The break for the Rays is that they'll never come off as the hunted.

What, with the Yankees and Red Sox out there?

They'll always be the hunter, the underdog, even from out front.

"That's probably true. Until we actually put up a flag somewhere, they're always going to have that feeling about us," Maddon said.

But now more and more people will be watching.

Many of these young Rays have never dipped so much as a toe in this fish bowl. They're in for a Channel swim.

"You've got to go through it at some point if you're going to become what you want to become," said Maddon, who has a World Series ring from 2002. "I told guys in the Angels organization that if you're feeling pressure, that's a good thing, because you're doing things that matter."

Now it's a matter of doing them when you feel the heat.

And it's not even all that hot yet.

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