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Shutout Puts Rays' Slide At 5

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By MARC LANCASTER

The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 12, 2008

CLEVELAND - For week upon week through the first three months of the season, the Rays were able to keep churning. They managed to maintain a high energy level while playing mostly clean, crisp baseball that usually resulted in victories.

In the final week before the All-Star break, though, the Rays have simply looked tired. Following Friday night's 5-0 loss to the Indians, which extended Tampa Bay's slide to a season-high five games, the Rays finally admitted as much.

"We've been playing really hard and with a lot of emotion for a long time, and I don't know if it just caught up to us at this moment right now," Manager Joe Maddon said.

"We've been pretty much spent," said starter James Shields.

That has been apparent in basically every aspect of the game.

The consensus seemed to be that Shields' stuff was plenty good enough to win Friday night, but he lost for the first time since June 10. The defense again let the Rays down, with a botched liner by Carl Crawford that didn't end up costing them and a misjudged fly ball by Jonny Gomes that did.

And the offense. Oh, the offense. The last thing the Rays needed was to see the guy who could very well start the All-Star Game on the hill Friday night - and a lefty at that - so it surprised no one that Cliff Lee turned in six stress-free innings against an increasingly feeble Tampa Bay attack.

After being shut out Friday for the second time in four games (after scoring at least once in 69 straight games), the Rays have gone an astonishing 46 innings without scoring a run on anything but a homer. Their most recent non-long ball tally came on an RBI single by Evan Longoria with one out in the bottom of the first inning Monday.

"Right now we're just not swinging the bats well," Maddon said. "Whenever that happens, everything else is magnified in a negative way. You will always be accused of lacking intensity or whatever, and it's just a matter of when you don't hit, your whole team looks bad, and that's what's going on right now."

The Rays are 2-for-40 with runners in scoring position in the last five games, with Longoria's aforementioned single accounting for one hit and an infield single by Dioner Navarro in the sixth inning Tuesday the other. When you're talking about a team-wide lack of production, it doesn't get much worse than that.

"Our pitchers can only do so much," conceded Crawford, who is hitless in his last 20 at-bats. "That's rough, to have the whole offense struggling at the same time."

It doesn't seem to matter what combination Maddon tries right now. Going with his usual lineup against a lefty, Maddon saw Gomes and Willy Aybar go 0-for-6 against southpaws Lee and Rafael Perez (Gomes is now 1-for-16 lifetime against Lee).

In the meantime, lefties Akinori Iwamura and Carlos Pena each reached base twice against Lee. Of course, once they got there, they didn't go anywhere.

"I think there's mental fatigue as much as anything," Maddon said. "We've been going after it pretty well. I'd like to see us finish up strong, obviously, for the next two days, and then if we could do that and move it along to the break, that'd be great. But I just think more than anything we have to push mentally right now."

The Rays aren't going to forfeit all of the progress they have made if they can't find a way to do that, but picking up a win or two this weekend would make it easier to get refocused for the second half.

"We've got to get out of it before the break," Shields said. "It's one of those things where we've got to end on a positive note going into the second half, and we'll do it."

Reporter Marc Lancaster can be reached at (813) 259-7227 or mlancaster@tampatrib.com.

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