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Rays Ready To Come Home

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By MARC LANCASTER

The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 22, 2008

Updated: 05/22/2008 12:14 am

OAKLAND, Calif. - The Rays did more than their share of grinding during a six-game road trip that concluded Wednesday, with four of those games decided by one run and two of them going extra innings.

So perhaps it wasn't all that surprising that the Rays - and in particular their hitters - looked spent Wednesday as their hopes of a sweep in Oakland vanished in a hurry with the A's rolling to a 9-1 rout.

Tampa Bay managed just three hits off A's starter Dana Eveland, who went the distance in a tidy affair that lasted only 2 hours, 6 minutes. The Rays would have preferred to fly cross-country on a higher note, but mostly they seemed ready just to get back to St. Petersburg, where they'll have today off before opening a season-long 10-game homestand Friday.

"No excuses, but I think it's been a very emotional trip," Rays manager Joe Maddon said. "I like the way we've played the entire time. ... These things happen sometimes. Their pitcher was really good today, and that set the tone for them."

A Rays lineup missing two of its most productive hitters, Carl Crawford and Dioner Navarro, couldn't do much against Eveland. The lefty retired the Rays in order five times, and only Jonny Gomes' first-pitch homer to left leading off the eighth kept Eveland from a shutout.

The only Tampa Bay player who had faced Eveland before stepping into the box Wednesday was Cliff Floyd, who had walked in his only career plate appearance against him.

"It's always tough to have success off a guy who's throwing three pitches for a strike that you've never seen before," Gomes said.

Eveland's fastball-changeup-slider combination was enough to keep the Rays quiet all day. Aside from Gomes' bomb in the eighth, an Akinori Iwamura single leading off the game and a single by Gabe Gross in the fifth were the only Rays hits.

Rays starter Andy Sonnanstine has had games like that before, where everything seems to be working, and he appeared on his way to another early Wednesday as he set down the first eight men he faced.

A couple of two-out runs in the third and another tally in the fourth weren't insurmountable obstacles, but the game got away from Sonnanstine after that. Jack Hannahan and Jack Cust homered in a three-run fifth to make it 6-0 and the A's tacked on another in the sixth before Cust closed the scoring with another longball, a two-run shot off Jason Hammel in the seventh.

"That's a tough one to swallow," Sonnanstine said. "The first couple innings I felt really good, the best I've felt in a while. I think maybe in the latter innings I was trying to overthrow or something and I threw some good pitches and they hit 'em and I threw some bad pitches and they hit 'em."

Coming off eight dazzling innings of one-run ball to open the trip in St. Louis, Sonnanstine suffered his first loss since April 9, his second start of the season. And the Rays absorbed their first loss by more than one run since falling 6-2 on May 7 at Toronto, with the eight-run defeat matching their most lopsided of the year.

Falling as it did in the middle of so many taut, well-played games, the Rays were compelled to brush off Wednesday's events as an aberration. Despite the final-game blowout and a couple of walk-off losses in St. Louis, the Rays went 3-3 on the trip. Most of the time, splitting the difference away from home is considered a success, but this .500 trip wasn't necessarily embraced.

"We'll take it, but we know it should have been better," B.J. Upton said. "We let a couple games get away from us, but there's nothing we can do about it now."

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