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Besides Goosebumps, It's Business As Usual

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By JOE HENDERSON | The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 3, 2008

ST. PETERSBURG - Playoff baseball is supposed to be different.

They promised it would be.

So we came to Tropicana Field on Thursday expecting history and things we had never seen before. What we got was a rerun from a script that produced 97 wins and the American League East championship this summer.

"I thought the same thing as the game was in progress," Rays manager Joe Maddon said. "... The good starting pitching, stellar bullpen work. We got timely hits when we needed it."

Indeed, the Rays' 6-4 victory over the White Sox in the opening game of the American League Division Series could have been plucked from just about any night this season and you would have sworn that, yeah, you saw that game.

Been there, watched that.

"The anonymous group that has ownership," Maddon said.

James Shields pitched like the fighter he is and gave the Rays a chance to win against a team that lives on the home run. They spotted Chicago an early lead and shook it off, just as they did so many times during the regular season. The bullpen was suffocating. Evan Longoria was spectacular.

They lost one of their key players, Carlos Pena, after two innings. Didn't matter. Just plug someone in - Willy Aybar, in this case - and get the job done.

The catwalks even took a bow. Longoria's second of two home runs clanked off the "C" ring. Their 57-24 record at home this season wasn't the best in the big leagues by accident.

Their speed helped produce runs. They didn't make many mistakes.

"We've done it all year," Shields said.

Here Comes Attention

The anonymity thing Maddon talked about is pretty much shot now, especially for Longoria. Hitting home runs in the first two postseason at-bats of your career tends to make news and send people with notebooks, microphones and cameras stampeding your way.

For the rest of it, though, it was business as usual.

"It was funny," reliever J.P. Howell said. "Everybody thinks it's so different, but the White Sox aren't all of a sudden going to become way better and us less better. It's just one of those things where it's the same teams and now the battle is to eliminate all the stuff going on around us.

"Being at home really helped. If we had been on the road it would have been a lot tougher, because we didn't have our familiar surroundings."

Pssst ... it all sounds like the Rays kept their cool, and maybe they did. But as they lined up along the foul lines before the game for introductions:

"Goosebumps," Howell said. "I just couldn't imagine at the beginning of the year we'd be doing this. It meant so much to be doing in front of this city and these people. As loud as they were tonight, that's the loudest I've ever heard."

He's not lying. Anybody got a cure for a cowbell hangover? That's as loud as anyone could remember the Trop. Why, it was as loud as people got in all those other cities we've watched when the playoffs rolled around in years gone by.

Fun, wasn't it? It was also just one game.

Work To Do

These things can turn quickly. The other team in Chicago, the Cubs, won the first game of the 1984 playoffs against San Diego 13-0, but didn't win the series.

But then you remember the Rays' mind-set, hammered relentlessly by Maddon all summer. Play the game, then flush it. Focus on the next game.

It worked all summer. It worked again.

Of those who played Thursday for the Rays, only Cliff Floyd, Jason Bartlett and Dan Wheeler have playoff experience. You couldn't have told it from the way the young Rays played, though.

They played with poise.

They shook off a 3-1 deficit to go in front.

And when it came time to protect the lead, Grant Balfour struck out consecutive hitters with the bases loaded in the seventh to end Chicago's last big threat.

It's the same formula that produced a championship and so many nights of fun this summer. The postseason really is different, honest, but the Rays don't seem to be buying into that notion. They look just like they always have.

No one seems to be complaining.

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