Rays are digging a deeper hole

There is plenty of baseball left.

But we're beginning to think there's plenty of this baseball left, too, the kind that has the 2009 Rays on the edge of the beginning of the end.

They returned to the Trop on Monday after a 10-game road trip and acted as if their luggage made it and they didn't. The Yankees, the new Yankees, were in town, and the Rays needed to make a statement.

They did. They offered feeble resistance in a butt-thumping 11-4 loss. James Shields couldn't get it done and Yankees starter A.J. Burnett silenced Rays bats that might as well have been shovels.

We're 100 games into this season and the hole now measures 71/2 games behind the Yankees and five games behind the Red Sox.

Not a bottomless pit, but a real hole.

"We can't bury ourselves any further than we are right now," Evan Longoria said.

Throw in tonight's pitching matchup, CC Sabathia against Scott Kazmir - Sabathia vs. Bloodbathia.

Monday was no way to start a series that the home team needs to win.

For weeks, the Rays have tried to keep pace. It's been frustrating at times. There have been nights Rays wins are matched by Yankees wins, a lot of nights.

But here were the Yankees, and if the Rays won Monday, well, the Yankees definitely would have lost.

"If we want to be real contenders in this division, we got to find a way to win at least two of these games," Carl Crawford said Monday.

These Rays, these inconsistent, underachieving Rays, need more urgency, from the manager on out. Before Monday's game, Joe Maddon was saying that "if you take away April," the Rays haven't played badly.

They were 61/2 back April 29. Three months later, they're one game further behind.

"I actually thought we did a decent job against A.J. tonight," Longoria actually said after the Rays amassed two hits in seven innings against Burnett.

Urgency, thy name is Rays.

Back to pregame realities.

"With the way it's been going, I just don't know if they're going to lose many in a row," Crawford said of New York. "It's kind of like last year, when we kept winning and we were hard to catch."

These are not the 2008 Rays and these are not the 2008 Yankees. The Yankees have Burnett and Sabathia. They have Mark Teixeira and his 25 home runs, compared to the Rays' prized Philly cheesesteak, Pat Burrell, who hit a spectacularly meaningless solo home run in the ninth.

The Yankees? Most of them seem to be hitting, Rivera remains Rivera and they have that new bandbox in the Bronx ... and the Rays are 71/2 back. Their deepest hole last season was five games out of first.

It was nearly enough to make Rays fans forget to boo Alex Rodriguez, who celebrated his 34th birthday with a two-run double and presumably with Kate Hudson after that.

The Yankees homered four times. Nick Swisher homered twice. The Yankees hit so many balls hard some of them might have even gotten out of the supersized mansion Jeter is building in Tampa, provided they moved in the fences.

Shields will hit August with a 6-7 record. He is among the least of his team's problems, but it needed him Monday and he didn't come through. No one did. While the game was technically still a game, Carlos Pena struck out - shocker - with two men on to end the eighth. The Yankees pitcher was someone named David Robertson. Cliff and Oscar Robertson could strike out Pena if the lighting was just right.

Things are getting dark. If patience isn't running thin, this season is, game by game, series by series. When these Rays are good, who looks better? They might go and beat the Yankees the next two nights ... and lose to the Royals this weekend. There's no real momentum, ever.

That's how real the hole is.