Rays still trying to solve lefties

The Rays' two biggest offseason acquisitions on the offensive side of the ball were Pat Burrell and Gabe Kapler, a pair of veteran right-handed bats who could be seen as replacing the veteran left-handed bats of Cliff Floyd and Eric Hinske.

The handedness involved isn't accidental, of course; the Rays struggled against left-handed pitching throughout 2008, and shoring up against southpaws was one of their prime goals over the winter.

"We're starting to build up a nice cache of hitters versus lefties right now, which was a big problem for us last year," Manager Joe Maddon said this week.

He noted Burrell and Kapler, of course, and also tabbed Evan Longoria, Ben Zobrist, Dioner Navarro and the soon-to-return B.J. Upton as potential assets in that fight. He didn't even mention Jason Bartlett, whose .379 batting average against lefties last year was the best in the majors.

It all makes sense, of course. As a general rule, you expect hitters swinging from the right side to do more damage against left-handed pitching. But the players who might have the biggest say in the Rays' hopes of improving in that regard this year could be their lefty swingers.

The three everyday lefties in the Rays' lineup this year - Carlos Pena, Carl Crawford and Akinori Iwamura - are coming off performances against their own kind that were anywhere from mediocre to terrible. And in the case of all three hitters, the numbers they put up represented a huge nosedive from what they had done against lefties in 2007.

Pena's batting average against lefties dived 81 points from 2007 to 2008, with Crawford's dropping 70 points and Iwamura's 63 points. All three hitters posted an OPS (on-base plus slugging) of less than .670 against lefties last season, when the previous year Crawford had the worst number of the three at .837.

It was a remarkable drop, particularly for Crawford and Iwamura, whose hitting profiles suggest they should be able to handle lefties fairly well by going to the opposite field regularly.

But the good news in a very limited sample size thus far in 2009 is that all three have looked pretty comfortable at the plate against left-handed pitchers in the first week.

Exhibit A was Wednesday's game against the Red Sox, in which Crawford and Iwamura collected three hits each off lefties Jon Lester and Javier Lopez, and Pena cracked his first homer of the season against Lester, a long drive to center field. Entering the weekend, Iwamura had reached base in five of his eight plate appearances against lefties.

Of course, that victory the Rays collected against Lester on Wednesday was balanced out by a loss to Baltimore's Mark Hendrickson on Friday. So they're .500, which is about where they ended up last season: 25-24 when facing a left-handed starter. They went 72-41 against right-handed starters, and if they had to choose to maintain one number, it would be that one.

But if they end up facing lefty starters about a third of the time, as they did last year, they'd prefer to have a bit more to show for it.

"We still want to be able to handle right-handed pitching as well as we did last year," Rays executive vice president Andrew Friedman said. "So it was a fine line for us in trying to manage that, and we feel like we're significantly better against left-handed pitching and as good if not better against right-handed pitching."