Reeling Rays happy to head home

Forgive the Rays if they take some time before tonight's game against the Twins to gaze with affection at the fiberglass roof hovering safely above them at Tropicana Field.

Set aside for a moment the welcome comforts of home. The Rays will be overjoyed just to be able to report to work with some knowledge that - power outages notwithstanding - their games will be played as scheduled for the next week or so.

And they can only hope the familiarity of that routine will help jolt them out of the doldrums that have set in over the past five days, as they endured five losses and four rain delays. Some of those defeats were more jarring than Thursday's 2-1 setback, but the Rays' 17th consecutive loss at Cleveland was the most lethargic.

A game that normally might have been described as a pitcher's duel instead had the feel of an endurance race, ending nearly 5 1/2 hours after the first pitch was thrown. The parties waited out a two-hour, 40-minute rain delay in the bottom of the fourth inning that included an attempt to restart the game that had to be aborted when the skies opened up again.

After play finally resumed, the Rays couldn't muster enough offense to get back over the top, leaving them to fly home dragging their longest losing streak since they dropped seven in a row heading into the All-Star break last year. That slide concluded with a four-game sweep at the hands of the Indians, and Manager Joe Maddon was quick to find the positive with a pre-planned opening line following the game:

"I just know one thing: The last time we got swept in Cleveland, we went to the World Series. So let's see if history can repeat itself."

The Rays will settle for stringing a few wins together in the meantime. They were well-positioned to grab one Thursday, with Jeff Niemann pitching well and allowing one run through three innings. Indians starter David Huff, pummeled by the Rays 11 days earlier in his big-league debut, was throwing up zeroes on the other side at the same time.

But the game was halted one batter into the bottom of the fourth, and as the minutes grew into hours it was clear neither pitcher would return.

"I stayed ready for probably the good part of an hour," Niemann said, "and then it kind of got to the point where it was an hour thirty and it was called."

Lance Cormier got the call for the Rays when play resumed and was effective in three innings, but Victor Martinez's two-out RBI single in the fifth (he also drove in Cleveland's first run with a third-inning groundout) proved to be the run that put the Indians over the top.

The four relievers that followed Huff never let the Rays get a rally going, with their only run coming on Willy Aybar's homer in the sixth that had to be confirmed by instant replay.

The Rays' only other extra-base hit was a second-inning double by the red-hot Ben Zobrist, and after seeing so much of its good work go to waste during the series, the offense looked worn out most of the afternoon.

"It's not easy to keep your body going," Zobrist said. "With the quick turnaround last night and then starting at noon and not getting done until 5:30 here, it's tough to keep your body going during those delays."

The entire situation was, in Maddon's words, "not optimal," but as he noted, that's the way it goes over the course of a season. The Rays certainly didn't want to get rained out and be forced to return to Cleveland later in the year to play one game.

Truthfully, they'd just as soon never see the place again.

"It's been a long last five days, going back to the last game in Florida," Ben Zobrist said. "We definitely will be glad to be back home."