'Close' may be a start

Entering second half as worst team in baseball, Rays hope for better showing in tight games.

By MARC TOPKIN, Times Staff Writer

© St. Petersburg Times
published July 11, 2002

ST. PETERSBURG -- Steve Cox has an idea for what to do about the abysmal first half of the Rays' season.

"A redo," he said. "It's a redo. I wish you could do that, like in the minor leagues, where the winner of the first half plays the winner of the second half and you start all over again.

"But it's not that way ... "

The Rays return to the field tonight against Seattle with conflicted objectives, hoping to forget the pain of a first half in which they compiled a major league-worst 28-57 record but to have learned something from repeatedly losing close games: 28 times by one or two runs.

Whether they can do that, especially if they don't have some of their experienced players (who soon may be traded), will be the challenge for the remaining 12 weeks of the season.

"If we just learn how to win, we will win more games," manager Hal McRae said. "It's an attitude. We've been in position to do it, so if we have the attitude, we'll get it done."

Day after day, the Rays seem to be in games only to come up short or give it away at the end. They lost their last five before the break in their opponents' last at-bat, and 15 overall that way. They're 13-21 in games decided from the seventh inning on, including 8-13 in games decided in the ninth or later.

"I guess there's positives and negatives to that," All-Star outfielder Randy Winn said. "You can look at it as a positive like, 'Hey, we've been in a lot of ballgames and we've learned a lot.' But on the other hand, a loss is a loss. The key is that we learned from it either way."

The Rays can make the case, with something of a straight face, that they are a better team than their record shows, that they have not played as poorly as a team on pace to lose a franchise-worst 109 games.

"We've played good enough to have a better record than we have," Ben Grieve said. "Take about 10 of those games we lost by one run and say we win half of those. If we do that in the second half we can start to turn things around."

The starting pitching, save for an occasional blip, has been better than expected. Joe Kennedy is emerging as one of the better young starters in the league, and Paul Wilson and Tanyon Sturtze have kept their ERAs near or below the league average despite losing records. Wilson Alvarez has been healthy lately and Ryan Rupe should be back from the disabled list Monday.

Conversely, the bullpen went from being the strength of the team to its biggest weakness. And improvement is not a certainty as McRae struggles to get any type of consistency and dependability out of the erratic relievers.

The offense has been as or more feeble than expected, ranking last or next to last in the critical categories of average (.245), runs (338), home runs (69) and on-base percentage (.306). Winn's production has been a pleasant surprise, but veterans Greg Vaughn (out for at least two more weeks with a sore shoulder) and Grieve have struggled and most of the others have been inconsistent, at best.

McRae said he cannot fault the players' effort. "They've played as hard as they can play, but the results were not good," he said. "The effort was there, the desire was there, but we weren't good enough as a club to win. We were inconsistent, and we let things get away. We hope to not repeat the same mistakes and to win more games."

The Rays struggled through the first half last season but followed a 27-61 first half by going 35-39 after the All-Star break and finishing 62-100. An influx of young players, such as Kennedy, Toby Hall and Brent Abernathy, fueled that drive, and the situation may be similar this season.

General manager Chuck LaMar again is under orders to make the team younger and less expensive by trading veterans, with Wilson, Rupe, Doug Creek, Winn and Cox among the candidates. Outfielder Carl Crawford and pitchers Jason Standridge, Dewon Brazelton, Luis de los Santos, Gerardo Garcia and Seth McClung are among those who may be called up.

Rays officials can assess their development in a number of ways, but the ultimate judgment is wins and losses at the big-league level. And McRae is hoping they can find a way to have more of the former and fewer of the latter.

"We've done most of the things that we can do to say we've made progress," he said. "We have to go to the next level and win games. We've done all those other things. We did it during the 15-game losing streak. We played like hell, we had leads, we did all these wonderful things, but we let games get away. So we're not there.

"To make progress, we've got to close the deal when we're in position to close the deal. That's progress to me."