We'll See You Next Year

"...and here's one for Christmas..."

Finally, we must sadly bid adieu to Joe Maddon and the Tampa Bay Rays who left our playoff grid today with a 4-3 loss to the Texas Rangers in game four of the first-round playoffs. 

At least we think the Rays are done...

They've been run over and come back more often than the Terminator.  Cats only get nine lives.  Zombies get one reawakening.  A Rays season ends like the movie "Carrie"  --  you look at the grave and you wait for a hand to reach through the dirt.  The Tampa Bay Rays have made reappearing from the dead and raising hell not just an art, but a livelihood, and it's getting to be a year-end tradition.

"You talkin' to me?"

They raised the bar on themselves this year with their season finale, just one movement in an incredible four-game symphony that the MLB Serendipity Orchestra could never have written on their own.  Yet beyond the dramatics of game 162 lies a season that started 0-6 and stayed thereafter a series of scrambles within one big long climb.  Like the squirrel that fell down a well and made its way back clawing up three feet and dropping down two, up and down like that for an entire schedule.  After 2010's last pitch the script said the Rays would stay at the bottom of the well in 2011, that without Carl Crawford, with no payroll, they had no chance.  It would be a terribly painful rebuilding year, a suicide mission for any manager trying to make that franchise viable.

Joe would probably have asked for it no other way.  When the Rays won the American League pennant in 2008, they spent 2009 as the returning champions, the defender of their crown, the team to beat, which conflicted with their growing image as the anti-Yankees  --  "they're not lowly, they went to the World Series."  They would wind up 19 games out of first place behind the Yankees and Red Sox, yet their winning record was only the second of their existence.  In 2010 they won 96 games and the AL East crown and took the Rangers to five games in the ALCS before becoming resume material for Cliff Lee, and no sooner than that game was over the Rays were declared dead for 2011.

"Just ask us to stay, and we'll go..."

The changes in personnel are part of why Joe Maddon's name comes up for Manager of the Year, but perhaps it is not despite those changes, but because of those changes.  Maddon loves redemption, extracting the good out of the negative, focusing on the essential and not the distractional -- all the classic elements of the true underdog, one who is not unknown, but once forgotten or disregarded.  While nobody considers Johnny Damon a down-and-outer considering his solid years in Detroit, his value is annually questioned while a clock ticks in the background, yet he grinds to play another day.  Casey Kotchman and Sean Rodriguez, cast-offs from his alma mater Anaheim Angels, are both products of the same philosophy he was brought to Tampa Bay to instill.  Can anyone imagine a bigger, more monstrous reclamation project than Manny Ramirez?  Joe Maddon actually had him on board for maybe fifteen minutes before the drug results came back and Manny resigned rather than serve a 100-day suspension.  Maddon actually sounded saddened by the situation, no anger, no judgement, no lesson for the kids.  Strange to think what the final 62 games would have been like for that team with a viable Manny Ramirez.

"It's 'Evan,' not 'Eva.'"

What they were like was a march to the sea, torches and flags carried night and day, feet on the ground game after game, moving forward because that's what they did and that's what they would do until they could not.  On game 162 in front of a home crowd of 29,518, and a national audience of millions, they made their mark again as the comeback kids, rallying not only over a season, but from another seven-run deficit made good in the ninth inning and golden in the thirteenth with a home run from Evan Langoria, himself to the brink and back with injuries.  Again, redemption.  Circles of life. 


Thanks, Joe Maddon and Tampa Bay Rays, it was fun.  We can't wait to see you run circles around them all come next spring.

Until then we'll have our Snuggie to keep us warm.