Another bad news hits the Tampa Bay Rays: The head coach of the Tampa Bay Rays shed tears as four of his star players made a final decision to terminate their huge contracts.

Another bad news hits the Tampa Bay Rays: The head coach of the Tampa Bay Rays shed tears as four of his star players made a final decision to terminate their huge contracts.

The Tampa Bay Rays have received more unfavorable news: Four of their great players have decided to end their enormous contracts, causing the team’s head coach to cry.

The Tampa Bay Rays in 2023 would be a dreadful movie subject. The Rays, who finished the season with a record-tying 13 straight wins at the start of the season and a stellar 99 games overall, ended their run on Wednesday with an AL wild-card series sweep at the hands of the Texas Rangers.

In the series, they came dangerously close to making history again, but this time it was a less exciting kind: the team was only one or two innings away from matching the longest postseason scoreless streak in MLB history. Ultimately, the Rays managed to score just one run in two games as Nathan Eovaldi and Jordan Montgomery kept Texas from having to deploy its dubious bullpen.

The Rays were unable to take advantage of their opponents’ weaknesses in this series. They emerged from October hardly looking like the group that made such a big splash in April.

Not included on the postseason roster are the three most effective pitchers (Drew Rasmussen, Jeffrey Springs, and Shane McClanahan) and the two most productive position players (Wander Franco and Brandon Lowe) from that 13-game barnstorming campaign. Four died from injuries sustained, and Franco is currently on administrative leave as Dominican Republic authorities look into claims he dated underage girls.

During their heyday, the Rays were already facing pitching staff ailments and took care to give credit to the “next men up,” which at the time included Kevin Kelly, Braden Bristo, Ryan Thompson, and Taj Bradley. All of them were also not included in the postseason roster. The hallmark of any baseball team’s success in the 2020s, but especially the Rays’, is their ability to consistently locate valuable players to be the next men up.

This team has never finished higher than 23rd in payroll over the previous five seasons, according to calculations based on the competitive balance tax, but it has the fourth-most wins in baseball—behind only the Los Angeles Dodgers, Houston Astros, and Atlanta Braves—and the Rays have made it to the World Series.

The Rays are probably not good movie subjects because of all the turnover that takes place over a 162-game season. However, that doesn’t automatically make them a poor baseball club or a poor baseball team in the postseason. It is well known to the Rays. Randy Arozarena, who only appeared in 23 games for the team before becoming a standout in the postseason, drove their 2020 pennant drive.

In his postgame remarks on Wednesday, manager Kevin Cash rejected to offer explanations for the team’s lackluster exit and referred to the notion that the Rays’ squad had changed since their strong April campaign as “an easy narrative.”

Cash remarked, “We finished the regular season with the guys that we had. We are who we are.” “With the roster we had, I still think we could have performed better.”

The Rays’ lineup against the Rangers still had five hitters who, in at least 300 plate appearances in 2023, were at least 25% better than the MLB average (by park-adjusted wRC+). They also brought two more prospects who are widely regarded as among the top 50: Junior Caminero and Curtis Mead. Despite their lack of experience, both players have the capacity to be significant contributors.

The Rays had a combination of relatively new players, Josh Lowe and Isaac Paredes, and October veterans, Arozarena and Yandy Díaz. They had hitters who could hit for home runs and contact. In a series where they faced one starter from each side, they faced lefties and righties.

No, the Rays weren’t captured by a silver bullet. They mostly failed to live up to their own expectations. The Rays were one of the most aggressive teams against breaking and offspeed pitches in the regular season, swinging 50.8% of the time—a percentage only exceeded by the Rockies—and batting.259 against them, making them one of the most successful teams in the game (fourth by wOBA).

However, their aggressiveness proved to be ineffective in this wild-card series. They persisted in hitting Eovaldi’s splitter and Montgomery’s curveball and changeup. In these two games, the outcome was devastating. It meant they had fewer opportunities to respond to a Rangers bullpen that faltered miserably in the latter part of the season, compiling an ERA of 4.67 following the trade deadline on August 1.

Even though it didn’t show up as we’d grown accustomed to, it meant that the Rays were authentically themselves.