What a night! What a game! What a series! As the rest of the CL crew was loafin’ it up at the Best of the Bay Awards, your intrepid Tampa Bay Rays blogger was dutifully in attendance at Tropicana Field for Game Three of the series with the New York Yankees. While I wanted to see Auto? Automatic??, I suppose Dan Johnson’s two-homer display and Rafael Soriano’s exciting save will have to do.
Wednesday night’s game didn’t look like a great start for Rays pitcher “Big Game” James Shields. Jimmy allowed a leadoff single to Derek Jeter and a one-out base hit to Mark Texeira to move the long-time Yankees shortstop to third. He then walked Alex Rodriguez and allowed an RBI-single to Robinson Cano. Shields got Lance Berkman to ground into a 4-6-3 double play to put out the fire with only a single run scored.
That would be the only damage to Shields, who turned his evening around; the Rays right-hander pitched six and one-third innings, allowing the one run on eight hits. He allowed two walks and struck out eight men. With the win, he improves to 14-12. It was nice to see him remember he has a ridiculously awesome change-up, as he used it well this evening.
The Rays came back to take the lead in the bottom of the fifth inning. Held hit-less through four frames, the Rays got their first base runner of the evening when Evan Longoria led off with a line-drive single to center field. Longo moved to second on Matt Joyce’s ground out and into third base on a wild pitch by Yankees starting pitcher Phil Hughes with Dan Johnson at the plate. Johnson ran the count full and launched a 3-2 fastball into the right-field stands, giving the Rays a fragile 2-1 lead.
This article appears in Sep 16-22, 2010.