How real are the Rays? Inside Tampa Bay’s historic unbeaten start
Yes, it’s only 10 games into the 2023 MLB season but what the Tampa Bay Rays have done so far is mind-boggling: A 10-0 record. A plus-58 run differential. And their 1-0 win against the Boston Red Sox on Monday was the first time they’ve won by fewer than four runs.
To make sense of it all, we asked ESPN MLB experts Jeff Passan, David Schoenfield and Bradford Doolittle to answer one of these three questions: Why do the Rays believe this team is special? What do the numbers show us so far? How real are the Rays?
The undefeated Rays! Are they as surprised as we are?
During the Rays’ postgame victory celebrations, when they toast the heroes of the game, players get together and decide who will drink the tequila shot given to the best pitcher that day. Among those who have yet to receive the honor this season: closer Pete Fairbanks. The Rays have won so convincingly that before Fairbanks registered a save to lock down Tampa Bay’s 10th consecutive win Monday, his teammates had saddled him with a new nickname fitting for someone who throws so infrequently: Rarebanks.
Chances are the Rays will level off, Rarebanks will morph back to Fairbanks and the excitement surrounding the most dominant start in nearly a century and a half will give way to a dogfight in the American League East. For now, though, the Rays are a vibe, a team embracing all the things that make it good and running roughshod through an easy early schedule in historic ways.
Everything is working — and lest you believe that’s an exaggeration, chew on these numbers going into Monday night’s 1-0 victory over Boston, the Rays’ third consecutive shutout:
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Runs scored: 76 (1st in MLB)
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Runs allowed: 18 (1st)
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OPS: .967 (1st)
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ERA: 1.89 (1st)
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Barrel %, batters: 14.2% (1st)
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Hard hit %, pitchers: 32.1% (1st)
Category after category, the Rays find themselves at the top. (Which, as we’ll get to below, is in part a function of a schedule that has included series against the Detroit Tigers, Washington Nationals and Oakland Athletics.) And while Tampa Bay’s sprint to an undefeated start has surprised outsiders, it aligns with the Rays’ internal expectations entering the season. From the front office to the clubhouse, they believed they were a very good baseball team. They simply needed to show the world how good.
During an Opening Day players-only meeting, the Rays emphasized that even though they were coming off their fourth consecutive postseason appearance, this was a new year, a new opportunity to play like the team they believed they could be. Wander Franco and Randy Arozarena could be stars. Jeffrey Springs and Drew Rasmussen could take leaps. The bullpen could be the island of misfit toys. They just needed to do it together.
Winning 10 games — the first nine by at least four runs, something that hadn’t been done during a nine-or-more-game winning streak since 1884, when the pitcher’s mound was 50 feet from home plate — reinforced that notion of camaraderie, fellowship, fun. This isn’t a team that started in the depths of the minor leagues together and worked its way up; only seven of the players on the Rays’ 26-man roster are homegrown. They’ve nonetheless figured out how to coalesce, with each player filling a necessary role, something the Rays preach and achieve better than anyone.
Franco and Arozarena are playing like stars — and the next eight hitters with the most plate appearances on the team (Luke Raley, Harold Ramirez, Josh Lowe, Jose Siri, Brandon Lowe, Manuel Margot, Isaac Paredes and Yandy Diaz) all are slugging .467 or better. Springs and Rasmussen have thrown a combined 26 scoreless innings, and Shane McClanahan and Zach Eflin aren’t far behind, with six runs allowed over 23 innings. The bullpen ERA of 1.50 is best in the AL.
Long lauded for its relief depth, Tampa Bay entered the season looking for something new. Even with Tyler Glasnow out because of a strained oblique, the Rays wanted their starting pitchers to work deeper into games and avoid overtaxing their bullpen. It has mostly worked: Before using an opener against Boston, Tampa Bay’s 29 innings from relievers this year were the third fewest in baseball.
The Rays’ schedule grew more meddlesome starting Monday against Boston, and it really accelerates starting May 5: New York Yankees, at Baltimore Orioles, at Yankees, at New York Mets, Milwaukee Brewers, Toronto Blue Jays, Los Angeles Dodgers — 23 games in 24 days. By that point, they’ll presumably have come back to earth, but until then, they’re happy to keep hoisting those shots of tequila, knowing what they are doing, regardless of who they’ve done it against, is indeed rare. — Passan
So how much of this is the Rays — and how much is the competition they are facing?
It’s been 20 years since the 2003 Kansas City Royals started 9-0 — the last team before the Rays to do that. Those Royals finished 83-79, and if they’re remembered for anything, it’s for posting the franchise’s only winning season between 1995 and 2012.
Now after getting to 10-0, the Rays are aiming for the 1987 Milwaukee Brewers and 1982 Atlanta Braves, who both started with 13 straight wins, the longest winning streaks to begin a season. The Braves held on to win the NL West that season (that’s right, they were in the West), but the after slugging outfielder Rob Deer made the cover of Sports Illustrated, the Brewers soon squandered their hot start with a 12-game losing streak in May.
While winning 10 straight to start the season is unusual, winning nine in a row isn’t: There were six separate winning streaks of at least nine games last season, including the Seattle Mariners and Braves both winning 14 in a row. But what we haven’t seen in a long time is a nine-game stretch of dominance like this one by Tampa Bay. The Rays won all nine games by at least four runs, the first team to do that at any point in a season since the 1939 Yankees — a team many consider the greatest of all time.
The Rays have trailed in just two of their 10 games — they trailed the Nationals for five innings in their fifth game before scoring five runs in the top of the ninth on three home runs for a 10-6 victory and they trailed the A’s 1-0 in the top of the second inning in their seventh game before exploding for six runs in the bottom of that inning. The Rays’ run differential of plus-58 is the best through the first 10 games of a season since the 1884 St. Louis Maroons of the dubiously professional Union Association and the 1884 New York Gothams of the National League. Those comparisons to teams from 1884 are a little silly, so let’s compare that run differential to last season’s top winning streaks:
Mariners (14): +36
Braves (14): +60
Dodgers (12): +61
Astros (11): +43
Yankees (11): +48
Orioles (10): +22
The Rays’ run differential per game still beats any of those streaks. This is where we now mention who the Rays have played: the Tigers, Nationals, A’s and now one game against the Red Sox. There’s a strong likelihood that three of those clubs might be the three worst teams in the majors at the end of the season. So, yes, the Rays took advantage of a soft schedule. But that’s usually the case with winning streaks. The Braves beat the Nationals, Pittsburgh Pirates, A’s, Colorado Rockies and Arizona Diamondbacks in their 14-game streak, all teams that would finish with losing records, while the Mariners also played the Nationals and A’s (although they did win six in a row against the Blue Jays and San Diego Padres).
That’s not to diminish what the Rays have done — they’re succeeding in every aspect of the game. Perhaps the biggest key is they’re hitting a lot of home runs — 25 so far, in all 10 games this season. The Rays were third in the AL in home runs in 2021 when they finished second in runs scored, but they fell all the way to 11th in both categories last season. If they keep hitting home runs — Franco leads the way with four — they’re going to be tough to beat. — Schoenfield
Bottom line: Are the Rays for real?
After the Rays’ back-to-back 11-0 drubbings of the rebuilding Athletics over the weekend, their start made the leap from absurd to sublime. At that point, the Rays were on pace to outscore their opponents 1,350 to 324 this season. Those numbers are stunning, eye-popping, spine-tingling, or whatever hyperbolic adjective you want to conjure. They are also, if we’re being realistic, all but fictional.
No MLB team is that good. If you identified the best possible 40-man roster made up of all the best-right-now professional baseball players in the world and put them on the same team, that club would not outscore its opponents by 1,026 runs over the course of a season. It would not do anything close to that. So from that standpoint, as amazing as the Rays have been, this start is more unreal than real.
Still, there are lots of reasons to think that this unprecedented start offers some real evidence of a special team, quality of opposition aside. It’s way, way too early to start talking about things like 116 wins or a 1939 Yankees-level run differential, which was a modern era record plus-411. However, it’s not too early to suggest that the Rays might have already surpassed the Yankees as the favorites in the AL East. Some of the betting outlets have flipped, others have the Rays closing in fast. Either way, the bottom line is that the Rays’ early surge is creating a lot of believers.
This is not because the Yankees have floundered, either. New York has been very good in the early going and has plenty of reasons to stake a claim to the title as the best team in the majors. My own power rankings have the Rays and Yankees as the top two clubs in baseball, in that order. The Rays won the AL East in 58% of my most recent run of simulations, up from 19% when the season began. That surge has happened even though the Yankees’ strong power rating hasn’t changed much. The Bombers have played to expectations, but the Rays have exceeded their forecast to a degree that has changed their outlook, even though the season is less than two weeks old and even though they opened the season against baseball’s lesser lights.
All this being said, I do think the scale of the Rays’ early run differential overwhelms systems like mine and, I assume, others. Sure, we adjust for schedule but those adjustments are conservative, especially this early in the season. The Rays will fall back, relatively speaking. The only question is how far. We’ll know a lot more about six weeks from now, as the Rays have already completed one of the softest stretches of schedule any team will have this season. In the weeks ahead, matchups with the Yankees, Mets, Blue Jays, Houston Astros, Red Sox and Brewers all loom.
For now, what we can do is look at some of the early metrics that have led to this run, the ones that are somewhat opponent agnostic and meaningful in short samples.
On offense, the Rays lead the majors in barrel rate and near the top in average exit velocity, and hard-hit rate. This has led to an off-the-charts isolated power percentage (.299) that laps the field. For context: The big-league record for isolated power at the team level in a season in a non-shortened season is .224, by the 2019 Minnesota Twins. So that’s not sustainable and there is probably a strong element in that figure that reflects the pitching the Rays have faced.
Still, stylistically this is who the Rays are. Only the Athletics and Pirates have a higher average launch angle. Elevating the ball is what this collection of Rays seeks to do. They won’t keep hitting homers at this rate, but they’ll keep trying.
As their homer rates drop, however, the Rays’ offense could still maintain much of its early scoring rate by a corresponding climb in offensive BABIP. So far, Tampa Bay’s BABIP is just .283, 16 points below the big league average, and that’s despite all of those hard-hit balls. The sky-high flyball rate has something to do with that (fly balls that don’t leave the yard tend to be caught) but the Rays do have a line-drive rate around league average. Yet their average on line drives is about 40 points below league average. This, too, will level out and in this category, it’ll be to the Rays’ favor.
On the pitching side, one quick observation we can make is the Rays have been baseball’s stingiest run prevention team even though Glasnow has been on the IL with an oblique injury. Also: The Rays’ team defensive metrics have been more middling than elite, but Tampa Bay projected to land somewhere in the six-to-eight range in team defense going into the season.
As those things find their levels, it should be a mild boost for the Rays on the run-prevention side. Their early sub-2.00 ERA isn’t sustainable, of course. In fact, the Rays have been merely good (as opposed to off the charts) in things like FIP and strikeout-minus-walks percentage. Per Statcast, their WOBA allowed (.240) is a whopping 28 points better than their expected WOBA (.268). Those numbers will move closer together as the season goes along.
Here’s the thing: That expected WOBA figure is the second-best in the majors. That’s really the theme of the Rays across the board. Their key indicators aren’t going to remain this far ahead of the majors over the full season. But that doesn’t mean that they won’t remain strong.
For now, all we can say is that the Rays were a strong on-paper team before the season started and what they’ve done against lesser opposition to date is remarkable. But all of those wins and runs and runs prevented have given Tampa Bay a sprinting start to the campaign. Surely the Rays will be challenged as the months pass, but the onus is now on the competition to chase them down.
Maybe the Rays haven’t yet broken baseball. Still, this is a team we expected to be good, really good, and this amazing start suggests that despite our high hopes for the 2023 Rays, we may have actually underrated them. — Doolittle
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Adam Rittenberg
Michigan’s investigation into its football program and wider athletic department could lead to findings of additional misconduct that might trigger more employment terminations, interim university president Domenico Grasso said Wednesday.
In a video statement, Grasso described the week since football coach Sherrone Moore’s firing as “no doubt a challenging time for our university community.”
Michigan fired Moore on Dec. 10 for engaging in an inappropriate relationship with a staff member, discovered through a university investigation. Moore faces three criminal charges, including felony third-degree home invasion, for allegedly confronting the staff member at her residence after being fired.
Michigan’s investigation into Moore’s conduct and the football program continues, and the university commissioned Chicago-based law firm Jenner & Block to conduct a larger review of the athletic department culture, conduct and procedures following a series of scandals.
“We will take whatever steps are necessary to ensure that conduct like this does not happen again,” said Grasso, who took over as interim president in May and will step down when a permanent president is installed. “Make no mistake. We will leave no stone unturned, and any further action we take will be based on credible evidence and findings, developed through a rigorous investigation.
“If the university learns of information through this investigation or otherwise that warrants a termination of any employee, we will act swiftly, just as we did in the case of Coach Moore.”
Grasso encouraged those who have information regarding misconduct within the football program or athletic department to contact Jenner & Block.
“Our focus is strictly on uncovering the facts,” Grasso said. “It is my job, my duty, to ensure the integrity of this investigation.”
Grasso also briefly addressed Michigan’s search for its next football coach. Athletic director Warde Manuel, who has led the department since 2016, has not publicly addressed the search, which he is expected to lead.
Biff Poggi, a Michigan staff member under both Moore and predecessor Jim Harbaugh, is serving as interim head coach for Michigan’s upcoming Cheez-It Citrus Bowl matchup against Texas on Dec. 31.
“We will hire an individual who is of the highest moral character and who will serve as a role model and a respected leader for the entire football program,” Grasso said. “And who will, with dignity and integrity, be a fierce competitor.”
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Greg Wyshynski
Boston Bruins forward Morgan Geekie can finish a Rubik’s Cube in under a minute.
“I mean, right now I’d be pretty rusty,” he said. “I’m not insane, like those kids that you see on TV, but I’m pretty good at them.”
When Geekie was around 10 years old, a cousin taught him how to speed solve the puzzle. While some have never found a way to line up that mosaic of colors despite years of trying, Geekie said it’s doable once one cracks the code. One summer at their lake cottage, his cousin wrote down its patterns. Geekie spent two weeks memorizing them and working out solutions while fiddling with the cube.
“It’s basically just all algorithms. You just do the same moves all the time once you get the pieces in the right spot. Once you do that, I mean, it’s pretty cut and dry. Everything goes in order,” he said. “I haven’t really forgot. It’s just one of those things that once you know it, you know it.”
Perhaps Geekie just knows how to score goals now, too.
That’s the simplest rationalization for the 27-year-old’s unexpected transformation into one of the NHL’s premier goal scorers. Through 34 games, Geekie is second in the NHL with 24 goals, trailing only the dominant Nathan MacKinnon of the Colorado Avalanche (28). Going back to the start of last season, Geekie is tied for 11th in goals scored (57).
Geekie scored 33 goals in 2024-25, which is 16 more than his previous career high set two years ago with the Bruins. He shot 22%, which obliterated his previous career best of 13.1% set in 2023-24.
There’s always an offensive player whose unexpected scoring surge in one season makes him the consensus choice for regression the following season. Entering this season, that player was Geekie.
He was the first player listed on ESPN’s rundown of regression candidates, with the expectation that he would top out at 26 goals. Sports Illustrated did the same thing, writing that his “offensive numbers are set to dip next season.” Daily Faceoff wrote that Geekie’s shooting percentage was “a strong indication that his performance isn’t sustainable, at least at this level” for the Bruins.
Geekie gets it. He called the predictions “a fair statement” given that he was scoring less than 10 goals in a season with the Seattle Kraken just a few seasons ago.
“I see it all. It’s an easy cherry to pick to be like, ‘Obviously he’s shooting 22%, it’s going to go down.’ It didn’t bother me at all,” Geekie said.
Rather than regress, Geekie has progressed this season. Through 34 games, he is shooting 28.2%.
“I mean, it’s got to go down at some point,” he said, with a laugh. “Like I said, I don’t really pay attention to that and I’m not somebody that has 10 shots a game, so I just try to make the most of my opportunities when I get the puck.”
GEEKIE IS AMUSED by the focus on his shooting percentage, because he feels there are easy explanations for it. The first is that he doesn’t believe he shoots the puck all that much. Over the past two seasons, David Pastrnak averaged 3.79 shots per game in 110 games. Geekie averaged 2.11 in that same span. Only Sidney Crosby (2.45 shots per game) has a lower average than Geekie (2.48) among the top 10 goal-scorers this season.
“I feel like I’m a big quality over quantity person,” he said.
His first season in Boston, coach Jim Montgomery stressed the need for Geekie to get chances from deep inside the attacking zone.
“I think a high-danger chance is better than just shooting it from the wall. That’s kind of the mentality that I’ve had always. I’m not trying to waste shots that aren’t good for anybody,” Geekie said. “Unless I’m trying to create something off it, I’m honestly not trying to put it on net. Maybe that’s why I end up where I end up.”
Pastrnak recently said the Bruins were reminding Geekie to shoot the puck more often. In fairness, Geekie is shooting more this season. Pastrnak said Geekie is “definitely trying to be a little more selfish to take them” when he fights into high-danger areas of the ice. But Geekie acknowledged there are sometimes philosophical differences between his striving for quality over his team’s desire for quantity.
“I think it’s a push and pull,” he said. “It’s like, I don’t think I need to be shooting this, but other people think that it still gives us an opportunity to create a chance. So I just try to keep that in mind when I have the puck”
This is Geekie’s seventh season in the NHL. He was selected by the Carolina Hurricanes with the 67th pick in the 2017 draft as a goal-scoring forward with the WHL Tri-City Americans. His first two seasons as a pro were mostly spent in the AHL with the Charlotte Checkers, before playing 36 games with the Hurricanes in 2020-21.
That summer, the Seattle Kraken held their expansion draft as the NHL’s newest team. Geekie was left off Carolina’s protected list. At the time, it wasn’t expected that former Hurricanes GM Ron Francis would select him for the Kraken, with options like defenseman Jake Bean and forward Nino Niederreiter available from Carolina. But Geekie was the choice, a player whom Francis had drafted while with the Canes.
Geekie had 22 points in 73 games in his first season in Seattle, skating 12:36 per game with just seven goals. His second campaign saw him jump to 28 points in 69 games, but with even less ice time (10:27).
He was a restricted free agent after the 2022-23 season. Francis attempted to re-sign him before the deadline for submitting qualifying offers, but Geekie and his representatives declined it. The two sides couldn’t find common ground. Rather than go to arbitration, where the Kraken weren’t keen on Geekie potentially setting the terms of his next deal, they chose not to qualify him, making him an unrestricted free agent.
“With Morgan, we did make what I felt was a pretty fair offer,” Francis said at the time, via Sound of Hockey. “It didn’t work out, and he has the right once we don’t qualify him to go elsewhere.”
And so he went to Boston, signing a two-year deal worth $4 million in total.
While he wasn’t seeing much time with the Kraken, Geekie felt he was improving as a player. He said a “integral part” of that development was thanks to Jonathan Sigalet, a skills coach who improved all facets of his game.
“When I first started working with him, he was adamant that he wasn’t going to try and make me play like I’m on the first line,” Geekie recalled. “He said, ‘We both know that trying to do things that you do on the first line on the fourth line is going to get you in the press box.'”
He said working with Siglet slowed the game down for him. He started to see the game differently. He began to see “little tendencies” that all of the NHL’s good players share. Geekie also appreciated having a “third party” assessment for his play, apart from that of his coaches and his own.
Geekie was immediately given an opportunity to thrive in Boston in 2023-24, playing 15:21 in his first game with the Bruins. He ended up averaging 15:25 per game, with 17 goals and 22 assists in 76 games. He earned time with Pastrnak and Pavel Zacha on the Bruins’ top line.
His follow-up season didn’t start well. Geekie scored one goal in his first 17 games and was a healthy scratch early in the season. Some trade whispers started about him as a pending restricted free agent. He had eight goals by the end of the 2024 calendar year.
How did he end up with 33 of them? With one of the greatest goal-scoring heaters this side of Alex Ovechkin: Geekie scored 14 goals in his last 20 games of the season. His chemistry with Pastrnak was undeniable — the Bruins scoring ace assisted on 21 of Geekie’s 33 goals last season.
Geekie expressed a desire to stay with the Bruins. The feeling was mutual, as GM Don Sweeney in June handed him a six-year, $33 million contract for a team-friendly $5.5 million annual cap hit.
WHEN GEEKIE SIGNED his new contract, he decided he wanted to join in the tradition of NHL players celebrating a windfall with their teammates. It’s usually a dinner or something of that nature.
But Geekie wanted to do something different.
“Everybody’s eating at the same restaurants in every city. And I’m sure they’d remember it for a little while, but I think it would be just one of those things like, ‘Hey, thanks for dinner.’ So I wanted to do something a little more nostalgic,” he said.
Geekie is a huge baseball fan who played competitively until his late teens. He was in the process of designing a personalized baseball glove for himself through a company called 44 Pro Custom Gloves when his wife, Emma, suggested that he design ones for all of his teammates as a gift.
Geekie started the process in July, sketching out what he wanted on the gloves for 30 teammates — including players that were on the bubble for the Bruins’ roster this season. He had the biographical information for them, from their birth cities and countries to their schools to where they played junior hockey.
“Honestly, for probably three weeks, I just sat in front of my TV watching baseball and I would just draft gloves up. I thought it was so fun,” Geekie said. “My wife got sick of me for a little while.”
He would FaceTime his brother Noah, a coach at Okotoks Dawgs Academy in Alberta, to bounce the designs off him and get input. He was cognizant of having the designs as unique as possible, despite some of the school colors being similar for his teammates.
Before a practice in October, Geekie delivered the gloves to the locker room stalls of his teammates. It went over well.
“Baseball is not that big in Sweden, but it’s obviously cool to have,” center Elias Lindholm told the Bruins website, having received a glove with a Swedish flag on it. “Hopefully, when my kids get a little bit older, we can play a little game or something. For now, it is just going to be at home, resting.”
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Morgan Geekie nets goal for Bruins
Morgan Geekie nets goal for Bruins
While the gloves were a chance to celebrate with his teammates, there weren’t many celebrations anticipated for Boston this season. The Bruins were trading players away at last season’s trade deadline, sending mainstays like captain Brad Marchand (Florida), center Charlie Coyle (Colorado) and defenseman Brandon Carlo (Toronto) elsewhere. They had an incoming first-year coach in Marco Sturm. At best, it was supposed to be a transition year for the Bruins.
But through 34 games, Boston is second in the Atlantic Division with a 20-14-0 record, within a point of division-leading Detroit in the crowded Eastern Conference.
Many around the NHL were surprised. Geekie wasn’t.
“We underperformed. Last season was like the perfect storm of bad events with our kind of discombobulated training camp and then having a coaching change and just kind of everything that could have went wrong went wrong,” Geekie said. “The core group we have is just too good to be written off. But I understand why people had doubts about us.”
But defying doubts is what Morgan Geekie’s all about, whether it’s his team’s predicted finish in the standings or his own predicted regression as a scorer.
“He has everything to score 50 in this league,” Pastrnak said. “He has a heck of a shot. He has the goal-scoring instincts. He is going to get it one day.”
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