ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. -- At various points inside Tropicana Field, as the Boston Red Sox made it clear they weren't going to fade easily into the night, you've never heard 40,000 mostly silent people. It was so eerily quiet at moments you could hear fans putting the champagne corks back into the bottles.
The fun-loving, happy-go-lucky Tampa Bay Rays have stopped smiling and joking. They know this has developed from a rout into a knife fight.
The blood pressure is rising, the sphincter tightening, and the CinderRays are no longer merrily skipping through the wilds unchallenged. There is a big, bad bully on their six.
I don't want to say that Tampa Bay is choking, but a whale was just spotted in the Atlantic giving a Devil Ray the Heimlich maneuver.
Troy Polamalu has reversed himself. He now says it's the Rays who are pansies.
The Rays were once on the fast track to the World Series and now they're riding the Pineapple Express to possible oblivion.
Suddenly all those Mohawk haircuts look really, really stupid.
Like many, I declared Boston baked after Game 4. Should've known the Rays were untrustworthy newbies and Boston is harder to kill than Carrot Top. I'll never declare the Red Sox dead ever again. I don't care if they're spotted in the Back Bay with a stake in their heart and Van Helsing in hot pursuit.
Well, actually, let's thank the Rays for doing their part to help save the planet from a Rays-Philadelphia championship monstrosity. That's a World Series where you actually pray for a television network's routers to do the Macarena just as the game begins.
The Sox have done this shocking rise-from-the-dead thing before. This group might be the most mentally tough team we've ever seen in baseball. Still, if the Rays lose this series it will be one of the greatest chokes in postseason history.
In any sport.
And they're on the verge of doing just that.
"It's all about how we react to the moment, and it's a seventh game," manager Joe Maddon said. "It's a great learning experience. For us to win that game would be something special for us, also. So it's not about looking into the past. It's about looking into the future right now. We've got to get ready to play that game tomorrow. We've got (Matt) Garza ready to pitch and we're going to go out and play our game, and that's basically how I'm going to look at it. It has nothing to do with what happened over the last couple days."
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| Cliff Floyd should remember what team he plays for and what team he faces the next time he talks. (US Presswire) |
Maddon sounds like someone trying to convince himself as opposed to the Red Sox who are a team that knows what they can do in these impossible spots.
The Rays are big-game virgins. The Red Sox have notches in their belts.
Everything has switched: the momentum, the efficiency of Red Sox hitting, the pitching of Josh Beckett. The entire personality of the series has undergone a 180 degree tilt.
Tampa Bay losing would be worse than New York's falling to Boston in 2004 and Cleveland losing to them last year. That's because the Rays had precedent. They witnessed not once but twice what happens when you allow the Red Sox breathing room.
The Yankees were nabbed by surprise. Nothing like that had happened in baseball before. The Rays have absolutely no excuse. They should know better. Tampa Bay needed to do what Philadelphia did. The Phillies took inferior NLCS competition in the Los Angeles Dodgers and pummeled them unconscious. The Rays have suddenly demonstrated a lack of heart while simultaneously performing CPR on their opponent, a Boston team without Manny Ramirez and until recently mostly struggling stars.
I know that saying anything bad about the darling Rays is like gunning down a unicorn but allowing this series to go to a dangerous, improbable seventh game is wholly inexcusable.
Not only are the Rays blowing it they're being a tad cocky, if not obnoxious, in the process. Tampa Bay's Cliff Floyd metaphorically slapped Beckett in the face on Friday in anticipation of facing him on Saturday night. "We don't go up there and think, 'Now we've got to beat Beckett' -- no one cares about Beckett," Floyd told the media before Game 6. "Face him the same way you face everybody else. If anything, Beckett should be worried about us. We just beat him."
Who is he, Cliff Floyd or Floyd Mayweather?
Show some humility, jackass.
Beckett's been getting rocked, that's true. He gave up a home run in the first inning on Saturday night to B.J. Upton that glanced off a portion of the Tropicana Stadium roof.
Yet who the hell is Cliff Floyd to talk smack?
If the Rays aren't careful for what will be a dramatic Game 7 on Sunday, people are going to be asking what the heck happened to the Rays?
Were they phonies all along?
In fact, maybe we should start asking that right now.
