Rays eye wild September: 'We've got to get hotter than hot'

ST. PETERSBURG -- Hours before the Rays took the field for their wild 4-3 loss to the Padres on Sunday afternoon at Tropicana Field, Zack Littell was talking to Brandon Lowe about their road through the final month of the season.

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The Rays entered the day a game under .500, six games out of the final American League Wild Card spot, with the third-hardest schedule in the Majors left to play. Their chances of making the postseason, according to FanGraphs, had dwindled to 2.1 percent. And yet …

“We’ve got an opportunity to, at the very least, bring it down to the last week and play meaningful baseball,” Littell said. “We've put ourselves definitely in a tough spot, I would say -- on the outside looking in. But with Minnesota, with Boston, with Cleveland all still on the schedule, I don't think it's out of this realm to really make that last week interesting.”

The Rays certainly made Sunday afternoon interesting, staging a bizarre rally against former Tampa Bay reliever Jason Adam to tie the game in the sixth inning on a hit batter (Junior Caminero, who was fine afterward), a run-scoring double-play grounder and a wild pitch.

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But they couldn’t overcome a season-high 10 walks, their most in a game since also walking 10 on Aug. 29, 2019. And the last one came back to bite them. Reliever Manuel Rodríguez walked Jake Cronenworth to lead off the ninth and he advanced to third on a Manny Machado single, then pinch-runner Tyler Wade scored when Jose Siri airmailed the throw home on Xander Bogaerts’ sacrifice fly.

“We kept the scoring down, but the big one came there in the ninth inning,” manager Kevin Cash said. “You know the guys that are coming up and are 3-4-5 [in the Padres' order]. They're all really talented hitters, and they benefited from getting that first baserunner on.”

The Rays put two on in the ninth but couldn’t convert, completing a 1-for-10 day with runners in scoring position, as they dropped their third straight series and their sixth in the past eight. The defeat dropped them back to two games below .500 and seven out of a Wild Card spot.

“We've got to get hotter than hot, basically, is what we need to do,” Cash said. “[Series] splits aren't going to cut it [or] series wins, two out of three. We've got to find ways to do some really special things.

“There's no doubt it's an uphill climb … but we've put ourselves in this spot where we got to play really good baseball and are probably going to need some help from some other teams.”

At the same time, Cash acknowledged, that’s a difficult message to preach to the clubhouse. The Rays can’t worry about the final week of the season when they’ll have to win a lot of games before then to still be in the playoff picture.

“If you think about it where we have to go win every game, you’re going to put too much pressure on yourselves and put too much pressure on the team,” echoed starter Ryan Pepiot, who gave up three runs over three-plus innings in Sunday’s finale.

But the Rays will have perhaps their best opportunity to make up significant ground when they host the Twins, who are battling with the Royals for the final two AL Wild Card spots, for a four-game series starting Monday (6:50 p.m. ET, live on MLB.TV).

They also have six games left against the Red Sox and three against the Tigers, two more postseason hopefuls currently standing between Tampa Bay and a playoff spot, plus three against the Orioles and four against the Guardians.

“It's just more games. It’s the way you’ve got to approach it,” Lowe said. “Can't put any added pressure on ourselves [where], if we don't win one game, we're out of it or anything like that.”

Of course, the Rays’ greatest challenge might not be the schedule or even the standings, but rather the apparent gravitational force pulling them toward .500.

They’ve spent the entire season no more than five games below or three games over .500. They haven’t won or lost more than three consecutive games since they were swept by the Orioles from June 7-10. They were 48-48 before the All-Star break, and they’re 19-21 since.

With the home stretch officially here, do they finally have a run in them?

“Obviously, we’ve got to come out here and play the baseball that we're capable of playing, and the schedule is going to be tough,” said Littell, who will start Monday. “We put ourselves in this spot, so at the end of the day, it's just going out there, competing, controlling what we control and seeing where we're at.”