Arozarena's hit nets banged-up Rays big win

BALTIMORE -- If any team is deep enough to survive a significant spate of injuries, logic dictates it will be the Rays. No team in baseball is hobbling into the Trade Deadline quite like Tampa Bay, which left Oriole Park at Camden Yards on Wednesday night with 17 players on its injured list, seemingly losing another regular every day.

Few teams needed a win quite as badly, either.

So for the Rays, who’ve built a brand out of their boundless organizational depth, the hard-fought, 6-4 victory in 10 innings that the club squeezed out over the Orioles was as cathartic as it was instructive. Tampa Bay used a two-run 10th inning rally to snap its season-high four-game losing streak. In the process, the Rays salvaged a steamy night that saw them lose yet another key piece to injury (reliever Matt Wisler) and watch another late-inning lead slip away -- though unlike Monday night, they recovered from this one.

“We’ve started the second half a little bit slow,” said Randy Arozarena, (through team interpreter Manny Navarro), whose two-run double off Baltimore's All-Star closer Jorge López proved the game-winner. “But as long as we have that confidence, I think we can just keep it going from there.”

Before Arozarena’s big hit and Pete Fairbanks’ first save, the Rays were reeling a little bit. They’re still in the thick of things thanks to that aforementioned depth, but they’re testing its limits. Their 17 players on the injured list are the most of any team in the Majors. The players sidelined by various issues run the gamut from veteran stalwarts out for the year (Kevin Kiermaier, Mike Zunino) to key contributors still a ways away (Wander Franco, Manuel Margot) to important arms (like Wisler, who landed on the IL on Wednesday) and almost all of Tampa Bay’s high-level catching depth.

They’re looking to both their remaining healthy regulars like Arozarena and fresh faces, like newly-minted Baltimore villain Luke Raley (whose second-inning solo homer was his first in 13 games with the club), to fill those gaps, particularly on the offensive end. On the pitching side, righties like Ryan Thompson and Justin Adam especially figure to be leaned on more in light of Wisler’s surprise neck injury.

In that vein, there was a familiarity to Arozarena’s big hit given it came against the Orioles, against whom he’s crushed historically (.378, 13 HR in 33 games). Wednesday’s victory was Tampa Bay’s second in six games since the All-Star break, and only third in nine games in Baltimore this year, after going a perfect 9-0 at Camden Yards in 2021. It also stretched the club's lead in the jumbled AL Wild Card race back to four games over the no-longer-last-place O’s.

“That’s a good sign for our team, that we’re battling back like that,” said winning pitcher Colin Poche. “We were pretty desperate for a win today.”

A win they got, indeed -- but it wasn’t exactly pretty. The Rays hit three batters, made their MLB-leading 48th out on the bases and endured their second bullpen meltdown in as many nights, with Poche coughing up Jorge Mateo’s game-tying homer in the ninth.

That erased the 4-plus innings of air-tight relief Thompson, Brooks Raley and Adam strung together behind Drew Rasmussen, who gutted through four-plus innings on his 27th birthday.

“It’s been a little bit of a grind, this road trip, and we’re trying to finish it on a high note,” manager Kevin Cash said. “It felt like there was pressure the entire game. Our pitchers were pitching with runners on base, having to make pitches and execute pitches.”

Eventually, they made enough. It took a village. The Rays know the stretch run will, too.

“As a team, it just shows that no matter what happens the night before, we’re going to come back and attack,” Poche said. “That’s the only way we’re going to have success.”