'It's been tough': Rays lose fifth straight

For more than a month, the Rays seemed almost allergic to defeat. But their losses have come fast, furious and frustrating this week.

Mariners right fielder Mitch Haniger lined a first-pitch RBI single to left field off Rays reliever J.P. Feyereisen in the 10th inning, and Tampa Bay trudged back into the visitors’ clubhouse with a 6-5 loss to Seattle at T-Mobile Park on Saturday night.

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The Rays have lost five games in a row, their longest skid of the season. Their defeat and the Red Sox win knocked them out of first place by half a game in the American League East, where they had resided alone since the end of play on May 24. Three of their last four games have been walk-off defeats, with two of them coming in extra innings.

“Losing is never fun. And especially the way we've been losing in close games, those aren't fun. But we're a great team still, and we're going to get through this,” Rays left-hander Josh Fleming said. “We’re going to get out of this little funk that we're in, and we're going to be rolling soon.”

The funk actually dates back to their last win Monday night in Chicago, when ace Tyler Glasnow exited with an injury that could sideline him for most or all of the season. The next night, the Rays were shut out for just the third time this season. Then came consecutive walk-off losses, one in Chicago and another in Seattle. On Friday, their offense went quiet after Michael Wacha struggled through a tough first inning. On Saturday, they fell to 3-7 in extra-inning games on the year.

The Rays set themselves up well by going 16-1 from May 13-31, and 22-6 overall last month. But they are now 8-9 in June, and this losing streak has been full of aggravating games like Saturday.

“It hasn't been ideal. I mean, it's been tough,” manager Kevin Cash said. “We don't like to lose games, and we generally don't put together these types of strings, this type of negative run. But we’ve got to come back and get them tomorrow.”

One particularly vexing aspect of the Rays’ latest defeat was that they did plenty of things right. They just didn’t do enough, a theme throughout this past week.

The Rays scored two runs in the second then almost immediately found themselves trailing again. Fleming gave up three consecutive hits to begin the inning, allowing one run on another hit by former Ray Jake Bauers, then walked Dylan Moore to load the bases. After striking out the next two batters, Fleming fired a sinker down and in that J.P. Crawford lined just over the right-field wall for a grand slam.

“I'll be honest, I didn't think it was going out. I knew he hit it hard,” Fleming said. “I saw it skip over the fence, and I was like, just, damn it. That's baseball.”

Fleming settled down from there and didn’t allow another run while throwing 110 pitches in 6 1/3 innings. And Tampa Bay’s lineup did its part from there, too, as Mike Zunino crushed his 14th homer of the season off Logan Gilbert in the fifth and Manuel Margot went deep to left off Gilbert in the sixth. Another baserunner in either moment would have done wonders for the Rays, but they struggled to find their way on as they struck out 11 times without a walk.

It looked like Joey Wendle might tie the game with one out in the ninth, but the fly ball he hit off Kendall Graveman landed in Taylor Trammell’s glove on the warning track. Up came Brandon Lowe, pinch-hitting on a day off, with Cash saying Saturday afternoon that he’d “help us late in the ballgame with a big at-bat if needed.”

It was needed. Lowe clobbered a hanging 2-0 pitch from Graveman out to center field, tying the game with his 13th home run of the season and the first pinch-hit homer of his career.

“It’s a great at-bat and something that B-Lowe is going to really be able to build off of,” Zunino said. “It was uplifting for us. We just couldn't complete it, though.”

The Rays had a chance to change that and end their skid. With Zunino starting on second base as the automatic runner in the 10th, Kevin Kiermaier flied out and Randy Arozarena bounced into another out that moved Zunino to third. He was left there, however, as Ji-Man Choi flied out.

“We're not showing the adjustability with it that we're capable of doing at the plate, and it cost us multiple times this season where just moving the baseball, getting the guy from second to third gives us that much better of a chance,” Cash said. “We just didn't get it done tonight, and we haven't been very good at that here as of late.”

One pitch later, the game was over. Feyereisen started off Haniger, a fastball hitter, with a breaking ball that Haniger swatted into left field to drive in Crawford from second.

“Any loss is frustrating, but it is a little bit more frustrating when we’re right there with them the whole time and we just come up short,” Fleming said. “It's going to go that way sometimes, and teams are going to go through slumps like this, and we'll get out of it.”