HUGE Week of Baseball for the Tampa Bay Rays 2009 Playoff Race

In what could be one of the best opportunities for the Rays to gain some ground in the brutal American League East pennant race, the Rays kick off a 2-game set against the Boston Red Sox. First up will be Matt Garza vs. Jon Lester. On Wednesday, the Rays will throw David Price against Brad Penney. It's goes without saying that a 2-game sweep of the Red Sox would be HUGE. More interestingly, the Red Sox follow-up their "Stop at the Trop" with a 4-game weekend series against the New York Yankees. Given the Red Sox domination of the Yankees to date, this series could offer up big swing in fortunes for the Rays.

In addition, the Yankees face Roy Halladay tonight (against Andy Pettite) and throw Sergio Mitre (who's been TERRIBLE - 7.90 ERA) against 3.25 ERA throwing Marc Rzepczynski (who's been a very big positive surprise for the Blue Jays this year). SOOOOO...as it is always fun to speculate, it's not a stretch at all to see the Rays picking up 2-3 games on each of the Red Sox and the Yankees if they can take care of business tonight and tomorrow night against the Red Sox and follow that up with a winning road trip (4-2 would be a good goal for the SEA and LAA series).

I can't state the importance of the Rays next road trip either. This will be the 3rd to last major road trip of the year (the 11-game Sept 7-17 trip is THE BIG ONE, which includes a double-header at Yankee Stadium, but we'll worry about that one later) and is on the West Coast. The WC trips have notoriously been tough on the Rays, so a 4-2 record on this jaunt would be a big win, in my opinion.

Just for fun, here is how things very well could shake out over the next week: Rays take both games from the Red Sox and the Yankees drop both games to Toronto today and tomorrow (based on pitching matchups and home field advantage, this is a very plausible scenario, in my opinion). That would put the Rays 3.0 and 3.5 games back of the Red Sox and Yankees, respectively, after the next 2 days. If the Rays can take 2 out of 3 against Seattle and either the Yankees or the Red Sox wins their weekend series (I'll assume the Yankees win 3 out of 4 for this example as I believe in regression to the mean in baseball), the Rays would then be 4.0 games back of the Yankees and 1.5 games behind the Red Sox. If the Yankees can sweep Boston (seems unlikely to me, but possible), then the Rays would only be 0.5 games behind the Red Sox. If the Red Sox continue their domination of the Yankees in 2009 and sweep them, then the Rays would find themselves 4.5 games behind the Red Sox and 1.0 games behind the Yankees.

No matter how you slice it, the Rays are VERY MUCH in the playoff hunt if they can win their next 2 series (that's the big assumption in my analysis). Thus, this IS A HUGE WEEK OF BASEBALL FOR THE TAMPA BAY RAYS!!!