by
Greek Giant
For those of you keeping score at home “FFS” is an abbreviation for an exclamation of frustration that is particularly British “For F___s Sake.” Tonight the Tampa Bay Rays visit Willie Mays Field for the first of three games. The Giants are in desperate need of a win at home. Let’s win one game before we can talk about winning an actual, like, you know, series at home. Tampa Bay went through a torrid streak of winning in May and June but has fallen back to Earth in july and August stands at a record of 59-63, 12 games behind the American League East-leading Toronto Blue Jays. The Rays are unlikely to even make the postseason.
Junior Caminero, the Rays third baseman, is having a superb season with 34 homers and 86 RBIs. Jonathan Aranda is batting .316 and leads the team in hitting. Brandon Lowe, the second baseman for Tampa Bay, is a good player and is having another strong season with 24 round-trippers despite missing some games due to a stint on the IL. Tampa Bay is a strange team, very streaky. Like many teams, their weakness is pitching, both starting and relief pitching. It’s amazing how much at a premium strong pitching is this season.
There was a very interesting and flawed article in The New York Times Magazine earlier this week by Bruce Schoenfield on the Rays, their baseball philosophy and their owner, Stu Sternberg. It goes into deep detail on their moneyball approach, their origins as a highly experimental club, and the owner’s liberal creative, outside the box approach to running an MLB team. I highly recommend it I also wrote this comment in response to the author’s citation of the Rays being the third winningest team in the regular season since 2008, after the Yankees and the Dodgers:
..the Analytics revolution does not equal World Series titles. A true MLB winner is a World Series champion. The regular season is meaningless without the final prize. No analytics-first team has ever won a World Series. This article failed to mention the terrible decisions by the Rays Manager in the 2020 World Series, decisions based on some analytics guidebook to managing. That note about the Rays winning the third most games in the last 17 years is completely meaningless and without context. How many times have the Rays won the World Series? The answer is zero. The Giants, my team, went through a magical run of three titles (2010, 2012 and 2014) in five years with some lean years in between and after. As a fan, I could not care less about regular season wins. You want to celebrate the title.
The problem with Moneyball and their practitioners is that they are bottom-feeders and they begin with a poor, loser’s mentality. It’s a philosophy for losing less, not winning more. The current Rays owner deserves credit for his unorthodox and creative thinking but he is a Robber baron and he has treated his team and his fans with contempt as much as he has won regular season games. If he were an owner committed to winning and committed to his fans he would build a privately financed stadium complex with a retractable roof in Tampa. But of course, he wants a city or a county government to foot half or most of the bill.
The Pitching Matchups
Tonight: Joe Boyle, 1-2, 3.82 ERA versus Landon Roupp (making his return from the IL!), 7-6, 3.11 ERA, Game time is 7:15 PM
Saturday: Adrian Houser, 6-4, 2.84 ERA versus Justin Verlander, 1-9, 4.53 ERA, Game Time is 6:05 PM
Sunday: Ryan Pepiot, 8-9, 3.86 ERA versus Logan Webb, 10-9, 3.34 ERA. Game time is 4:05 PM.
The Giants Team Photo
This is cute:
A quarter century later, here are all the #SFGiants teams that have suited up at @OracleParkSF 🧵 pic.twitter.com/R5NOAsbhi3
— SFGiants (@SFGiants) August 14, 2025
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