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Ditto.

Cue "Brie Pottery Gif" in 3...2...1...

PS: She Knows! (.com)

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He has a degree rather than medicine, but the closest thing baseball has to the fictional Moonlight Graham character in Field of Dreams is now a part of the Rays 25-man roster. Earlier today, the Rays traded Durham Bulls outfielder Kyle Hudson to the Phillies for veteran minor league outfielder Rich Thompson and have added him to the 25 man roster as his name appears on tonight's lineup card per Joe Smith of the Tampa Bay Times.

Thompson was drafted in the 2000 draft by Toronto and has but one major league plate appearance in his professional career and that came in 2004 as a Rule 5 player with the Royals. One of our readers pointed out that the plate appearance came against former Devil Rays catcher Tim Laker in a game whose winning pitcher was current television color analyst Brian Anderson.

He was returned to the Pirates a few days after that plate appearance and has remained in the minor leagues since that time. It has been a very long career for Thompson who is known for his baserunning as he has had quite a successful conversion rate throughout his career.

Matt Gelb of the Philadelphia Inquirer had a great story on Thompson over the weekend that is a must read and helps put a nice framing on how special this roster move is for a player who has persevered in the minors a very long time waiting for another chance. In that story, he highlights this anecdote:

"It (a callup) would give a lot of validation to my rationale," Thompson said. "It obviously doesn't look like it's that realistic. It would give me some affirmation. But if you were to tell me I won't make it to the big leagues again, it's not like I would just leave. That doesn't drive it at all. By no means is anything I do in the big leagues from this point on going to change my life financially. You get called up for a month, it would be nice. Maybe I could buy a new car."

Who knows what the move will bring for the Rays, but a guy with 5,680 minor league plate appearances is back in the major leagues hoping to get his second career plate appearances and that elusive first major league hit at the young age of 33.

There aren't many players in baseball like Ben Zobrist. Sure, lots of players will hit roughly the same number of homers and drive in roughly the same number of runs and steal roughly the same number of bases, but few, if any, will do it with the defensive prowess of Zobrist. He's a gold glove caliber second basemen and an above average right fielder. He's also started at least one game at every position besides pitcher and catcher. How many players can say that? The Rays' Mr. Everywhere is having one of the stranger starts to a season that I can remember, and it's been a whole lot of fun to watch.

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Over the past few years, advanced statistics have infiltrated baseball. Front offices are filled with Ivy League economists making decisions based on esoteric numbers, some fans think they’re smarter than players, and anyone brave enough to talk about intangibles gets mercilessly mocked on "blogs." What these nerds just don’t understand is that you can’t measure heart, scrappyness, grit, or toughness. Until now.

I’ve just invented a new metric that I think will accurately measure toughness in pitchers. It’s called Batters Retired On Broken Leg per Nine Innings, or BROBL/9. Currently, our very own Jeff Niemann leads the league this year with a BROBL/9 of .526. The league average, weighted by innings pitched is .002, and our sample has a standard deviation of .024. This means that Niemann is more than a full 21 standard deviations above average in BROBL/9.

And while the Rays pitching staff as a group sports a BROBL/9 significantly below Niemann, their .056 mark still leads the league. This is a testament to the Rays training staff, strength and conditioning staff, and Maddon’s motivational abilities.

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Hideki Matsui's debut was uneventful, but Josh Sale's coming out party has continued.

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Injuries are a handy excuse to point to when a team is struggling, but the hard truth is that all teams have to deal with unfortunate injuries over the course of a season. Some teams get hit worse than others, but if a team manages to get through a year mostly unscathed, they have a huge advantage over most other teams (and also, everyone will want to hire away their training staff).

In recent years, it's always felt like the Rays have had rather good luck when it comes to injuries. That hasn't always been entirely true -- they've had to deal with missing Longoria for extended periods of time before -- but it's felt that way because the Rays have built their team with extra depth so that injuries don't hurt quite so bad. Sure, luck has still had its role in helping the Rays when times are toughest (remember Super Sam Fuld?), but they have been very intentional about planning well to cope with injuries.

This season, though, the Rays probably have the least amount of depth that they've had in recent years. Their top options in the minors are a far cry from last season's replacements of Alex Cobb, Matt Moore, and Desmond Jennings. And of course, they're having to cope with an impressive amount of injuries at the moment.

Quick trivia question: How many players are currently on the DL for the Rays right now? Anyone able to guess? The answer (and more) after the jump.

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