February 19th Tampa Bay Rays Camp Notes

General Statistics:

All 38 pitchers and catchers worked out for a fifth consecutive day.

The Breakdown of the 62 players in camp(61 without Iwamura)

• 31 Pitchers
• 7 Catchers
• 14 Infielders
• 10 Outfielders

Maddon Quotes:

On today's workout

"We had pop-up communication on a very windy day, that was kind of fun. Everybody's doing well. The hitters look good, everybody's in good shape. We got a lot of ground balls. The pitchers completed their fifth day of their regular pitchers' programs. Tomorrow we'll bring everything together where everybody starts working out together with one schedule. We've been working off two for the last two days."

On the pop-up drill

"We're just trying to re-establish the priorities. There are pop-up communication priorities. The outfielders over the infielders, always people coming in over guys going out, shortstop over the rest of the infield, the corner guys over the catchers. You just talk about who should be the dominant player in a situation. Sometimes that gets skewed, but you talk about it up front and make sure that when somebody calls for it they say, ‘I got it, I got it, I got it,' loud, three times. When you have an infielder going back you want him waving his arms and not saying [anything], because there's confusion with outfielders, infielders and crowd noise."

On tomorrow's workout, and the possibility of pitchers throwing live to hitters

"I'm not 100 percent sure we're doing that tomorrow, but it may be tomorrow. I've got to talk to Hick [Jim Hickey] about it. But we're arriving at that point because the games are so close to us, we want to get that done tomorrow. More than likely we are going to get into that element of our spring training."

On the windy conditions

"You really don't want that much, because in the Trop the wind doesn't normally blow this hard - we've had more problems with rafters. We should just bring the rafters out. But it's always fun to do it that way. It's more difficult when you have a clear sky and wind. Actually, having some clouds today helped a bit."

Tomorrow's Schedule:

• Parking lot opens at 8 a.m.
• Gates open at 9 a.m.
• Players take the field at 9:30 a.m