FanPost

We should be concerned about the Rays offense.

Everything is rosie in Ray-ville because the Rays are scoring runs. In fact, they are scoring Runs as one of the best offensive teams in the league. However, I am concerned that this trend will end soon, and our offensive numbers will come crashing down. At that point we will start hearing how every bodies batting average outside Crawford and Longoria is terrible. Why do we have to wait until runs come down to notice that our player by player offensive production is simply not that good.

First lets look at our team wOBA.

Team wOBA
Yankees 0.37
Brewers 0.36
Diamondbacks 0.36
Red Sox 0.36
Twins 0.35
Tigers 0.35
Cubs 0.35
Dodgers 0.34
Phillies 0.34
Rays 0.34
Giants 0.34
Blue Jays 0.34
Rockies 0.33
Royals 0.33
Cardinals 0.33
Nationals 0.33
Marlins 0.32
White Sox 0.32
Padres 0.32
Braves 0.31
Reds 0.31
Angels 0.31
Athletics 0.31
Mets 0.31
Orioles 0.31
Pirates 0.31
Indians 0.31
Rangers 0.31
Mariners 0.29
Astros 0.27

The Rays are 10th in team wOBA following our 2 AL east rivals.

If we break it down to the player level, the numbers get more concerning. Our top wOBA performer is John Jaso(.470) who is sporting an unsustainable walk rate (23.1%) and a very small sample size. Thanks be to Evan Longoria and Carl Crawford who have good offensive production that we can expect to continue. After the small sample size of Willy Aybar we get into struggle town which is where most of our team is residing. Slightly above .330 wOBA for Upton and Brignac and sub .320 for everybody else including our lead off hitter at an underwhelming .300.

Surely these numbers suggest that we shouldn't be at the top of the league in offense and we won't be able to sustain our offensive production going forward unless we have some improvements out of 60% of the lineup.

I do expect some of the offensive production to increase from Bartlett, Zobrist and Pena. I don't know when it will happen, and if it never does we will be in some big trouble.

This post was written by a member of the DRaysBay community and does not necessarily express the views or opinions of DRaysBay staff.