-There's a first time for everything, Shields lost a game, Reyes blew a save, Hammel gets a win, Jackson doesn't, oh wait...If nothing else, the bullpen losing the game isn't anything new, and the plus side, if there is one, would be that in the last month the Rays have responded to losing after leading by five or more by winning two, and three games in a row. If history repeats itself, there's a strong possibility the Rays would end the week in third place, as of now the Blue Jays are two games up, the second place Yankees four games, and the first place Red Sox 13 games, as for the wild card; 12.
-Projecting the rest of the season the team is on pace to win 69 games, one shy of the franchise record, and this coming off of arguably the worst week of the season. On the positive end of the spectrum the lineup (read all, except Dioner Navarro) is hitting, hopefully this continues for a certain utility man that's surfaced in trade rumors, by God Wigginton keep raising your price!
-Using the great site Hit Tracker I noticed some interesting things about the Rays and homeruns other than the obvious Pena is third in the AL in homers. Elijah Dukes ranks second in the ball's speed off of the bat, at 120.5, he's tied with Tony Clark, slightly ahead of Ryan Zimmerman and Mark Teixeira, and behind Hideki Matsui. Dukes also has the `Golden Sledgehammer' award for the highest distance average; 412.9, not surprisingly Carlos Pena is in the top three with a 409.3 average. Although none of those numbers mean anything, it is quite appealing to anyone who has a fascination with the long ball or with time to kill.
-Juan Salas isn't eligible to return to the Rays until July 2nd, but he'll be in Montgomery seeing his first live game action in nearly two months.
-Finally I know there hasn't been much opinionated reaction from the staff concerning Dukes' comments and well, there likely won't be any. We're not going to take attention away from the team for Elijah's issues off the field unless it's something more than just some comments or some story about him knocking up another woman, we'll make note of it, however I don't think any of us will be receiving any awards for our feature on Elijah Dukes' super sperm.
-Speaking of Dukes, here's my radical solution for the month. We don't want to trade him and get ripped off, don't want to release him and allow him to make major bucks while we're under pressure from Fehr and the MLBPA, and can't demote him since Durham nor Montgomery want him, and sending him any lower down the system is non-sense. So...sell him. No not to another MLB or MILB team, but sell him to Japan or to an Independent League team. I'm not 100% sure on how this would work, but if the Rays could do this with some stipulation that at any moment they want him back they would give the team 500K or something and that the team cannot sale Dukes to anyone else, I think it might be our best option. In any other league Dukes is going to put up monster numbers while playing, something he's not doing here, and if the Rays aren't technically losing him; what's the harm? Again not sure that's legal, and at this point I'm not serious enough to research it, but hey I gave it a go.