- It's easy to forget how good David Price is, so go read Tommy Rancel's FanGraphs piece on Price and remember how lucky we are to have him. As Tommy points out, Price has only gotten better this season, and right now he has a legitimate case for the title of best pitcher in the AL (it's got to be Dan Haren, but Price is darn close). And the scary thing is, I still think he's got room for growth.
- The Draft is over at this point, but that's not going to stop anyone from writing about it; that just means now instead of 10,000 pieces previewing the draft, we now get inundated with 10,000 pieces recapping the draft. And as always, if you're looking for coverage on the Rays and the draft, you can't go wrong with the coverage over at Rays Prospects.
If you're looking for the Rays' complete draft board, RP has that (all 50 rounds!). If you're looking for a list of where every high school player drafted by the Rays has commited to college, they have that too. And if you're interested in thoughts, analysis, and summaries of the draft, they have you well covered. -
Sternfan was the first one to bring this up earlier this year (or at least, the first one to write something about it), but the Rays simply aren't walking this year. Marc Topkin covered this is a column yesterday afternoon, and I think some of his numbers are pretty sobering:
"While Rays hitters have struck out the second most in the American League, they've drawn the second fewest amount of walks, a significant decrease - down nearly 30 percent, from 672 last season to a projected 478 - that is a major reason for their offensive issues. [...] Not coincidentally, the Rays are on pace for a nearly 17 percent drop in runs from last season." - R.J. Anderson takes a quick look at Sean Rodriguez's tendency to take the extra base. In general, the Rays are doing fairly well on the basepaths this season -- whether you look at BPro or FanGraph, the Rays look solidly above average. Now if they could just get more baserunners on...
- This is a few days late, but there's a great piece on ESPN about Matt Joyce. Actually, scratch that - there's multiple.
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