Rays Tank: Extra bad in extras

It was the James Loney show until the eleventh inning last night, with the Rays first baseman both chipping in a home run and a costly throwing error. Come extras, though, the other Rays decided to give up runs without balancing them out by scoring them. The eleventh was bad. The embed code isn't ready yet, but you can watch the whole sequence here. Recap here.

You can't say that Maddon didn't use his bullpen correctly, though. His closer, Jake McGee, had pitched both the ninth and the tenth of a tie game. Brad Boxberger, Kirby Yates, and Joel Peralta were also already used. This is a case of the bullpen as a whole just not being deep enough as it needs to be.

And that ties into Matthew Murphy's in depth explanation of how leverage matters in a bullpen and how that affect's a team's ability to get value from a reliever they buy (like perhaps how the Rays were in a position to get great value from buying a quality reliever like Grant Balfour).

More on this later, but I'd like to throw out one number, since it seems to be a topic for discussion. Three years, small sample size, yada yada yada, but when talking about when you can trust defensive statistics to say that a player is a good or bad defender, the amplitude of their opinion matters too, not just the sample size.

Kevin Kiermaier UZR: 587 innings (mostly in right, some in center), 50 runs above average per 150 games.

Rays Links:

Brad Boxbberger is really good.

Nathaniel Stoltz scouts Rays catching prospect Nick Ciuffo.

Other Links:

The coolest thing written in a little while, Robert Arthur tries to use the sound off the bat as a sabermetric data point.