Tampa Bay Rays news and links: Teetering on the edge

The Rays continued their trot through baseball purgatory, with a win over the wild-card-spot-holding Minnesota Twins. That puts them only three games behind the Twins for the second wild card, but with five teams between them.

That means that they’re still in it, but barely.

The good news, is that the Rays doctors have found no structural damage in the arm of team ace Chris Archer. He’ll be reevaluated today. It’s not impossible for him to make his next scheduled start, on Friday, but manager Kevin Cash says that seems like a long shot.

There was another injury scare, for Steven Souza Jr., following this play.

But while Souza exited the game, it doesn’t sound like he’ll miss much, if any, time.

Rays Radio had a postgame interview with Souza, and he seems pretty adamant that he’s fine. He also mixed a metaphor, pretty spectacularly:

We’ve dug our own grave, so we’ve got to sleep in it. So now we’ve got to win games.

That’s a bit more dire than the saying usually goes.

In the Rays Radio link, there’s also interviews with Kevin Cash, Alex Cobb, Corey Dickerson, and Kevin Kiermaier.

Links

• Matt Duffy still exists. He took grounders at short.
• Marry Craig wrote about the National Colored Base Ball League, and black baseball generally in the late 1800s. It’s an arc which mirrors much of the rest of the story of Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction America.
• The Yankees have stopped throwing fastballs (as often). Eno Sarris looks at how that’s working for them.