Tampa Bay Rays News and Links: Joey Wendle demands your ROY attention

Rays Links:

• Joey Wendle had himself another huge game, both in the field and at the plate for the Rays yesterday. As Juan Toribio explains at The Athletic ($), it’s about time to at least give Wendle some consideration for that AL ROY.
• For bonus fun, check out the comments for both Juan’s tweet and Ken Rosenthal’s re-tweet of it for some Yankees twitter freakouts.
• Mallex Smith returned from the DL, and that’s just great news because Mallex is awesome. This is also a good excuse for me to direct everyone who hasn’t seen it yet, to the very fun interview he did with the Cespedes Family BBQ boys (where he reveals the contents and the origin of the Notebook!).
• Also worth checking out is this episode of the Morning Lineup podcast for some more Blake Snell love, and some insights from him on the Opener as well as his sneaker obsession.
• Thanks to some Passport problems for Adam Moore, Nick Ciuffo got his call to the show, being added to the 40 man, flying to Toronto, and starting his first game all within a very tight time window.

Around the League:

• Wil Myers put his cleat in his mouth in a BIG way, accidentally ranting about practice and his manager on his teammates Fortnite stream. Myers used the term “it’s so miserable” which is....not great. Also the long sigh and pause from Myers after being told “I’m streaming” is just high comedy. Wil Myers later apologized for the comments.
• The Texas Rangers are going to try and use the Opener strategy, which means more beat writers diving in to explain and understand the strategy to (hopefully) expand the horizons of fan bases around the league to some new ways of thinking about baseball.
• In case number 42069 of “Joey Votto is really weird/cool/fun”, Votto traded shirts with a fan in the stands.