What a brutal five days it's been. One lousy trip through the rotation ago, the Rays looked like they were ready to run away andfar ahead of the rest of the AL East.
Instead, they went from Jekyll to Hyde and dropped five in a row, getting swept in a series for the first time this season. The Rays' bi-polar tendencies are absurd. When they are playing well, they look like the best-put-together team in baseball over the last 20 years or more. When they're not, they look like they can't beat anyone.
Just look at the last two games in Toronto: Saturday night, they score 11 runs against Terry Greer and the Argonauts and lose by six, Sunday they get shut out (and very nearly no hit again ... AGAIN!!!!) by Felix Potvin and the Maple Leafs.
There's no rational explanation for this. And while there's still plenty to love about this team and the situation they are in at this point of the season, you can't blame fans for being driven at least partially up a wall. So I propose that Rays fans do exactly that: let's get nuts ... just for today.
You want to fire hitting coach Derek Shelton? Go ahead, start a Facebook group. Why not manager Joe Maddon? Sure, flood the phone lines at all the sports radio stations. But that's amateur stuff. As Jack Buck said, "Go crazy, folks! Go crazy!" Or, more appropriately for our situation, in the words of Hunter S. Thompson, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." Let's demand they bat Evan Longoria ninth, send David Price to Montgomery and not only call up Rocco Baldelli but re-sign Bubba Trammell too.
Doesn't make any sense? Perfect! A team reflects it's fans and vice-versa. There's a purple banana out there somewhere, people! Let's put on tin foil batting helmets, start some infield chatter with people who aren't there and put peanut butter in our underpants, just for today.
Get it all out of our system before the first pitch of tonight's game against the Tigers so we never have to do it again, and hope that's all the Rays were doing for the last five games.