The Rays Are One Win From the Brewers in the World Series. Fox Is Already Sweating
Drew Rasmussen held Cleveland to one run over seven innings Sunday, and Tampa Bay leads the ALCS 3-2. Game 6 is Monday night.
By the Heckle Desk · · 2 min read
The Tampa Bay Rays beat the Cleveland Guardians 3-1 on Sunday in Game 5 of the American League Championship Series and lead the series three games to two. Drew Rasmussen pitched seven innings and gave up one run on four hits with six strikeouts, which is the kind of line a pitcher frames and hangs over the toilet so he can see it every morning. The Rays outhit Cleveland 12 to 5 and scored in each of the first three innings, then spent the next six politely refusing to give any of it back.
It's been a seesaw series. Cleveland won Games 1 and 3, the Rays won Games 2, 4 and 5, and rain postponed Game 4 by a day, as if the weather wanted a vote. Game 6 is Monday at 8 p.m. Eastern on TBS. If the Rays win, they'll meet the Milwaukee Brewers, who swept the Dodgers and haven't been to a World Series since 1982, a year when most of their current fans were either a twinkle or a toddler.
Now consider the television people. Somewhere in a Fox office there's a man who spent all summer praying for the Dodgers and the Yankees, the two teams America loves to hate and pays to watch, and he's about to be handed Tampa Bay and Milwaukee. That's not a World Series. That's two regional insurance agents meeting for lunch. I'd pay to watch him take the call.
But here's what the big-market crowd always forgets: the Rays won 98 games this year to Cleveland's 85. They are not a Cinderella. They're the best team in the American League, run by people who treat a payroll the way my grandmother treated aluminum foil, folding it up and using it again until it's see-through. They've been to the Series twice, in 2008 and 2020, and lost both times, which gives them the sad, determined look of a man who keeps proposing to the same woman.
Cleveland, meanwhile, is one loss from another long winter, and Cleveland knows long winters. The city hasn't won a World Series since 1948. They'll fight. People with nothing to lose but more of the same usually do.
Television wants the teams with the biggest cities, and baseball keeps handing it the teams with the best pitching. That's how you know the sport still belongs to the players and not the people selling the commercials, at least until somebody figures out how to fix that, too.