'A special place': As MLB's last unbeaten team, Rays look very much for real with dominant rotation

WASHINGTON – After signing the biggest free agent contract in Tampa Bay Rays history, Zach Eflin did not strut into the clubhouse bent on influencing his environment.

Instead, he was ready to go to school.

Coming off a World Series appearance with the Philadelphia Phillies, Eflin knew he was joining an organization renowned for maximizing pitchers’ ability, to guide them toward pitch usage and shaping that took seemingly ordinary arms and made them elite.

After the famously penurious Rays showed him the money – three years and $40 million – Eflin wanted them to show him the data, too.

“Not only do I feel obligated to be a part of that, as everybody in here is, but I want to get as good as I can,” Eflin told USA TODAY Sports. “You look around this locker room and see so much talent that other teams have given up on. They’ve come here and outperformed any expectation anyone’s ever had for them.

“It’s really cool to be a part of that and I’m looking forward to getting as good as I can.”

And it’s quite possible Eflin joined a juggernaut just as it is about to peak.

The Rays have barely completed one full turn through their rotation, and while plenty can change in the 156 games that remain, the early returns are daunting. At 6-0, Tampa Bay is the only Major League Baseball team that’s still undefeated, and the first four arms in their rotation – All-Star starter Shane McClanahan, Eflin, Jeffrey Springs and Drew Rasmussen – were virtually unhittable.

They allowed just five runs in their first four games, striking out 30, walking just three and posting a 0.39 earned-run average as the Rays posted a 27-5 run differential.

After a 7-2 win over the Nationals on Wednesday, the Rays became the first team to start 6-0 since 2016. According to MLB.com, they're the first team to do so while outscoring each opponent by four or more runs since 1884.

It’s nothing shocking: Tampa Bay has reached the playoffs four consecutive seasons, including a 100-win campaign in 2021 and a World Series appearance in 2020.

Yet there was a certain smoke-and-mirrors element to much of that success. The ever-innovative Rays pioneered the use of the “opener,” a relief pitcher who would start the game in service of limiting the starting pitcher’s exposure to opposing hitters. They hewed strongly to limiting starters to just two trips through an opposing lineup.

And thanks to their lower-revenue status, the Rays would churn players by the dozen from year to year, trading stars as they reached more expensive arbitration years, or even pitching linchpins – Chris Archer, Blake Snell and Wade Davis, to name a few – already signed to team-friendly deals.

But this? This has more the air of permanence.

While the Rays’ payroll is still a very team-friendly $72 million, eight players are signed to multiyear deals, including 22-year-old shortstop Wander Franco, whose $182 million guarantee is stretched through at least 2032. And while Eflin was the big offseason get, it was multiyear contracts signed by Springs (four years, $31 million), reliever Pete Fairbanks (three years, $12 million) and first baseman Yandy Diaz (three years, $24 million) that galvanized the Rays heading to spring training.

“Having that contract security plays a big factor in their confidence, knowing that hey, we’re going to be here a while and this team believes in us,” says McClanahan, the club’s ace who won his first two starts and will be arbitration-eligible next year. “It was awesome to see them signing long term because they work hard, they’re great people and they deserve it.”

Or, as Rasmussen put it, “It’s awesome to see good people getting paid.”

The gratitude certainly runs both ways.

'They believe in us'

When Springs joined the Rays from Boston in a February 2021 below-the-radar trade, he was admittedly a bit of a mess. The pandemic-shortened season caused him to put “way too much pressure on myself” to impress the Red Sox, he says, and he flopped, posting a 7.08 ERA.

Rays pitching coach Kyle Snyder, backed by a Rays analytics department that’s remained best in class even a full decade after the departure of trailblazing GM Andrew Friedman to the Dodgers, long had a reputation for maximizing pitchers’ abilities, be it a veteran like Charlie Morton or a reclamation project.

Springs, 30, was simply a reliever with a career 5.42 ERA with promise but long stretches of inconsistency in three years with Texas and Boston when Snyder, pitching performance analyst Winston Doom and the Rays got their hands on him.

“A lot of it was understanding who I am as a pitcher – where I need to go to get strikes, to get weak contact, swings and misses," he says. "They dove into that with me and opened my eyes to, this is what you do well. A lot of it is confidence – in the big leagues, when things aren’t going great, at times confidence can sway a little bit with that and you can get caught up in results.

“Getting out of that mentality and looking at it for what it is: Baseball is a really hard game.”

The modern trappings of pitch development – high-speed cameras, granular data for every pitch thrown in a big league game, pitch tunneling – can amount to something of a cheat code. Every franchise has had access to largely the same tools for nearly a decade, with the Statcast era dawning in 2015 and early leaders in the space moving on to higher-level jobs with other organizations, leveling the intellectual playing field.

What separates the Rays and Dodgers in this pack, it seems, is imparting their internal convictions to the players.

“They believe in us,” says Springs. “They have the utmost confidence in whoever takes the ball that night. They believe it. They make you feel that. Eventually, you start to buy in. It might take some guys a little bit longer.

“But you’re hearing the stuff: ‘You’re really really good. Here’s the numbers.’ They trust us. They trust me. You buy in.”

Springs lived it in 2021, when his early-season leverage index resembled a bull market. By the season’s 16th game, manager Kevin Cash called on him to close out a game, and by May 5 he had two saves, four holds and a 1.93 ERA.

A year later, the Rays began stretching him out to start, and by last June 24 had his first six-inning outing. He finished with a 2.46 ERA and started 25 games and took that confidence into his 2023 debut: A six-inning, 12-strikeout, no-hit effort against Detroit.

If McClanahan, a 2018 first-round pick, is the Rays’ anointed one and Eflin the high-priced mercenary, Springs and Rasmussen are the separators, the guys who extend the rotation into a four-headed monster. Both have been nursed along from relief to the rotation and while the club will closely monitor their stamina, will not face any hard innings limits.

“They’re looking out for my long-term career,” says Rasmussen, whose 2.84 ERA came across 146 innings in 2022. “They value me and my career. So they were constantly saying, we’re going to minimize workload in this specific outing and this specific outing, to try and safely build you to an area where you can safely go in years to come.”

While Springs was a reclamation project, Rasmussen was always on the Rays’ radar. They drafted him 31st overall out of Oregon State in 2017, only to see him return to Corvallis, after which Milwaukee drafted him sixth overall a year later. With Franco’s time arriving, the Rays burned a key bit of trade capital – incumbent shortstop Willy Adames – to acquire Rasmussen in 2021.

What did they see? Not a radar gun reading or the break on a particular pitch, but rather the lateral rotation of Rasmussen’s right wrist.

“I supinate really well,” says Rasmussen, “so they said hey, how do we continue to add different breaking balls to the arsenal? We just developed, through supination, how I can continue to develop more breaking balls to be able to keep hitters guessing at different speeds and different movement profiles.”

It didn’t hurt that the Rays’ No. 2 starter last year was two-time Cy Young Award winner Corey Kluber, who has been something of a pied piper for the “sweeper,” his big-breaking offspeed pitch that’s a more extreme version of a “slurve.” Snyder has worked diligently with both Rasmussen and Springs on the pitch, with sublime results.

“It looks like guys can’t see the ball out of his hand,”says Eflin of Springs. “With his changeup and his slider and his sweeper and his heater, he just mixes it up so well. It’s almost like he’s a 10-year vet.”

'I'm learning every day'

It’s Eflin, actually, who most closely fits that profile, with his six-plus years of service that included occasional flashes of brilliance – he had three career shutouts within his 37-45 record and 4.04 career ERA with Philadelphia. Yet with the Rays, it is Eflin who is the student, who freely admits he did not know what a sweeper was until arriving here.

The more advanced kids in the class have quietly watched Eflin assimilate.

“It seems he’s gotten information here he didn’t know prior to coming over here,” says Rasmussen, “which is incredible because you look at the career he put together before coming over here. He’ll only continue to blossom.”

Eflin admits some of it is like dusting off an old algebra or geometry book – Xs and Zs and axes and other stuff long forgotten by a ballplayer – but that challenge was the bonus of signing with a team near his Orlando roots.

“I’m learning every day,” says Eflin, who pitched five innings of three-hit ball to beat Detroit in his Rays debut. “In my career, I haven’t figured it all out yet. I wanted to go to a team that had really a reputation for developing arms, being able to learn as much as I can and be surrounded with guys that are trying to get as good as they can.

“That, in itself, has been really, really cool. It’s been cool kind of learning the vocabulary of how everybody talks about pitching here.”

Some of it is prioritizing pitch shape, speed differential and tunneling over spin rate. More of it involves the slightest adjustments, or as Eflin says, “It’s amazing what a little seam adjustment can do.”

A lot of it is just vibes. Eflin says there are moments when he can feel the magic happening, that “when you can line up a number to a feeling that you have, that’s when it starts to make sense.”

And more of it is simply ancient baseball dogma. Rasmussen threw 50 strikes and just 16 balls in a six-inning, seven-strikeout start against the Nationals, dominating them in the strike zone before teasing them outside of it.

“The most successful pitchers in this game – yes, they have good stuff, but they’re more elite at throwing strikes,” says Cash. “To get chase, or create chase, you have to establish pitches in the zone.”

Says Springs: “It is simple. It is very hard to do. The message is try to get ahead, throw strike one, throw strike two and expand. Yes, it sounds simple at first.

“First time I heard it I was like, there’s got to be something else.”

Cash can’t stress early or often enough how young the season is. And dominating the Tigers and Nationals for six games does not a season make, particularly when the AL East will run at least four deep.

Whether the Rays will hit enough is always a question, but Franco has looked primed for the All-Star season the Rays expect, and their 13 home runs lead the AL.

Oh, and Tyler Glasnow, who averages 11.3 strikeouts per nine innings, should fill out the rotation when he returns, likely next month, from an oblique injury.

And perhaps most important, the pieces are in place and likely not going anywhere for a while. Not when the collective thirst to improve never abates.

“A very, very long way,” Springs says of his journey since leaving Boston for Tampa Bay. “It’s a special place.

“Very simple messages, but everybody receives it very clearly.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Tampa Bay Rays' dominant rotation makes them a real threat in AL East