Rays 1 Nationals 8: Bullpen implosion plus anemic offense

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that relievers are going to reliever (hat tip to our old friend JT Morgan).

It’s very very rare to find a reliever who can be effective nearly every outing across a season (let alone multiple seasons!) So for a while Garrett Cleavinger is lights out, then he has a week of stinkitude, and then he finds his stride.

And now we have Shawn Armstrong, who has mostly been pretty reliably decent for the Rays, but in the last two weeks he’s blown two saves, and then done....whatever we are calling his awful, ERA busting appearance today.

I mean, you just can’t give up six runs in a third of an inning and expect your team to have a chance. I suppose if the Rays were more competitive in the game Cash might not have left him hanging out there as long as he did, but once he’d give up two runs (to make the score 4-1) I guess you just let him wear it (although Cash did finally bring in Uceta to get the last two outs, a show of mercy to Armstrong and everyone watching the game). Amazingly Armstrong managed to allow all those runs without a homer — but a double and a triple along with a whole lot of singles can still get the job done.

On the plus side, newly activated Edwin Uceta pitched 2.2 innings and didn’t give up a hit or a walk.

Although he only gave up two runs, Civale was not sharp. He walked four, threw a wild pitch that allowed a run to score — and when you have Aaron Civale’s stuff you really have to have command to be effective. He struck out just two, and granted Civale’s not a big whiff guy but even pitch-to-contact guys should be fooling batters a little more than that.

But I’ve always said that if your offense can’t score more than two runs, you can’t blame the pitching and defense for the loss.

The Rays managed two hits and four walks. One base runner was caught stealing and another eliminated on a double play. Brandon Lowe’s home run was THE ENTIRE OFFENSE. The Rays struck out eleven times. I mean....pathetic.

Whenever I recap one of these hopeless games I come back to this: The Rays are a .500 team and that’s exactly how they play. They are good enough to win a couple of games but not good enough to sustain the winning. We can still hope for a series win tomorrow.