Bay statement

Back on April 28, the Tampa Bay Rays had just come off a three-game sweep of the Red Sox at Tropicana Field with a 3-0 win, their sixth win in a row, launching them into a three-way tie with Boston and Baltimore in the American League East. The Rays were 14-11, the latest in any season to that point that they had ever been three games over .500 in their franchise’s pitiable existence.

On that same day, the Tampa Tribune's Martin Fennelly wrote, "The Rays have had grand moments before. Wade Boggs gave us one night. Doug Waechter gave us another. The 12-game winning streak in the middle of 2004 was the greatest collective achievement.

“But there has never been anything like this.”

In terms of franchise-defining, it wasn’t exactly Jack Buck’s bellow of disbelieving his eyes, or even Joe Castiglione’s lame-at-first, now just-tired inquiry of conviction, but it was a start.

Of sorts.

Nothing really illustrated just how pathetic your team has been over the years than whooping it up over a winning April. Nothing could sum up the woes of the Rays more than the fact that Waechter’s Single-A no-hitter was mentioned near the top of “Greatest Moments in (Devil) Rays history.” Or, perhaps it’s wrong to scoff. Maybe there are plenty of Red Sox fans who consider Tomo Ohka’s Pawtucket no-hitter right up there with David Ortiz’s 2004 ALCS Game 4 blast among the most memorable moments in team history. No?

It was their greatest moment, yet comparatively so incredibly lame.

It’s safe to guess even Rays fans would tell you the same now.

Tampa Bay has a taste of, and now at chance at, ultimate baseball glory, besting the inferior Chicago White Sox in four games of their league division series, setting up a fabulous ALCS showdown against the AL East rival Red Sox, who finally put the Angels to bed last night with a Jed Lowrie-induced nightcap. For the first time in team history, Tampa Bay has won a playoff series, and now finds itself four wins away from the World Series.

Anyone still want to talk about Doug Waechter and Wade Boggs?

There isn’t a more potentially fascinating matchup than what’ve got in the ALCS (barring, of course, a possible to-come World Series with the Red Sox vs. the Dodgers). In order to complete this radical dream, winning the AL East and the first round aren’t enough. The Rays have to go through the champs, the division rival Red Sox, the team against whom they have enjoyed measured success – finally – this season, and the team against whom, throughout their history, they have shown no resilience to throw a punch or two.

Don Zimmer, Rays senior adviser, will likely be at Fenway come Monday. Is it in poor taste to have Pedro Martinez throw out the first pitch?

“Of course it is going to be Boston in the AL Championship Series,” writes Gary Shelton in the St. Pete Times. “After all that has gone on between them, after all the feuding and the fussing and the friction, who else could it be? The Red Sox are that sneering gunfighter you see in Westerns who you know is destined to draw against John Wayne. Or that glowering boxer who feels no pain who is bound to fight Rocky Balboa.”

Of course, that’s the furthest from the case. The Red Sox are hardly feeling little pain, what with Mike Lowell to miss the series, and possibly the rest of the postseason with his torn labrum. Whether it was the oblique or not, postseason master Josh Beckett looked more like Josh Fogg on Sunday night. Club warrior JD Drew is a daily game-time decision.

Ironically, the Red Sox are 1-8 this season at Tropicana Field, where the ALCS opens (wrap your head around that for just an extra moment, would you?) Friday night, the same mark made so prevalent heading into the ALDS as Boston’s regular-season mark against the Angels. And, with all apologies to John Lackey and his bottom-feeding 100-win Angels (“We are way better than they are,” Lackey said. “We lost to a team not as good as us.”), these are the two best teams in the American League, slugging it out for the pennant.

And the Rays will be favored. Favored.

It’s been five months, but eons in terms of baseball calculations. Today, Andy Sonnastine is a big-game pitcher by virtue of his Game 4 win yesterday. Because of his penchant to come up big in the clutch, you wonder if Carlos Pena has an Ortiz-sized moment in him. And the next bad move that Joe Maddon makes will seemingly be his first.

The Red Sox are battered, bruised, and still very much alive in their quest to repeat. The Rays stand in the way in a series that nobody is amounting to a cake walk, though with the knowledge that a cat walk will likely come into play.

“So bring on the annoying Coco Crisp,” Shelton writes. “Bring on the dangerous David Ortiz. Bring on the mouthy Jonathan Papelbon and Kevin Youkilis, the escapee from the biker bar. Bring on the entire cast of Bond villains that is the Red Sox.”

I seem to remember the Bond villains having some semblance of the last laugh at the conclusion to “Casino Royale,” but no matter. There have been four ALCS in history where division rivals have met for the right to move onto the World Series; the last two being, of course,‘03 and ’04, both Red Sox-Yankees, both seven-game series.

When two teams know each other this well, it’s one thing to make for a compelling series. When they just don’t plain like each other, as is the case with Boston and Tampa Bay, just as it was with the Red Sox and Yankees, it’s not aloof to expect a knock-down classic.

The best moments of the Tampa Bay Rays are maturing by the day. They are in the LCS. Former manager Lou Piniella, once thought their savior, is not.

But Piniella will always have that 12-game winning streak under his watch, the one-time “greatest collective achievement” in franchise history. As recently as April.

No longer.