Roundtable: What is the top storyline of the first third of the season?

or, are the Rays good?

With the 2025 season one third complete, what is the top story line of the year thus far?

Danny Russell

With the series win against the Twins, the Rays have risen to a 28-27 record, second in the AL East — albeit 7.0 games back from the Yankees — and, in an astonishing turn around, improving their playoff odds to 30%.

Yes, that’s a climb from last place to second in the standings for playoff projection! I don’t think we entered this season expecting the Rays to be fully formed, especially with your ace and starting short stop on the injured list before the season began, but the sudden leap is unexpected!

Like every season, the starting rotation has kept the Rays in a competitive position to grasp onto the failings of their division rivals and turn a tough start of the year into a second chance.

Ashely MacLennan

This year for the Rays has reminded me of how disposable everyone on the team feels, because I haven’t even bothered to learn every player’s name since I assume only maybe half of them will return next season (or even in the latter half of this season), and it has made it kind of a bummer to follow the club since I just don’t have those guys who are “my guys” to root for this year. I love a savvy franchise, but at what cost? Also I hate their temporary stadium, give me back my dome and flappy bois and maybe I will start to feel like I can care again.

This whole season feels displaced and temporary, like none of it counts.

Brett Phillips

It seems unfair to be so pessimistic about a franchise when they’ve finally put together a little success at the end of May, but this early Rays season has got me feeling frustrated and stuck.

Tearing the roof off the dome doesn’t help. In spite of (or maybe because of?) the negative industry-wide view of the Trop, it’s never felt like anything other than home from me. Baseball outdoors is beautiful but baseball under our dome was ours. And having that literally ripped away makes me feel lost, out of place, a bit unfocused.

A team that came out barnstorming might have assuaged that ennui a bit, but the Rays seem complacent as ever to fight for their 86 win team and walk backwards into a second wildcard spot per usual.

Darby Robinson

I also think the story for the first half as we approach the first half is: frustrating start annoying stadium situation, and some damn poor luck, but the table is set for potentially a very fun second half. It’s been survival mode since November.

We are entering thriving mode...

Elijah Flewellen

This season feels like the Rays are playing with house money. They aren’t at Tropicana Field, nothing was really expected of them, and nobody knows where they’ll be playing in the future. At the 1/3 line, they’re starting to play like they have nothing to lose. With Shane McClanahan and Ha-Seong Kim returning, the Flappy Boys can roll the dice down the stretch. This summer is going to be full of uncertainty.

Why not the Rays? They’re playing the cards they were dealt, and you never know what can happen

Elizabeth Strom

This season is one third over and I still have no idea who these Rays are.

We’ve seen their offense stifled. We’ve seen each of their starters struggle – indeed some do little other than struggle. We’ve seen the bullpen blow leads. But we’ve also seen each starting pitcher put together multiple quality starts, we’ve seen Jonathan Aranda emerge as the hitter we hoped he’d be. We’ve seen Brandon Lowe return to form. They are playing .500 ball and I guess this inconsistency is what a .500 club looks like.

There are parts of this season I’ve really enjoyed. Pete Fairbanks has some of his scary mojo back. Chandler Simpson clearly has a few holes in his game, but how much fun is it to have a player whose speed disrupts the entire game any time he gets on base?

I know for some playing the season in a minor league stadium makes the season seem less than legit. but as a Tampa resident who lives 15 minute drive from the ballpark, it’s been such a blast to attend more games, always close to the field, and (thus far at least — I know it will be different in August) enjoying outdoor baseball on a warm spring evening.

Ian Malinowski

I got into this gig because baseball is fun (and stats-analysis friendly) and Tampa Bay was a place I had left. It was escapism from my mundane irl in a tiny NYC apartment I couldn’t afford, an escape to home. Somewhere along the way though, the lines in the baseball culture war shifted, and the clever underdog Rays became the symbolic bad guys, a penny-pinching villain in a suddenly politically-conscious baseball narrative.

Writing about Rays baseball — indeed being unashamed of my erstwhile home — became political. And exhausting. Hurricane Milton changed all that, reminding us that $/WAR isn’t politics; politics is politics.

With the Trop’s roof gone, writing about the Rays meant listening to city council and county commission meetings in one ear while trying to read bedtime stories without letting on that I was only half there.

It meant filing FOIA requests and studying hundreds of pages of legal documents and damage assessments. And actu,ally, the use agreement is easier to parse than the actions and intentions of the Rays FO’s business side.

I can’t tell you where the Rays will play in five years, can’t even handicap it. But it turns out that the baseball on the field this year is actually still baseball, and moreso baseball than it’s been in awhile. Also, these Rays remain a haven for numbers nerd. So what is the storyline? I’ll can give you three.

• We knew The Stein was going to have an interesting park effect, but with its low walls and shifting winds it’s wilder than anyone imagined. On some days it plays huge, on others tiny. Also it’s hot. Florida outside is hot, who knew?
• The Rays signed a brand name catcher and got him to update his stance to better frame low pitches, and it totally hasn’t helped. Huh!
• Rays pitchers this year are throwing more secondaries high in the zone than any team in the statcast era. And next on the list are Milwaukee and Cleveland. I don’t know what that means yet but when those three teams sit at the top of a leaderboard it means there’s something going on worth paying attention to.

But here’s the one that matters: I don’t know if these Rays are good (I’d bet yes but I’m an optimist and a romantic and have been wrong before). But I’m 100% certain they’re a baseball team, and for the moment they’re mine, and that is enough.

Austin Reimann

Having watched this franchise play the underdog role for years, rallying behind payrolls well below league average and usurping the beasts of the East, I likely took it for granted that they would automatically rally behind the cards they were dealt when the roof was ripped off the Trop.

Maybe, I also took it for granted that they would rally when their ace went down with a nerve issue in Spring Training, or when their All-Star right fielder strained his oblique on opening day, or when Palacios returned for just one day before landing on the injured list again. Mangum and DeLuca quickly followed with injuries of their own and the roster rapidly took a different shape. But, surely they would just rally, right? They always have.

It was probably unfair to expect them to just “rally” behind playing in a minor league stadium with a roster that looked different than anticipated, all while their anticipated new stadium deal fell apart in real time.

Early on, it appeared that they wouldn’t. Their play at their temporary home was abysmal. Pitching, which was expected to be the backbone of this team, faltered early and often. If it wasn’t the starters, it was the pen. If they faced a LHP, you could chalk up a shutout and move on. It seemed as though the injuries, new stadium, and noise surrounding their future in the region was too much to overcome… until it wasn’t.

The tide seems to have turned recently.

Their pitching has improved. They have one of the best defenses in baseball. The lineup looks confident. They appear to have embraced The Stein and now sit in second place with 108 games to go. The roster will continue to round into shape as Kim nears his Rays debut and McClanahan starts a throwing program. Mangum and Kelly are on the mend. They battled back to the .500 mark and are playing better baseball on a nightly basis.

Now, with 2/3 of the season remaining, it appears that they are rallying once again.

Darby Robinson

There’s something about the Rays as a franchise that makes us fundamentally view them through the lens of “success is fleeting, failure is expected”. No matter how many years of sustained excellence, there’s been the prevailing wisdom throughout baseball fans and writers alike that surely the Rays magic will run out and their true talent level of a bottom feeding franchise will win out.

So when the Rays start slow, it is obviously the correct order of things. It’s not expectations for them to turn it around, it’s cosmic justice to regress to the mean.

And the Rays did indeed start slow in the first third of the season, playing truly bizarre baseball. Starters struggled at times, especially promising young starters Taj Bradley and Shane Baz. Bullpen struggled mightily despite maybe the best raw stuff they have ever assembled back there. And the Offense struggling, which may not be unexpected, but struggling from Yandy Diaz, Junior Caminero, and Brandon Lowe is. Especially so with Junior, who the Rays and many others in baseball projected for big things, and not the type of big things like being on pace for breaking the ground into double play record.

To me, I came into this year with wild card aspirations. I didn’t see a team preparing to be in rebuild mode, not with spending on true FA acquisitions at SS and C and keeping vets like Yandy and B-Lowe around. But when I see the first half of the Rays season I saw a team weirdly struggling to gel, and perform as one, but with too much talent to stay in the mud.

As the calendar flipped to May the Rays team as a whole started to be the more competitive club this level of talent should be. 14-11 record as I’m writing this, horn record at the cursed Steinbrenner field starting to be a curse on more than just the “home team”, and 6 series wins out of 8 series played, the Rays are back to playing competitive baseball and winning baseball games.

They remain squarely in the wild card hunt and a game above .500. Which I guess remains perfectly as a Rorschach test still. You can choose to believe April and the worst parts of May are the true Rays and they shall return to the bottom and fade back. Or perhaps the sluggish start adjusting to a new home park has been put aside and it no longer is mentally crushing what should be a competitive team deep into September.

Or maybe the cigar is just a cigar and the truth lay somewhere in-between.