The Tampa Bay Rays are one of the rare professional sports franchises where the name on the front of the jersey always seems to matter more than the name on the back. The Rays have routinely taken the scraps from the rest of Major League Baseball and turned them into All-Star caliber players. They're a low-budget baseball factory built to win games no matter how anonymous their roster might appear at first glance.
But so far, 2024 hasn't quite had the same feel at Tropicana Field. After being swept at home this week by the Boston Red Sox, the Rays are back under .500 almost a third of the way into the season. They don't have a clear All-Star on the roster for the first time in a long time, plus their typical calling cards like home run power and an electric bullpen seem to be less prominent than ever.
But if we're going to lay the blame for the Rays' mediocre-at-best start to 2024, it really has to go to three players in particular. Expectations were high for Tampa Bay because they were high for these three and so far, they've flat-out failed to perform.
1. Randy Arozarena
The guy playing left field for the Rays and batting near the top of the order every night this season has looked nothing at all like the Randy Arozarena who took the world by storm in 2023, parlaying a World Baseball Classic for the history books into his first career MLB All-Star appearance. With -0.5 bWAR and 62 strikeouts, Arozarena has been easily the least valuable position player on the Rays thus far in 2024.
It's been jarring to sit down and watch Arozarena play a full game in 2024 because so many things seem off. His pitch selection is atrocious. When he gets a pitch he can handle, he rarely takes advantage of it. Then, if by some miracle he does get on base, he's liable to get thrown out on the basepaths in a slough of ghastly ways. He's in the 14th percentile of baserunning run value, which is awful for a player with 77th percentile sprint speed.
Simply put, Arozarena looks checked out. That's not to say he can't have a lightbulb moment and become his normal self at some point again in 2024, but right now, he's just not the same guy the Rays thought they could depend on. If he keeps hitting .160, Tampa Bay can kiss its playoff hopes goodbye.
2. Aaron Civale
We were very deliberate in saying Arozarena was the least valuable position player on the 2024 Rays because the distinction of least valuable player on the entire roster actually belongs to Aaron Civale. The 2023 trade deadline acquisition has the highest ERA of any qualified starter in the big leagues at 5.92 and his bWAR sits at -0.7.
It's stunning to see how quickly all the positives in Civale's game from last season have become negatives. His hard-hit rate, barrel rate, and home run rate have all skyrocketed from his typical career plateaus. Interestingly, his strikeouts are up from when he was in Cleveland, but down from where they were in the second half of 2023. It seems apparent the Rays believed they could make him more of a strikeout artist, and that seems to be backfiring.
And how's this for a sign of the times in Tampa? Not only was Civale supposed to be the number two starter on this year's Rays out of the gates, but he's just become the de facto ace with Zach Eflin landing on the injured list. Though everyone else on the staff is outpitching him, Eflin is the only one in the starting rotation right now who has even one full season of starting pitching experience. It already feels like the days of Shane McClanahan and Tyler Glasnow are decades in the past.
3. Jose Siri
There was a time when it seemed like anyone the 2023 Rays sent to the plate could do no wrong, and Jose Siri was the poster child of that unexpected success. He was traded from the eventual World Series champion Houston Astros to the Rays in the middle of the 2022 season in the deal that sent Trey Mancini from Baltimore to Houston and his track record at the plate was flat-out bad. But last season, he popped 25 home runs while playing a Gold Glove-caliber center field.
This season, it's been as if that version of Siri never even existed. He's got a .542 OPS/57 OPS+, a first percentile strikeout rate of 39.6% and seems in grave danger of losing his starting job to rookie Jonny DeLuca. Not only has his offense been awful, but despite 96th percentile sprint speed and arm strength, he's just been an average defender, thanks to some bad reads and ill-advised throws.
While the Rays may not be depending on Siri's production long-term to keep winning baseball games, it's undeniable he was a huge spark plug for the team a season ago. He plays the game with an edge and at times, that edge can seem to take him out of his focus, especially on defense. This season, he has yet to do enough good things on the field to help generate that spark and as a result, the vibes are largely negative with the fan base.
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