By Thomas Boswell
Saturday, October 18, 2008

Now, we can't lose. This weekend, we may watch as Boston runs its streak to an incredible 10 straight wins in ALCS elimination games. Bend the laws of probability? The Red Sox would mangle them. The odds of winning 10 straight games against roughly equal foes are about 1,000-to-1. The Sox have now pulled off eight such win-or-go-home LCS games in the span of just three Octobers.

However, if we are even luckier, we will watch an opposite outcome: a Tampa Bay win that sets up an even more incredible improbability. We will see Tampa Bay, after surviving a once-a-century Red Sox comeback on Thursday, reach a World Series where it can accomplish something so off-the-charts we're only starting to grasp it.

What the Red Sox did in Game 5 has been surpassed only once in postseason baseball history. Boston trailed 7-0 in the seventh, but won. Regular as clockwork, every time we get a stock market panic, somebody pulls this trick. In 1929, the Philadelphia Athletics trailed the Cubs 8-0 in Game 4 of the World Series, then scored 10 in the seventh inning.

What Tampa Bay may do this month, however, is utterly unique. Not only to baseball, but in the NFL, NBA and NHL as well. The Devil Rays would go from the worst team in their entire sport to world champions in one year.

Sorry, that would be "Rays." That's how new and ridiculous this all is. By the time you learn that they've changed their name, Tampa Bay has gone from a franchise that never did anything worth remembering in its first 10 years to one that may complete a feat as memorable as any team in American pro sports.

It's almost impossible to digest what the Rays are trying to accomplish because we have no frame of reference. They have rushed up into our faces so fast we haven't got them in focus. Nobody in the NFL or the NHL has even reached a championship game after being dead last. In the NBA, only the 1958-59 Minneapolis Lakers, with rookie Elgin Baylor, reached a title series. In baseball, only the '91 Braves reached the World Series. But Atlanta lost.

The Red Sox' comeback in Game 5 will be remembered for years. But if the Rays go all the way, it'll be one of the sport's treats of a lifetime.

If anything, the suddenness of the Rays' quest almost doesn't seem fair. It's as though we'd been served a nice wine, then were told when we were down to the last sip that it was actually the only Château Lafite-Rothschild we'd ever get to taste. Hey, can we start the meal over and appreciate this properly? Just three weeks ago, the Rays hadn't even iced their division crown. We're not allowed to hit rewind? We have to play catch-up with the tallest tale of a lifetime?

Some, in Tampa, now wear "Rayhawk" haircuts. But, even in Florida, few fans caught this fever until very recently. At their 151st game, the Rays drew only 17,296 to ugly Tropicana Field. The worst club in baseball, the Nationals, outdrew the Rays by 30 percent. It's not a certainty the Rays could even sell out a World Series game.

Because the Rays, and their 97 regular season wins, arrived so quickly, a synopsis is still appropriate. One Rays executive calls the club, "the first post-steroid era team." With the fifth-lowest budget in baseball, the Rays can't afford free agents with dubious ethics. Instead, Tampa Bay has drafted, trade or signed cheap free agents who give them a sleek, young and fast look, with defense everywhere and stolen bases, too. The Rays are the only team in MLB with above average gloves everywhere. Jason Bartlett and Akinori Iwamura turn double plays in a blink.

In the turf-field Trop, the Rays actually have elements of Whitey Herzog's Runnin' Redbird teams in St. Louis in the '80's. Carl Crawford is a triples machine and B.J. Upton stole 44 bases. The Rays' sudden October explosion of power is partly an anomaly. Their 180 homers were plenty. If Carlos Peña and Evan Longoria had been healthier, both might have had 35 homers and 120 RBI. And Upton, who hit only nine homers all season, but has three in this ALCS, may be a 30-homer man someday.

But swinging for the fences isn't their main game. The Rays love the whole offensive game and enjoy taking the extra base and challenging outfield arms. For the ALCS, the Rays actually kept speedster Fernando Pérez on the roster instead of Eric Hinske (20 homers); Pérez won Game 2 with speed, scoring on a short sacrifice fly to end the game.

Tampa Bay's real signature is pitching. If there is luck in the Rays' season, it is the complete health of their original Opening Day rotation. Those five men started 153 games. By contrast, the Nats got 105 starts and the Orioles only 94 from their season-opening rotations.

Many now expect the Rays to fold after being so close to a pennant. But they probably won't. They didn't expect such a chance, so they don't have the built-in sadness of a team that nursed a pennant dream for years. In fact, one of the Rays' first reactions to their loss was: Hey, now we get to clinch at home. Maybe they're too young to worry about goat horns. Instead, they think they're one win from heroism.

Most important, the Rays have two healthy power pitchers on tap with extra rest in James Shields and Mike Garza. Turn up the heat. Meanwhile, the Red Sox' Game 6 starter, Josh Beckett, must go old school, pitching hurt.

If Thursday's comeback from a 7-0 deficit had happened in a World Series, the winner might carry forward some mystique. But the Rays and Bosox know each other so ridiculously well (Tampa Bay leads their 23 meetings this year 13-10), that nothing about the other surprises either of them.

If anything, it is the Red Sox who have seemed impressed in this ALCS by their first look at an entirely healthy Rays offense with Crawford now back. The Red Sox, by contrast, don't even bother to hide how aware they are of the loss of Mike Lowell's key bat.

The Rays still have a long road ahead. But, until they are knocked out, they're the story of this October. If they reach the end of it victorious, then recovering from the Red Sox' mighty haymaker to the jaw Game 5 at Fenway will just become part of their confidence-building lore, their story of improbability stacked on top of fantasy.

Boston, after adoring its Idiots in '04, surely knows the look of a team of destiny. If the Rays win just one game in the Trop this weekend, they won't merely capture a pennant. They may enter the World Series feeling bulletproof.

No matter which way this ALCS ends, it's now guaranteed to be a classic vintage, down to the final drop.