TAMPA -- Drew Rasmussen returned to a traditional starting role on Tuesday night, and reliever Edwin Uceta continued his return to form.
More importantly, after a 5-11 start to July, the Rays returned to the win column with a 4-3 victory over the White Sox at George M. Steinbrenner Field.
They didn’t record a single extra-base hit. They only had six at-bats with runners in scoring position. They scored all their runs in the second inning, putting together a rally that included three walks and as many balks (one) as balls hit out of the infield.
“This is the kind of team that we have,” said José Caballero, who also made the defensive play of the game on a Chase Meidroth grounder up the middle in the eighth. “We can manufacture runs, and we also can go for the long ball.”
And they didn’t mind that at all, because they put themselves in position to win the series on Wednesday night.
“We need wins right now. We'll take whatever we can get, any way we can do it,” manager Kevin Cash said. “If you've got to be opportunistic with good at-bats and finding a hole when guys are on base, great. If we slug like we did the first night out of the break, that's great as well. But we're happy we won.”
The Rays were especially pleased with their pitching, starting with Rasmussen and finishing with a bullpen that scuffled through the final stretch of the first half.
The Rays limited Rasmussen to seven innings over his final three starts leading into the All-Star break, keeping his workload in check while operating under a 150-inning limit this season. He was able to stay in his routine as a starter, but he didn’t throw more than 54 pitches in an outing during that stretch while Joe Boyle handled the bulk of the innings behind him.
But Cash said the Rays’ goal is to keep Rasmussen in a starting spot “for the remainder of the season,” so he was back in his usual role after pitching a perfect inning in the Midsummer Classic last week, albeit operating with a five-inning/75-pitch limit.
Rasmussen breezed through three spotless innings on 43 pitches before running into trouble in the fourth. He gave up three straight hits and a walk, but held the streaking White Sox to only two runs as he escaped a 32-pitch inning.
“I felt really good. Obviously, it would have been nice to finish the outing just as well as it started,” Rasmussen said. “But it's a team over there that controls the strike zone, and if you make mistakes in the big part of it, they have the ability to put bats on balls.”
Rasmussen threw 75 pitches, his highest total since a 92-pitch start on June 19, but still needed the bullpen to cover more than half of the game. Uceta handled his portion with relative ease.
One of the Rays’ biggest disappointments in the first half, Uceta admitted after giving up two runs in a 4-2 loss in Detroit on July 8 that he would “have to study more and then have to make my adjustments.” Since that loss inflated his ERA to 5.77, he has looked more like the 2024 version of himself.
It’s hardly a stretch to think Uceta can put together a dominant stretch in a high-leverage role for the Rays. He did it for the better part of three months last season, producing a 1.51 ERA with 57 strikeouts and eight walks in 41 2/3 innings.
But he struggled with home runs and walks in the early going, and it took some time to work his way through those issues. Specifically, Uceta said he has worked on getting the ball in and out of his glove quicker and throwing early strikes.
“It's just [to] make it uncomfortable for them,” Uceta said through interpreter Eddie Rodriguez. “I'm getting ahead in the count, and that's helping me.”
The right-hander struck out four of the six batters he faced in a scoreless outing at Fenway Park on July 12. He struck out three over two shutout innings against the Orioles on Saturday. And on Tuesday, he racked up four more strikeouts over another pair of scoreless innings while forcing the White Sox to whiff on six of their 14 swings.
“It feels like he's pitching with a little bit more conviction,” Cash said. “The commitment to the strike zone is good. The fastball power is good. That changeup is pretty lethal.
“He's got everything going right now … and that's a good sign for us.”