ANAHEIM -- Ryan Pepiot couldn’t even figure out what to pack in his luggage.
“How do you pack for 14 days?” he said.
He emptied his underwear drawer and his sock drawer. Then there was the question of the different climates in each of the four cities the Rays will be playing in throughout their 12-game road trip, the franchise’s longest in 20 years. It’s warm in Anaheim and Sacramento, chilly in Seattle and it’s always cold in San Francisco.
“That’ll be nice to get away from the Florida heat a little bit,” Pepiot said. “Get away from the Florida heat a little bit and get a little bit of West Coast sunshine. We just take it day by day.”
The Rays are staring down a 22-game stretch, two weeks away from home, out West, where they will play three home games. In August, they’ll play only eight home games after playing only eight home games in July.
It seems like the only thing to do is take things day by day, especially after losing the first game of the trip 5-1 to the Angels at Angel Stadium.
“We’ve had some long road trips already," left fielder Jake Mangum said. “The whole message this Spring Training -- and the whole year -- was just like, we’re gonna have to be a little bit grittier than normal teams with how our schedule’s laid out.”
As someone born and raised in Mississippi, Mangum’s no stranger to the humidity he deals with in Florida. So when the team got off the bus in Anaheim after arriving on Thursday, he took a deep breath. A chance to breathe without humidity.
The road trip comes at what is likely the most critical point in the season for the Rays. After a 25-9 stretch from late May through the exact midpoint of the season, they’ve cooled off. Tampa Bay went from a half-game behind in the AL East (and first place in the Wild Card standings) on June 26, to 11 games behind in the division and 5 1/2 games out of the third Wild Card spot, with five teams now ahead of them.
In their last 19 road games, the Rays have gone 3-16.
But even still, the Rays had enough faith in the group not to fully punt at the Deadline. They shipped out a pair of impending free agents in Danny Jansen and Zack Littell while keeping most of their core intact and adding a rental starter in Adrian Houser, who made his Rays debut in Monday’s loss after giving up five earned runs on 11 hits -- both season highs for him -- over 5 2/3 innings pitched.
“It’s been a unique couple of days for him, no doubt,” manager Kevin Cash said. “Fly out on the West Coast, come in and make a start with a bunch of new faces that you don’t know. But I thought he competed really well. Appreciate how he got so deep in the ballgame, given where the pitch count was trending.”
With his Rays debut now behind him, Houser’s embracing the long road trip as a time to get acclimated to his new environment.
“We’re all away from home, away from our families, so we’re going to have to rely on each other,” he said. “Especially with this being a 12- or 14-day trip, whatever it is. We’re gonna rely on each other, hang out a lot. [It’ll] give me time to talk to the guys, chat them up and get to know them a little better.”
But most of all?
“We need to win some ballgames,” Houser said.
The biggest thing Brandon Lowe stressed was for the guys not to add any more pressure to the trip than there already is. The team knows how important the trip is, and he emphasized the need to make sure the basics are covered before anything else: swinging at the right pitches, throwing strikes and playing good defense.
Lowe knows that if they do all that, then they’ll have their best foot forward to still be playing meaningful baseball at the end of August.
“Take it day by day,” he said. “... Let’s focus on that. Let’s focus on the game at hand. In 14 days, when we’re all dog tired and want to go back home, we’ll be able to go back home.”