No longer a novelty, Rays fear no one - even the Yankees - in 2020: 'We're stacked'

PORT CHARLOTTE, Fla. – The music is always loud and the mood perpetually light in the land of the underdog, and on this spring training morning, Blake Snell eases through the Tampa Bay Rays clubhouse like Peter Pan with a $50 million contract.In one moment, he is singing along to Post Malone, daring observers to join in with him. In the next, he is reaching into a drawer in his locker and removing his pingpong paddle – the house models won’t do – and hammering the ball at a teammate with ferocity.Hours later, the 2018 American League Cy Young winner is more reflective. He’s 27 now – “Twenty-sev-en,” he says disbelievingly, as if it were 50 – and coming off an injury-plagued season that forced the Fortnite aficionado to reconsider his sleep habits, his arm care, even his diet.“I eat a lot of veggies, and I hate veggies,” he says somberly. “And I gave up candy, and I love candy.”Perhaps Snell swapping his beloved Baby Ruths for spinach isn’t the perfect metaphor for his team’s hopeful pivot to consistent domination, but it’s close. Their startling 90-win season after a winter dismantling in 2018 was backed up by last year’s 96-win tour de force, which was followed by a wild-card conquest of the Oakland Athletics and an elimination-game loss to the Houston Astros in the AL Division Series, a series that looked like an overmatch but nearly resulted in the toppling of a mini-dynasty.Now, the famously low-revenue and tight-budget team is wondering how to close the gap on a 103-win New York Yankee squad that shrugged its shoulders and lavished $326 million on Gerrit Cole, who beat them in that decisive ALDS Game 5 and now will face them up to a half-dozen times in the AL East.“Oh, I was thrilled,” majority owner Stuart Sternberg chuckles when asked about Cole’s move to his divisional neighborhood. “There’s certain guys who tend to follow you around. Look, you saw what he did to us in the playoffs and loved pitching against us.“But by the same token, it will be that much sweeter when we beat him.”Is that merely the hubris of an owner who’s also audacious enough to try and convince Major League Baseball, the Tampa Bay area and Montreal that his franchise should be carved up like Solomon’s Baby and shared with two markets willing to build him a stadium?Not necessarily. Since re-setting their minor-league system in 2014, the Rays have been building to this moment, a point in time where their 40-man roster is bursting with matchup-capturing versatility, and their minor-league system stocked with elite talent ready to bubble up to the majors, led by consensus No. 1 prospect Wander Franco.A franchise that first shocked the industry with a 2008 World Series run has, since then, been forged on pitching, from James Shields to David Price to Chris Archer to Snell.In an ironic twist, the team that was chastised for employing the “Opener” strategy in 2018 can potentially overwhelm opponents with a traditional rotation.Charlie Morton struck out 240 in 2019. Tyler Gla

stacked'