Rays Sweep Red Sox, Extend Start-Of-Season Win Streak To 13 Games

Well, credit the Red Sox for holding the Rays to winning margins of only one and two runs in two of the four games of Tampa Bay's sweep. Those games are the only ones the Rays (now 13-0) have not won by at least four runs.

After dropping a pitching duel 0-1 on Monday, the Red Sox lost the next two games 2-7 and 7-9. On Thursday afternoon, Boston held a 3-1 lead in the middle of the fifth. The Rays sent 11 batters to the plate in the home half, battering Corey Kluber and Richard Bleier for seven runs. And that was that. Tampa Bay won 9-3. 

The Rays have scored 101 runs and allowed 30, a +71 run differential that ranks as the best of any team through its first 13 games since 1900 and third-best in major league history (after those two 1884 juggernauts: the New York Gothams and St. Louis Maroons). Eleven of their 13 wins have been by at least four runs. The Rays have had a lead at the end of 111 of 117 innings.

Speaking of 13, the Red Sox have lost their last 13 games in Tampa Bay. They won on April 22, 2022, then lost last season's remaining nine games and the four in the series just completed. Boston will try its luck again on September 4.

The Rays are the third team since 1900 to win 13 consecutive games to beginning a season. Seven major league teams have begun a season with wins in their first 10+ games. The list is here.

Most Consecutive Wins, Start of Season (1901-2023)

13    2023 Rays
13    1987 Brewers
13    1982 Atlanta
11    1981 Athletics
10    1966 Cleveland
10    1962 Pirates
10    1955 Dodgers (Brooklyn)

The St. Louis Maroons began the 1884 Union Association season with 20 wins. The UA lasted only one season. The team moved to the National League for five years (1885-1889). They were in St. Louis in 1885-86, then moved and became the Indianapolis Hoosiers (1887-79).

The Rays will go for Win #14 in Toronto tomorrow night.

The Red Sox head home for four games against the Los Angeles Ohtani-Trouts (7-5), who are tied with Texas for first place in the AL West. Ohtani is scheduled to start on Monday morning (Patriots Day).

Note: "Maroons" is most likely a racial slur, much like Indians or Braves. From Wikipedia:

Maroon, which can have a more general sense of being abandoned without resources, entered English around the 1590s, from the French adjective marron, meaning 'feral' or 'fugitive'. (Despite the same spelling, the meaning of 'reddish brown' for maroon did not appear until the late 1700s, perhaps influenced by the idea of maroon peoples.)

The American Spanish word cimarrón is also often given as the source of the English word maroon, used to describe the runaway slave communities in Florida, in the Great Dismal Swamp on the border of Virginia and North Carolina, on colonial islands of the Caribbean, and in other parts of the New World. Linguist Lyle Campbell says the Spanish word cimarrón means 'wild, unruly' or 'runaway slave'. In the early 1570s, Sir Francis Drake's raids on the Spanish in Panama were aided by "Symerons," a likely misspelling of cimarrón. The linguist Leo Spitzer, writing in the journal Language, says, "If there is a connection between Eng. maroon, Fr. marron, and Sp. cimarrón, Spain (or Spanish America) probably gave the word directly to England (or English America)."

Alternatively, the Cuban philologist José Juan Arrom has traced the origins of the word maroon further than the Spanish cimarrón, used first in Hispaniola to refer to feral cattle, then to Indian slaves who escaped to the hills, and by the early 1530s to African slaves who did the same. He proposes that the American Spanish word derives ultimately from the Arawakan root word simarabo, construed as 'fugitive', in the Arawakan language spoken by the Taíno people native to the island.