Red Sox vs. Rays
Season series: Red Sox won 12-7.
Tampa Bay Rays (92-71): Evan Longoria is the face of the Rays, but Wil Myers had a huge impact as a rookie. Tampa Bay went 56-38 after Myers was promoted from Triple-A Durham on June 18. The key acquisition in an offseason trade that sent pitcher James Shields to Kansas City, Myers has led the team in RBIs (53), runs (50) and doubles (23) since being called up. He was second in hits (98) and homers (13). … Myers and Ben Zobrist led the Rays with .294 batting averages after the All-Star break. … David Price, the reigning A.L. Cy Young Award winner, pitched the Rays into the playoffs with a 5-2, complete-game victory at Texas in the wild-card tiebreaker. Alex Cobb followed that up two nights later with 6 2/3 gritty innings in a 4-0 win at Cleveland in the wild-card game. … Cobb beat the Rangers, Yankees and Orioles in his final three regular-season starts, pitching to a 1.16 ERA. … Matt Moore, an All-Star this season, had 143 strikeouts in 150 1/3 innings. … With one of baseball’s deepest rotations leading the way, the Rays won 14 of their last 19 regular-season games to rebound from a 4-13 stretch that knocked them out of contention for a third division title in six years.
Boston Red Sox (97-65): The Red Sox finished with the best record in the A.L., earning home-field advantage throughout the postseason. … The Red Sox are the second A.L. team in the three-division era to go from worst to first. … This is Boston’s first A.L. East title since 2007 and just the second since 1995. … David Ortiz is the only player remaining from the 2004 World Series team. Dustin Pedroia, Jon Lester and Jacoby Ellsbury were also on the 2007 champions. … The Red Sox led the majors with 853 runs. They were successful on 86.6 percent of stolen base attempts, the best in A.L. history since baseball started keeping track of caught-stealings in the 1920s. Boston was successful on its final 39 tries this season. … This is the fourth time Jonny Gomes has been a part of a big turnaround. The 2008 Rays won 31 more games than the year before; the 2010 Reds won 13 more, the 2012 Athletics won 20 more and this year’s Red Sox won 28 more than the previous season.
Watch for: Glove Work. The Rays are built on pitching and defense. They committed 59 errors, second-fewest to Baltimore’s major league-record 54. Rays’ Ben Zobrist led A.L. second basemen with a .9928 fielding percentage, .0001 ahead of Pedroia. Tampa Bay’s Yunel Escobar, meanwhile, led all major league shortstops with a .989 fielding percentage after being acquired in an offseason trade.