Throughout the season the CBS Sports MLB experts will bring you a weekly Batting Around roundtable breaking down pretty much anything. The latest news, a historical question, thoughts about the future of baseball, all sorts of stuff. Last week we discussed two projected contenders off to a slow start. This week we're going to tackle the hottest team in baseball, the 12-0 Tampa Bay Rays.
Are the Rays the best team in baseball?
R.J. Anderson: It depends on how you determine such things. Yes, if you go merely off record to date. Otherwise? Eh, probably not quite the best. I try to not overreact to small samples. Two weeks ago, I had them as the third-best team in the American League East. They've done an outstanding job out of the gate, and it's quite possible (perhaps likely) that they end up better than that. But I feel like a lot of evaluative mistakes are made by moving off baselines too quickly. We're not even halfway through the first month; I think it's OK to wait and see.
Matt Snyder: To this point, it's not even a question. Yes, they have been. It's also an incredibly small sample and while I'm sorry that some Rays fans are getting annoyed at how much it's been mentioned, I'm doing it again: They've played a laughably easy schedule. The Red Sox are very likely the worst team in the AL East and the other teams they've played are arguably the three worst teams in baseball; perhaps even historically bad. They deserve credit for beating the hell out of this schedule and most great teams would be something like 9-3 or 10-2 right now, but we also shouldn't lose all context behind the small-sample record.
If we're looking just at the roster strength over the course of 162 games, I'd take several other teams to have better records the rest of the way, starting with the Yankees and Blue Jays in the AL East.
Mike Axisa: I mean, you are what your record says you are, right? The Rays have played some truly awful teams, no doubt about it, but you can only play the schedule you're given and they're thrashing those awful teams. Tampa Bay deserves all the credit in the world for capitalizing on their schedule and banking wins early. It'll make life easier later in the season.
I've been doing this long enough to know that making sweeping declarations two weeks into the season is a bad idea. I thought the Braves and Astros were the two best teams in baseball coming into the season and I'm going to stick with it for now (Houston does look a bit more vulnerable than I expected). The Rays have been great and they're climbing my internal power rankings. I'm not ready to say they're the best team in baseball after two weeks though.
Dayn Perry: Yeah, I'm comfortable calling them that at this juncture. It's more than just the start to the season, though. Over the past few years, they've put together one of the strongest bodies of work of any team in MLB, so there's nothing aberrant or out of character about a hot start. A healthy and ready-to-take-the-next-step Wander Franco gives them a true superstar in the lineup, and they continue to churn out pitching (almost as fast as their pitchers get hurt). Given their start to the season, it wouldn't surprise me if the Rays wound up with the best record in baseball this season.
