Pete Fairbanks had a night to forget for the Tampa Bay Rays. In a difficult AL East with the Yankees and Orioles as legit World Series contenders and no other teams below .500 to date, the Rays need every win they can get. Unfortunately, it wasn’t meant to be on Wednesday night against the Angels, as Fairbanks was trusted to sew up a 4-3 win in the top of the ninth in Tampa, only to totally blow it.
Fairbanks got tagged for three hits, two runs and walked two batters in one inning of work in a 5-4 loss. If it wasn’t for a bang-bang play at the plate that was overturned, he would’ve been on the hook for three runs.
Rough stuff. It’s still so early in MLB’s 162-game regular season, so there’s time for Fairbanks to sort things out and correct whatever is going haywire. The problem is, at least in the moments after the game, Fairbanks himself couldn’t diagnose what was wrong.
He didn’t know where to begin when it came to evaluating his performance:
“No I thought it generally sucked. I didn’t think it was a specific suck, I thought it was like an all-encompassing type of suck. So we’re going to try and rectify that, but for right now, I’m going to be pretty pissed about it.”
Asked for potential solutions and whether he’d watch game tape or examine his mechanics, the interviewee flipped the question back onto the reporter in a hilarious exchange.
“You tell me. I’ve tried that. If you’ve got an answer, I’d love to hear it. Just, you know, not gonna let it beat me up for…maybe give it till 10, it’s 9:44 right now. We’ll give it 16 minutes of sulk, and then we’ll get back on the bump and figure it out.”
Couldn’t have picked Pete Fairbanks out of a six-dude lineup before this epic/chill postgame self-evisceration, but now it should be required that he hold court with the media whenever he’s deployed in a game. We need more of this guy and his ilk. Baseball is boring at this time of year. Fairbanks is the refreshing adrenaline needle to the heart that makes us feel alive. Not to mention, exposure of any kind helps for the Rays, who are basically the successful Moneyball version of the soon-not-to-be Oakland A’s.
I get the sense that Fairbanks will bounce back from a rocky start to the 2024 campaign. He’s yielded eight walks, eight hits and eight runs in 10 innings of work thus far, yet he’s also converted three save opportunities. Fairbanks had only four blown saves in 29 chances last year with a 2.58 ERA. Or at least that’s what I’m rooting for, because we need to have at least one or two follow-up stories on this. Just to see how Fairbanks is faring as the season rolls along.
