ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. -- Elimination from postseason contention Friday has Tampa Bay Rays manager Joe Maddon considering an interesting offseason goal: Devising creative ways to generate more offense.
With a 4-3 loss to the Chicago White Sox on Friday, the Rays faced the reality that they will miss the playoffs for just the third time since 2008. A large reason for Tampa Bay's struggle this season has been an underwhelming offense.
Entering Saturday, the Rays had scored 590 runs, which stands tied for 22nd in the majors, and their 114 home runs rank 25th. They are on pace for 621 runs scored and 120 home runs, both of which would be their fewest totals in the categories since their first season in 1998, when they had 620 runs and 111 home runs.
"We just were unable to hit enough offensively," Maddon said. "However, it's becoming an industry-wide situation -- offense, and it has gone backward, obviously. The big frontier is to figure that out: How do you generate offense in 2015 like you did several years ago when we were able to combine pitching and defense with victories because we came up one-run plus as opposed to one-run minus?
"The biggest offseason mental exercise for me is to come up with ideas on how do you garner that one extra run, those two extra runs that we were unable to come up with this year."
The task facing Maddon is complex, and there doesn't figure to be an easy answer. Entering Saturday, the Rays ranked 19th in the majors in batting with a .247 average, but they had stranded a major-league-high 1,144 runners this season. So the task is not only about producing more hits but manufacturing them when they're needed most.
"The hitter is at a total disadvantage right now," Maddon said. "And there are no advantages on the horizon. I don't see it. ... It's going to take a lot of creative thinking."
The Rays have been on the cutting edge of untraditional strategies before, including the defensive shift that many teams have adopted. The Rays' challenge will be inventing new ways to give their hitters more opportunity at the plate. Maddon has said he's interested in exploring options to improve hitters' peripheral vision.
"Whatever helps the hitter to see the ball sooner and better would be the next level of being able to, I think, fine-tune your hitters," he said in August.
Still, the urgency is clear. Maddon doesn't like that the Rays will miss play in October, and the key to returning to the postseason could depend on inventing ways to generate more production at the plate.
"It just did not want to work this year, and there's no solid explanation," Maddon said. "You look at it, primarily, the offense did not achieve at the level that we thought it would.
"It's kind of fun that we kind of spoiled folks for a bit. And then all of the sudden everybody thinks it's relatively easy to do that when it's not. There's another validation that it isn't easy to do that. But I will be upset. I shall be upset for another couple weeks -- the fact that we're still not playing. I won't be able to watch playoff games. ... I really believe we should be there."
You can follow Andrew Astleford on Twitter @aastleford or email him at aastleford@gmail.com.
