It's Working. Oh, It's Working.

The "starter" tonight for the Tampa Bay Rays was one Ryne Stanek.

It was, in fact, Stanek's league-leading 10th "start" of the year, and his 39th since the beginning of 2018.  In those 39 starts he has lasted a total of 86 1/3 innings, or just a tad more, on average, than the 2 scoreless frames he threw this evening.

Pitted against him was the Yankees' own sort-of starter, CC Sabathia, who gutted out five pretty decent innings himself, as is his wont.

On hand to witness this extravaganza were all of 25,025 fans.  Last night, for the first game of the series, the turnout was all of 20,846.

Fewer than 23,000 fans a game, for a weekend series with the New York Yankees.

Even with the ever-plucky Rays fighting to hold onto first place, where they've been all season.  Even with the usual hordes of obnoxious retired Yankees fans available to swell the attendance.

Of course, this is a considerable improvement over the average Tampa Bay crowd, which is just a tad under 14,500.  That puts the Rays 15th out of 15 AL teams, on pace for 1.173 mill on the year.

That would be just a tick above what the team drew last year, when it finished 3rd, 18 games out of first.  It would be nearly 700,000 below what Tampa Bay drew in its one pennant-winning year, back in 2008; less than half the 2.5 million the team drew in its opening year, in 1998.

No doubt we'll get to hear the usual excuses.  Their miserable park is in the wrong part of town.  The team is under-capitalized, which isn't really an excuse at all.

But never mind, for a moment, how it is that MLB can never manage to find someone with deep enough pockets to run a Florida franchise properly.

The fact is that the Rays are a flop.  All of their clever innovations to get around spending money still won't bring out the fans.  And a big reason is Ray Stanek, "opener."

This whole idea of diminishing the pitcher—especially when combined with the current, one-dimensional philosophy of hitting—is striking at the heart of the game.  It's one big reason why attendance in plummeting.

Baseball is unique in that it is an individual sport—pitcher against batter—at the heart of a team sport.  And the pitcher is unique in sports, a player who, though solely on defense (at least in the AL), controls the ball and initiates every play.

To diminish that role, to diminish the most heroic role on the field, is to mess around with the essence of baseball.

Put it this way:  the only position that comes close to the pitcher in terms of importance, is the quarterback in football.

Think of how much football you'd watch if tomorrow all NFL teams came up with a new strategy where someone else played quarterback every series.  (And where every play was a pass sixty yards downfield.)

And while the Yanks and Rays continue the tussle down in Tampa, the team surging up from the briny depths like the shark in Jaws is Your World Champion Boston Red Sox.

The Sox don't have a particularly deep or even outstanding roster, as world champions go, and we can always hope that their sad racial divide over going to the White House will lead to an out-and-out civil war in the clubhouse.

But what the Sox DO have is a manager (and management) that refuses to play home-run-or-die all season, and a staff full of big starting horses who will run over over everyone in the postseason.

Ray Stanek is not going to be outdueling Chris Sale in the ALCS.  And Coops Cashman, whose weakest spot has always been his failure to put together a first-rate starting staff, is not going to be out-maneuvering Boston no matter how many Sabremetricians he hires.

And the day everybody goes to the "opener"?  Nobody will be there to see it.  Literally.