I hate the fact that the Red Sox have to play the (Devil) Rays

In mid-summer Boston and Tampa were locked in a dead heat atop the AL East.  But over the next six weeks the Sox ran away with the division title, building a 9.5 game lead half way through September.  Throughout that time I taunted the Rays mercilessly on twitter, in response to their trash talk about taking over first place back on July 29th.  Two months of vastly superior baseball down the stretch should have been enough to put Tampa in the rear view mirror for good.

But now after winning consecutive one game playoffs the Rays are back, and the Sox will have to deal with them in a best 3 of 5 ALDS series.  I don't care that Boston beat them 12 times in 19 tries this year.  Tampa has great pitching, and they scare me, especially in such a small sample size.  Not to mention the fact that somehow despite playing 3 straight desperation games they've still managed to line up their top two starters (Matt Moore and David Price) for Friday and Saturday.

It's not supposed to be this way (and actually under the old Wild Card system it couldn't have, teams in the same division never met until the league championship series; and while I'm on this grumpy old man tangent the Rays wouldn't even have qualified for the postseason either).  We shouldn't have to worry about those guys anymore, in my mind they've already been defeated.  I might have been able to stomach the idea of losing to Cleveland or Texas, but after the way the end of the season unfolded it just doesn't seem right that the Rays will get a chance to send Boston home for the winter.

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