Strength in reserve: Rays bench plays starring role in ALCS

Willy Aybar came off the bench to get four hits and five RBIs in Tampa Bay's Game 4 rout of Boston. AP John Donovan's Mailbag Comments, questions or obviously unfounded criticism? To e-mail Donovan, use the form below. Name: Email: Hometown: Question: SEND

BOSTON -- By now the deflated and nearly defeated denizens of Red Sox Nation have seen all they want to see from Evan Longoria, Carl Crawford, B.J. Upton and Carlos Pena. The Tampa Bay Rays are up three games to one in the best-of-seven American League Championship Series, with a possibly clinching Game 5 scheduled for Thursday night at Fenway Park. The Rays' starting lineup is for real. The Red Sox and their fans get it.

But does Willy Aybar really have to pile on? And Rocco Baldelli, for Pete's sake? Fernando Perez? It's open season on the defending World Series champs, and every bench jockey in a Rays uniform is taking a shot.

Take Aybar for example. The 25-year-old utility man is a castoff from the Dodgers and Braves, a kid with a shadowy past, a good glove, nice patience at the plate and a bat with more pop than you'd think. He filled in for Longoria when the third baseman was injured in mid-August and hit .314, with three homers and 14 RBIs in that 27-game stretch. He stepped in for the first baseman Pena in the Division Series against the White Sox when Pena scratched his eye, and all of the sudden it was, "Carlos who?"

Aybar has quieted talk about his past problems with substance abuse by working hard, saying little and playing anywhere on the field that the Rays want him to play. Forty games at third. Nineteen at first. Nine at second. A pair of games at short. He's been a regular designated hitter.

Tuesday, in Game 3 of the ALCS, manager Joe Maddon put the switch-hitting Aybar in as DH and he collected four hits -- including a mammoth home run off of Tim Wakefield that cleared Fenway Park's Green Monster -- and drove in five runs in the Rays' 13-4 rout. Aybar's night stunned the Red Sox, but you know what? It surprised exactly no one on the Rays.

"This guy could play every day. We're very lucky to have a guy like him," says the Rays' bullpen coach, Bobby Ramos. "He's a big-game player. You can't take that away from him."

Aybar has six hits in 12 at-bats in the ALCS. For the postseason he's 9 for 23. That's a .391 average over parts of seven playoff games, the first seven he's ever played in. And he's just a utility guy on the deep, talented Rays. "It's a little tougher when you're not in the lineup every day," Aybar, a native of the Dominican Republic, says through Ramos, acting as his translator. "But mentally, I'm ready for it."

Says Ramos: "He also takes ground balls at third, ground balls at short, ground balls at first. He makes sure he gets all his work in, every single day. When he gets to play, there's no excuse. He's ready to play."

Baldelli's another Ray who has made good off of the bench. At one time considered a superstar in waiting, Baldelli is now happy to be contributing at all. His well-chronicled fight with a muscle-sapping form of mitochondrial disease threatened his baseball career, but after rounds of tests and consultations with doctors, he returned to start a game in Seattle in August, put in 28 games with the occasional start and hit .263 during the regular season.

In Game 3 of the ALCS on Monday night he started in right field and in the eighth crushed a three-run home run off Boston reliever Paul Byrd in a 9-1 Tampa Bay win. "To be going from not knowing if I'd play to being able to contribute in the playoffs is a pretty big jump," Baldelli said after Game 4. "It's not something I expected. It's something I always thought about. Wanted to be a part of. It just ended up happening like that. It just worked out."

Baldelli and, at times, Ben Zobrist, fill in outfield spots, along with Eric Hinske (who subbed for Crawford in left field when he was injured late in the year but who is not on the ALCS roster). The other player in the mix is Perez, who got the bulk of playing time in center when Upton was hurt late in the season. Perez's main asset is his speed. He scored the winning run from third in the 11th inning of Game 2 of the ALCS, easily beating J.D. Drew's strong throw from short right field on Upton's sacrifice fly.

"This is the way we've been playing the entire season," Baldelli says. "When Longoria and Crawford went down we counted on a lot of guys to come through. And they did.

"Throughout the year, every single person on our team pretty much has missed time with injuries. That doesn't get talked about very often because we just maintain the same level of consistency. But I think our bench has done a good job for us this year. It's been the strength of our team."