The Tampa Bay Rays can normally be viewed as one of the preeminent pitching factories in MLB. They have shown an uncanny ability to take the most unlikely of pitchers, prospects or otherwise, and turn them into viable options at the Major League level.
While that has been the case for the better part of the last two decades, 2025 has been, well, different. While the team as a whole has struggled to reach .500, the pitching staff has been simply … mediocre?
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Now they are missing a major piece in Shane McClanahan, but to be fair, he has not pitched in the regular season since 2023. Without him, no other pitcher on the roster has been able to stake their claim as a consistent force to be reckoned with on the mound.
A recent article from Kerry Miller of Bleacher Report took a look at all 30 pitching staffs in MLB, and ranking them from best to worst. For the Rays, they placed 17th on the back of their mediocrity.
“The Rays are just kind of perfectly mediocre,” Miller wrote. “As of Monday morning, not a single pitcher on their staff had a WAR (neither on FanGraphs nor Baseball Reference) above 0.7 or below negative-0.3. Pete Fairbanks has been stout at closer, though. Shane McClanahan logged seven scoreless innings in spring training, but hasn’t pitched in the regular season in nearly two years. Getting him back would be huge.”
Entering Friday, the staff ranks 12th in MLB with an ERA of 3.84. Most of that has come from the bullpen, however, as the rotation holds an ERA of 4.10, 18th in MLB, while the relief corps holds a 3.42 mark, eighth overall.
McClanahan holds a career ERA of 3.02 across 404.2 innings over three seasons. Getting him back on the mound would work wonders for a pitching staff that, to this point in 2025, has just been… meh.