ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. _ Kevin Cash will use the next few weeks to learn and decipher his team.
How to best fit the pieces together. Whom to trust in key situations. What adjustments to the original plans need to be made. Which players are better or worse than projected.
But for these first couple of weeks, it's a matter of seeing what they do, reacting with the right moves to take advantage of the contributions, and trying to pull out a win.
On Saturday, a game showcasing the value the Rays place on getting the max effort and the most out of using their full roster produced a second straight win, 3-1 over the Astros.
"They play with high energy, the effort level, all those things," Cash said. "We talk about it all the time. Some teams are built differently. One way to win is run eight guys out there for 155 games. That's not the way we're built. We're going to continue to find ways to have these guys have the opportunity to impact us on a nightly basis."
Among them the biggest contributors Saturday, before an announced 16,010 at the Trop:
_ Starter Tyler Glasnow, happy to make his first regular-season start after a rough 0-5, 10.28 spring, walked his talk about turning up the intensity with a solid five-inning outing.
Sure, he needed 43 pitches to get the first six outs, allowing six hits and a walk. But, after deciding during warmups to abandon the pause in his delivery he toyed with all spring, he allowed only one run, a first-inning homer by 25th birthday boy Alex Bregman, and clocking a career-high-matching 100.4 mph.
"I know everybody was talking about his spring training and not performing as well as he would have liked," Cash said. "But he certainly performed well tonight."
Glasnow suggested Friday that things would be different once games counted, and they were.
"I think it's more you're not really in the 'working on stuff' or 'the process' mind-set," he said. "You're definitely out there, the games mean something. I've said it before, it's not like spring doesn't (matter), but there's just a little extra boost when everyone is out there trying to win and your team is just going out trying to get a W. There's that extra kind of oomph in there."
_ Catcher Michael Perez, making his first appearance on the short side of the timeshare with Mike Zunino despite being a lefty hitter, did a lot.
He had a two-out single to cap the Rays' first rally in the fifth and a leadoff double in the eighth to spark the other. Cash was more impressed with how Perez helped his pitchers, throwing out Jose Altuve trying to steal and blocking many pitches.
"Glasnow throws a bunch balls in the dirt, that's how he gets a lot of chase with the breaking balls, and Mikey is like a brick wall back there, more times than not," Cash said. "And to be able to shut down a runner like Altuve, that probably sends somewhat of a message to the Astros in that it's not easy to walk into second base, even with Glasnow on the mound."
_ Four relievers teamed to cover the final four innings, making it 11 scoreless to start the season by a bullpen some have questioned.
Adam Kolarek got the biggest out after putting the Rays in trouble _ a Josh Reddick liner to right-center run down by Avisail Garcia with the bases loaded in the eighth _ and Jose Alvarado, who's not officially the closer, the final three outs.
"They've been outstanding," Cash said. "They've gotten big outs. The way the matchups have gone, we've been pretty fortunate with where the lineup is and turnover to this point. We aren't always going to have those ideal matchups, but so far when we've called on them, they've done a nice job."
_ Kevin Kiermaier, in full Purdue super-fan mode for his Boilermakers' late Saturday NCAA hoops game, had the biggest hit, a run-scoring double two outs after Yandy Diaz got the Rays' first one off Collin McHugh. Tommy Pham, after striking out his first three times, had another, singling in Perez in the eighth for an insurance run.
While the Rays are striking out too much _ 13 times in their two wins _ they also are coming up with clutch hits, scoring five of their eight runs with two outs. And they're playing the expected and necessary good defense, with Ji-Man Choi making the early push for Gold Glove at first base, even if he did lose track of the outs in the second inning.
Astros manager A.J. Hinch, whose 1-2 team dropped under .500 for the first time since June 20, 2016, made clear how impressed he was when a reporter asked about the Rays being underrated
"Underrated to I don't know who, not me," Hinch said. "They match up with you as good as anybody in the league. They're not sneaking up on anybody. They played really well. They outplayed us (Saturday) by getting a couple big hits, and their pitchers have come in and done a good job getting through the latter part of the game. You've got to play well. You can't give them any extra bases. We've made a couple errors the last couple games.
"You do that against a good team, you're going to get beat."
