Randy Arozarena homers as Rays win fifth straight

The Rays’ All-Star left fielder went deep for the third time in five games on Tuesday night, blasting a two-run shot to left field in the third inning of Tampa Bay’s 5-1 victory over the White Sox at Tropicana Field.

After a stunningly sluggish start in which his club dropped four games below .500, Arozarena has played a part in the Rays’ City Connect-clad five-game winning streak, their longest since a seven-game run last June 3-9. They are back over .500, at 19-18, for the first time since they were 12-11 on April 21.

“Looks like it’s the Randy that we all know,” third baseman Isaac Paredes, who clubbed his team-leading eighth homer on Tuesday, said through interpreter Manny Navarro. “It just seems like he’s picking up his rhythm a little bit.”

Arozarena agrees only to a certain extent. He said through Navarro he feels “just a little bit” more like the slugger who has produced such consistent results over the past three seasons. So what’s missing?

“When I get two hits in one game,” Arozarena said, “that’s when I’m going to start feeling better.”

It’s a fair point, considering it has been a career-long 33 games since Arozarena posted back-to-back two-hit performances on March 29-30, the second and third games of the season. But there’s really no solace in doubling his 2024 home run total over the past five days?

“That’s simply just one hit,” Arozarena said, grinning. “I still need to get a couple hits.”

Arozarena seems to be trending in the right direction, at least, and his nine-pitch at-bat against White Sox starter Michael Soroka was a good example. He immediately fell behind, 0-2, after swinging at a fastball and a slider. But he was disciplined after that, fouling off three fastballs over the plate and taking three pitches outside the zone.

Finally, Arozarena got the breaking ball he wanted, an 82.4 mph slider left up in the zone. He launched it a Statcast-projected 363 feet out to left field, extending Tampa Bay’s lead to four runs.

“I think we’re seeing a guy that is starting to feel a little bit better about himself,” manager Kevin Cash said. “When Randy’s right, he does that quite a bit with those pitches.”

That was perhaps the oddest aspect of Arozarena’s brutal skid through April: He was getting beat in the strike zone, not crushing the pitches he typically does, rather than losing his plate discipline. He combined the best of both approaches in that at-bat.

“All I was really focused on was just trusting my hands, and then he kept throwing me a lot more pitches,” Arozarena said. “He was hitting me with the fastballs, but on that 3-2 pitch, he threw me a breaking ball that I was waiting for.”

Arozarena’s blast was one of many encouraging performances for the Rays as they clinched their second straight series victory. Paredes had three hits, boosting his average to .299 and his OPS to .904. Harold Ramírez drove in another run. Jonny DeLuca picked up two more hits.

Starter Zach Eflin set the tone by pitching a season-high seven innings, allowing just one run on six hits and striking out three without a walk while matching his longest outing with Tampa Bay. He did it while sporting a mustache, sans beard, that came as part of the team’s effort to move past a rough 1-5 road trip.

“Well, things weren’t going great, so you’ve got to switch it up a little bit every now and again,” Eflin said, smiling. “I got the approval from my wife, and she said, ‘You’ve got to do it for the boys.’ She’s not very fond of it. … It’s working so far.

“I know I’m pretty embarrassing-looking with it. But you know, self-embarrassment brings laughter, laughter brings smiles, and smiles are contagious.”

The Rays’ energy also seems to be contagious. They will point to their undefeated City Connect uniforms as the spark, but they were also motivated by a team meeting before Friday’s series opener against the Mets. They spoke then about playing and supporting each other with more passion, something Eflin mentioned after each of his past two starts.

“It’s something that we needed to do, and everybody’s all on board for it,” Eflin said. “We just have to go out there with a spark and a chip on our shoulder every single night.”

The past five days, they’ve done exactly that.

“It feels like we’ve kind of turned the dial or the volume up a little bit with the intensity and the energy,” Cash said.