Perhaps the best news of the month is the current seven-game slide of the Tampa Bay Rays. They looked unstoppable a month ago, but now seem to be regressing to the mean. That’s not to say they’re not a good team. They certainly are. And they’d be a lot better if Carl Crawford was hitting as he has in recent years. Given current indications, though, we could see the Rays drop off a bit in the second half, much to the delight of the Yankees.

The key to Tampa Bay’s second half is their home/road discrepancy. They currently hold a 36-14 record at home, and a 19-25 mark on the road. The significant part of that is the number of games they’ve played with each: 50 at home, and just 44 on the road. So they have 31 games left at home, and 37 on the road. If they continue to play sub-.500 ball away from the Trop and can’t keep up the torrid pace at home, they could quickly fall out of the Wild Card race.

Then again, this is an instance where past performance might not be the best indicator of future results. If Tampa Bay can get their overall road record back to .500, they could negate any kind of drop-off in play at home. Still, to know that they have more road games in the second half is a bit reassuring.

Update: I’m not upset about the dissenting in this post…just wanted to note that a couple of paragraphs got cut out in the middle because I misread a quote attributed to Gomes which I originally has as Shelley’s words. So that kinda took the air out of that balloon.

PeteAbe told us this afternoon that Shelley Duncan slid into Akinori Iwamura with his right spike high. Okay, I thought. No big deal. No, you don’t want your guys taking out other guys’ knees at this time of year, but from the description, it seemed harmless. In fact, I even privately chastised Jonny Gomes for running in from right field. But then I saw this pic:

(AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

There’s a difference between sliding with your spikes high and sending your sole towards another man’s family jewels (I’ve always loved that euphemism, family jewels). So I pretty much agree with what B.J. Upton said: “Just a flat-out dirty play. Period.”

As if things couldn’t get worse, Tough Guy Gomes ran in from right field:

(AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

“I probably could have done a lot of things worse, but it is a baseball field and there’s fans and kids watching,” said Gomes. “I just had to let him know, that’s not going to fly with me on the field.”

Yeah, it’s nice to see the players fired up. But this needs to end now. It really should have ended after Heath Phillips drilled Evan Longoria. But since we’re far past that point, we need Girardi and Maddon to jointly say “enough.”