To look at the Rays, a not very uncommon favorite among the experts to be this year’s Team That Does It Again, is to generally see something not unlike Twins East: scrappy, versatile players using core baseball skills to augment a solid pitching staff, all on a small budget and relying more on savvy trades and excellent scouting than winterlong shopping trips.

To look at the Rays today is to see yet another facet shared with this year’s Twins: TRUE DEATH AT THE HANDS OF THE SOUTH SIDE BOMB SQUAD. Air strikes coupled with moonshots, lasers and ropes, doubles and triples and run after run after run, all working in concert to reduce even the mightiest of young pitchers to tears. Oh yes, Tampa Bay, who’s winning three of four now, huh? Where were your precious mohawks when you needed them? How do those pitching trades heists look now, huh? I CAN’T HEAR YOU, GHOST OF LOU PINIELLA!!!

In all seriousness, it’s hard to look at a series like this and say that either the Sox or Rays have fundamentally changed since the last time they met because, for all intents and purposes, they haven’t. Pat Burrell is pretty cool, and we all know the importance of South Side pop sensations Emergence McGrindy and the Right Way of Playing Baseball, but can anyone really look at the Rays as constructed and say “that is a team helpless against a softball team”? No. Is anyone watching the Sox and uttering “they can crush a team with speed and pitching”? No, of course not.

So what makes these last two weekends cool is not that the Sox can win by beating teams into submission – we already knew they could do that – but that the Sox can beat good teams into submission. Catch ’em in a funk. Kick ’em when they’re down. It’s a strategy that just might save this team, and one we all remember them being famously unable to capitalize on before. (“Yeah, well, we beat the Pirates 16-5!” Yeah, well, you’re supposed to beat the Pirates 16-5!)

And it’s a good feeling, this trouncing of a sick champion. Let those Rays save their A game for the likes of the Red Sox and Yankees, and let us all pine for these fleeting glory days when the Sox get their intestines handed to them by the dregs of the American League.