By Gus "Walk-Off" Fields
The scoreboard in the Bronx read visitors 6, home team 0 for six and a half innings Tuesday night, and for long stretches of it there wasn't a hit to show for New York's side of the ledger at all.
Drew Rasmussen carried a no-hit bid into the seventh inning against the Yankees, and by the time it finally broke, the Tampa Bay Rays had already done what they came to do: clinch the American League East, their fifth division title, with a 6-1 win.
There is a particular cruelty, for a Yankees fan, in watching a division get clinched on your own field by the team that keeps doing more with less. The Rays have made a habit of it. No marquee free-agent class, no glittering payroll — just pitching depth and a knack for finding value nobody else wanted, and here they are again, standing atop the East.
Rasmussen's night was the story within the story. A no-hitter is baseball's loneliest kind of magic — one pitch from unraveling at any moment, the whole ballpark leaning forward waiting to see if history holds. It didn't hold all the way, but it held long enough to matter, and it held long enough to make sure that if you were rooting for Tampa Bay, you got a night you'll actually remember instead of just a line in the standings.
The Yankees, meanwhile, will have plenty of October business of their own to attend to. But Tuesday belonged to Rasmussen and to a Rays team that has once again made itself very hard to ignore.
— Compiled from reporting by ESPN.
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