Place Your Bets: The Rays are For Real

Tampa Bay has played more than half a season sitting first overall in the standings, and they owe much of their success to a rookie. (AP Images)"]

The Tampa Bay Rays came into the current MLB campaign like they have every season since being born into poverty in 1998: with very little shot of making the playoffs. Stuck in the same division as the free-spending New York Yankees ($209 million payroll) and Boston Red Sox ($133 million), Tampa Bay's $44 million in player salaries – the second-smallest payroll in baseball to the Florida Marlins' ($22 million) – didn't exactly translate into high hopes for the Tropicana Field faithful. In fact, if anyone was going to knock the powerful duo off their twin thrones, the Toronto Blue Jays ($98 million) would've been the prudent choice to do it.

Yet here we are, just past the halfway mark of the season, and the Rays (55-32) are the best team in all of baseball, let alone the AL East in which they hold a 4.5-game lead over the Red Sox, 9.5 over the Yankees. Winners of seven in a row after Sunday's 9-2 thrashing of Kansas City, the same franchise that's never won more than 70 games out of 162 are on pace to break that mark sometime in early August.

As any bettor knows, there's nothing sweeter than a winning team that's supposed to lose. The Rays have racked up a pile of profits for their backers, although that's assuming there were any backers in April.

One of the heroes of the Rays' run has been rookie third baseman (and preseason Bodog Nation fantasy pick) Evan Longoria, who boasts 16 homers and 52 RBIs in 77 games.

"There's a sense of calmness in our dugout," said Longoria, who had a two-run homer on Sunday. "It's incredible the things we're doing here."

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