Caminero, Three Rays Homers Bury Arizona in 5-1 Rout

Junior Caminero went 3-for-3 with a home run, two RBI, and a run scored as Tampa Bay dismantled Arizona 5-1 on Sunday. Drew Rasmussen threw six shutout innings while Merrill Kelly surrendered five earned runs on eight hits — the gap in starting pitching told the whole story.

Tampa Bay wasted no time. In the first inning, Caminero singled to left to score Díaz, putting the Rays on the board immediately. The second inning is where the game effectively ended: Mullins launched a 404-foot homer to right center, pushing the Rays' win probability from 77% to 84%, then Díaz added a sacrifice fly to right to score Walls, and suddenly Arizona was staring at a 3-0 deficit before they'd recorded six outs against Kelly. That two-inning burst set a tone Arizona never recovered from.

Kelly's afternoon got worse before it got better — it never got better. Caminero, already the game's most dangerous bat, crushed a 463-foot shot to center in the fifth to make it 4-0, and Williamson added a 402-foot homer to left center in the sixth to cap the scoring at five. Four different Rays went deep, which looks like exactly the kind of balanced offensive performance that makes Tampa Bay difficult to game-plan against. Caminero finishing 3-for-3 with the long ball is the standout line, but Mullins, Williamson, and Díaz all contributed in ways that kept Arizona from finding any foothold.

Rasmussen, for his part, was quietly excellent: six innings, three hits, zero earned runs, one walk, five strikeouts. Arizona's lone answer came in the eighth when Ketel Marte hit a 424-foot homer to center — a solo shot that made the final 5-1 but changed nothing about the outcome. The Diamondbacks, who activated outfielder Max Kepler from an 80-game PED suspension earlier this week, got nothing from their lineup beyond Marte's late consolation blast. Kelly and the two relievers who followed him — Loaisiga and Jameson — each threw a clean inning after the damage was done, but the game was long decided. Arizona's offense managed just one run against a Rays staff that appears, at least on this Sunday, to be operating at a completely different level.