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Jorge Castillo
Multiple Authors
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Junior Caminero, the Tampa Bay Rays‘ 23-year-old superstar third baseman, ordinarily projects unmistakable confidence with an unadulterated swagger, but he wasn’t quite himself before his team’s 7-3 win in Game 6 of the American League Championship Series on Monday night.
With the Rays one victory away from the World Series, he wasn’t producing to his lofty expectations against the Cleveland Guardians and was noticeably dejected.
“He was a little down after batting practice,” Rays bench coach Rodney Linares said in Spanish. “And when we got inside I told him, ‘Listen, the pitcher is more afraid of you than you are of them. You know who you are.’ Then he connected on a blast against one of the best relievers in the major leagues.”
That blast was an unlikely two-run home run against All-Star closer Cade Smith in the seventh inning of the Rays’ pennant-clinching win. Never had Smith allowed a homer on his splitter in his major league career. Then Caminero turned on one in on his hands and clanked it off the foul pole to ignite a raucous celebration of his first career postseason home run.
Caminero turned to his dugout as he trotted to first base and stopped before reaching the bag to pound his chest, releasing a scream, then resumed his trot. He cupped his ear rounding second base, urging the deafening sellout crowd for more noise. He hopped his way down the third-base line, pointed to the sky and pointed to Randy Arozarena, a former teammate sitting in the second row behind home plate.
Caminero then stopped a few feet short of home plate and crossed his arms tightly across his chest with a stone stare at Arozarena, mimicking the celebration Arozarena made famous while fueling the Rays’ 2020 World Series run with a historic postseason, before concluding the longest postseason home run trot of the Statcast era (since 2015) at 38.7 seconds.
“That came naturally,” Caminero said in Spanish. “I just saw him and did it.”
The home run doubled the Rays’ lead to four. An inning later, after the Guardians finally mustered a rally to cut the deficit in half, Yandy Diaz, the longest-tenured player on the roster who guaranteed a win after Game 5 on Sunday, demolished a changeup from Hunter Gaddis to double the margin again with his own two-run home run.
Minutes later, All-Star closer Bryan Baker worked a perfect ninth inning to send the Rays to their third World Series in franchise history. They’ll look to win their first championship against the 103-win Milwaukee Brewers in the second World Series matchup between franchises without a championship in the past 100 years and the first since the Philadelphia Phillies faced the Kansas City Royals in 1980. Game 1 is Friday in Milwaukee.
“Tonight was a perfect example of how we win games right there,” Baker said. “Junior and Yandy being the two that hit their massive home runs to give us those cushions and give us a little bit of room for error in those last three innings.”
The typical Rays triumph began with Freddy Peralta continuing his remarkable turnaround since Tampa Bay acquired him at the trade deadline. Two days after recording two outs out of the bullpen in Game 4, the right-hander held the Guardians to one run over 5⅓ innings. For the series, he surrendered one run across 12 innings for a 0.75 ERA to earn ALCS MVP honors less than three months after he joined the club with a 4.99 ERA in 22 starts with the New York Mets this season.
In 10 outings (nine starts) since Aug. 26, Peralta — behind an electric fastball he has manufactured with various mechanical changes — has an 0.89 ERA in 50⅔ innings. His next start will be against the club that traded him to New York for two prospects in February after eight seasons and two All-Star nods.
“It’s crazy, like, how not only life can surprise you, but this game,” Peralta said.
Peralta walked off the mound in the sixth inning to a standing ovation with the Rays, unable to take advantage of chances to put Cleveland away, leading 3-1. That soon changed in the seventh inning.
It started with Liam Hicks working a leadoff walk, which generated a chat among Rays coaches over whether they should have Jorge Mateo pinch run for Hicks. But Rays manager Kevin Cash’s gut rendered that unnecessary.
“He said, ‘No, because Junior is going to hit it out right now,'” Linares recalled.
Caminero had not hit a home run since the Rays’ penultimate game of the regular season on Sept. 26. He entered the night 4-for-20 with 11 strikeouts and one walk in the series. But for the Rays, it was a matter of time.
It was Caminero who crushed a go-ahead 454-foot home run that broke the scoreboard in the ninth inning of Game 7 of the Dominican Winter League championship series in January 2025. It was him who hit the walk-off home run to clinch a playoff spot for the Rays on Sept. 11 en route to finishing with 42 home runs after hitting 45 last season. And it was him who electrified Tropicana Field in the most important game of his major league career.
“There’s a long list of big moments where he’s produced for such a young player,” Rays president of baseball operations Erik Neander said. “There was not a doubt in our mind that that moment was coming, and we felt pretty good about it happening tonight.”
