ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. \u2013 Mt. Spokane High product Drew Rasmussen, the Tampa Bay Rays\u2019 ace, continued to pitch like an All-Star, putting together perhaps the best outing of his career Wednesday in a 7-5 win over the Boston Red Sox.<\/p>\n
Rasmussen struck out a career-high 13 batters, improving to 6-2 on the year. The 30-year-old right-hander allowed two singles and one walk over seven shutout innings and 97 pitches. He struck out the first four Boston batters, then punched out four in a row during the third and fourth innings, and fanned five of six in the sixth and seventh.<\/p>\n
Rasmussen was coming off another exceptional outing in a win over Miami on Friday, when he tossed seven shutout innings, allowing one hit and striking out nine.<\/p>\n
Rasmussen\u2019s 13 strikeouts Wednesday matched the third most in a game for a Rays pitcher in franchise history. He improved his ERA to 2.71 on the year \u2013 the 14th best among big league starters \u2013\u00a0and ranks fourth among MLB starters with a 0.88 WHIP. Rasmussen earned his first All-Star nod last year, and he\u2019s trending toward another appearance in the Midsummer Classic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. \u2013 Mt. Spokane High product Drew Rasmussen, the Tampa Bay Rays\u2019 ace, continued to pitch…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":305236,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[202,204,203,199,201,200],"class_list":["post-305235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305235\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/305236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}