CLEVELAND — The Tampa Bay Rays were down two games to one in the American League Championship Series, their offense had been quiet for three games, and on Saturday night three of their players hit a combined five home runs in a 7-3 win over the Cleveland Guardians, evening the series at two games apiece.
The three are Junior Caminero, Jonathan Aranda, and Yandy Díaz. The local media had been calling them the “Big 3.” The national media, having seen the game, has begun calling them the “Three Little Ones,” after the 1989 film in which three small baseball players, signed for a publicity stunt, outperform an entire major league roster.
The comparison is not flattering in the way the internet intends it. Caminero is a 21-year-old slugger who hits baseballs into the upper deck. Aranda is a grinder who plays through a wrist wrapped in enough tape to bandage a horse. Díaz is a veteran who has been in this exact situation before and looks, in the photos, like a man waiting for a bus. None of them is small. The nickname is a joke about the movie, in which the players are small, and the joke is that these three are not, and that the Rays, a team that has been to the World Series twice and won it zero times, has once again assembled a scrappy, improbable, slightly cartoonish lineup that refuses to die.
The Guardians, who entered the series as the AL’s top seed and who beat the Rays’ “Big 3” for three straight games, now find themselves in a best-of-three with the momentum pointed the other way.
The series returns to Cleveland on Sunday for Game 5, with the winner of Games 6 and 7 — if needed — advancing to face the Milwaukee Brewers, who have been waiting since Wednesday and who are, by all accounts, extremely ready.
The Rays’ manager, asked after the game whether the “Three Little Ones” nickname bothered him, said he had not seen the movie. He said he had seen the scoreboard. The scoreboard said 7-3.
The bus, in the movie, is the one the small players ride in. In Cleveland on Saturday, the bus drove itself.