Boston, Sept. 8-Red Sox defeat Rays, 3-0, and cut Rays’ lead over them to half a game.

St. Petersburg, Fla., Sept. 15-Red Sox thrash Rays, 13-5, and slice Rays’ lead over them to two percentage points.

St. Petersburg, Fla., Sept. 18-Twins beat Rays, 11-8, and reduce their American League East lead to a game and a half.

St. Petersburg, Fla., Oct. 10-Red Sox trim Rays, 2-0, and take 1-0 lead in American League Championship Series.

St. Petersburg, Fla., Oct. 22-Phillies edge Rays, 3-2, and take 1-0 lead in World Series.

Phillies, beware. The Rays are working the Pattern again and have you right where they want you.

For the fifth time in 45 days, the Rays lost the first game of a critical series Wednesday night, and Saturday night they can make it the fifth time that they win the next two games and win or position themselves to win the series.

Maybe the first-game losses have lulled the other teams into a false sense of success, and then the Rays have ambushed them. Certainly, by the time the teams played the A.L. series, the Red Sox should have been onto the Rays’ tricks. But it didn’t matter; it didn’t help the Red Sox. They still lost the next two games.

In Boston last month, the Rays rebounded and won games started by Daisuke Matsuzaka and Josh Beckett and restored their A.L. East lead to two and a half games.

At home the next week they protected their first-place status with another pair of victories over the Red Sox and their starting pitchers, Beckett and Tim Wakefield.

After the second series encounter with the Red Sox, the Rays pulled out the Pattern against the Twins and clinched the first playoff spot in their 11-year history. Six days after that, the division title was theirs.

The Rays didn’t have to use the Pattern in the division playoff series against the White Sox because they won the first two games, but they returned to their routine in the league series against the Red Sox, suggesting that the Pattern was reserved more for the Red Sox than anyone else. Maybe the Twins just happened to be an innocent bystander.

For the third time the Pattern worked against the Red Sox as the Rays won the second and third games of the A.L.C.S. But then they gambled their 2008 survival by winning Game 4 and extending their winning streak to three in a row and their series lead to three games to one.

What they should have done was lose Game 4, as if that were the start of another three-game series, and that would have put them in position to win the next two games and finish off the Red Sox for good in six games.

But after the Red Sox won twice and tied the series at three games each, the Rays won and finished off the Red Sox for good in seven games.

Now it is the Phillies who are challenging the Rays’ tried and true Maddon method, and if they lose the first World Series game played in Philadelphia in 15 years they may as well go home. Oh, that’s right; they will be home.

But if they are to bump the Rays’ rocket ride to the World Series championship off course, the Phillies will have to play a different game. Call it let’s pretend. They might have to pretend that they have no runners in scoring position when they come to bat.

In the first two games of the World Series the Phillies had one hit, Shane Victorino’s infield single, in 28 times at-bat with a runner at second or third base, going 0-for-19 before Victorino’s hit. They left 11 runners on base in each game.

A team can’t keep stranding so many baserunners and expect to win too many games. That’s not the way the Phillies played during the season. During the season the Phillies had the best runs to runners left-on-base ratio in the National League (1.4). In the first two games of the World Series their ratio was 4.4.

Perhaps they should have borrowed a trick from Joe Maddon’s book of winning baseball. Despite knowing that the Angels died in their division series with the Red Sox on a failed suicide squeeze, a rarely used strategy in these power-mad days, Maddon called for a suicide squeeze in the fourth inning of Game 2.

The Rays had a 3-0 lead and runners at first and third with one out when Maddon had Jason Bartlett squeeze. But he bunted the ball foul, and Cliff Floyd returned to third. Instead of letting Bartlett swing away, though, Maddon called for another squeeze attempt, but this time a safety squeeze.

This time Bartlett bunted the ball fair, and as soon as he did, Floyd broke for home and scored easily. The run increased the Rays’ lead to 4-0 but became even more important late in the game after the Phillies scored. They sliced their deficit to 4-2 and had a runner at first with one out in the ninth.

Obviously there’s no way of knowing what might have happened if Bartlett had swung away instead of bunting, or if the Phillies would have played the subsequent innings differently had the Rays not scored the run. But the fact is they did score the run, and Maddon gets a lot of credit for using a play that can be effective even if most managers disdain it.       

Maddon also gets credit for using David Price as the Rays’ secret post-season weapon. The No. 1 pick in the 2007 draft who has one season of professional experience, Price pitched the final 1 1/3 innings of the Game 7 victory over the Red Sox and secured the Game 2 victory over the Phillies, pitching the final 2 1/3 innings.

Price’s performance is reminiscent of the role Francisco Rodriguez played for the Angels in the 2002 post-season. After relieving in only five games during the season (with a 0.00 earned run average in 5 2/3 innings), the rookie Rodriguez compiled a 5-1 record in helping the Angels get to and win the World Series.

Price also pitched in five games for the Rays, one as a starter, and had a 1.93 e.r.a. in 14 innings. The difference between Rodriguez and Price is that Rodriguez was a relief pitcher and played that role in the 2002 post-season. Price is a starter but has fit effortlessly into his new, temporary role.

Most impressive has been Price’s poise. Needing the last two outs against the Phillies, the 23-year-old left-hander had to face Chase Utley and Ryan Howard, the Phillies’ two best hitters, both ultra dangerous. No problem. Price struck out Utley and induced Howard to ground out.

The rookie applied the coup de grace, and the Phillies were halfway to succumbing to the Pattern.