<table> </table> ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. | Oh, sure, this one&#8217;s easy. Here come the highfalutin Red Sox, with their championship rings, their $133 million payroll and enough history to fill Cooperstown twice.</p><p>And over there are the Rays, with their decade&#8217;s worth of 90-plus loss seasons, the second-lowest payroll in baseball, and a few months&#8217; history highlighted by fans with cowbells and players with Mohawks.</p><p>So, yeah, this one looks as easy as a turkey sandwich. Except it&#8217;s not stupid to think the Rays can beat baseball&#8217;s powerhouse &#8212; unless you&#8217;d call Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn stupid.</p><p>&#8220;Yeah, I think they can win,&#8221; he said. &#8220;And I think they <em>will</em> win.&#8221;</p><p>If we can ignore the Big Papi aura around the Red Sox, and confine what you look at to 2008, the recent history actually favors the Rays. Seriously. And not just because they won the season series 10-8.</p><p>Forget everything you previously knew about a team that plays on fake grass in what is quite possibly the most awkward stadium in baseball in front of crowds that before this season you could often count by hand.</p><p>Hindsight being what it is, this Rays&#8217; run could be seen coming way back in spring training, when Jonny Gomes stood up for a teammate by going after Yankee Shelley Duncan for retaliation for a cheap shot.</p><p>Another sign came in June, when James Shields stood up another teammate by drilling Coco Crisp, setting off a benches-clearing brawl.</p><p>The final doubts should&#8217;ve been squashed when the Rays won two in a row in Fenway Park, taking charge of the AL East division with game-winning homers from Dan Johnson and Carlos Pe&#241;a.</p><p>That&#8217;s what convinced Gwynn.</p><p>&#8220;We all learned a lesson right there,&#8221; he said. &#8220;We were all writing them off, like, &#8216;OK, the shoe&#8217;s coming off now.&#8217; But they competed and they fought and they won. This team&#8217;s really good.&#8221;</p><p>&#8226; &#8226; &#8226;</p><p>A national sportswriter went on ESPN the other day, the latest to say the Rays &#8220;are bad for baseball.&#8221;</p><p>So maybe the message of Rays as a legitimate championship contender hasn&#8217;t gone mainstream quite yet. But it sure has made its way through baseball circles.</p><p>Heck, just on Thursday, David Ortiz &#8212; who knows a thing or two about this &#8212; said the Rays have the best pitching in the American League.</p><p>&#8220;Everybody needs to give Tampa Bay a lot of credit,&#8221; Ortiz said. &#8220;I can tell you one thing, if they keep themselves out of trouble, they&#8217;re going to do a lot of damage. Because it&#8217;s not just one or two guys, it&#8217;s all of them. That&#8217;s something you don&#8217;t see every day.&#8221;</p><p>This is all still just a little surreal, which is fitting for a team that plays in a dome where it&#8217;s tough to tell whether it&#8217;s night or day without a clock. The Rays have no Cy Young contender, nobody receiving MVP mention and only three All-Stars this season &#8212; fewer than the Rangers.</p><p>So maybe it&#8217;s easy to let them become an afterthought.</p><p>But that kind of thing should have stopped in the second week of September, after Jon Lester and Jonathan Papelbon blanked the Rays and pulled Boston to within a half-game of the division.</p><p>This is the part that Gwynn is talking about, when writing off the Rays came back, and this is the part where Johnson &#8212; a September call-up who was zero for 15 as a pinch hitter &#8212; hit the game-winning, two-run, <em>pinch-hit</em> home run off Papelbon.