ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. | David Ortiz names no names. So maybe this is just a little gamesmanship, his way of welcoming the Rays to the franchise&#8217;s biggest stage.</p><p>The people here in Florida &#8212; and small-market fans everywhere who&#8217;ve adopted the Rays this October &#8212; better hope so.</p><p>Because if not, if Ortiz is just being honest, he&#8217;s describing his impression of what sounds an awful lot like a Rays team in way over its head after losing 2-0 to the Boston Red Sox in the first game of the American League Championship Series on Friday night at Tropicana Field.</p><p>&#8220;I watch everybody&#8217;s faces,&#8221; Ortiz says. &#8220;I&#8217;m telling you, I saw faces tonight different than what I see in the regular season. I don&#8217;t blame anybody. It&#8217;s a lot of pressure out there in this game.&#8221;</p><p>Ortiz, baseball&#8217;s premier clutch hitter, is throwing his verbal grenade directly into the Rays&#8217; clubhouse, and it doesn&#8217;t matter that it&#8217;s punctuated with a smile.</p><p>The accusation is firm and will require a rebuttal in tonight&#8217;s game two.</p><p>It&#8217;s easy to see where Ortiz is coming from. The Rays won 57 games during the regular season in this building, the most in baseball. They won two more in the first round, and then when the ALCS came around they got shut at home for the first time since April 20.</p><p>And it&#8217;s not as if they didn&#8217;t have chances. Bases loaded in the first inning, and they got nothing. Runners on first and third with nobody out in the seventh, and they got nothing. First and second with nobody out in the eighth, and the same result.</p><p>Ortiz smells nerves.</p><p>&#8220;You come up with men on second base,&#8221; he said, &#8220;that same look that you saw all year. Like, &#8216;OK, we&#8217;re down one run or two runs it doesn&#8217;t matter, we&#8217;re going to get it done.&#8217; It wasn&#8217;t there tonight. I don&#8217;t think I saw that tonight.&#8221;</p><p>He pauses. And here comes a backhanded offer of sympathy.</p><p>&#8220;It&#8217;s their first time in the playoffs,&#8221; he says. &#8220;You can&#8217;t blame them.&#8221;</p><p>Before Ortiz&#8217;s thinly veiled accusations, the story coming out of the ALCS opener was Daisuke Matsuzaka, the Japanese pitching sensation who walked the bases loaded in the first inning but took a no-hitter into the seventh.</p><p>It was easy to see that Dice-K wouldn&#8217;t last long enough to make history. He needed 27 pitches in the first inning, 18 in the second, and 16 in the third. But along the way, he used a dazzling mix of pitches, all of them making the Rays&#8217; hitters look at times as if they were swinging at a swarm of bees.</p><p>They didn&#8217;t get a hit until Matsuzaka&#8217;s 90th pitch, an 88-mph slider that Carl Crawford lined into right field for a solid single.</p><p>&#8220;Some days I can pitch like that,&#8221; Matsuzaka says through a translator, &#8220;and other days I can&#8217;t.&#8221;</p><p>Dice-K led the American League in walks, and also allowed the lowest batting average against, so none of this was particularly surprising.</p><p>It&#8217;s down to an art form, really, Matsuzaka creating messes and then pulling a Houdini routine before anyone knows what happened. He still hasn&#8217;t allowed a hit in 15 chances with the bases loaded this season, and batters are hitting just .164 against him with runners in scoring position.</p><p>&#8220;If you see him once or twice you might think, &#8216;Geez, that&#8217;s going to come back and bite you,&#8217; &#8221; Red Sox outfielder Jason Bays says. &#8220;But I&#8217;ve been here two months, and they&#8217;ve been saying that the whole two months.&#8221;