ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. | So here it is, the first real challenge of Evan Longoria&#8217;s pro career, and the baseball world waits to see how it will all play out.</p><p>In steps Longoria, the hotshot rookie in a terrible slump that&#8217;s being watched by a national TV audience.</p><p>He points his bat at Red Sox pitcher Josh Beckett, who&#8217;s in a funk of his own, waits for the 2-0 pitch, and &#8230; knee-bending curveball for a called strike.</p><p>This is how it&#8217;s gone for Longoria these last few weeks. The first two times he came up in the playoffs he hit home runs. Since that day, he has one lousy hit in 16 at-bats with eight strikeouts, and it feels worse than that.</p><p>Rays manager Joe Maddon talks as much about Longoria&#8217;s maturity and confidence as the 23-year-old&#8217;s talent, and he needs all of it as he faces Beckett with a man on and two outs in the first inning of the second game of the ALCS on Saturday.</p><p>So in comes a fastball, Longoria dips his bat at it, finds the sweet spot, and there it is &#8212; in the time it takes for a sip of soda, the ball flies into the left-field seats for a two-run homer and Longoria is out of his slump.</p><p>Next at-bat, a line drive off the left-field wall for a double. Then in the fifth, a go-ahead RBI double that knocked Beckett out of the game. Longoria went three for five in the Rays&#8217; 9-8 win in 11 innings.</p><p>Beautiful game or what?</p><p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve seen him do this before,&#8221; Maddon said before the game.</p><p>&#8220;He may have a couple of bad games in a row, and boom, all of a sudden, heads up. So he&#8217;s got it in him.&#8221;</p><p>The list of true challenges Longoria has faced in his baseball life is short.</p><p>To find a real one, maybe you have to go all the way back to his senior year at St. John Bosco High in California, when he received no Division I offers.</p><p>He chose to go to Rio Hondo Community College, where he starred enough to earn a scholarship to powerhouse Long Beach State after just one year.</p><p>From that point on, baseball has been as easy for Longoria as it possibly could be for anyone. He turned an All-American career in college into a $3 million bonus out of the draft, then, after just a week in the big leagues signed an extension that guarantees $17.5 million and could be worth as much as $49 million.</p><p>Fair to say Longoria stomped his first challenge down to mush.</p><p>With their team needing to win at Fenway Park to advance, Rays fans need that home run to be the beginning of another stomp-out for Longoria.</p><p>&#8220;I just think for right now, he just expanded his own strike zone a bit,&#8221; Maddon said. &#8220;It happens. It happens to everybody.&#8221;</p><p>Longoria needed something good to happen Saturday.</p><p>In the ALCS opener on Friday, Longoria missed a perfect chance to break out of his funk when he came up with runners on first and second and no outs in the eighth and grounded into a double play.</p><p>According to a metric called winner&#8217;s win expectancy, no play in the entire game had a bigger impact on the Red Sox winning and Rays losing than Longoria&#8217;s double-play grounder.</p><p>This first-inning home run goes a long way toward erasing those bad feelings, though.</p><p>&#8220;He&#8217;s never indicated in any way that he doubted himself,&#8221; Maddon says.</p><p>&#8220;There&#8217;s times he&#8217;s had problems this year. There&#8217;s times he went through some struggles, particularly early on. He was hitting at a very low number and they were pitching him very well, and he was struggling, but he worked his way through it because he knew he belonged here, and I really believe in that.&#8221;