TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) – After Wednesday’s game against the Phillies, the Rays have just four more Spring Training games before the start of the regular season. At this point, Manager Kevin Cash is hoping there are no injuries and that his players are available for Opening Day. 

“Health. I think that’s first and foremost,” Cash said about what he was looking for from his team this next week. “I feel like we’ve had a good spring. We’ve missed some guys certainly to the WBC for good reason. We got two of them back with Isaac Paredes—congrats to him and Johnny Aranda for their run that Mexico had. We’ll see Randy [Arozarena] on Friday. But with [Taylor] Walls getting back in the mix and playing, we’re pretty healthy on the position player front and we just want to keep it that way as we get closer.” 

The Rays had eight players from their 40-man roster and 12 overall in their organization participating in the World Baseball Classic and will have all of them back with the team by the end of this week.  

“Pretty awesome for baseball,” Cash said about the WBC. “Big congrats to all of our players that participated in it and certainly to the USA team and obviously to Japan. That was a pretty tense 8th and 9th inning. But if we wanted to promote the game by doing that, it’s hard to argue that we didn’t, so congrats to MLB and everybody that was involved.” 

As for the Rays’ highly-touted pitching staff, their ramps-up is right on schedule. 

“Everybody is kind of hitting those marks of innings and pitch count,” Cash said. “I know we’ve got a couple guys in the next couple days that will pitch maybe in some minor league games to get their last outings in. But we should be pretty full-go breaking [camp]. Give credit certainly to the pitchers but Kyle Snyder’s done a nice job of planning all this. With all these bodies, that’s very tough to do but he’s done a good job with it.” 

The next several days the team will work to finalize their Opening Day roster, which is expected to be set by this time next week. As for the Rays’ Opening Day starter, they will announce that on Friday.