Rays beat Athletics to advance as Yandy Diaz homers twice

OAKLAND, Calif. - When he got to second base, Yandy Diaz stole a glance back toward the dugout and saw all his teammates going crazy. He gleefully kept running.

Out for two months? No matter.

Diaz homered twice for baseball's lowest spender and Charlie Morton silenced the powerful Athletics on the mound as the Tampa Bay Rays beat Oakland at its own game with a 5-1 win in the AL wild-card round Wednesday night.

After playing only one game since late July because of a foot injury, Diaz hit a leadoff homer and went deep again in the third inning.

"When I looked to the bench and saw the guys super excited, it pumped me up to go around the bases," Diaz said through a translator. "I thought we had to carry that momentum throughout the game."

Avisail Garcia hit a two-run drive in the second, and Morton had all the support he needed as Tampa Bay advanced to face the AL West champion Astros in a best-of-five division series. Game 1 is Friday at Houston.

"We have a tough road ahead of us, Houston's a great team, but we played them well this year. It's going to be a dogfight," Rays DH Tommy Pham said.

"They kind of beat us with our game," Oakland manager Bob Melvin said. "We're normally a home run-hitting team."

The Rays were unfazed by a towel-swirling Oakland crowd of 54,005 that established a wild-card record.

"I really feed off the energy of this situation. … It helped us to come in here and be in a high-pressure situation," Morton said. "The stadium was pretty rowdy, but I think that helped us focus."

The A's have lost nine straight winner-take-all games since 2000. Their only win came in 2006 against the Twins before being swept in the ALCS by the Tigers.

Even a day earlier, Rays manager Kevin Cash wasn't sure Diaz would play given how much time he missed during the season's second half.

"He probably caught us off guard a little bit with how quickly he turned around over the last five, six days," Cash said.

Teammate Kevin Kiermaier noted Diaz is "just one of those guys, he just wakes up out of bed and rakes. Everyone knows him for his muscles and what he can do in the weight room and stuff like that, but the guy finds the barrel so much throughout this whole season, and any time we're able to have him available, we're happy."

Morton, with a career-high 16 wins and a career- best 3.05 ERA this season, counted on his playoff experience giving him an edge.

He won Game 7 of the ALCS and World Series for the Astros in 2017.

Morton gave up five hits without an earned run over five innings.