Rays tweet and embarrassingly delete Yankees diss after Bombers' Sunday collapse

Come on, Tampa Bay Rays! Come on. If you're going to take a stranglehold on the AL East -- and especially over the Yankees -- just over a month into the season, you're going to have to grow into your role as big, bad bullies.

And big, bad bullies don't delete tweets. Didn't the 1884 St. Louis Maroons teach you anything? They had a famously toxic Twitter presence.

Sunday's Yankees loss was the worst of the season, surpassing the other worst loss of the season, a 15-2 rout against the Rangers, as well as several other "worst losses of the season" (the Karinchak game, the Clay Holmes game, the other Clay Holmes game against Correa) in a 2021 reboot no one asked for.

New York led 6-0 in the fifth inning of their series finale at the Trop with Gerrit Cole on the mound. You won't find a cleaner chance for an undermanned Yankees team to take a series win on the road and feel shockingly good about themselves amid an otherwise morose stretch of baseball. Harrison Bader had fueled everything. The team may not have changed much, but they were at least taking a stand with two more four-game sets against Tampa Bay and Toronto on the horizon.

Alas, Cole collapsed shockingly quickly, Jimmy Cordero allowed a runner to score from second on a grounder, and the Yankees went 1-for-15 with RISP, eventually being walked off in the 10th inning after fumbling the Ghost Runner spectacularly. In the aftermath of New York's embarrassment, the Rays tweeted a brutal dig at their detractors, insinuating the Yankees were not a "real team". Brutal. Accurate. A good tweet.

And then they deleted it?! Weasels! Tiny-payrolled weasels!

Why did Tampa Bay Rays delete tweet talking smack on the Yankees? Wimps!

What happened here? Did someone get in the Rays social team's ear and tell them it wasn't nice to make fun of the Yankees, considering they've been so beset by injuries? That it wasn't in good taste to call a roster without Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton "fake"? I don't know. This seems pretty innocent to me. Seems like good boasting.

It feels like the Rays just didn't want to provide their opponents troll material for when they inevitably come back to earth a little bit from their 28-7 start. But you know what? You forgot the First Rule of the Internet. Deleting things makes it so much worse. When you start to slide, the trolling will be doubly powerful, considering the whole world knows you were cocky enough to tweet, but not confident enough to keep it up.

The 2023 Yankees may not be able to hold a lead, but they can certainly hold a grudge.