Manager Joe Maddon has been unhappy with the Rays' lack of hustle and let them know after Saturday's game.

For the first time in his three-season reign, Maddon ripped into his team, delivering a brief but pointed message. Several players said he was obviously "hot,'' another described him as "borderline irate - for Joe."

"It was something that really needed to be said,'' LHP Scott Kazmir said. "It really needed to be said.''

Maddon's basic message was that everyone on the team needs to play hard for the Rays to be successful.

"Mistakes happen, but one thing you can control is your effort,'' he said before Sunday's game. "It takes no talent to hustle, whatsoever. It takes no talent at all.''

The fiery speech was brief, less than two minutes, but very much to the point.

"I think it had to be said,'' Maddon explained. "I've done it on an individual basis, and I still believe that's the right way to do it. But at some point it had to be done within the group, because you can lose a pennant by one game, and I've been there. Every game matters, every game counts, every play counts. The assumptionists of the world, I would like to eradicate. I want to eradicate assumptionism.''

Maddon was publicly upset with the lack of hustle in Saturday's game by 2B Akinori Iwamura, saying in his post-game media session that Iwamura "just didn't run hard enough" during an eighth-inning sequence in which he could have scored the go-ahead run.

But his displeasure was broader and had been building, and he picked his spot on Saturday, figuring the message would be received better after a victory. He walked from his office into the clubhouse before it was opened to the media, turned down the usual post-win music and made it very clear how unhappy he was.

"Play hard or don't play at all - that's what the message was,'' Miller said. "You could tell his heart was behind it 100 percent. When you have a manager who doesn't express a lot of emotion have a moment like that, you know it's serious, it's not for show. You accept it for what it was and listen to it - he didn't say anything that was not true.

"Every now and then, you need a little spark like that especially in the dog days. We need to respect what we're doing here - it's not every year you get to do something this special, the turnaround this organization's had. There's a responsibility, and respect for the game, to take into consideration.''

Said Kazmir: "He was just fed up with it. I think it meant a lot more after a win.''

Maddon's message was a reinforcement of what it is on the inspirational T-shirts he distributed earlier this season, that it takes nine players playing hard to nine innings to be one of the eight teams that make the playoffs. "9 = 8, or else we ain't going there,'' he said Sunday.