Holy Naimoli!!! What hath the Tampa Bay Rays wrought?
Stu Sternberg and his baseball brain trust have turned the woeful Rays into one of this season’s best teams but better than that, the season’s best story. They are simply the most intriguing and awesome team in the majors.
The Angels have a better won-lost record; the Cubs have a bigger lead. But two-thirds of the way through the season the Rays are the most stunning team. They entered August leading the American League East and threatening to upset the Red Sox-Yankees playoff tandem.
Whoever would have believed it?
Maybe the Rays will run out of steam and collapse before the season’s end, but they have already done enough to deserve to be recognized and saluted for their achievement in the first four months of the season. To give them their proper due, we have to recognize where they came from.
They were owned and operated in the first eight years of their existence by Vince Naimoli. I have not covered everyone who has ever owned a baseball team, but in my nearly half a century of covering baseball, Naimoli has easily been the worst, most inept owner I have seen. He took an expansion franchise and operated it into a perennial state of expansion.
They were the Devil Rays when Naimoli owned them, and his decisions sent them into permanent reverse, unlike other expansion teams: the Florida Marlins, who won the World Series in 1997 and 2003; the Arizona Diamondbacks, who won the World Series in 2001, the Colorado Rockies, who played in the World Series last year.
Those three teams and the Rays are the majors’ last four expansion teams, and only the Rays staggered from season to season, finishing in last place in all but one of Naimoli’s seasons and winning as many as 70 games in a season only once.
Last year the Rays won 66 games and finished last again. The results on the surface didn’t look good; they certainly didn’t look any better than what the Rays had done their first nine years. But positive things were happening nevertheless.
“Teams that don’t take Tampa Bay seriously will get their butts kicked.”
Bill Bavasi was the general manager of the Seattle Mariners when, unsolicited, he offered that observation last March. As it turned out, his view was echoed by many other people in baseball. It was also prescient.
“Tampa Bay is good enough to ruin someone’s season,” Bavasi said, adding, “You have to hope they make mistakes. You just hope they’re young and dumb.”
He was speaking as an opponent, which he no longer is so he is free to appreciate that the Rays have not been dumb. They have been smart, and they have been very good.
They have gone beyond the pre-season assessment of a National League scout, who wasn’t ready to anoint the Rays as 2008 champions.
“If they can make it to .500, that’s quite a feat for them,” the scout said. “It’s premature to say they can contend this year. I’d give it to ’09, ’10 to say they could contend.”
The Rays, however, are contending this season, right now. From May 9 through the entire month of July, they were in first place (43 days) or in second (41) but no farther from first than two and a half games.
They lost their last seven games before the All-Star break, squandering a five-game lead and tumbling out of first. By the end of July, though, they had regained the lead and had built a new three-game lead.
“It’s remarkable that it’s happened,” said Sternberg, the man who has made it happen. “We are very proud to get to this point.”
Sternberg chose an unconventional way of getting there. A veteran and economic beneficiary of the financial securities industry, Sternberg extricated the Rays from the Naimoli tarpit with inexperienced baseball people.
An inexperienced baseball person himself, Sternberg is so young that he was born in Brooklyn and grew up there but after the Dodgers abandoned the borough and fled to Los Angeles.
Sternberg might have been expected to surround himself with veteran baseball people, but his top two aides don’t fit that definition. Like Sternberg, Matt Silverman, the club president, 31 years old, and Andrew Friedman, the 30-year-old general manager, are products of the financial industry.
Gerry Hunsicker, senior vice president of baseball operations, is the exception. He was general manager of the Houston Astros for nine seasons before joining Tampa Bay. Sternberg calls Hunsicker his “safety net;” Hunsicker refers to himself as a resource.
“I can’t say any of us forecast this to come together so quickly,” Hunsicker said. “But these kids have grown up and it’s fortunate that it’s happened at the same time. Credit goes to Joe Maddon, too. He’s upbeat and impassioned.”
Manager Maddon is only one of the ingredients of the team’s success.
“Stu has shown a lot of confidence in Andrew and Matt,” Hunsicker said. “They’ve taken that as great responsibility not only to Stu but to the organization and the community. It’s very refreshing to me to see an owner who has so much trust and confidence in his upper management to allow them to do some of the things we’ve done here.”
Hunsicker didn’t say so, but he was alluding to his experience with the Astros, whose owner, Drayton McLane Jr., made his job difficult with his interfering ways.
“You’ve got to give Andrew Friedman a lot of credit,” Hunsicker said of the young general manager. “He’s just beginning his career as general manager and he has shown remarkable insight and feel for the game. He made some moves that weren’t heralded at the time but have worked out real well.”
Among the players Hunsicker refered to were three relievers, the veteran closer Troy Percival, Dan Wheeler and Grant Balfour. But the trade that bolstered the pitching and defense was the swap with Minnesota that brought the Rays a starting pitcher, Matt Garza, and shortstop Jason Bartlett.
“Last winter,” Hunsicker said, “we decided pitching and defense was what was going to get us to the next level.”
The Rays acquired Bartlett to play short and moved Akinori Iwamura to second base, opening third for rookie Evan Longoria. But they put Longoria in the minors at the start of the season. They were accused of depriving the rookie of a full season so they would buy an extra year before he would be eligible for salary arbitration and free agency.
“It was never about that,” Sternberg said. “We were discussing a contract with him and we were quite certain we were going to get it done. We just felt it was best not to have the spotlight on him at the beginning. There was no question he was going to be in the major leagues.”
Longoria joined the Rays April 12 for their 11th game and began August as their runs batted in leader with 63. The Rays have not dazzled anyone offensively. Their batting average, .257, is 12th in the league, and they are 10th in runs scored. Their players’ names are difficult to find among the league’s leading hitters.
But they have the third lowest earned run average, 3.75, and their pitchers have allowed the second fewest hits.
“I’d like to say there was a magic bullet to this as far as a player or two,” Sternberg said. “We had three players in the All-Star game. They didn’t exactly jump off the page. They weren’t slam dunks. It has been the ultimate team effort. It’s been done with pitching and defense for the most part.”
The Messed Up Mariners
The Seattle Mariners are a competitive and a financial disaster. The Angels and the Cubs, whose payrolls are half a million or a million more than the Mariners’ $118 million payroll, lead their divisions, the Angels with the best won-lost record in the major leagues, the Cubs with the best record in the National League.
The Mariners have the worst record in the American League. Theirs is the largest deficit in any of the division races. They have hopelessly squandered the season in which they were supposed to contend for a division title or at least the wild card spot.
And so it was that in the weeks leading up to the trading deadline other teams wanted to relieve the Mariners of some of their payroll. Pitcher Jarrod Washburn and outfielder Raul Ibanez were players in demand.
The Yankees, for example, wanted Washburn and told the Mariners they would accept one of two deals: the Yankees would pay the approximately $14 million the left-hander was owed for this year and next and would give Seattle a mid-level prospect, or if the Mariners wanted better prospects they would pay part of what he was owed.
The Mariners responded that they wanted better prospects without paying any of the money. The Mets and the Blue Jays encountered similar experiences in their pursuit of Ibanez.
Had the Mariners traded Washburn and Ibanez on July 31, deadline day, they could have saved about $15 million.
“They’re in disarray,” an executive of another club said. “They’re all afraid of losing their jobs.”
Saving Wilson
Brian Wilson and C.J. Wilson are hardly household names, probably not even in the cities where they work. Both are closers, Brian for the San Francisco Giants, C.J. for the Texas Rangers. At the start of the weekend, they collectively had more saves this season than all pitchers named Wilson, including them, had combined before this season.
Brian had 29 saves and C.J. 24 for a total of 53. Before this season, Brian had 7 saves, C.J. 14 and four other Wilsons – Billy, Don, Kris and Steve – had a combined 26 for a collective total of 47. The Wilsons’ time has obviously arrived.
Escape to New York
Ivan Rodriguez’s path to the Yankees began when the Detroit Tigers told him his playing time was about to become limited. The Tigers also had Brandon Inge as a catcher, he has two years and $12.9 million left on his contract while Rodriguez can be a free agent and they wanted to use Inge more than they had been using him.
When Rodriguez was told he and Inge would split playing time, he talked to manager Jim Leyland about it, and Leyland talked to general manager Dave Dombrowski.
The Tigers knew the Yankees, with Jorge Posada out for the rest of the season, needed a catcher and they needed a relief pitcher because their closer, Todd Jones, was also out.
Dombrowski called Brian Cashman, the Yankees general manager, at about 10 o’clock in the morning on the day before deadline day and proposed a deal, Rodriguez for Kyle Farnsworth. The Yankees played a day game that day, and before it was over, they had agreed to the swap.
Out of courtesy, the Tigers called the catcher’s agent, Scott Boras, to tell him about the trade. Boras said wait a minute, you can’t do that. Pudge has to agree to the trade and sign papers. Sorry, Scott, the Tigers said, Pudge has already signed them and agreed to the trade.