The Extra 2% (11 page)

With the first pick of the thirteenth round, the Devil Rays selected Jason Pruett, a left-handed pitcher out of a Texas community college. Seventeen picks later, the Cardinals threw their own dart. With the 402nd overall pick in the 1999 draft, St. Louis grabbed the player Arango had wanted all along. A pudgy kid from Missouri named Albert Pujols.

Arango was crushed. He quit his job and went to work at a sports agency. It didn’t take long for the Devil Rays to realize their mistake. The player who once carried the weight of his
abuela’s
rice and beans carved his body into granite. Pujols crushed the ball the minute he got to the minor leagues. He continued to mash in spring training of 2001, impressing St. Louis brass so profoundly that the Cardinals tossed him into their opening day lineup, despite Pujols having played only three games above A-ball to that point. He hit .329 that year with 37 homers, a .403 on-base percentage, and a .610 slugging percentage, one of the greatest performances by any rookie in major league history.

Arango never forgot his initial scouting report, and neither did Pujols. Late in Pujols’s third season, he reached 39 home runs.
Arango called Pujols with a message: he and his wife had a bottle of champagne chilling that they would open as soon as Pujols cracked number 40. The next day Pujols called back. Arango already knew what he was going to say.

“I got forty,” Albert Pujols told one of the few scouts who had believed in him, “and forty-one too. You can go ahead and call the Devil Rays now.”

To be fair, twenty-eight other teams missed on Pujols too. But the D-Rays’ whiff on the greatest player of the past decade epitomized the team’s early struggles in building a productive farm system. Tampa Bay would eventually become known as a scouting and player development powerhouse, one built partly on high draft picks, but also on a smarter approach than the competition. That reputation would take a while to bloom, though. Before that, the D-Rays were a team that struggled to build the talent pipeline it needed to win at the major league level. Those failures were the results of poor choices, cheapskate spending habits, and in the case of the thirteenth-round pick turned future Hall of Famer, plain old bad luck. That and failing to listen to baseball’s equivalent of a foot soldier—the overworked, underpaid, underappreciated area scout.

For almost as long as there’s been commerce in this country, there have been debates on how to regulate commerce. Grant too much unfettered power to the largest companies and you risk widespread malfeasance and potential monopolies. Throw up too many restrictions and those companies suffer, the economy suffers, and people lose their jobs. These debates cover every industry imaginable and show no signs of going away: Should the government overhaul the financial sector to prevent the kind of market manipulation that built a housing bubble and a near economic collapse and made the biggest banks too big to fail? Should regulators blow up coal mining companies given the heavy environmental damage and lapses in worker safety the industry has caused, or lay the hammer to oil companies like BP that callously drill deep into the ocean floor
without any feasible plan if disaster strikes? Or does the threat of an energy crisis make it necessary to allow energy providers to run their businesses any way they choose? Evaluating the boundaries and definition of free markets will always rank among our society’s biggest challenges.

Major League Baseball has no such dilemmas. It’s not a free market and doesn’t pretend to be one. To keep fans’ interest, both teams must have a reasonable chance to win on any given day. To address this issue, rich teams—typically those in the largest and most profitable markets—share hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue every year with poorer teams. Still, by comparison, the amateur draft looks like full-blown kibbutz living. The team that finishes with the worst record in the major leagues gets rewarded with the top pick in the draft the following year. Meanwhile, success is penalized: win the World Series and you’ll wait until the end of the first round to make your first pick. Picture the top producer at an investment bank getting a $5 bonus and the worst producer getting promoted to vice president and you’ve nailed the MLB draft.

Few teams have reaped baseball’s equivalent of government cheese for longer than the Devil Rays. For ten straight years, the D-Rays lost enough games to draft in the top ten (though they would willingly surrender the first of those ten). Their futility earned them four number-one overall picks, with no selection lower than eighth. That collection of top draft picks helped form the core of a team that would wash away a decade of embarrassment in Tampa Bay. But despite several successful picks, the team’s many draft misses during Chuck LaMar’s decade as general manager remain damaging to this day.

By the time a baseball man rises to the position of GM, his scouting days are usually all but over. General managers seldom travel to small-town ballparks to follow A-ball prospects in other organizations who could someday make for interesting trade targets. They don’t venture to the Dominican Republic to find sixteen-year-old diamonds in the rough. And with apologies to Billy Beane and his legendary chair-tossing skills, they rarely pull the strings on
draft day, at least not after the first round; LaMar had little say in who the Devil Rays drafted beyond the early rounds. But he did assemble the team of scouts, coaches, and instructors who helped identify and mold some of that talent—including a few late-round picks—into winning major league players.

One of them was scouting director Dan Jennings. “He’s fun to talk to, a great storyteller from Alabama,” said
Baseball America
’s John Manuel. “The classic scout that you drum up in your head.” Jennings’s scouting proclivities mirrored LaMar’s: he loved strapping pitchers who threw blazing fastballs. For position players, he targeted speed and athleticism first—he’d find the athletes, the team could turn them into ballplayers.

Thanks to Major League Baseball’s restrictions on expansion teams, Tampa Bay and Arizona were forced to pick at the end of each round in each of their first three drafts. Both franchises cried foul, complaining that the decision was unfair to a pair of expansion teams starting from nothing. Making matters worse was the challenge both teams faced in building complete scouting and player development departments from scratch. Simply forming and implementing an organizational plan and getting to know the preferences and quirks of everyone from the scouting and farm directors on down can take several years. Without the benefit of high picks, and with everyone simply getting to know each other’s philosophies, the Devil Rays’ first three drafts went horribly.

Dipping into the high school ranks—as they would many times in the ensuing years—the D-Rays grabbed an outfielder from North Carolina with the twenty-ninth overall pick in 1996. But Paul Wilder was a six-foot-five, 240-pound bruiser, far from the speed demons Jennings preferred. Wilder didn’t play a single game in the big leagues, nor did the team’s second- or third-round picks. The Devil Rays didn’t draft a significant major league contributor that year until fifth-rounder Alex Sanchez, a slap-hitting speedster who hit a career .296 with little power and 122 stolen bases—while playing all but 43 of his career games with other teams. The D-Rays
didn’t find another good major leaguer until thirty-fourth rounder Dan Wheeler.

In 1997, Tampa Bay led off with a prototypical pick. With the thirty-first selection, the Devil Rays took Jason Standridge, a six-foot-four, 215-pound right-hander out of an Alabama high school, the kind of power pitcher who sets scouts’ hearts fluttering. But again the pick bore little fruit: Standridge appeared in just eighty major league games (started just nine) and compiled a 5.80 ERA. The next seven picks? Kenny Kelly, Barrett Wright, Todd Belitz, Marquis Roberts, Doug Mansfield, Eddy Reyes, and Jack Joffrion, who combined to appear in thirty-nine major league games. Toby Hall, drafted out of UNLV in the ninth round, became a useful big league catcher for a few years. The draft yielded no one else of note for the next
sixty
rounds, until Heath Bell became a throw-a-dart success in round sixty-nine—with a different team, years after the Devil Rays failed to sign him.

The Devil Rays’ first two drafts underscored the risks that come with drafting raw high school athletes, especially when the top pick comes well after the top ten. But the D-Rays weren’t going to deviate from their plan, even after some of the earliest high school picks flamed out.

“We were facing tough competition in the American League East,” said LaMar. “We also had the mentality that it was going to be rough going for a while, but that we wanted to eventually build a championship organization. We also knew that our payroll, for the most part, was not going to be what some of the other clubs would have. So we took the chance on high school players, knowing that if you hit on them, you had a chance to hit big.”

LaMar shot himself in the foot after the 1997 season, blowing the Devil Rays’ first-, second-, and third-round picks in ’98 by signing veteran free agents Roberto Hernandez, Wilson Alvarez, and Dave Martinez; the Hernandez and Alvarez deals cost the team a combined $63 million in salary. Vince Naimoli and his let’s-win-now-at-all-costs partners weren’t as involved with these signings as
they were in the creation of the ill-fated Hit Show. But LaMar did feel some ownership pressure to bring in proven veterans for the Devil Rays’ debut season—though he should have known better than to blow the team’s top three draft picks in the process. Two years later, the D-Rays would sacrifice their second-, third-, and fourth-round picks by signing another passel of veterans. As shortsighted, ill advised, and counterproductive as it was to blow tens of millions of dollars on aging veterans in those early Devil Rays years, punting high draft picks to sign them was even more indefensible.

“We’d be sitting there waiting to pick, and in the meantime our draft boards were getting decimated—it was difficult to keep morale,” said Jennings. “You look at some of the drafts we had after that, and we ended up doing okay. But overall, they still didn’t have the impact we were looking for.”

Despite losing valuable picks, Jennings and his staff of scouts and cross-checkers finally found some draft success in ’98. The Devil Rays grabbed Aubrey Huff in the fifth round, Joe Kennedy in the eighth, and Brandon Backe in the eighteenth, landing one very good major league hitter and two serviceable big league pitchers. Still, Huff, like Toby Hall before him, was a college draftee. After three years of drafts, the Devil Rays had scooped up a handful of players who would go on to become useful major leaguers. But the master plan to stock the farm system with high-upside high schoolers had yet to get started—owing to MLB’s draft restrictions for the first three Tampa Bay drafts, the free-agent largesse of LaMar and the Devil Rays’ owners, and a bunch of plain old whiffs.

It was the 1999 draft, however, where a few real signs of promise finally emerged. Despite losing out on Albert Pujols, four of the team’s top five picks would make it to the big leagues. In the third round, the team pulled a Devil Rays exacta, not only targeting a big high school right-handed starter but also grabbing a local kid in Doug Waechter, a product of St. Pete’s Northeast High School. Another imposing high school righty, Seth McClung of West Virginia, came in the fifth round.

The best Devil Ray of the bunch—in fact, the best Devil Ray
ever for quite some time—would prove to be the team’s second-round pick, high school phenom Carl Crawford. Skeptics wondered if Crawford merely looked good in high school owing to poor competition in the Houston circuit in which he played. He didn’t play in the big showcases that other top prospects attended. His split focus on football and baseball led critics to wonder if he could refine his raw baseball tools into playable skills. Crawford proved the doubters wrong, honing his baseball skills and becoming a major league All-Star. For Jennings and the Devil Rays, Crawford’s rise helped vindicate their approach.

“If someone is going to surprise you, it will usually be someone with athletic ability,” Jennings opined. “In my seven years [with the Devil Rays], the greatest compliment I ever had came from [Tampa Bay’s future head of scouting] R. J. Harrison. He said, ‘You try to hit a home run every round, don’t you?’ That kind of defined us.”

However, it was the Rays’ first pick in the 1999 draft that would prove to be the biggest risk—though for reasons they didn’t anticipate. In their debut season, the Devil Rays had finished with the worst record in the American League and the second-worst record in the majors. Thanks to baseball’s quirky alternating league system (which has since been changed) for determining number-one picks, plus the end of MLB’s three-year restriction on high draft picks, Tampa Bay gained the right to call out the first name of the 1999 draft. The consensus top two picks that year were Josh Beckett, a big Texas high school right-hander who’d already been compared to Nolan Ryan and Roger Clemens, and Josh Hamilton, an obscenely talented high school player from North Carolina with more tools than Home Depot. Both players fit the high-upside mold that the Devil Rays craved. They chose Hamilton.