Authors: Jonah Keri
“We knew we would have to have pitching to win,” LaMar said. “But we were picking so high in the draft that we made a concerted effort to lean toward position players. Our feeling there was that we might get pitching later on in the draft and that the attrition rate from a health standpoint of pitching made position players the better choice.”
Hamilton was supposed to be the Devil Rays’ biggest home run. Tampa Bay handed him a $4 million signing bonus and sent him to rookie ball, but Hamilton was too good for that entry-level competition, batting .347 with power in 56 games and finishing his first professional summer in low Class A. Following the season,
Baseball America
ranked him as baseball’s number-13 prospect. He posted similar stats in 2000, hitting .302 with power and speed in the Class A South Atlantic League. This time
Baseball America
looked at Hamilton’s pedigree, combined it with his precocious performances at age eighteen and nineteen, and named him the top prospect on the planet. Then the bottom dropped out. Hamilton got into a serious car accident. He plunged into a spiral of drug and alcohol abuse that wrecked his ability to play, earned him suspensions, and washed him completely out of baseball for three seasons, all of 2004 through 2006.
Scouting directors are hired and paid to avoid such mistakes. But drafting any supremely talented high school prospect is inherently risky. Often coddled by parents and coaches and lacking an authority figure who will speak the cold, hard truth, teenage superstars can lose their focus, drop the work habits that helped hone their skills, and flame out as prospects. And like a child actor given too much too soon, baseball players in similar situations can easily fall victim to all the temptations that come with fame at a young age. Talk to baseball men with any team, and they’ll echo the glowing reports on Josh Hamilton. Sure, his precocious ability and young age carried risk as surely as it did huge upside. But the Devil Rays had no specific reason to believe that Hamilton would prove to be a cautionary tale rather than an organizational triumph.
As most baseball fans know now, Hamilton finally made the big leagues in 2007 and immediately played like a star. But his comeback began in Cincinnati; by then the Rays had given up. In something of a happy ending for Tampa Bay, Hamilton and the Rays would meet again under vastly different circumstances for each, in a memorable moment, years later.
What followed in the six years after the Hamilton and Pujols
whiffs, first under Jennings, then under his successors Cam Bonifay and Tim Wilken, was a decent run of later-round picks that helped stock an eventual pennant-winning team (including James Shields and Andy Sonnanstine, both part of the 2008 AL champion Rays’ starting rotation and the 2010 AL East–winning squad), as well as the farm system. Still, the Devil Rays should have raked in premium talent in the top rounds of the draft during LaMar’s ten years at the helm. During a seven-year span, they landed just five players between rounds two and ten who have made notable contributions to the major league club or project as plus prospects: Crawford (second round, 1999), Reid Brignac (second round, 2004), Wade Davis (third round, 2004), Jeremy Hellickson (fourth round, 2005), and Fernando Perez (seventh round, 2004). The failure of the Hamilton pick in particular was a reminder that even with the right process and the number-one overall pick, the draft remains a crapshoot, and soon the selection of Rocco Baldelli would reinforce that point—though in retrospect bad omens followed him from the start.
The Devil Rays loved the highly athletic high school outfielder and A student from Rhode Island as a prospect and potential franchise cornerstone. A few of the more rabid prospect hounds in baseball even mentioned him and Joe DiMaggio in the same breath, somewhat for their common jersey numbers and heritage, but yes, also for the raw talent. The Devil Rays sent Bill Livesey, the special assistant to the GM who’d briefly served as director of player development, to New England to watch Baldelli play. In his second game watching the center fielder, Baldelli laid out for a line drive and tore an oblique muscle. With Baldelli shut down for four months, most other teams were chased off the scent. Just a couple weeks before the draft, Baldelli returned to action, and Tampa Bay sent an area scout to see him. That second look, combined with the information they’d gathered earlier, convinced Jennings and eight more talent evaluators to fly to Providence and work Baldelli out.
“We had to rent a van, there were so many of us,” Jennings recalled. “We worked this kid out, and he was the same guy we remembered.
He’s crushing the ball all over the ballpark. The first at-bat he grounds out and runs a 3.97 or so to first base—some crazy number. We get back on the plane and set up our draft right away.”
The Devil Rays spent the number-six pick of the 2000 draft on Baldelli. They thought they had a great prospect, so they were going to look past the injury that knocked him out for four months. Tearing a muscle while diving for a ball could be seen as a onetime event, so perhaps the Devil Rays shouldn’t be faulted for what followed. But injuries and various maladies became Baldelli’s kryptonite. His list of setbacks included a torn ACL, Tommy John surgery, chronic hamstring problems, and eventually a diagnosis of mitochondrial fatigue syndrome. He showed flashes of greatness when healthy and was a highly respected teammate who served as a source of inspiration in the 2008 playoffs, overcoming his mitochondrial condition and blasting a pair of homers as a part-time player. Still, given the early DiMaggio hype, the Devil Rays had to wonder what would have happened had Baldelli been able to stay on the field. He played in just 509 major league games, then retired just after his twenty-eighth birthday. Despite a token comeback in late 2010, Baldelli looked unlikely to ever again make a significant impact in the major leagues.
However, even considering Hamilton and Baldelli, the two biggest draft flops of LaMar’s tenure were caused by the most indefensible excuse of all, the dirtiest word for any rebuilding team:
signability
.
In 2001, the Devil Rays owned the number-three pick in the draft. The consensus top two were, in some order, Minnesota catching phenom Joe Mauer and USC right-hander Mark Prior. The third-best player in the draft was widely believed to be Georgia Tech slugger Mark Teixeira. MLB strongly urged teams to adhere to a slotting system, with the maximum recommended signing bonus for each slot in the draft predetermined. A few months before the draft, Jennings and area scout Danny Hall went to see Teixeira. Was there any reason, Jennings asked, that he would
not
sign with the Devil Rays? No sir, Teixeira replied. Jennings left the meeting confiden
he would get his man. At the end of Georgia Tech’s season, Jonathan Bonifay, another Devil Rays scout (and son of future scouting director Cam Bonifay), called Jennings. A third party had passed along the message that Teixeira wouldn’t sign with the D-Rays if they drafted him. Livid, Jennings called the office of Scott Boras, the superagent who represented Teixeira. After a brief and heated chat, Boras told Jennings he’d have Teixeira see him for another face-to-face meeting. The young slugger had indeed changed his mind. His dad was whispering in his ear, as were other advisers, and Teixeira no longer wanted to play for Tampa Bay.
On the eve of the draft, LaMar called Boras in a last-ditch effort to sway Teixeira’s camp in the Devil Rays’ direction. To everyone’s surprise, Boras told LaMar that yes, his client would sign with Tampa Bay. LaMar then held a closed-door meeting with Naimoli. The Devil Rays had fallen well short of attendance targets and other revenue projections put forth by Naimoli and his partners. They’d made matters exponentially worse by blowing tens of millions of dollars on Roberto Hernandez, Wilson Alvarez, and the aging bashers who comprised the infamous Hit Show. If the Devil Rays couldn’t be disciplined about spending on major league talent, they were going to hold the line on the draft—never mind that elite prospects are the lifeblood of rebuilding teams, even more so for expansion teams. Besides, Naimoli fumed once the two men exited the meeting, if Teixeira’s so unsure about playing in Tampa Bay, we don’t want him anyway. Between the Teixeira camp’s flip-flopping and contract demands that scared the D-Rays away, the team decided to pass.
With Teixeira out of the picture, the Devil Rays went to their fallback plan with the number-three pick: Dewon Brazelton, a right-handed pitcher from Middle Tennessee State. Brazelton’s stuff was impressive; Jennings rated his changeup the best of any pitcher in the draft, an off-speed pitch held with a split-finger grip. Brazelton set win and strikeout records in college, and an ERA record with the U.S. national team. But red flags abounded. Brazelton’s lack of a quality breaking pitch made him vulnerable against
good right-handed hitters. He also had a history of injuries, including Tommy John surgery as well as knee surgery in high school; the latter had messed up his leg so badly that he couldn’t run between starts and struggled with conditioning. Brazelton’s biggest deficiency, though, was what baseball men call “makeup.” Hailing from a small town in Tennessee, Brazelton was used to being the best player—by a wide margin—on every one of his teams; he bristled under the pressure of facing tougher competition. Even everyday needling from teammates, the kind of joking behavior found in every big league clubhouse, set him off. Brazelton was also burdened by personal tragedy: his twin brother, Fewon, was born with cerebral palsy, suffered through numerous other ailments, and finally died of pneumonia, a skin-and-bones ninety pounds when he passed in December 2002.
Brazelton struggled badly in his brief time in the majors, drawing boos from fans at the Trop and on at least one occasion from Naimoli too. His career ended in 2006 with an 8-25 record and a 6.38 ERA. The Devil Rays were so determined to draft on the cheap that they convinced Brazelton to accept his signing bonus spread over five years. Total amount: $2.5 million. Two picks later in the 2001 draft, the Texas Rangers picked Teixeira, paying him an identical $2.5 million bonus, but also giving him a $7 million major league contract. As with many other Boras clients, Teixeira ended up costing more but earning out many times over for his ball club. Just eight years into his major league career, he’s already racked up more than 1,300 career hits and is closing in on 300 home runs, with four Gold Gloves and two All-Star appearances. For the additional cost of one year of Wilson Alvarez, Teixeira could have been a Devil Ray.
But LaMar, Jennings, and others noted that most major league teams don’t think that way. They throw different baskets of cash at different organizational needs. Few teams actually take the time to crunch the numbers—gauge what percentage of draft picks pan out by round and by signing bonus, study how much pre-arbitration major league talent is worth for a team, and figure out the right formula
for determining draft value. More often, the owner simply approves a certain number for a season’s major league payroll, a certain number for international signings, and a certain number for the draft.
“Teams have a set signing budget,” explained
Baseball America
’s John Manuel. “But you have to decide which players are worth stepping out for, worth paying the extra dollars. If your talent evaluators say that’s the best guy for that spot, you have to take him, regardless of price tag. If he’s as good as you think he’s going to be, he’ll be worth it anyway, especially when you consider those cost-controlled first few major league years. Taking a signability guy, unless you
really
believe in him, almost always is the wrong choice.”
The D-Rays would eventually get all this right, remaining flexible in shuttling resources from player development to the big league roster and back, depending on need. They would smash league-recommended payment levels for certain prospects when they were confident they were getting a premium talent. They were nimble, creative, and open-minded in all their endeavors—
after
LaMar gave way to Andrew Friedman and the new management team.
LaMar didn’t leave the cupboard entirely bare, however. In fact, he occasionally got lucky. In 2002, the Rays actually benefited from another team’s cheapness when, with the number-one overall pick in the 2002 draft, the Pittsburgh Pirates took college right-hander Bryan Bullington. The Pirates proudly told the world they’d landed a future number-three starter that day, as if acquiring a pitcher with the upside of being a number-three starter was something to celebrate. (Bullington never met even that modest goal.) Ecstatic, Tampa Bay pounced on number-two pick B. J. Upton, who has since become a frontline player with the Rays.
Even LaMar’s intransigence finally paid off: he gained a reputation among other GMs as being impossible to deal with because he would ask for more in return during trade talks than anyone else in the game. But after years of failed opportunities to stock the farm system with veteran-for-prospect trades, Tampa Bay acquired Scott
Kazmir, a hugely talented, hard-throwing lefty prospect who quickly became the best pitcher in franchise history. The main player going the other way in the four-player trade was Victor Zambrano, the Devil Rays’ number-one starter at the time, who turned out to be anything but for the Mets. Zambrano made just three more starts that year before missing the rest of the season due to injury, and winning only ten more games for the rest of his career.
Despite the Kazmir heist, the end of LaMar’s tenure in 2005 left the Devil Rays wishing they’d done more, especially with the stream of high first-round picks that came their way. First-rounders Evan Longoria and David Price followed in the Devil Rays’ first two years under new management, giving the team a big lift. Still, cynics would later claim that any team could finish last for the better part of a decade, rack up a bunch of picks, and win—a position some of the game’s brightest minds dispute.
“It’s not as simple as that,” said Dave Dombrowski, GM and architect of several successful, young teams, including the Montreal Expos of the 1990s, the two-time champion Florida Marlins, and the 2006 AL pennant–winning Detroit Tigers. “If you’re consistently drafting high, you should have more hits than other clubs. But it’s no guarantee. And if you don’t, you should ask yourself, ‘Why not? What are we doing wrong?’ ”