The Extra 2% (27 page)

Tempers erupted in the second inning of the series’ final game. James Shields hit Crisp on the right hip, prompting him to charge the mound. Both benches emptied, and the fight turned ugly on the ground. The first player into the pile, unsurprisingly, was the team’s eccentric enforcer, Gomes. After Dioner Navarro tackled Crisp before he could get to Shields, Gomes pounced on Crisp and landed several punches.

The fighting Rays’ reputation grew, but their first-place lead disappeared: the club found itself a game and a half behind Boston after the Red Sox completed the sweep. A split of the next six games against the Rangers and Angels dropped Tampa Bay two games behind the first-place Sox. Never before had any Rays team gone this deep into a season with legitimate playoff aspirations, and players were necessarily approaching each game with more intensity than they’d shown during their all-too-recent losing days. When the Rays’ fortunes turned against them after that first burst of success, losing became doubly hard to swallow.

Simmering tempers boiled over again just three days later, on a 94-degree Sunday in Arlington. The Rangers led 1–0 in the bottom of the fourth when Ramon Vazquez singled with one out. That brought up number-nine hitter German Duran. A light-hitting, fringe prospect rookie with just two extra-base hits in the first 26 games of his big league career, Duran didn’t seem like much of a threat—until he blasted Matt Garza’s 3-2 pitch over the center-field wall, 400-plus feet away.

A big, strong right-hander from California, Garza had long toed the line between spirited competitor and hothead. When the Rays shipped off Delmon Young in the trade that sent back Garza, they were dealing one player with a checkered reputation for another. The Rays soon learned that Garza is nothing more complicated
than a perfectionist. From the moment he settles into his clubhouse chair before a start, he’s wired as tightly as any pitcher in the game, Tupac Shakur blasting through his earbuds, the rest of the world far away. When he fails, the world knows he cares: even when he’s on his game, Garza has a habit of twirling around in a blur after giving up a long fly ball, then cursing himself if the ball clears the fence. When Duran’s homer sailed over the center-field wall on this day, Garza came unglued—he stalked around the mound, swore loudly, and had trouble settling down.

This time, Navarro was having none of it. The catcher had watched Garza dominate at times, only to lose his concentration and get knocked around. Garza knew, Navarro knew, everyone knew that the right-hander was too good to be giving up bombs to the likes of German Duran. Navarro walked to the mound, and told Garza to quit complaining and get his head in the game. Talking quickly escalated into yelling, and both players shoved their gloves in each other’s face. Pitching coach Jim Hickey separated the two. But at inning’s end, the confrontation got worse and the two players went jaw to jaw, spilling into the dugout tunnel before Maddon, Hickey, and others split them up.

“It was a younger brother against older brother fight,” said Navarro. “It was in the heat of battle, we were in the pennant race, we were playing well, and Garza, he’s a really competitive guy, and I’m a really competitive guy, and I think we just got carried away at the moment.”

Maddon rarely berates players, preferring the same positive reinforcement he got from his favorite managers and coaches growing up and his most revered role models as a young minor league manager. When he does get on a player, it is never in public. Still, Maddon didn’t admonish Navarro, nor did anyone else on the coaching staff. Instead, Maddon and the coaches brought Garza into the manager’s office for a talk. No one was taking sides. But the prevailing message was clear: if Garza could just learn to settle himself, he could become one of the best pitchers in the game.

“With him, you can see it coming, you can see the smoke coming
out of his ears,” said Hickey. “So we did a lot of behind-the-scenes type of work. Nothing big, just conversations, just saying, ‘Listen, next time this happens, this is what you need to do. Let’s just be realistic about our expectations, control what we can control.’ I love the energy, love the emotion. It’s just a waste when it’s expended in a negative way, a nonproductive way. We would always say, if we can just take the energy and the emotion and just channel it toward productivity, this guy is gonna be off the charts.”

Garza downplayed the incident. “Just heat of passion,” he said after the game. “We’re both competitors. Whatever happened, we’ll just keep it here and we’ll fix it. This is a great bunch of guys, and everybody is on each other’s side. We can fix it.”

Call it a direct result of the confrontation or just a happy coincidence, but Garza’s season instantly turned for the better following his showdown with Navarro. Here again, the Rays brain trust wouldn’t be able to conclusively quantify the impact of an attitude adjustment. Still, Garza’s numbers through that June 8 game and his numbers afterward were markedly different.

“It was the single biggest improvement in a pitcher out there on the mound, mentally and emotionally, that I have ever seen in that short of a period of time,” raved Hickey.

The Rays split the final 6 games of their road trip before heading home for a 9-game home stand and the start of 15 straight games against National League opponents. American League teams have dominated interleague play for years, and Tampa Bay took 12 out of 18 games against NL opponents. The team’s interleague success included another showdown against a first-place team from Chicago,
in this case the Cubs. The Rays swept the three-game set, with a big assist from the bullpen: Rays relievers allowed just two runs in 11 innings. For Stuart Sternberg and Matt Silverman, the team’s attendance was even more encouraging: nearly 98,000 fans swarmed the Trop for the three-game series. The prevalence of Chicago transplants in the region surely helped, but these were still heady numbers for a midweek series, doubly so given the team’s long history of attendance woes.

The Rays started July with a seven-game winning streak, including another Tropicana Field sweep of the Red Sox. Tampa Bay’s record was a jaw-dropping 55-32 through July 6, when the Rays were up five games in the East. But the team’s fortunes would quickly turn for the worse. The Rays lost their last seven games before the All-Star break, dropping back to second place. Their July 10 loss typified the streak. The Indians outscored the Rays 13–2 and out-hit them 15–5 in that game. The Rays’ hitters went 0-for-6 with runners in scoring position, while their pitchers ceded four home runs. For a team that trusted the process and didn’t overreact to small sample sizes, the streak was frustrating, but not a source of panic. The Rays knew that clutch hitting tends to regulate by season’s end, that the line drives they were hitting would eventually fall in, and that other teams’ seeing-eye singles would eventually fall into their own gloves. It was only a matter of time before their luck would turn.

In their first game after the break, Jays starter A. J. Burnett shut out Tampa Bay for six innings at the Trop as Toronto claimed a 1–0 lead. After two quick outs, Hinske worked a walk. That brought Ben Zobrist to the plate. Coming up through the minors, Zobrist gained a reputation as a slap hitter with a good batting eye. The most optimistic scenarios had him grabbing a starting middle infielder job for a few years and holding his own. More likely, he’d stick around for a short while as a utility infielder, then fade into baseball oblivion. Such was the probable fate of a baseball player who hit just 23 homers in 1,642 minor league plate appearances.

But Zobrist had begun a transformation in the off-season. This
wasn’t some suspicious training regimen that turned a 150-pound weakling into Jose Canseco in four winter months. Instead, Zobrist teamed up with Jaime Cevallos, an aspiring hitting instructor. Cevallos recorded footage of Zobrist swinging the bat, broke it down from a variety of angles, then delivered a succinct message: swing harder. For years, coaches and instructors had taught Zobrist that the best way for him to establish a career in the big leagues was to become a spray hitter, slapping singles to all fields. Cevallos wanted Zobrist to change his approach, use more weight transfer, and try to crush the ball. Zobrist still couldn’t find his way into the everyday lineup. But he was proving to be a valuable utilityman with serious power.

Still, Zobrist’s reputation as a banjo hitter preceded him. Hoping to make quick work of the Rays’ number-nine hitter, Burnett’s first pitch to Zobrist was a hit-me-if-you-can fastball. Zobrist whacked it deep down the right-field line. Gone. Game-winning, two-run homer. The Rays reclaimed first place with that swing. They wouldn’t give up their lead for the rest of the season.

“I didn’t have much time to think about it,” said Zobrist, referring to both the Rays’ Cinderella season and his own breakthrough year, in which he cranked 12 homers in just 198 part-time at-bats, with a .505 slugging percentage. “I just continued to work on my swing and find a way to stay in the big leagues. I think a lot of us younger guys didn’t really realize how difficult it was to do what we were doing. It was just
happening.
”

The Rays’ return to first place did little to put Maddon at ease. The Rays’ skipper had become known as a manager who was willing and able to speak frankly with any player who needed to strategize or just vent—that was the influence of his late father, Joe Sr. But Maddon could also grow frustrated when he felt a player wasn’t giving his all, and that reaction occasionally led to a heated confrontation or disciplinary action—that side of his personality came from his tough mother, Beanie. As the hot summer wore on, Maddon began to sense complacency among a few players. Few players could push Maddon’s buttons more than B. J. Upton.

Many of the reasons Upton drove Maddon crazy were not Upton’s fault. Here was the type of tools-oozing player who gave scouts palpitations. Upton had, at various times in his career, shown an ability to hit for power (24 home runs in 2007) and for average (a career-high .300 in 2007 and multiple .300-plus performances in the minor leagues); run (he’d topped 40 stolen bases in three different minor league seasons); field (the Rays, confident in Upton’s instincts and speed, played him shallower than any other center fielder); and throw (he’d finish second in MLB with 16 assists in 2008, prompting runners to stop testing his arm the following season). He’d shown himself to be a thoughtful, intelligent player who picked his spots well, at the plate, in the field, and on the base paths—all this before his twenty-fourth birthday.

But Upton had also shown an occasional tendency to lose his focus. On routine grounders and pop-ups, he would, from time to time, jog halfheartedly to first base. This wasn’t a terrible offense. Maddon wasn’t the type of manager to preach hustle just for show. Players have been jogging to first base for about as long as there’s been a first base. Still, when Upton failed to run out a ground ball in an August 5 game against the Indians, Maddon benched his center fielder for the next game. The manager harbored great expectations for his young star and treated him accordingly when his concentration lapsed—the way a teacher might treat a star pupil who tries to coast through an exam. Asked why he’d benched Upton, the manager didn’t mince words.

“When it comes down to individual effort, it takes absolutely zero talent, zero, to try hard and play hard every day,” Maddon told reporters. “I’m okay with physical mistakes, with mental mistakes, I’m accepting of all that. The part that I’m not accepting of is the part that you can control. And that’s your effort. You just can’t pick and choose when you put your effort out there. It has to be all the time.”

The timing was classic Maddon. The Rays
won
the Upton non-hustle game, their sixth win in seven contests. But the manager had gone against the grain in his handling of the team all season long,
offering words of encouragement after losses, then sternly lecturing players for failing to execute after a win. When Upton again failed to run out a ground ball in the sixth inning of an August 15 game against Texas, Maddon again yanked him from the lineup—in a 7–0 win.

While Maddon sought to keep his team’s emotions in check, Friedman searched for ways to improve the roster. The Rays’ GM had scanned the trade market in search of reinforcements, but ended up not completing any deals before the July 31 nonwaiver deadline. Friedman thought he had a deal for slugging Pirates outfielder Jason Bay. But just a few minutes before the deadline, the rival Red Sox swooped in, pulling off a huge three-way trade that shipped Manny Ramirez out of town and brought in Bay to replace him. (That the deal didn’t happen for Tampa Bay would prove to be a blessing: the Rays reportedly would have given up rising young right-hander Jeff Niemann and shortstop prospect Reid Brignac in the trade, two players with the mix of talent and available service time that a low-payroll team like Tampa Bay could ill afford to lose.)

If the Rays were going to upgrade their roster down the stretch, they’d do it with the kinds of moves that had defined the season to date: claims of free talent and reinforcements from the loaded farm system. Like hedge fund managers planning against multiple contingencies, Friedman and his cohorts hoped they’d have an in-house answer for any pennant race challenge.