Authors: Jonah Keri
This would not stand. The following off-season, the Yankees embarked on one of the biggest spending sprees in the history of sports. The three biggest signings, CC Sabathia, Mark Teixeira, and A. J. Burnett, inked contracts worth a combined $423 million—more than the GDP of four nations. The strategy—if leveraging the sport’s most lucrative market and deepest pockets and outbidding everyone else could be called a strategy—worked. The Bombers won 103 games in 2009, reclaimed the AL East title they felt was rightfully theirs, and steamrolled the rest of baseball en route to their twenty-seventh World Series title. After laying waste the league, the Yankees then traded for Javier Vazquez, seeking to bolster their already strong rotation with one of the National League’s
best pitchers. The Red Sox, coming off a strong season and a wild-card berth, opened their own checkbook, signing John Lackey to a massive five-year deal that matched Burnett’s. The Yankees’ spending spree was especially conspicuous: the team would take a 2009 luxury tax hit of $25.7 million—or as the Yankees typically call a sum that size, a rounding error.
Baseball’s intelligentsia was suitably impressed. Fox’s Ken Rosenthal surveyed the already loaded New York and Boston rosters now buttressed with reinforcements, then looked back at the rest of the division, and gave his readers the bad news. His December 22, 2009, eulogy for the Jays, Orioles, and Rays was nearly as light on subtlety as the headline of said oeuvre: “Rest of AL East Should Just Give Up Now.”
The Rays would do no such thing. They were going to challenge the Yankees and Red Sox using the most challenging of playbooks. Chuck LaMar claimed he couldn’t follow ownership’s directives and still stick to his multi-year plan; Dave Dombrowski said trying to win and build at the same time in the AL East was impossible. Yet that’s exactly what the 2010 Rays set out to do.
The first casualty of the Rays’ plan was public relations. Tampa Bay experienced success for the first time in franchise history in 2008. As the summer of 2009 wore on, the Rays found themselves looking up at the Red Sox as well as the reloaded Yankees. By August 29, the Rays sat four and a half games back of Boston in the wild-card chase. A tough mountain to climb? Sure. But the Rays’ magical run in ’08 had shown that anything was possible. With the stretch run upon them, the Rays gauged their situation, looked at their roster—and traded away the greatest pitcher in franchise history.
The locals howled. How could the Rays trade Scott Kazmir, the lefty with the electric fastball, the young ace with the balls to come out on the first day of 2008 spring training, after a decade of losing, and predict a Rays playoff run? How could Stuart Sternberg, that cheap New York carpetbagger, do this to us?
As with all of their decisions, Andrew Friedman and the Rays
were simply playing the odds. With just thirty-four games left in their season, trailing a strong Red Sox squad, those odds were heavily against them—the website
CoolStandings.com
gave the Rays just a one-in-eight chance of making the playoffs. Kazmir had struggled with injuries and ineffectiveness earlier in the season, putting up an ERA over 5.00 with no bite on his pitches. He’d come back strong later in the year after working with pitching guru
/Moneyball
character Rick Peterson. The former A’s pitching coach had helped Kazmir regain some of his lost fastball velocity and, more important for the lefty’s success, rediscover his devastating slider. Friedman knew that Kazmir’s recovery might not last long and that he might get only one more chance to sell high before Kazmir’s injuries and poor performance returned. If they kept Kazmir, the Rays would be on the hook for nearly $24 million over the next two-plus seasons. If Kazmir’s arm went south again, he’d become untradeable, saddling the low-budget Rays with a financial burden that could torpedo any efforts to get back to the promised land.
Ignoring would-be critics, Tampa Bay dealt Kazmir to the Angels. The lefty excelled down the stretch in Anaheim, only to collapse the next season, when his 5.94 ERA made him one of the worst starting pitchers in the majors. Derisively called a “money dump,” the trade did indeed free up a huge chunk of cash, even more so by Rays’ standards. But Friedman also reeled in some intriguing young talent, nabbing Sean Rodriguez, an up-and-coming infielder with power and speed; Alex Torres, a Venezuelan left-hander small in stature but big on results; and first-base prospect Matt Sweeney. Rodriguez would prove to be an important player for the 2010 Rays.
Meanwhile, J. P. Howell’s shoulder injury and attrition elsewhere created multiple vacancies in a suddenly thin Tampa Bay bullpen. But the Rays tended to build their bullpens on the cheap, and they seemed unlikely to break the bank. Ahead of the 2009 winter meetings, the Rays had made only minor moves—but with extra points for creativity. Second baseman Akinori Iwamura, the man who had stepped on second base to send the Rays to the World
Series the year before, played just sixty-nine games in 2009 owing to injury. The thrifty Rays seemed unlikely to pick up Iwamura’s $4.25 million club option. Under baseball’s arcane rules, ranging from draft pick compensation to contract-tender deadlines, the Rays were probably doomed to let Iwamura go for nothing; unlike in the NBA, sign-and-trade deals never happen in baseball. Of course, Friedman never says never. Hurting for a second baseman, the Pirates expressed interest in Iwamura, and a deal was soon consummated. In return, the Rays got Jesse Chavez, a right-handed reliever with a 94-mile-per-hour fastball but largely unimpressive numbers. He was a body to add to the mix, nothing more. Or so it seemed.
A month after that unusual but seemingly innocuous deal, Tampa Bay media began grilling Stuart Sternberg about the team’s Swiss cheese bullpen. Would he open his wallet and throw serious bucks at a relief pitcher? How about a closer? Sternberg was quick to snuff out that idea.
“There’s no $7 million closer showing up,” he told inquiring media.
Or so he said. In fact, the Rays were about to hatch one of their most nefarious schemes. The same free-agent compensation rules that make sign-and-trade deals nearly nonexistent also bind teams’ hands when it comes to signing free-agent relief pitchers. You can justify sacrificing a first-round draft pick if it means wooing Albert Pujols to your team. But GMs’ increased awareness of the value of picks made it rarer to see a relief pitcher with that Type A designation signed away from another club. Still, the Braves figured someone would sign their likely-to-depart closer Rafael Soriano. Braves management saw little risk in offering Soriano arbitration, figuring someone would grab the fireballer with 27 saves, 102 strikeouts, and a 2.97 ERA. If that happened, Atlanta would gain a valuable comp pick. Instead, Soriano shocked the team by accepting arbitration. Suddenly the Braves had a budget crisis on their hands. They became desperate to find a taker for Soriano.
No one picks up the scent of desperation faster than Andrew Friedman. In short order, the Rays yanked Soriano away from the
Braves. In return, they sent back that unassuming, innocuous afterthought, Jesse Chavez.
The Rays gave up virtually nothing in player value to land their closer. And by trading for Soriano after he accepted arbitration rather than signing him as a free agent, they had avoided sacrificing the kind of high draft pick that had become the lifeblood of the organization.
There was one final twist to Friedman’s master stroke. Soon after Soriano’s acquisition, the Rays agreed to a one-year deal with their new stopper. The cost? A tick over $7 million. Don’t ever play poker with Stuart Sternberg is what we’re saying.
The Soriano heist triggered a sequence of events that saw the Rays do almost no wrong through the rest of that off-season and into 2010. Three months after nabbing their closer, the Rays tossed a minor league deal to Joaquin Benoit, a thirty-something relief pitcher coming off major arm surgery. The Rays saw Benoit’s track record of high strikeout rates and solid command and figured he’d be worth a flyer. For the tiny cost of $750,000, they got one of the best setup men on the planet, a lights-out eighth-inning man who teamed with Soriano to form one of the most devastating late-inning duos in baseball.
The plan to build and win at the same time also depended heavily on the contributions of rookies and other young players. Every one of them seemed to click. Matt Joyce earned a June promotion, won a platoon role in right field, and became a late-inning terror, winning several games in the late innings, including a couple with monumental home runs. Rodriguez, part of the booty in the Kazmir trade, flashed an excellent glove, deft base running, and periodic power in becoming the team’s new Ben Zobrist, a dangerous superduper utilityman. Once relegated to afterthought status in the Rays’ farm system, John Jaso finally got a chance to play and promptly snatched the Rays’ starting catcher job, becoming an on-base machine who gave opposing pitchers fits. Wade Davis, the starting rotation’s heir apparent after Kazmir left, enjoyed a big second half for a rookie fifth starter in a pennant race.
The Rays’ usual arsenal of scrap-heap finds did their thing too. On August 28, 2010, a year less a day after the Kazmir deal waved the Rays’ white flag, Dan Johnson smoked a tenth-inning, walk-off home run to beat the Red Sox and push the Rays closer to another playoff berth. This was the same Dan Johnson who had hit perhaps the biggest homer in team history, a game-tying shot against Jonathan Papelbon and these same Red Sox two years earlier, propelling the Rays to their first division title. Unable to find any takers in the big leagues, he had left for Japan in 2009, only to end up back in Triple A Durham in 2010 and eventually back on the Rays’ major league roster. So acute was Johnson’s ability to rise up out of nowhere, smite the Red Sox, then return to obscurity that he earned a new nickname. The ginger-locked slugger became “the Great Pumpkin.”
Everything else fell into place. The Rays’ core players excelled, with Evan Longoria and Carl Crawford putting up near-MVP-level performances and David Price emerging as one of the top five starters in the American League. Joe Maddon, aided by the reams of data fed to him by Rays number crunchers, brought out his usual tricks. Three straight times in a late July series against Detroit, Maddon faced the prospect of pitching to beastly Tigers slugger Miguel Cabrera while nursing a one-run lead. Each time, he gave Cabrera a free pass, loading the bases and setting up potential disaster for the Rays. All three times, the plan worked.
“All I could think of was that sign [in the clubhouse] that says
FORTUNE FAVORS THE BOLD
, “Carlos Peña said afterwards. “So I was like, ‘Hey, Joe, let’s go with it. That’s living the sign.’ ”
Peña himself embodied the other ingredient in the Rays’ success: luck. Even the boldest, most astute, best prepared teams need some 50-50 odds to roll their way if they are to achieve success. Plop the league’s two scariest teams into your division, have them continue to run much bigger payrolls—the Rays would spend more than $70 million in salaries in 2010, less than half what the Red Sox would shell out and about one-third the size of the Yankees’ payroll—and you’ll need good fortune on your side. Peña might
have never played a game in a Rays uniform if not for random chance. In spring training 2007, the Rays released Peña, opting to go with journeyman Greg Norton at first base instead. Mere hours after making that decision, Norton came up lame. Frantic, the Rays buzzed Peña and asked him back. Installed as the team’s first baseman that year, Peña smoked a franchise-best 46 home runs and established himself as the team’s vocal leader. Though Peña would suffer a down year in 2010, you couldn’t help but look at the Rays—the reclamation project setup man, the litany of kids playing beyond their years, the Charlie Brown creature come to life—and wonder if destiny was simply on their side.
On the very last day of the season, the Yankees lost, giving the Rays their second AL East title in three years. To a generation of fans who remembered the Vince Naimoli years, one crown seemed wildly improbable. Winning two was downright impossible.
But there was one bad decision that lingered, festered, and may have cost the Rays their chance at breaking through and winning their first World Series. Pat Burrell had been a disaster in his first season with the Rays, not only failing to hit at anywhere near the perennial 30-homer pace he had shown in Philadelphia but also saddling Tampa Bay with a financial burden that made other moves incredibly tough. The Rays could have accepted that Burrell wasn’t going to work out and gone after a new DH. Instead, they passed on several far more attractive options, including Jim Thome—who swatted 25 homers in just 276 at-bats with the Twins and emerged as the team’s most dangerous hitter, helping them back into the playoffs—for the princely sum of $1.5 million. After a few more weeks of failure in Tampa Bay, Burrell got kicked to the curb. He promptly signed with the Giants, instantly resurrected his career against inferior competition, and blasted 18 bombs in 96 games to push San Francisco to an unlikely NL West title. Meanwhile, the Rays pondered several big-ticket moves at the trade deadline, figuring an all-in season might warrant a major deal and bigger spending. But hampered in part by the remnants of Burrell’s ugly two-year, $16 million contract, which the team still had to honor, the Rays
passed on several would-be upgrades, including coveted left-hander Cliff Lee.
Thrust into the postseason with the best record in the AL and the league’s number-one playoff seed, the Rays ran into an upstart Rangers club. Texas used killer left-handed pitching to tie Tampa Bay’s lineup in knots for the first two games of the series. With a huge hole where Burrell’s right-handed bat would have been, the Rays resorted to Rocco Baldelli in one of those games, leaning on a player whose fortunes had fallen so far that he’d semi-retired, become an instructor in the Rays’ system, then returned for just 24 big league at-bats and somehow earned a spot on the postseason roster. The pitcher who finally did them in was the best left-hander in all of baseball that year, the very same Cliff Lee. Lee’s Rangers would make it to the World Series, where they would fall to the National League’s Cinderella story … Pat Burrell’s Giants.