It's okay to be torn about the Rays
Are they rays of light? Or are they sea creatures? THE WORLD WANTS TO KNOW.
The Rays are a young, exciting team filled with great players enjoying breakout seasons, hammering baseball’s villains* to the tune of a 3-1 lead in the ALCS going into today’s game. They pitch well, they hit well, they play great defense. They’re the model for a poor small market team doing the best they can to compete in a tough economic landscape.
Also, that last sentence is entirely bullshit.
The thing about Major League Baseball is that there are no poor teams. There are simply the teams that choose to spend $200 million on baseball players and the teams that choose to spend $75 million. There are teams that extort taxpayer money out of their state or municipality to build a new stadium, and there are the Rays, who tried to extort taxpayer money out of two municipalities before everyone was all, “Dudes, if you can’t get a stadium built in Tampa, how are you going to get stadiums built in both Tampa and Montreal?”
There was also a pandemic, which sorta screwed up a bunch of things, including cockamamie baseball schemes. It’s been on the news.
Now, all that isn’t to say that the Yankees don’t have financial resources that the Rays lack — of course they do. If both teams were to spend as much money as possible on player salaries while breaking even financially for the year, the Yankees would blow the Rays out of the water.
But nobody does that. Nobody spends as much money as possible on player salaries; the luxury tax was created specifically to stop owners from spending market rates on baseball players, and it has finally succeeded. So when I say that the Rays can afford to spend more money on their baseball team, even if I don’t know the exact number, I can be positive that that’s true.
So Tampa Bay’s success this year is a credit to the skill and creativity of their front office, but it also represents an unwillingness by ownership to spend money. Because make no mistake, even if the Rays win this year, that will change nothing about the amount of money their owners spend on keeping one or two of their stars around. Like Evan Longoria and David Price and James Shields and innumerable Rays before them, today’s stars will become tomorrow’s trade bait, eventually fetching a couple of decent prospects and a lot of salary relief.
Will this keep the team competitive? Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. When Tampa traded Evan Longoria to the Giants, for example, their returns were Matt Krook, Stephen Woods, Christian Arroyo, and Denard Span’s salary (for one year only), which made the money work out in the short term. Krook and Woods haven’t made the majors, Span got traded to the Mariners very quickly, and Arroyo, the best prospect of the bunch, got unceremoniously dumped on Cleveland, who DFA’d him shortly thereafter.
In short, the only thing that the Tampa Bay Rays got for trading the best and most popular position player in franchise history was the privilege of not having to pay his extremely-reasonable-in-baseball-terms contract. Which they could have, if they’d wanted to.
And we’re supposed to praise them for this? This is a good example of running a baseball team? This is the model we want everyone to follow? I don’t like it and I don’t think I ever will. It’s taking money from labor and putting it into management. For years, the Rays have had an unquestioned plucky underdog label, when at least some of that is their own choice. They alienate their fanbase and play in the worst stadium in MLB, and their owner isn’t going to be the one to pay to fix it. None of it sits right. Yes, I will root for them to win the ALCS against Houston***, but their team building model makes me uncomfortable.
If the Rays are the future, it’s a bleak future where individual performances get you almost nothing, and there the real stars are the front office guys studying their proprietary Excel formulas to gain the tiniest advantage. Yes, Randy Arozarena is spectacular today, but in 2024, he’s gonna get shipped out of town and the machine will start to whirr again. Is that a good thing? Well, I guess it depends on how much you like whirring.
* The Astros**
** Who are cheaters
*** Still the Astros**