The Extra 2% (10 page)

The Hit Show needed an extra “S” to properly illustrate its catastrophic effects on the Devil Rays. Vaughn had a decent first season in Tampa Bay, hitting 28 homers with an .864 OPS, but that was down from a combined 95 homers in the previous two seasons. His production plunged off a cliff from there, leading to his eventual release in 2003. Pumped to the hilt with the latest chemical enhancements, Canseco bashed 31 homers by the 1999 All-Star break, before a back injury started a precipitous decline. Castilla completely tanked in Tampa Bay, hitting just .221/.254/.308 with 6 homers in 2000; released the next season, he quickly regained his power stroke in Houston, even added a 35-homer, 131-RBI season at age thirty-six in Colorado. McGriff remained a quiet, steady performer for several more years; the Devil Rays tried to cash him in for useful prospects the next season, only to land the feckless combination of Jason Smith and Manny Aybar.

Like the Diamondbacks, the Devil Rays deferred big chunks of the contracts they doled out. Unlike the Diamondbacks, they wound up with crippling debt but very few wins. The D-Rays won just 69 games in 2000, the same as a year earlier with a payroll about 40% smaller. Even more jarring, attendance actually got worse, dropping from roughly 1.6 million in 1999 (10th in the AL) to around 1.4 million in 2000 (13th in the AL). Meanwhile, the
Moneyball
A’s won the AL West with a payroll half as big as Tampa Bay’s in 2000, while the White Sox won the AL Central with a $35.7 million payroll, in line with the Devil Rays’ expenditures the year
before
they shot the moon. Five other teams with smaller payrolls enjoyed winning records that year.

The Hit Show’s spectacular failure sent the Devil Rays into a tailspin. Manager Larry Rothschild lost his job fourteen games into the following season, starting a bizarre managerial chain reaction that would eventually lead the Devil Rays to trade established outfielder Randy Winn to Seattle for the rights to manager Lou Piniella—a straight-up player-for-manager deal that had never been done before and hasn’t been done since. With Naimoli’s finances now stretched tight, ownership ordered a huge fire sale over the next couple of years, knocking the team’s payroll from twelfth in the majors in 2000 to dead last two years later. The Devil Rays not only chopped major league talent; they also phased out their Latin American operations almost entirely, cutting off an essential pipeline of young talent. When Commissioner Bud Selig proposed contracting two teams, the Devil Rays were one of the candidates considered, their financial woes having already drowned out the optimism that flowed through Tropicana Field for that first pitch in 1998.

And then there was the losing. In 2001, the Devil Rays lost 100 games for the first time, then tacked on 106 more losses in 2002. Only once in the eight-year Naimoli-LaMar era did the team manage even 70 wins or avoid last place in the AL East. The losing didn’t just beat up fans and management. It also wore on the players.

“You just hated to be going through what we were going through,” said Carl Crawford, a second-round Devil Rays draft pick in 1999 who played through much of the old regime’s reign, then stayed when new ownership took over. “Losing so much started to take a toll on you, and you started to think bad things about yourself. You just wished that things would change.”

“You would just kind of get the vibe when a lot of veteran guys would sign [with the Devil Rays], that it would just be them on their
last legs,” recalled Scott Kazmir, who played in Tampa Bay from 2005 to 2009. “We were just a team that would get beat up by everyone in the American League East. We didn’t really have any goals. We were just out there not having the confidence, not thinking that we could beat anyone.”

Crawford and Kazmir shook their heads in disbelief as they recounted the bad old days. Both would become stars for the new Rays, young veterans and team leaders who lived through the darkest times and then the brightest. The new regime would transform the team’s fortunes so quickly that Kazmir and company went from that defeatist attitude to making preseason playoff predictions nearly overnight.

Meanwhile, LaMar stuck around to the bitter end of Naimoli’s reign. The GM got his first contract extension at the end of the Devil Rays’ first season, then improbably nabbed another two-year deal in 2004, after his five-year contract expired. When LaMar was finally fired by new ownership after the 2005 season, he left his job as the fifth-longest-tenured general manager in baseball—despite a ghastly 518-777 record, a .400 winning percentage, and an average of 97 losses per season. Naimoli first hired LaMar based on his track record. He gave him his first contract extension because he thought LaMar was the right man to lead the Devil Rays to winning baseball. He then appreciated LaMar’s efforts to keep costs down: “I’m not saying I like this quotient, but if he had a quotient of the cost per win, I think he would come out far ahead,” Naimoli told the
St. Pete Times
. By the end, it seemed, neither man was going to leave until a third party forced them out, and that’s exactly what happened after the 2005 season. LaMar and Devil Rays fans were left to wonder what might have been.

“Looking back, it wasn’t the players we signed that I regret,” LaMar said. “It was not being able to look at Vince and the ownership group and say, ‘Gentlemen, trust me. We cannot do this.’ ”

There are few jobs in baseball less glamorous and more taxing than that of the area scout. These road warriors cover wide swaths of territory in pursuit of baseball talent. Their cars become their homes on their long, lonely drives down drab highways, burger wrappers and soda cups strewn all over the passenger seat. The area scout dreams of uncovering that hidden gem, the player other teams miss who goes on to stardom. The area scout isn’t the person who makes the final decision on whether or not to draft a player. He doesn’t even have a direct line to the scouting director, much less a team’s general manager. For every player an area scout touts, a cross-checker—itself a pretty thankless, often lonely job—must travel to see that player perform, then report back to his bosses. Area scouts do gain credit if the team drafts and signs the player. But until that moment, the scout can only hope that someone will listen to him.

Fernando Arango understood the drawbacks of his job. Arango covered five states in his role as area scout for the Devil Rays:
Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Nebraska. His region was nowhere near the baseball hotbeds of California, Florida, and Texas. But the relative lack of talent in his area could also mean fewer eyes on some intriguing players, thus causing a few to slip under the radar. One spring Arango drove to the tiny town of Republic, Missouri, to catch a high school tournament. One player stood out. This one kid, a burly third baseman, just a junior, was smacking line drives all over the park. Arango introduced himself, and the two hit it off. Both scout and player were students of the game, happy to talk about the finer points long after others would tune out. Arango saw a rare mix of natural ability and baseball intelligence in the third baseman. He got the player’s contact information and promised to keep in touch.

The following year, Arango’s prospect accelerated his education. A strong student with an affinity for math, he earned all his high school credits by January 1999, then transferred to Maple Woods Community College in Kansas City. Arango went back to see the young man play. This time there would be no covert operation. Several major league scouts and representatives, including former Kansas City Royals manager John Wathan, also showed up to see various players. The high school third baseman, now playing as an oversized shortstop, launched two long home runs over the fence in left-center, into a thicket of trees.

“The ball sounded like a cannon went off,” Arango recalled. “It wasn’t even fair for him to use an aluminum bat.”

No way we’ll get this guy, Arango thought to himself. Still, when he met with his cross-checker, Stan Meek, as well as scouting director Dan Jennings, Arango filed a glowing report on the player. Meek had gone to see the young man in action, but wasn’t nearly as impressed as Arango.

“He was this paunchy, thick-bodied kid,” Jennings recalled. “Stan said to me, ‘I saw this kid strike out two or three times, I don’t know what position he’d play, I can’t do anything with him. I can’t write him up.’ ”

Undaunted, Arango told his bosses, “All I want to say about this guy is that someday he’ll hit 40 home runs in the big leagues.”

Jennings wasn’t ready to dismiss Arango’s report or his ranking of the top prospect in Arango’s five-state area. So he sent in R. J. Harrison, a national cross-checker (who would take over, years later, as scouting director). Harrison’s verdict: “I can’t do anything with this guy.”

Even after two emphatically negative reports, Jennings wanted to give Arango’s find one last shot. The Devil Rays invited him to a pre-draft workout. No other team extended an invite. Not even the Royals, who played twenty minutes away.

Arango met his young protégé over Grand Slam breakfasts at a Denny’s. The more they talked, the more Arango loved the smarts and grounded approach that went with the kid’s talent. A huge contingent was waiting when Arango arrived at Tropicana Field. Jennings and Meek were there, along with fifteen other talent evaluators, Chuck LaMar, even Vince Naimoli. They watched a big group of draft hopefuls take their turns. Finally, the Missouri kid got his chance.

What happened next depends on who’s telling the story. Arango claims his prospect looked like Lou Gehrig. Jennings saw no such thing.

Arango observed a 60-yard dash in 7.1 seconds, a good time for a player that size. The Devil Rays tried him at his college position of shortstop, where Arango says he handled an array of sharply hit grounders and showed good instincts for a big man. Jennings looked at the player’s body, then suggested maybe he should catch. He’d never caught before and was worried he’d make a bad impression. Arango told him to relax, put on the equipment, and humor everyone for a few minutes. His first throw to second base came in a flash: 1.89 seconds. That time was phenomenal for a high school catcher and solid for a college catcher; several big league catchers show similar times. Only this player had never caught at any level.

Then he got in the batter’s box and started roping line drives all
over the park. Growing up, his dad had taught him to hit the ball with authority to right-center. Do that consistently, his father told him, and he could one day hit .300 in the big leagues. Jennings wasn’t impressed. “Where’s the power?” he muttered. Arango got the message. “They’d like you to hit it a little farther,” he told his pupil. On the very next pitch, the kid crushed the ball off the top of the left-field foul pole. Arango smiled. He was going to get his man.

Jennings said he and the other scouts in attendance—all except Arango—remained concerned about the kid’s thick build. They also focused on the negatives rather than the positives as Arango and Jennings both fell into a bit of confirmation bias. Jennings didn’t like the player going down on one knee more than once to field grounders at short. He was also concerned about the player’s performance at catcher: messy footwork and iffy throwing mechanics, despite a few good throws. At bat, he worried about the player’s approach more than the results. “He’s sitting very deep on his back leg, uppercut swing, back shoulder dipping pretty good,” Jennings said.

“We go back upstairs, and I pose the question to the room,” Jennings recounted. “ ‘This kid Fernando’s got on his list, you see anything different today than what we’ve seen before?’ Nope, no one saw anything. We left the workout with the same identical issues that caused us not to have him high on our board.”

When draft day arrived, Arango waited. And waited. The Devil Rays weren’t going to take his guy in the first round, he knew. But after the third, fourth, and fifth rounds passed, with the kid still undrafted, he started to wonder if his prediction of forty-home-run seasons had simply been forgotten. The D-Rays weren’t the only team passing. On and on the draft went, and still no news. There were a bunch of reasons for the snub. The Devil Rays went after Florida players aggressively, giving them preference over other prospects—and Florida-raised veteran free agents priority over non-Floridians—in a constant quest for local identity and support. It was a shortsighted practice that never paid tangible dividends and often hurt the team. They still worried about the player’s build, as
Jennings had earlier, and wondered what position he would play. This was especially odd, since the player didn’t get much chance to try out at third base, his natural position, or first, where Arango thought he could also fare well. Many skeptics also wondered about his age: he was born in the Dominican Republic, didn’t move to the United States until high school, and always looked old for the age he was supposed to be. Meanwhile, the player’s agent was new to the gig, and that uncertainty raised fears that just signing the guy could become dicey, even in the later rounds. Besides, the Devil Rays had their targeted names up on the draft board, and the draft was flying by. Jennings wasn’t ignoring Arango’s projection per se. There was just so much other stuff going on that they didn’t give it much thought. By the time you get past the tenth round, most players have no shot of ever sniffing the big leagues, let alone becoming productive regulars, let alone becoming the kind of superstar Arango envisioned. No big deal.