The Extra 2% (3 page)

The Rays, and the rest of baseball, would quickly learn the extent of Friedman’s deal-making chops. In his first off-season as the team’s de facto GM, Friedman pulled off several trades, including the acquisition of young starting pitcher Edwin Jackson. A few months later, in the summer of 2006, he made five trades within the span of a month that netted the franchise five more players who were lightly regarded at the time: relief pitchers J. P. Howell, Grant Balfour, and Dan Wheeler; catcher Dioner Navarro; and utilityman Ben Zobrist.

Observers didn’t think much of these deals at first. Here were six players, all with significant flaws. Jackson and Howell were onetime hot prospects who’d turned into pitching piñatas. Balfour’s once-live arm seemed finished after a series of shoulder injuries. Wheeler was a generic relief pitcher who seemed out of place on a perennial last-place team. Navarro was still young enough to retain some prospect sheen, though this made two teams that had now given up on him. As for Zobrist, no one thought much about him at all.

All six pickups proved to be golden for the Rays. Howell, Balfour, and Wheeler became standout relievers who would engineer one of the biggest year-to-year bullpen turnarounds in baseball history. Jackson went from castaway status to solid midrotation starter and would later net a promising young outfielder in trade. Navarro matured into one of the most valuable catchers in the American League in 2008. Meanwhile, Zobrist added needed pop to the team’s bench; when handed an everyday job, he became something more, shocking the league by becoming “Zorilla,” a seven-position beast and dangerous hitter who ranked among the best players in the game in 2009.

There would be other, bigger moves on the Rays’ journey to the top of the American League, including one blockbuster trade that knocked baseball on its ear. But it was Friedman’s first batch of seemingly minor deals that typified the organization’s new approach. The old regime zigzagged from one approach to the next, seemingly every year. Under Friedman, every baseball decision was carefully considered. No deal was too small to warrant consideration. Fringe relief pitcher goes on the market? Sure, we’ll grab him if the price is right. Ben Zobrist is a 50-50 bet to become a decent twenty-fifth man on a future contender? And a 10,000-to-1 shot to develop into an MVP candidate? Okay, we’ll take him.

Management’s efforts were just as evident in other areas. To find new sources of talent, the Rays greatly expanded their international operations. Led by baseball operations special assistant Andres Reiner, they became the first team to open a baseball academy in Brazil, seeking to tap into a talent pool drawing from nearly 200 million residents. They traveled to the Czech Republic to sign a sixteen-year-old pitcher.

Off the field, they looked for ways to revamp their image and draw a new generation of fans. Stadium ushers, once ordered to crack down on fans bringing food to the ballpark and to generally act as enforcers, were retrained to provide a friendlier atmosphere at Tropicana Field, letting fans bring in outside food and generally becoming far more hospitable. Jumping on a concept in which a few teams had dabbled, the Rays built the biggest postgame concert series of any team in the majors. To better monetize and market those concerts and find additional revenue sources, the team formed Sunburst Entertainment, a spin-off company that would manage concerts, experiment with other sports such as the United Football League, and pursue other potentially profitable ventures. To win back the fans and goodwill lost under Naimoli, the Rays even made stadium parking free for two years, and it’s still free for cars loaded with four or more people. Asked why he made that decision, Sternberg said he got the idea from the
FREE PARKING
space on a Monopoly board. Unorthodox? Sure. But this was the guy who
stood at the gate for the 2006 home opener at the Trop, shaking as many fans’ hands as he could. This was a 180-degree reversal from the old Devil Rays.

The new Rays never missed a trick. No conversations would be wasted, no ideas ignored, no course of action embraced or dismissed without considering the costs and benefits, the reactions and consequences. Just like that, the team’s culture changed. These weren’t just the new Rays; this was a team that was run differently from any other team in baseball. For Sternberg, every decision—how to sell tickets, which players to sign, how to treat his customers—would require smarter, more creative thinking. It was about gaining that little advantage on the competition.

“We’ve worked hard to get that extra 2%, that 52–48 edge,” explained Sternberg. “We don’t want to do anything to screw that up.”

Eight months after Scott Kazmir made his bold prediction, Akinori Iwamura gleefully stepped on second base, ending Game 7 of the American League Championship Series and sending Tampa Bay to the World Series. As the players jumped onto a frenzied dogpile, sold-out Tropicana Field exploded into the kind of cathartic celebration that wiped away a decade of losing and mockery.

No longer was it ridiculous for the Rays to expect success. Not after they’d unlocked the secrets of “the extra 2%.”

Big Jim Thompson stalked the floor of the Illinois state legislature, sweat soaking through his shirt and streaming down his brow. The Illinois State Senate had narrowly passed a bill that would pay for a new stadium for the Chicago White Sox. It was now up to the House of Representatives to approve the bill. That meant Thompson, the six-foot-six, 230-pound Illinois governor, now had to crack some skulls.

The Senate’s vote had been contentious. Dissenting lawmakers blasted the bill. They asked why Illinois should shell out nine figures to build a new ballpark for White Sox owners Jerry Reinsdorf and Eddie Einhorn, both of them millionaires many times over, while the state’s schools went woefully underfunded. Now House members were expressing similar objections. Worse yet for Thompson, the clock was ticking. The General Assembly had until midnight Central Time to pass the stadium bill. If the House failed to get the necessary votes, July 1, 1988, would be forever remembered as the day one of baseball’s oldest franchises was forced out of town.

Twelve hundred miles away in Florida, St. Petersburg couldn’t
sleep. Hundreds of thousands of dollars had been spent on committees and feasibility studies. Millions more were spent to remove toxic chemicals from a downtown plot of land that once housed a coal gasification plant. Another $138 million would be spent on a domed, multi-use stadium on that site, which the city had begun building—
on spec
—to attract a major league team.

Giddy with anticipation, St. Pete’s community leaders and baseball advocates watched the clock approach 1:00
A.M
. Eastern Time. For months, speculation had grown that the White Sox wouldn’t get their deal and would bolt for Florida. Local newscasts had long ago embedded reporters at the Illinois Statehouse, and live reports were now streaming in from Springfield, Illinois. St. Petersburg’s hulking new stadium was half-completed, still awaiting an anchor tenant. In just a few minutes, the city would learn if the stadium plan variously described as courageous, reckless, and just plain
ballsy
would finally reel in the Major League Baseball team that the stadium’s builders craved.

As the deadline approached, Governor Thompson’s lobbying efforts intensified. He towered over House members, grasping shoulders, shaking hands, whispering threats to some, promises to others. Thompson saw the White Sox as a vital part of Chicago’s very self, a valuable institution with a history stretching beyond anyone’s living memory. The governor gradually swayed votes to his side. But every time he looked up, he would see that damned clock. All the pleading and cajoling was about to go to waste. With midnight about to strike, Thompson was still six votes short. The governor had only one move left.

He stopped the clock.

“We were live on the air, and twelve o’clock came and went,” recalled Mark Douglas, a former reporter for WTSP-TV St. Petersburg who was embedded at the Illinois Statehouse. “John Wilson, our news anchor at the time, says, ‘Mark, help me out here. I thought the vote had to be made by midnight.’ Sure enough, the clock in the chamber was stuck at a few minutes before midnight. Since they’d stopped the clock, they had not officially reached their deadline.”

Even by the down-and-dirty standards of Illinois politics, this was a jarring move. The state had seen countless Chicago aldermen rung up on racketeering and extortion charges, judges brought down for accepting bribes, mayors and state senators indicted or convicted on various charges. Two decades later, sitting governor Rod Blagojevich would be impeached and removed from office for a range of alleged infractions—including an alleged pay-to-play scheme in which he plotted to sell Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat to the highest bidder—and later convicted on a charge of lying to the FBI. But never in Illinois history had lawmakers stopped time to get what they wanted.

Thompson took full advantage. The governor secured the votes he needed, then put the bill up for vote. The proposal was approved by a thin margin: 60–55.

“It’s a political resurrection from the dead,” Thompson beamed afterward.

Meanwhile, the mood turned to shock and anger in St. Pete. The city had collected nearly twenty thousand entries to name the new stadium. Thousands of Florida White Sox T-shirts were chucked into the trash. The local media eviscerated Thompson and the rest of the Illinois General Assembly.

In a court order the day after the vote, David Seth Walker, the longest-serving circuit judge in Florida history, summed up the unlikely chain of events that got the Chicago stadium bill passed. Only twice in the history of man had the passage of time stopped, Walker proclaimed. Citing the Bible, Walker noted that the first instance occurred when Joshua was surrounded by enemies and feared he’d be overpowered upon nightfall. He pleaded to the Lord, who responded with a miracle—making the sun stand still. The second time happened in the Illinois legislature.

Major League Baseball had just begun to take St. Petersburg for a roller-coaster ride. With a completed, mostly empty stadium, the city wouldn’t—couldn’t—jump off.

Long before Vince Naimoli made baseball miserable for an army of sad, black, gold, green, purple, and teal-clad fans, the people of St. Petersburg pined for any major league club at all. But once an MLB team finally came to St. Pete, it stunk. Imagine you’re a Chicago Cubs fan, doomed to follow a team with no hope of winning the big one … no matter what the theoretical odds say. Only instead of playing in picturesque Wrigley Field under bright blue skies, you watch your Cubbies lope after fly balls in a windowless warehouse somewhere in Indiana—a warehouse you waited half your life to get built. Use the Tampa Bay Devil Rays conversion system, where ten years of losing (most of those under the worst owner in sports) feel like a hundred, and you have a sense of the despair that rained down on St. Pete. It would take a complete management overhaul, a new generation of young star players, and a full-blown exorcism to finally turn the tide.