The Extra 2% (8 page)

In April 2001, Naimoli appeared at a surprise press conference. The franchise was said to be hemorrhaging cash and also had intractable disputes between the partners. Wearing a Hawaiian shirt that caught everyone off guard, Naimoli forced a smile and announced that he would give up his title of managing general partner to spend time traveling and relaxing and that a new chief operating officer would be named. A few weeks later, longtime baseball architect John McHale Jr. took the COO job. But Naimoli returned at the same time, reinstalling himself as managing partner and CEO. McHale, one of the few people in the organization with both the gravitas and experience to speak his mind to Naimoli, left after nine months.

Naimoli’s brother Raymond might’ve been the best hope of all to bring order to the franchise. Raymond Naimoli didn’t have one specific job; he did a little of everything. Most important, he served as a middleman between Vince and team employees. If someone had a good idea and Vince hated it, Raymond might convince his brother that it was something worth pursuing. But in the winter of 1998, after the team’s first season, Raymond passed away. His death did more than take away a much-needed buffer.

“It was sad—it really just took a lot out of Vince,” said Veeck. “Ray was the one person to really say no to Vince. I said no too, but that didn’t mean he’d listen. But Ray said no and he would listen. I liked Vince. But he was an intense guy who said the first thing that popped into his head. Ray softened it a little. Ray was the yin to Vince’s yang.”

Without Raymond, McHale, or anyone else to offer counsel, the Devil Rays were left with a group of people who were new to their jobs, who struggled to adapt, and who wouldn’t stand up to the boss. Larry Rothschild’s first and only major league managing job came with the Devil Rays. Chuck LaMar’s first and only stint as a general manager started in 1998, the D-Rays’ inaugural season. In the postmortems written about the Naimoli era, LaMar and others
within the organization were frequently described as yes men. More than that, Rothschild, LaMar, and company were hired for jobs they couldn’t make work. Rothschild was a respected pitching coach, but ill suited for the manager’s chair. LaMar had a long track record as a scout and player personnel man, but lacked the key traits to be a successful general manager, including an ability to bend Naimoli’s will when necessary.

More than anybody, though, it was Naimoli who didn’t fit the role for which he was cast.

“Naimoli was General Patton,” said Dodge. “No one was better in a time of war than Patton. And it took a big son of a bitch with a gigantic ego to win the war and get a team in St. Petersburg. But when the war was over, people needed a peacetime general. No matter what he did, Vince just couldn’t transfer to peacetime.”

Some people are born deal-makers. Like that kid flipping baseball cards who knows Dwight Gooden is your favorite player. Sure, you can have the card in his right hand, the really cool one with Gooden firing his trademark fastball. Just give him that Rickey Henderson card, and maybe that card in your dad’s closet—you know that really old one? With Nolan Ryan’s signature on it? You remember them. Later in life they’ll sweet-talk Dad into lending his ’Vette, cajole a college admissions board into early admission. They’ll memorize Alec Baldwin’s “Always Be Closing” speech from
Glengarry Glen Ross
. Make the most deals and you win a Cadillac. Finish second, steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.

Deal-makers pursue careers that reward their skills. Wall Street is built on them: bond traders and commodities traders, market makers and merger-and-acquisition specialists. A few of these deal-makers make it all the way back to their roots, going from swapping cardboard likenesses of major league players to trading the genuine
article, the kinds of transactions that can win or lose pennants, make a baseball team millions of dollars or lose tens of millions.

Chuck LaMar was never cut out to be a deal-maker.

“I grew up as a baseball man, as a scout,” LaMar said with a laugh. “In the areas of scouting and player development, I felt like I was as prepared as anyone. There were other areas, however, that …”

He paused, chuckled again. “… That I was not as prepared for, that I wish I would have been, looking back.”

Like Vince Naimoli, the Devil Rays’ owner who’d mastered the art of turning failing manufacturing companies around only to find his overbearing and thrifty ways counterproductive when running a baseball team; like Larry Rothschild, the highly respected pitching coach who could get the most out of a young arm but struggled to manage personalities and outwit opposing field managers; like Naimoli and Rothschild, LaMar gained a fine reputation, only to be thrust into a job he was ill equipped to handle. Together, the three men oversaw the first three-plus years of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays’ existence, with disastrous results.

Raised in Houston, LaMar grew up in a baseball family, his father coaching Little League and his brother Danny becoming a high school star and first-round pick of the Cincinnati Reds. After coaching at the high school and college levels, LaMar was hired in 1985 by the Reds, first as a full-time scout, then as a scouting supervisor. That era saw the Reds lay the foundation for the young squad that won the 1990 World Series, though LaMar played only a minor role. The Pittsburgh Pirates hired him away in 1989, making LaMar their director of minor league operations. By then, Barry Bonds, Bobby Bonilla, and Doug Drabek had already matured into young stars for the Bucs. But LaMar still oversaw the development of a few complementary players who played on the Pirates’ three straight division winners from 1990 to 1992. Tim Wakefield’s transition from light-hitting corner infielder to ace knuckleball pitcher began in the minor leagues, with LaMar running the farm.

LaMar’s reputation got the biggest boost from his time with the
Atlanta Braves. John Schuerholz hired him to be the team’s scouting director in 1991, a job he would hold for three years before moving to director of player development for two years. The Braves were about to start their run of fourteen division titles, with the biggest contributions coming from homegrown players: Tom Glavine, Steve Avery, Ron Gant, David Justice, Mark Lemke, Jeff Blauser, Chipper Jones, Javy Lopez, Ryan Klesko, Mark Wohlers, and many others. Those players were already in the organization when LaMar jumped on board. Still, he deserves credit for the Braves’ drafting, signing, and bringing along several prospects who flourished when he was long gone, among them Andruw Jones, Kevin Millwood, Jason Schmidt, Odalis Perez, and Jermaine Dye.

Some credit, and some blame. Millwood was an eleventh-round pick and Dye a seventeenth-round pick; such late-round picks are usually orchestrated by area scouts and cross-checkers, with the scouting director typically keeping close tabs on the first ten rounds at most. Schmidt was a steal as an eighth-round pick. But the Braves’ top draft picks in LaMar’s three years as scouting director were huge whiffs. In 1991, the Braves drafted Mike Kelly number two overall. The Arizona State outfielder never landed a full-time big league job, hitting a career .241 in 684 MLB at-bats. The next season the Braves focused on toolsier, higher-upside talent, selecting high school pitchers Jamie Arnold and Jamie Howard with their top two picks. Arnold threw 108.1 innings in the majors with a 5.73 ERA; Howard never made it. The Braves’ top pick in 1993, high school outfielder Andre King, also never reached the majors, though at least the Braves could claim waiting until number 66 overall as a good excuse that time. Meanwhile, the Braves missed out on the following players in ’91 and ’92: Shawn Green, Cliff Floyd, Jason Kendall, Johnny Damon … and Manny Ramirez.

“If there’s one thing you don’t want to do in the draft, it’s waste high picks,” said
Baseball America
’s John Manuel. “That’s exactly what the Braves did.”

Despite his mixed track record, LaMar benefited from a Braves halo effect. Several other baseball executives also parlayed their affiliation
with the 1991–2005 Braves into high-profile jobs elsewhere. The Washington Nationals raved about landing Stan Kasten as the team’s president, pointing to his tenure as president of the Braves. They made no mention of Kasten’s spotty track record with the Atlanta Hawks, which included some glory years in the 1980s with Dominique Wilkins but also curious decisions like making a zillionaire out of Jon Koncak, a player who could best be described as the opposite of Dominique Wilkins. The Kansas City Royals thought they were getting a scouting savant when they hired Dayton Moore to be their new general manager after a long stint in Atlanta that included numerous roles; the Royals since then have been so abysmal that the baseball blogosphere snarkily mocks Moore’s moves as part of “the Process.”

LaMar offered a lesson that any business should heed: Look beyond the résumé. Companies hunting for their next great executive don’t hire someone solely for having previous experience with Apple or Google. They look for candidates who made Apple and Google tangibly better. LaMar had his share of accomplishments in the scouting and player development realm, no doubt. With Atlanta, he learned the importance of building from within from legendary scout Paul Snyder, general manager John Schuerholz, and manager Bobby Cox. Still, LaMar’s claim to fame was being the Zelig of the National League.

From the beginning, Tampa Bay ownership’s goals differed wildly from the timetable set forth by LaMar. Naimoli and his partners pushed for a five-year plan that would culminate with playoff contention. These were successful businessmen who were used to turning profits quickly; Naimoli built his whole career out of quickly hoisting companies from the brink of insolvency to profitability. But five years was an unrealistic projection for an expansion baseball club in the Devil Rays’ position. When the D-Rays took the field for the first time, they faced the Yankees in the middle of their dynasty; the Orioles coming off two straight playoff berths; the tradition-rich, deep-pocketed Red Sox; and the big-market Blue Jays just a few years removed from back-to-back World Series. The
Rays would play an unbalanced schedule, with nearly half of their games against the Beasts from the East.

History is littered with examples of expansion teams that needed much more than five years to challenge for the postseason. The Toronto Blue Jays didn’t make it until their ninth year. The Montreal Expos needed eleven years to finish above .500, thirteen to play into October. The San Diego Padres took sixteen years just to climb above fourth place. The Seattle Mariners waited nineteen years to crash the dance. Still, the Devil Rays’ owners could point to more recent examples in making their case for rapid success. The Colorado Rockies didn’t merely draw huge crowds; they also made the playoffs in just their third season. Closer to home, the Florida Marlins raised expectations even more: all they’d done was win a World Series in their fifth season, just a few months before the Devil Rays first took the field. The success of the Rockies and Marlins, and later Tampa Bay’s expansion cousins in Arizona, would push the Devil Rays into a series of disastrous decisions that set the franchise back for years.

Still, LaMar was optimistic, if not quite as bright-eyed as his bosses. “I thought that within a seven-year period we could truly not only have a nucleus of players throughout our system, but that we would also be ready to win. The way we would do it, with our payroll, in our division, would be through scouting and player development.”

In the 1997 expansion draft, Tampa Bay and Arizona each got to choose thirty-five players from the other twenty-eight major league teams’ forty-man rosters and minor league systems. But each team could protect fifteen players, plus three more after each round of the draft, and the D-Rays and D-Backs were prohibited from picking anyone who’d been taken in the 1996 and 1997 amateur drafts or any player eighteen or younger when signed in 1995. That left few top commodities with which to build a team. Amateur draft restrictions were even uglier. Tampa Bay and Arizona made their first amateur draft picks in 1996; that meant that neither team was likely to start producing major league talent via the draft until at
least a couple years of big league play had gone by. Tougher still, both teams would be limited to picking at the end of the first round in their first three years of drafting (draft order is usually based on reverse order of the previous season’s standings), thereby missing out on some elite talent. The players picked from 1996 through 1998 ahead of the Devil Rays’ and Diamondbacks’ draft slots included Pat Burrell, Mark Mulder, J. D. Drew (twice), Brad Lidge, Troy Glaus, Michael Cuddyer, Lance Berkman, Jayson Werth, and CC Sabathia.

Even in the most optimistic scenario, those restrictions, combined with historical precedent, suggested it would take a while for the Devil Rays to catch up to the rest of the league. In the fragile early days, proper talent evaluation becomes vital for a team trying to make up ground. But before the Devil Rays ever took the field, LaMar made one of the biggest talent evaluation gaffes in a generation.