The Extra 2% (9 page)

With their third pick in the ’97 expansion draft (sixth overall), the Devil Rays selected a twenty-three-year-old Venezuelan outfielder named Bobby Abreu. In the minor leagues, Abreu had established himself as a player with diverse and precocious skills. Playing in Jackson of the Texas League at just twenty years old, Abreu hit an impressive .303/.368/.530 (batting average/on-base percentage/slugging percentage) with 50 extra-base hits in just 400 at-bats. As a twenty-one-year-old at Triple A Tucson the next year, Abreu banged out a .304/.395/.516 performance. Left in Triple A the next year despite his big numbers, Abreu posted a still solid .263/.389/.459 line, showing speed on the base paths and in the outfield—a strong enough effort to earn a cup of coffee with the Astros before the end of the ’96 season. Abreu started at Triple A the next year, then hit .250/.329/.371 in 59 games with the Astros. Despite his impressive minor league track record at a young age, some early signs of holding his own in the big leagues, and a mix of skills that included extra-base power, speed, a patient batting approach, a strong throwing arm, and playable defense, Houston left Abreu unprotected in the expansion draft. Here was a chance for the Devil
Rays to fulfill their promise of building through the acquisition of young talent, with the goal of crafting a winner a few years down the road.

LaMar had other plans. He’d arranged to swap Abreu to the Philadelphia Phillies for shortstop Kevin Stocker. The Devil Rays wanted defensive help for their pitching staff, and D-Rays scouts liked Stocker’s glove. On offense he’d shown he could take a walk, putting up respectable on-base percentages of .335 or better in four of his first five major league seasons. He had playoff experience. But the warning signs were flashing. Stocker struggled with injuries, hit just .252 in the four years after his debut—suggesting his .324 average as a rookie was a fluke—and hit just 14 homers in five seasons. He was also four years older and four years closer to free agency than Abreu; LaMar saw him as just a stopgap for a couple years, in stark contrast to the Devil Rays’ youth-targeted mandate.

So why’d they make the deal?

“Obviously we did not evaluate Bobby Abreu like we should have,” said LaMar. “I personally had never seen him, I had never seen him play a game, never an at-bat. But to tell you how inexact a science the scouting world is, there you have [then Astros GM, now Rays senior vice president of baseball operations] Gerry Hunsicker, one of the finest baseball men in the game. They didn’t evaluate him right either!”

LaMar felt that the Devil Rays could build a bullpen through the expansion draft, but that starting pitching would be hard to find, so any help they could get on defense, they would immediately take. It was all part of a teamwide goal, he said, to avoid losing 100 games in the team’s first season. LaMar admitted that goal was nearsighted. The Devil Rays never identified Abreu as a potential impact player, and plenty of teams have passed on plenty of good players over the years. But by placing particular importance on losing 99 games instead of 100 in their debut season, and picking veterans over younger players, the D-Rays sabotaged their (supposed) long-term plan.

When the Phillies and Rays met up years later in the 2008
World Series, Stocker fired off his tongue-in-cheek comment about Philly making a terrible trade. Not so terrible, as it turned out. Stocker was out of baseball three years later. Through the 2010 season, Abreu had played in more than 2,000 major league games and totaled well over 2,000 hits. Along the way, he would curse Tampa Bay yet again. After the 2008 season, with Abreu a free agent, the Rays made the highest offer for Abreu, an attractive two-year contract for a player who’d lost his defensive prowess but remained an effective hitter. Abreu spurned the Rays for a smaller one-year deal with the Angels. Forced to their backup plan, Tampa Bay instead signed Pat Burrell to a two-year, $16 million deal, the worst free-agent contract ever handed out by LaMar’s successor … by a mile.

As badly as the Abreu/Stocker trade backfired, few predicted Abreu’s rise to stardom at the time. The Devil Rays’ signing of thirty-three-year-old relief pitcher Roberto Hernandez, on the other hand? Incomprehensible.

There is no commodity in baseball more pointless than a high-priced, veteran closer on a bad team. Fans don’t feel any better if the closer saves two more games than a cheaper replacement might, lifting the team to 65 wins instead of 63; there’s little to no marginal revenue gain from winning games at that rock-bottom level either. In the Devil Rays’ case, signing Hernandez wasn’t merely a pointless move. Cash-strapped, the club would eventually pay Hernandez nearly $17 million. Hernandez did a respectable job, piling up 101 saves in three years. The Devil Rays could have saved millions of dollars and added prospects much sooner had they quickly cashed in Hernandez’s shiny closer status in trade. Instead, they waited three years, shipping out Hernandez and Cory Lidle—a starting pitcher who would have two strong years in Oakland—for young, slugging outfielder Ben Grieve. Though Grieve didn’t pan out, the D-Rays at least made a move with the future in mind.

By signing Hernandez, though, the Devil Rays did more than blow a big wad of cash. They also sacrificed a first-round draft pick. Under baseball’s arcane compensation rules, free agents are divided
into different classes based on often counterintuitive criteria. In the off-season of 1997–1998, Hernandez was classified as a Type A free agent. That meant that any team that signed him to a free-agent contract would have to sacrifice a first-round draft pick in the amateur draft (or a second-rounder if the team had already lost its first-rounder), assuming it was in the latter half of the first round. By inking Hernandez, Tampa Bay gave up the 29th overall pick in the 1998 draft.

This wouldn’t be the last time the Devil Rays jettisoned high draft picks for the right to sign veteran players to rich contracts. In the 2000 draft, Tampa Bay chucked its second-, third-, and fourth-round picks as compensation. For their trouble they got:

• Juan Guzman, a thirty-three-year-old starting pitcher who threw 1⅓ innings in Tampa Bay before his arm exploded.
  
• Steve Trachsel, a starting pitcher coming off a season in which he’d gone 8-18 with a 5.59 ERA. Trachsel offered the added bonus of being the slowest-working pitcher of his generation, thus driving Devil Rays fans mad with his lousy and slothful performance. He went 6-10 with a 4.58 ERA in 23 Tampa Bay starts before getting shipped out.
  
• Gerald “Ice” Williams, an outfielder perhaps best known for charging Pedro Martinez after being hit by a pitch and missing in his wild swing at the star pitcher. Williams lasted a year and a half in Tampa Bay. In 2001, he hit .207 with a .261 on-base percentage before the Devil Rays released him. In 2000, Williams hit 21 homers; he also made nearly 500 outs, ranking near the league leaders in that dubious category despite missing 15 games.
  

All told, the Devil Rays paid three draft picks and $20 million, getting light-hitting prospect Brent Abernathy (acquired when they traded Trachsel) and replacement-level performance from three forgettable veterans for their trouble. Other teams have similarly miscalculated the value of draft picks, and only recently have most
teams gotten serious about spurning mediocre Type A free agents. But there’s never a good excuse for a non-contending team to toss away a chance at an upper-tier prospect.

The Devil Rays made a slew of big-money signings in their first few seasons, most of them players whose past performance didn’t remotely warrant such largesse—never mind their inevitably lousy future performance. Wilson Alvarez got five years and $35 million. Rolando Arrojo got more than $20 million. The Devil Rays would later sign an army of lumbering, past-their-prime sluggers in an off-season that set the franchise back for years. But less splashy deals for players like Hernandez, Alvarez, and Arrojo also hurt the team in multiple ways. Naimoli gave LaMar a budget each year, with the understanding that he would spend the money he was given. But rather than make good on his promise to focus resources on player development, LaMar snatched up the first veteran free agents who would agree to take Naimoli’s money. He threw in preference for players with Florida connections, foolishly surmising that such connections would bring in lots more fans, even when the product on the field remained lousy. They did not.

Naimoli’s goal was to avoid 100 losses in the team’s first season, do better than 95 losses in its second season, and vie for a division title by year five. The Devil Rays did achieve those first two (modest) targets, going 63-99 in 1998 and 69-93 in 1999. But those goals, combined with Naimoli’s meddling approach, sabotaged the team’s building efforts.

“Vince micromanaged so much that there were deals Chuck wanted to make that Vince wouldn’t let him make,” said
St. Petersburg Times
baseball columnist Marc Topkin. “Quinton McCracken, who was a fringe player but became a fan favorite early on, was one of those guys. He had a good year, you knew his value was never going to be higher, and Chuck had some people maybe talking about trading for him. But McCracken was their fan favorite that first year. So Vince wouldn’t let Chuck make the deal.”

What Naimoli couldn’t see and LaMar failed to understand was the
opportunity cost
of the big-ticket contracts they doled out—and
the veterans-for-prospects trades they weren’t making. For a few million dollars a pop, Tampa Bay could have opened baseball academies in multiple countries. Convert just one sixteen-year-old prospect signed for $20,000 into a viable big league player and you’ve made back your investment. History told the Devil Rays that fans would show up for the first few seasons regardless of the quality of the product on the field, owing to the honeymoon period that teams get when they enter the league (or build new stadiums). Signing Hernandez, Alvarez, Arrojo, and others wasn’t going to stop the Devil Rays from losing no matter what. If they had diverted more money to drafting and developing players and less to sinkhole veterans, the Devil Rays could have hastened their rise to contender status by several years.

“Looking back, we should’ve just kept fighting and pouring more money into scouting and player development so that you have a chance to find a player to hit a home run—versus putting it into major league payroll when you’re just going to win so many games anyway,” LaMar lamented. “Looking back, we were trying to have our cake and eat it too, trying to build through scouting and player development and also trying to win a certain amount of major league games. And looking back, who cares about sixty-three or sixty-five or sixty-seven wins—let’s take our lumps, but load up with that nucleus of players. It’s something that I wish we had back.”

Credit LaMar for being able and willing to identify his former organization’s worst practices and his own mistakes. As a first-time GM with a get-along personality, he was ill equipped to take on an overbearing boss like Naimoli. So he followed the same script that many general managers, and by extension many corporate middle managers, swear by every year. Get an annual budget from the boss, then spend every penny while you can. Why look for creative ways to invest capital when there are easier, faster ways? Never challenge authority. Take the road most traveled so you won’t be second-guessed.

The early success of the Diamondbacks blew the Devil Rays further off LaMar’s preferred course. Arizona improbably won 100
games and the NL West title in its second year of existence. The D-Backs had deeper pockets than their Gulf Coast counterparts, and they dug into them. The difference for Arizona was who they acquired. Instead of nabbing midmarket talents at lofty prices, the D-Backs trolled for bigger fish. They signed Randy Johnson, who became one of the biggest bargains in the history of free agency. Though Matt Williams was getting a little long in the tooth, Arizona recognized that he could provide more value as an everyday third baseman than, say, a closer like Roberto Hernandez ever could. The Diamondbacks also started with a stronger nucleus, identifying several young players who would become solid major league contributors. More broadly, though, the Diamondbacks didn’t offer a blueprint that the Devil Rays could easily copy. The D-Backs spent more money than Naimoli and company could ever hope to raise and larded their books with back-loaded contracts, creating a huge long-term debt load that would eventually weigh them down for years. They also got really lucky. Veteran Luis Gonzalez had a huge breakout in his thirties; older players like Jay Bell and Steve Finley similarly found fountains of youth, excelling in Arizona at ages when players historically have declined. Williams, for one, would later be linked to a Florida clinic that sold human growth hormone and various performance-enhancing drugs.

None of this stopped Naimoli and his overeager partners from drooling with envy. Emboldened by the Diamondbacks’ success, the Devil Rays’ owners approved a $60 million budget for the 2000 season, up nearly $25 million from the year before. The GM had his marching orders: sign brand-name players who will not only win games but also put butts in the seats. Now. The problem with that plan was the horrendous timing. The free-agent market was paper-thin that off-season. “You had John Olerud, you had Greg Vaughn, and you had Gerald Williams, okay?” LaMar said.

Bad talent market or not, the Devil Rays pressed on. LaMar acquired Williams, Vaughn, and power-hitting third baseman Vinny Castilla, the three pickups joining a lineup that already included Tampa native and original Devil Ray Fred McGriff and injury-prone
powder keg Jose Canseco. The D-Rays dubbed their new lineup “the Hit Show.” For the first time, the team got significant national media attention for their on-field product. Few pundits thought the ploy would work. In baseball as in business, quick fixes rarely do. But the Devil Rays’ owners were happy to see the team finally getting attention. Happier still were the new additions.

“They want to win,” Vaughn said upon signing with the Rays. “They want to win now. They don’t want to wait. You couldn’t ask for a better situation.” Indeed, the thirty-four-year-old Vaughn couldn’t have asked for better than a contract that would pay him $34 million over four years, given the sky-high attrition rates of plodding, mid-thirties sluggers with no discernible baseball skills other than power.