Authors: Jonah Keri
Nearly a decade of high draft picks, followed by two years of well-placed trades and pickups, had stocked the Rays’ roster. The team had blazing speed and defense in Carl Crawford and B. J. Upton. Carlos Peña had grown into one of the deadliest power hitters in the game. The starting rotation boasted five promising arms, all twenty-six years old or younger. The supporting cast—the bottom of the order, bullpen, and bench—had been completely revamped, yielding a balanced team with no glaring weaknesses. The baseball world didn’t realize it yet, but Friedman and his advisers had taken a bunch of talented young players and turned them into a team. The Rays’ payroll would rise from just over $24 million in 2007 (lowest in the majors) to just shy of $44 million in 2008 (still the lowest in the AL, second-lowest in the majors). Despite the modest price—three times less than the Red Sox’s $133 million payroll and nearly five times less than the $207 million the Yankees spent—all the pieces now fit.
“Our emphasis changed,” Friedman said. “We felt like we had the talent on hand to aggressively move this thing forward. We identified certain areas we were going to attack so that we’d be in a position to achieve success, whether in 2008 or 2009. We were more focused on the construction of a twenty-five-man roster than we ever had been.”
Maddon liked the look of his team enough to predict an 81-win season, a modest outlook at first blush, but still a 15-game improvement over 2007’s result if it happened.
Baseball Prospectus
’s PECOTA forecasting system was more optimistic, predicting an 88-win season for the Rays. Still, only Scott Kazmir had the nerve to call a playoff appearance for the Rays.
Despite all the optimism coming out of spring training, the Rays started the 2008 regular season looking like the same old Rays. After scoring an impressive 6–2 win on opening day against the Orioles, Tampa Bay lost 10 of its next 16 games. Fan interest, as usual, was minimal. The Rays drew 36,048 fans for their home opener against the Mariners. The next night, they sold just 12,106 tickets. Weekend series, normally significantly bigger draws, weren’t much better. The Rays drew only 48,189 fans to the first home weekend series of the season against Baltimore, averaging just over 16,000 a game.
After taking two out of three against the O’s to draw back to .500, the Rays hosted the Yankees for a two-game set, April 14–15. The Bombers smoked Rays starter Andy Sonnanstine for seven runs in 3⅓ innings. Tampa Bay stormed back, scoring five in the bottom of the seventh—only to see the Yankees take the lead right back in the eighth and hold on for an 8–7 win. The next day, Edwin Jackson took his turn as the Yankees’ punching bag by ceding five runs. Final score: 5–3 Yankees, and a series sweep by New York.
The two losses dropped the Rays to 6-8. Worse, attendance was again sorely lacking. Home of the Yankees’ spring training, Tampa is packed with New York fans, some of whom would eagerly make the drive over the Howard Frankland Bridge and see their team beat up on their St. Pete–dwelling neighbors. But the boosts in attendance for series against the Yankees and Red Sox still left wide swaths of empty seats. In just their seventh and eighth home games of the year, a two-game set against the Yanks, the Rays drew fewer than 20,000 fans per contest.
One bright spot did emerge from that series, though: Evan Longoria belted his first major league homer, in his third major league game. The Rays had started the season with super-utilityman Willy Aybar at third base, before a quick injury brought Longoria up April 12. The third overall pick in the 2006 amateur draft, Longoria had already established himself as one of the sport’s premier prospects. Still, most observers figured it would be a while before he cracked the big leagues. Little did they know, but Longoria and his agent
had already laid the framework for the nine-year contract that would become the talk of baseball—and the foundation for a new era of winning Rays teams.
The ink was barely dry on that deal before Longoria began carving up the American League. The second homer of his big league career was a solo shot that launched a comeback win over Toronto on April 22. Two days later, Longoria doubled, tripled, walked, and cracked a sacrifice fly in four trips to the plate, pacing another victory over the Jays. By the end of his first month in the majors, Longoria was hitting .273 with a .388 on-base percentage and .527 slugging percentage, while playing stellar defense at third. The Rays had added another star to what suddenly looked like a loaded roster.
“There was really no identity with the Rays before,” said Dan Wheeler, a member of the 2008 Rays bullpen in his second stint with the team. “They were searching for something. They went young and they went old and then they went young. And then when these new guys stepped in, they picked the people they felt were going to be the future of this team—the Carl Crawfords, the B. J. Uptons, and the Evan Longorias. That’s what we had [in 2008].”
The Rays reeled off six straight wins in late April, sweeping the Jays and Red Sox at home. The team was getting contributions from its marquee players, but also from the supporting cast. Facing Boston in the opener of a three-game series, the Rays sent the game to extra innings. In the bottom of the eleventh, little-used reserve Nathan Haynes came up with men on first and second and nobody out.
The Book, baseball’s catchall name for the long-held strategies that most managers follow, called for a bunt in that situation. Moving the lead runner to third base with one out would give the Rays a chance to win the game via a sacrifice fly, a well-placed grounder, a wild pitch, a passed ball—a number of ways that weren’t a hit. But Joe Maddon, as usual, threw the Book in the crapper. He knew that run expectancy charts, which track the probability of a given number of runs scoring in different base/out situations, made a successful
bunt the slightly superior option in a situation where a team needed only one run. But Maddon also knew that sacrifices are no sure thing: a player can bunt a ball right at a fielder, setting up a force play; he can pop a bunt attempt in the air, leading to an out where no runner advances; or he can simply fail twice in a row, setting up a two-strike count and lowering the likelihood that the batter will produce a hit. Weighing all those factors, as well as Boston’s need to draw their corner infielders in to protect against a bunt, Maddon ordered Haynes to swing away. The lefty-swinging outfielder lashed a single to right, knocking in Carl Crawford with the winning run in a 5–4 victory.
“My first year here I put out a T-shirt:
TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK, NOT WHAT YOU’VE HEARD
,” said Maddon, whose more adventurous against-the-Book decisions included issuing the infamous bases-loaded intentional walk to Josh Hamilton, sending a runner while down 9–0, using unusually aggressive defensive shifts, and starting same-hand hitters against a handful of quirky pitchers. “So much of this stuff has been regurgitated for years. I love the basics of baseball, but when it comes down to moving it forward, why not utilize all the new technology involved, whether it’s video equipment or whether it’s numerically or statistically speaking. If you choose to not do that, you’re going to get left behind.”
Haynes’s game-winner marked just the fourth RBI of his career, one of only 10 hits he’d collect all season. He wasn’t the Rays’ last unlikely hero in ’08.
After finishing April at 15-12, just a game out of first place, the Rays hit a rough patch at the start of May. At Fenway Park for their first road series of the year against the Red Sox, Tampa Bay ran into a buzz saw. Boston outscored the Rays 26–10 in a three-game sweep. A split in the subsequent series against the Jays left Tampa Bay two games over .500, a respectable pace in most divisions but one that had the Rays three and a half games out of first place in the murderous AL East.
Just when it seemed they were again headed for also-ran status, the Rays reeled off their second six-game winning streak of the season.
The streak’s capper came in a rematch against the Yankees. Starting pitchers Edwin Jackson and Chien-Ming Wang traded punches for seven innings, with the Rays heading to the eighth up 1–0 after a five-hit, no-run performance by Jackson. Dan Wheeler retired the Yankees in order in the eighth, setting up Troy Percival for the ninth-inning save chance. With one out in the ninth, Hideki Matsui took Percival deep, tying the score at 1–1 and sending the game to extra innings.
Most of the player moves the Rays made heading into 2008 worked out well, with a few paying massive, unexpected dividends. The two-year, $8 million deal the Rays gave Percival was the only significant failure, given the gap between performance and pay. For the Yankees or Red Sox, eating an $8 million contract amounts to a rounding error. Percival’s pitching failures and injuries would knock him out of the bullpen stopper role before the end of the ’08 season. It also served as a useful reminder of one of sabermetrics’ better-known truisms: pay for performance, not for the overrated concept of a “proven closer.”
J. P. Howell, another quiet but effective Rays pickup by the new regime, faced the minimum six Yankees batters, surrendering one walk before wiping out that base runner on a first-pitch double play by Matsui. The winning hit came from an even stealthier Rays trade pickup, though. The front office had kept tabs on Gabe Gross, a reserve outfielder for the Brewers who would soon be out of a job when Mike Cameron returned from his suspension. With the suspension about to expire, the Rays knew they could grab Gross cheap, since the Brewers would have nowhere left to stash him. On April 22, Tampa Bay dealt minor league pitcher Josh Butler for Gross. The Rays would install him later in the season as the left-handed portion of a right-field platoon, where Gross combined competent offense with an excellent glove. On this day, Gross would replace Eric Hinske in right late in the game, then come up in the eleventh to face Mariano Rivera, the greatest reliever in baseball history. Gross’s solid single to center scored pinch runner Jonny Gomes, giving the Rays a dramatic 2–1 win.
The May 13 victory was one of the Rays’ 11 walk-off wins in ’08, tied for most in the majors. It also made Tampa Bay a first-place team.
“It’s tough to look at a guy after a loss,” said Howell, who saw more losing than most MLB players in his first three seasons with the lowly Royals and Devil Rays. “I don’t want to say you want to punch the guy, but you kinda do. You get sick of looking at people after a while. Being cool to each other is much easier when you’re winning. Once we figured out how to stop losing games in the seventh, eighth, and ninth innings, we knew we could be really good.”
The Rays won 9 of their next 15 games, setting up a showdown against the Central-leading White Sox at the Trop. Rays starter James Shields was his usual self in the opener, giving up just one run in six strong innings, with six strikeouts and just one walk allowed.
The problem for Shields was lack of run support. The teams remained tied at 1–1 going into the bottom of the ninth, when Cliff Floyd led off against White Sox reliever Scott Linebrink. Two months into the season, Floyd had cemented his role as a team leader, a smiling presence who, like Maddon, found a way to relate to the club’s many young players. Floyd also brought ample experience to one of baseball’s youngest rosters. His brush with pennant races dated to 1994, when he was a twenty-one-year-old rookie playing for the Montreal Expos. Like the Rays, the Expos had suffered through years of futility, then built a deep stable of young talent. Floyd just had to hope the Rays’ 2008 Cinderella run would have a happier ending for this new band of twenty-somethings than 1994 did for the upstart Expos, when a players’ strike ended the season in August—and with it the Expos’ best chance at a World Series.
On a 1-1 pitch from Linebrink, Floyd blasted a shot over the wall in right-center to win the game for the Rays. His teammates were so overjoyed by the win, and by Floyd being the man who won it, that their welcoming party at home plate became an emblem of the team’s magical season: Aki Iwamura crouched and pointing at
home plate; Jonny Gomes clutching his hat with his left hand, looking like he’s about to giddily bash Floyd with it; B. J. Upton gleefully leaping above his teammates from the back of the scrum. The image, captured by a
St. Petersburg Times
photographer, would become ubiquitous in the Tampa Bay area, doubling as desktop wallpaper, blown-up posters, even a giant cutout at Tropicana Field.
At 35-22, the Rays were off to their best start in franchise history. But the team’s recent hot streak had done little to give it any cushion in the standings—the Rays led the loaded AL East by just a single game as they embarked on a nine-game road trip. That’s when it all threatened to come apart.
On their return trip to Fenway Park, the Rays’ offense vanished. They scored just six runs in three games against the Red Sox and suffered their second straight sweep in Boston.
This wasn’t just any old sweep, though. The history of confrontations between the two teams dated back several years. The fourth pitch Red Sox starter Pedro Martinez threw on August 29, 2000, whacked Devil Rays outfielder Gerald Williams on the left hand. That set off a bench-clearing brawl. All told, the game included eight ejected Tampa Bay players, four hit batters, and two Boston players sent to the hospital. Among the players
not
ejected was Pedro Martinez, who tossed a one-hit shutout and afterward vowed revenge for Williams’s charge. Over the years, the bad feelings and the rivalry endured, even as the faces changed and the Red Sox continued to dominate the Rays.
Now, with the Rays playing winning baseball for the first time in franchise history and the two teams battling for first place, tensions ran even higher than usual. There were whispers of bubbling on-field hostilities between players; even Stuart Sternberg privately sneered at Red Sox owner John Henry, the two men having both made their fortunes on Wall Street, only to butt heads in their shared quest to topple the Yankees and establish dominance in the AL East. The Rays had grown frustrated after dropping the first two games of the series, doubly so when Red Sox outfielder Coco Crisp slid hard into Akinori Iwamura as retaliation for a sprained thumb
caused by Rays shortstop Jason Bartlett earlier blocking second base with his knee on a Crisp stolen base attempt. The incident prompted Maddon to turn to the Red Sox dugout and yell something to Crisp, then accuse him after the game of trying to hurt Iwamura.