The Extra 2% (32 page)

The Yankees and Red Sox have ably achieved those two markers of baseball success, win now and win later. From the first post-strike
season of 1995 through 2010, the Yankees made the playoffs fifteen times in sixteen tries, the Red Sox nine times. The two teams combined to win the World Series seven times in that stretch. That’s despite playing in the same division, putting the onus on one of the two to win the AL wild-card spot every year. With a mountain of resources at their disposal and intelligent management at the helm, both teams can load up on veterans who can win in the short haul, then invest in the draft and international market to keep winning long-term. Can the Rays, Jays, and Orioles do the same?

“It’s unlikely,” said J. P. Ricciardi, the Jays’ former GM. From 2006 to 2008, the Jays averaged more than 85 wins a season. Place them in the NL West in ’08 or the NL Central in ’06 with their win totals in those years and they win those divisions. And that’s without accounting for the hellacious, AL East–heavy unbalanced schedules they played, which probably cost them a bunch of wins over that three-year stretch. “You can’t just be good to make the playoffs, you have to be
great
. It doesn’t mean Tampa can’t get there or [the Blue Jays] can’t get there. But even if you do, it’s very unlikely that you will rattle off a few years in a row making the playoffs. The big monsters that sit in the division make that almost impossible.”

In a span of two decades, Dave Dombrowski built the foundation of winning clubs in Montreal, Florida, and Detroit, including three World Series winners and a ’94 Expos club that would’ve been a World Series favorite if not for that season’s strike. The current Tigers GM has served as a head of player development and was also baseball’s youngest GM when, at thirty-one, he took the Expos’ reins in 1988. Few executives in any sport can claim Dombrowski’s success in building winning teams from the ground up. “If you’re Baltimore, Tampa Bay, or Toronto, you know that there’s no sense in shortcutting what you’re doing,” he said. “If you’re going to be good, you’d better build your foundation and take your time, because you’re going to have to compete year in and year out. A lot of times what we all do is try to shortcut the process, speed it up, maybe continue building while trying to win. In that division, it’s tough. I’m not sure you can do it.”

Andy MacPhail led a similar homegrown effort as general manager of the Twins during their 1987 and 1991 championship seasons before moving on to the Cubs, and then later taking his current position as the Orioles’ GM. Both his father, Lee MacPhail, and grandfather, Larry MacPhail, made the Baseball Hall of Fame for their contributions to the game. Like Dombrowski, MacPhail said shortcuts don’t work and lucky breaks aren’t enough. “You’re not going to have a year [in the AL East] where you have 87, 88 wins and slide into the playoffs. You have to build it right—grow the arms, buy the rest. Free-agent pitching just does not want to come into this division unless they’re getting paid full retail and then some, or going to Boston or New York.”

With the odds constantly stacked against the Rays, the impact of every mistake is magnified. Cliff Floyd’s departure after Tampa Bay’s 2008 pennant run launched a search for a new DH. The Rays offered Bobby Abreu a two-year deal that topped any offer on the market, but Abreu opted to take a one-year, $5 million deal with the Angels instead. They looked into signing Adam Dunn, only to get outflanked by the Nationals, a far worse team and organization that made a two-year offer similar to the one the Rays floated. After weeks of research and negotiation, they finally settled on Pat Burrell, signing the longtime Phillies outfielder to a two-year, $16 million contract. The move was a disaster from the start. After averaging 31 homers and 103 walks a year in his previous four seasons, Burrell’s power and on-base ability deserted him. He hit just 14 homers in his first season in Tampa Bay, playing in only 122 games, drawing just 57 walks, and hitting a miserable .221. No one was quite sure what the problem was. Nagging injuries, including persistent neck pain, took their toll. Critics wondered if Burrell was struggling against tougher AL East competition, feeling the effects of a tougher hitter’s park, or even wilting as a designated hitter for the first time in his career. Whatever the cause, his struggles only worsened the next season. In 2010, Burrell posted a .202 average and .292 on-base percentage, and he hit only 2 homers in 24 games
before the Rays kicked him to the curb. Adding insult to injury, Burrell became a key contributor for the playoff-bound Giants, who picked him up for next to nothing, then cruised to a World Series title.

That $16 million spent on a lineup cipher has had far-reaching effects. The Rays passed on high-priced talent at the 2010 trade deadline; they preannounced plans to slash payroll the following off-season; and flushing away that $16 million might even tighten future budgets enough to prevent them from signing a homegrown talent to a long-term deal or paying big bucks for draft talent. A cynic would note that the Rays had fewer picks to sign anyway: their two top choices in the 2009 draft, LeVon Washington and Kenny Diekroeger, both opted to play college ball rather than sign with the Rays. It will be years before we know how good Washington and Diekroeger will become, or whether they will have major league careers at all. The Rays received compensation picks for the 2010 draft that could work out just fine. But spending millions on hitters who don’t produce and whiffing on the top of a draft are the kinds of moves that can scuttle a small-revenue team’s efforts to close the gap on their powerful foes—if not now, then over the long haul.

“One bad contract can handicap you for years,” said Forst, the A’s assistant GM. He would know. Oakland signed rising star Eric Chavez to a six-year, $66 million deal in March 2004. Major shoulder injuries and surgery after surgery knocked Chavez out of the lineup for months at a time, sapping his hitting and throwing and leaving the A’s with an albatross of a contract. Oakland offered Jason Giambi a six-year, $90 million pact after the 2001 season, following an MVP season and a second-place MVP finish. The Yankees outbid Oakland, locking up Giambi for seven years and $120 million. “We thought it would be a fair deal,” Forst said. “But then, as we made the offer, we also thought, ‘If we do this deal and it backfires, we could be screwed for the next six years.’ ” The Yankees watched Giambi deliver two miserable, injury-racked seasons out of
the seven on his $120 million megadeal and saw Carl Pavano and Kevin Brown turn into pumpkins after getting big bucks, but never sweated much when these fat contracts blew up in their face.

Jed Hoyer has seen the Rays’ monumental task from both sides, first as assistant GM of the well-heeled Red Sox, then as the head man in small-market San Diego. Ninety-five wins is almost a must to make the playoffs in the AL East, he said. That type of atmosphere forces the Rays—and the Jays and Orioles—to aim higher at everything they do: more aggressive spending on scouting, drafting, and development, more advanced analytical tools, more thoughtful management style both in the front office and on the field. Building slowly over a long period of time, as the Rays did with their LaMarera draft picks and a decade of losing, might be the only way to get it right. “Their patience was phenomenal,” he said. “I don’t think you could do a much better job building a small-market team. They never made moves just to fill holes. They looked at a team with the highest bullpen ERA and said, ‘Why the hell am I going to fix it?’ There’s no point in plugging holes to win 70 or 75 games instead of 67.”

No point in plugging holes—unless you work for an owner who won’t tolerate losing. Or a fan base that won’t. Or a demanding, always-in-your-face press corps that will roast you alive. “There are certain places where there’s more latitude on the part of management to deal with the issue of competition,” mused Alderson, the former A’s general manager. “Places like Minnesota. Not that Minnesotans accept failure. But there’s a long history of the Twins growing their own players, allowing them to leave, and at least staying competitive. So they have more latitude to get rid of, say, Johan Santana. Oakland, Tampa Bay, Florida—those types of places would be more forgiving. In other places—New York, Boston—it would be unthinkable. It would be unforgivable.”

The quality of the top three AL East teams drives the emerging rivalry between the Rays and their richer competition in New York and Boston. But the haves-versus-have-nots nature of the teams can also cause friction. For the most part, Andrew Friedman and
the Rays’ front office do their jobs without worrying about macro issues like their limited resources, just as Brian Cashman and the Yankees and Theo Epstein and the Red Sox tend to their own daily operations. But it’s easy to let your mind wander, to wish you had more money if you’re the Rays, or wish you could deal with less scrutiny if you’re the Yankees or Red Sox. Still, it’s a healthy, respectful rivalry, said Hoyer and others, with each team motivated to match the high-level decision-making of the others.

The owners are a different story—especially where the Rays and Red Sox are concerned. John Henry and Stuart Sternberg both hail from Wall Street. But it’s an awfully big street, one that includes wildly divergent investment strategies. Those different approaches to making money can make one man look upon the other’s efforts with contempt.

Henry made his fortune selling commodities futures. As a young commodities broker and later the founder of investment management firm John W. Henry & Company, he learned the value of quick thinking, and also of agnostic thinking. In his world, the true value of a bushel of corn or a ton of soybeans doesn’t matter. All that matters are the prevailing trends. Go long when market conditions dictate it. Go short when the market turns the other way. In Henry’s world, the market is always right. Sternberg takes the long view. With Goldman Sachs and later in his own ventures, he went to great lengths to learn the intrinsic value of assets. When working on a merger, he would pore over both companies’ operations, mining for synergies to exploit and redundancies to eradicate. When digging into a particular company, he’d consider every little edge in its supply chain, every rising star on its management team, every chink in rival companies’ armor. He’d look for the ideal long-term investment, the value play that could produce big gains over a span of multiple years. In Sternberg’s world, the market is often wrong, and it is his job to take advantage.

Those approaches are inherently at odds with each other. A successful commodities trader sees the big gains he’s scored from his fast-acting strategy and wonders why someone would waste so
much time doing painstaking research in the name of some nebulous, far-off goal. A successful long-term investor takes pride in the hard work he’s put in to find the hidden gem. He sees much less skill, and no elegance, in a commodity trader’s playbook.

Not everyone with those divergent backgrounds need become bitter combatants. But once both men joined the exclusive club of Major League Baseball owners, those feelings began to simmer. With the two teams playing in the same division, with vastly different revenue bases, the rivalry came to a slow boil. And when the Rays finally caught and passed the Red Sox in 2008, everything bubbled over.

The first signs of resentment cropped up in 2005, before Sternberg had even completed his buyout of Vince Naimoli and ascended to the role of managing partner. In the third round of that year’s amateur draft, the Devil Rays drafted a high school pitcher named Bryan Morris. A big kid out of Tennessee, Morris had been regarded as a near-elite talent who would require more than third-round money to sign. At first, Tampa Bay was prepared to shell out to get their man. But with the Devil Rays’ sale and ownership transfer pending, Sternberg changed his mind, opting not to go over slot for Morris in an effort to avoid upsetting anyone in the Commissioner’s Office. Tampa Bay passed, Morris went back into the draft the next year, and the Dodgers scooped him up with their first-round pick. When Sternberg watched Henry and the Red Sox pay over slot for several players, both then and looking back at previous years, he felt duped. Why should the rich get richer, he fumed, when he’s taking on one of the toughest rebuilding jobs in sports? When Tampa Bay picked right-hander Alex Cobb in the fourth round of the 2006 draft—from a Boston high school no less—Sternberg quickly authorized over-slot money to get him signed. The Commissioner’s Office gave him a tongue-lashing, but Sternberg didn’t care. He wasn’t going to let niceties scuttle his goals again.

In 2006, the Rays believed that Boston was tampering with their free-agent-to-be, shortstop Julio Lugo. That August, Tampa Bay learned that the Sox wanted to trade for Baltimore catcher Javy
Lopez and that the asking price was young outfielder Adam Stern. The Rays claimed Stern on waivers, forcing Boston and Baltimore to work out the Lopez deal for a player to be named later—that player being Stern, thanks to the work-around engineered by the Red Sox and Orioles. Still, the message had been sent—don’t screw with us, or we’ll screw you right back. The Rays were far out of contention when they pulled that bit of gamesmanship, cementing the notion that they were just looking for payback against their rivals. The Red Sox weren’t quite out of it when they made multiple waiver claims in 2010. Blocking the Rays from acquiring help was still a fun by-product.