I’ve written about this before, but what the heck, I’m so rarely right when it comes to predictions that I have to hold on to the few times when it’s happened. Going into the 2008 season, as I recall, nobody thought the newly named Tampa Bay Rays (they were the Devil Rays until 2008) had any chance at all. Why would they? The franchise had been around for ten seasons and finished dead last in the division every season but one.*
*In 2004, they went 70–91, which put them 30½ games behind the Yankees but still in fourth place in the American League East, ahead of the Blue Jays.
Not only did they have no history of long-term success, but they went into the year coming off the worst record in the American League and they had the lowest payroll in the league—a few million behind the A’s, Twins, and Royals. Their big free-agent signings included a 39-year-old Troy Percival, a 35-year-old Cliff Floyd, and a 36-year-old Brian Anderson. As an outsider—and aren’t most of us outsiders when it comes to the Tampa Bay Rays?—I didn’t see any reason to hope.
I distinctly remember thinking that when, at spring training, I picked up a preview magazine and, over breakfast, looked through the rosters and projected starters for each team. And that’s when I came across a shocking discovery.
The Rays had a lot of good players.
Carlos Peña was coming off an MVP-type season. Carl Crawford had hit .315 with some power and he stole 50 bases and he was a defensive wizard. B.J. Upton at age 22 hit .300/.386/.508 and was living up to the hype. James Shields and Scott Kazmir were both pretty darn good starting pitchers, and the Rays had just traded for Matt Garza, who had only a year earlier been called the best pitching prospect in baseball by some scouts. A couple years before that, Edwin Jackson was the best pitching prospect in baseball. Rocco Baldelli had been good before he got hurt. And then there were some huge, gigantic, mega-prospects coming—Evan Longoria at third base, overall No. 1 pick David Price on the mound…
I remember all of it just washing over me, and I thought: “Wait a minute…are the Tampa Bay Rays actually good?” It was like that scene in Clueless where Cher realizes that she’s in love with Josh. Well, not exactly like that scene, but sort of.
Anyway, the Rays did turn out to be good, really good. They won the division in 2008 and went to the World Series, and I was able to pat myself on the back and say, “Huh, I actually saw that before most people did.” Of course, when you constantly try to make bold predictions—which we tend to do as sportswriters—you’re bound to be:
- Right every now and again.
- Wrong a lot more often.
Those Rays had a nice run (they went to the World Series in 2008 and made it to the postseason three times between 2010 and ’13), but if we’re being honest, the last five or six seasons the Rays have been different and more impressive. Those older Rays did what bad teams sometimes do. They hit big on a couple of superhigh draft choices—Price at No. 1 and Longoria at No. 3—and to capitalize on that, they made a couple of shrewd deals (like getting Ben Zobrist) and found enough good players to become contenders for a while.
These Rays, though, well, what they’ve really done is break the system. Michael Lewis’s classic Moneyball, about the early 2000s A’s, launched a baseball revolution, as every team tried, in their own way, to mirror Billy Beane’s desperate search for market inefficiencies. But—and Moneyball might be my favorite baseball book ever, so this is not intended to be a knock—that book skirted the hard truth that those A’s won in a much more conventional way than suggested. They didn’t win because of Scottie Hatteberg’s on-base percentage or the acquisition of a late-30s David Justice or by picking up Jeremy Giambi.
They won largely because of the best pitching staff in the American League, built around No. 2 overall pick Mark Mulder, No. 9 overall pick Barry Zito, and an overachieving righty they drafted in the sixth round out of Auburn named Tim Hudson. The A’s might have been higher on Zito than other teams, but he was hardly unknown (he’d been drafted twice, including by Texas in the third round a year earlier) and, anyway, that’s not Moneyball. That’s just good scouting.
They also had a scout in the Dominican named Enrique Soto who discovered a 13-year-old Miguel Tejada, believed in him, and stuck with him, and eventually he became an MVP for the A’s. They selected probably the top high school position player in the 1996 draft in Eric Chavez a year before Beane became GM.
Joe Posnanski has been called “contemporary sports writing’s biggest star.” For more stories from Joe, subscribe to his Joe Blogs Substack newsletter at joeposnanski.com, where he writes about sports, pop culture, life, and all manner of nonsense.
I don’t mean any of this to downplay just how great a GM Beane was—he’s a Hall of Famer to me for the way he helped change baseball—nor, as mentioned, to poke holes in Lewis’s wonderful book.
It’s just to say that these Rays, well, they’re the real deal when it comes to finding market inefficiencies. Since 2019, they have the second-most wins in the American League, behind only the Houston Astros. And they’ve spent less than half in payroll than the Astros have. In fact, since 2019, they’ve spent just $3 million more than the tanking-for-Vegas Oakland A’s.
And they’ve done it without super-high draft picks. They have actually not drafted in the top five since 2018, when they took college slugger Brendan McKay out of Louisville. That didn’t work out. Instead, they’ve been fairly aggressive on the international market, and they’ve made some shrewd deals (for Isaac Paredes, for hitting machine Yandy Diaz, for bright lights Randy Arozarena), and they’ve developed a bunch of good players.
And they’ve bent the game. There were some obvious things. Eventually, everybody shifted defenses, but the Rays were first and most aggressive. They popularized the “opener”—a reliever who starts a game for an inning or two. Stuff like that. But perhaps more to the point was the way they built a top-to-bottom roster. The 2022 Rays won “only” 86 games because of a limited offense; they were 11th in the league in runs scored, 11th in home runs, 13th in slugging percentage, etc.
In 2023—with mostly the same players—they were second in the league in runs, fourth in home runs, and second in slugging percentage. They also stole almost twice as many bases as in 2022, taking full advantage of the new rules.
How’d they do all of that? Well…
- They made 24-year-old Isaac Paredes a full-time player, and he hit .250/.352/.488 with 31 home runs.
- They made 25-year-old Josh Lowe a full-time player, and he hit .292/.335/.500 with 33 doubles and 20 home runs.
- They found 400 plate appearances for Luke Raley, and he hit 19 homers and slugged near .500. They found 364 plate appearances for Jose Siri, and he hit 25 bombs and slugged near .500. They moved Yandy Diaz to first base to open some things, and he led the league in hitting and slugged .522.
- Yes, they built around their 22-year-old phenom Wander Franco, and for much of the year he was a leading candidate for MVP.
They just do smart things day after day after day. That is a front office—the names change, but the innovations keep coming—that seems to see itself as the luckiest group in baseball. It’s funny: They get little money and little fanfare, and the team plays in a bad stadium and few people come to watch. But because of all that, they can kind of do anything they want, throw as many things against the wall as they like, follow their wildest ideas and try out their craziest schemes.
So how long can they keep defying gravity?
Well, I don’t know. There is one thing that I do keep coming back to along those lines: The horrific tale of Wander Franco. The Rays actually went out on a limb to get him. They outbid other teams for Franco when he was 17… and the Rays pretty much never outbid anybody. They saw him as their franchise guy, and as a baseball player on the field they were absolutely right.
But Franco is at the center of a bizarre and horrifying sexual-abuse criminal case, and I don’t think that even if the criminal cases fall apart he will ever play another inning of Major League Baseball. This is obviously the least important part of the story, but can even the Rays overcome the loss of their most important player?
Joe Posnanski has been named the best sportswriter in America by five different organizations, including the Sports Media Hall of Fame and the Associated Press Sports Editors. He has also won two Sports Emmy Awards. He is the No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of six books, and he co-hosts the PosCast with television writer and creator Michael Schur.
