Tampa Bay Continues To Optimize At The Expense Of Their Fans.
The Tampa Bay Rays’ mascot should no longer be the stingray. The marine animal that would best describe the Tampa baseball club’s approach to the game would more aptly be the shark. That is because Tampa’s philosophy is one of constantly moving forward, with ruthless disregard for anything but the most stastically optimal approach to extracting maximum value from its players, and then trading them at the first opportunity.
The Rays are darlings of baseball’s analytical community, taking the “Moneyball” philosophy far beyond what Billy Beane of the Oakland A’s could have imagined when he became the subject of Michael Lewis’ 2003 book of that name. The Rays have pioneered innovations such as the defensive shift, the use of the “opener” (starting the game with a relief pitcher instead of a starter, and then having another pitcher take up the bulk of the innings), and more.
This has led the franchise to be repeatedly successful, especially when considering the extreme payroll constraints that they operate under, consistently among the bottom three teams of the league. They are coming off of three winning seasons in a row, culminating in a trip to the 2020 World Series, where they fell to the Los Angeles Dodgers in six games. However, this offseason has left the franchise’s fans more miserable than ever.
One of the hallmarks of Tampa Bay has been their ability to develop homegrown prospects into high level contributors to the Major League club. Blake Snell was one of the greatest examples of this on the team in recent years- picked with the fifty-second overall selection out of a Shoreline, Washington high school, he was developed by Tampa into an ace, winning the Cy Young award in 2018. In a rare move for the budget-conscious Rays, they signed Snell to a long-term extension, for the next five seasons at $50 million in value.
This was so rare for Tampa because in addition to development, the club has become known for aggressively trading away players the moment they become too expensive, even if they are productively helping the big league club at the time they are traded. A typical move of this nature took place during the 2019 offseason, as the club dealt away outfielder Tommy Pham, one of the team’s better hitters that season, to the San Diego Padres for outfielder Hunter Renfroe and infield prospect Xavier Edwards. Snell was caught on the video game streaming platform Twitch exclaiming “we gave up Pham for Renfroe and a damn slapdick prospect?”
Snell apologized for the comments and reached out to Edwards to welcome him to the Tampa organization. But in 2020 he would become an even greater center of controversy. He started Game 6 of the World Series with the Rays facing elimination against the Dodgers, and was dominant through the first five innings, allowing zero runs, two hits and striking out nine batters on only seventy-three pitches.
However, the Rays adhere to strict rules regarding their starting pitchers- that being that they are not to be allowed to pitch a third time through the batting order, as analytical data shows that in general, pitchers (and Snell in particular) are less effective when facing batters a third time. That Snell’s performance may have been an outlier in the data was, apparently, not taken into consideration. Manager Kevin Cash pulled Snell from the game, and reliever Nick Anderson promptly surrendered the lead to the Dodgers, who went on to win the game and World Series.
As controversial as that decision was and as heartbreaking as the result was to Rays fans, they had plenty of reason to be optimistic heading into 2021. Most of the Rays’ core players remained under contract, including Snell, who was signed to his extension for three more years. However, the average annual value (AAV) of $10m on Snell’s contract proved to be too much for the budget-conscious Rays, with CBS Sports describing it as “extremely affordable in the grand scheme [of baseball] but a bit pricey for the Rays.”
And so, it may have perhaps been inevitable that Snell would have been traded away this winter, and dealt he was, to the San Diego Padres for a package of prospects headlined by right-handed pitcher Luis Patino. Patino was inconsistent in his brief Major League stint in 2020, but has all of the raw tools to be an elite pitcher. His ceiling is that of a top of the rotation starter and Cy Young candidate- in other words, what the Rays already had guaranteed for three years in Blake Snell.
The Tampa Bay Rays have long struggled to draw fans to their ballpark (when that was such a thing that was permitted), even in years when the team was one of the league’s best. Part of that struggle is no doubt due to their stadium situation- they play at Tropicana Field, an antiquated stadium that is notorious for being difficult to drive to for the majority of the residents of the greater Tampa Bay area. But the Rays’ constant willingness to trade away any player may also be a factor as well.
There is no data to qualify this, but part of what draws fans to root for a sports franchise, but having at least some continuity of players may be part of that equation. Even franchises in similarly smaller markets such as the Milwaukee Brewers and Cincinnati Reds routinely outdraw the Rays- that may be because they have locked up at least one signature superstar for their whole career- Joey Votto in Cincinnati and first Ryan Braun, now Christian Yelich in Milwaukee.
The Rays have never done that with any of the players they are so proficient at developing. Even those that they have signed to extensions, such as Snell and before him Evan Longoria, will eventually be traded. The Rays will no doubt develop some of the prospects they got back from trading Snell into productive major league players. But their fans would do well not to get attached, because none of them will be in Tampa for long.
