PLAYING POOR: WHY IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN FOR THE TAMPA BAY RAYS

I was first introduced to the concept of Major League Baseball being “an unfair game” in the 2011 film Moneyball, mostly because I hadn’t read the book yet. Until that point, I knew that baseball didn’t have a salary cap, but I didn’t understand the wealth disparity between teams at the top of the league in payroll and those at the bottom. I came away from the movie deeply impressed by the recent success at that time of low-spending organizations like the Rays and Athletics, and spent many a postseason rooting for them if the Tigers were eliminated. Who doesn’t love an underdog story, after all? Then I got wiser as a baseball fan. After seeing teams like the Padres energize a demoralized fanbase by spending money to transform a roster almost overnight, by watching Phillies owner John Middleton get in the mix with fans at playoff games as his team marched to the World Series, and after realizing that the only sustained period of success for my Tigers was when Mike Ilitch wasn’t afraid to break the bank to bring premier talent to Detroit, I turned a corner in my baseball fandom. I stopped feeling bad for “the little guys” when it dawned on me that Rays Principal Owner Stuart Sternberg is worth $800M. And as I watched Tampa take it in the teeth in this year’s AL Wild Card Series from the Texas Rangers, a team that in essence bought its own core when they signed Corey Seager and Marcus Semien last offseason, I didn’t feel bad at all. Major League Baseball at an executive level is a rich man’s game, and there’s no glory in playing poor.

While $800M may seem meager when stacked up to a Cohen or Steinbrenner, I’m not asking the Rays to spend like the Mets or Yankees. What they need to do if they’re ever going to get over the hump is spend some money. There’s been some debate on the exact figure of their local TV deal, but Fangraphs reported it at $82M a year when it was signed in 2018. That number alone is enough to cover the entirety of their payroll and then some. And yet, despite ranking 27th in payroll this season, Tampa got off to a historic start and rode that record to a wildcard appearance. They’d just dished out the most expensive contract in franchise history, and while that appears to already be a disaster that they’ll be able to financially back out of due to non-baseball reasons, you’d think that meant progress on their end. That is, until you realize that of teams still alive in the playoffs as of the writing of this piece (10/9/23), Wander Franco’s franchise record breaking contract would rank TWENTY-SECOND in Average Annual Value. Notable names his contract trails behind include Jose Abreu, Pablo Lopez, Taijuan Walker and Lance McCullers. Tampa’s only other players making over $10M AAV this season are Zach Eflin and Tyler Glasnow. For contrast the Phillies have seven players topping Franco’s contract, and ten players total making above $10M. 

Of course Tampa can’t spend like the Phillies, but they can afford to make up some of the $166M gap that exists between the two teams in payroll. While Philadelphia sends a murderers row to the plate night after night, Tampa got critical playoff ABs from Curtis Mead, Taylor Walls and Rene Pinto. The way the Rays construct a roster, typically with young, cheap players that they’ll let leave in free agency when it’s time to get paid before they replace them with another young star thanks to their historically outstanding development system has its benefits, to be sure. It’s how they endure constant roster turnover to remain competitive in an extremely cutthroat AL East. But it has its limits. Sure, they wouldn’t have been able to hit free agency and outbid the Yankees for Aaron Judge, but the problem is the depths of the bargain bin that they dive into to fill the holes in their roster. Harold Ramirez was batting third in a playoff series, for God’s sake! I won’t let myself be fooled into believing that a player like Cody Bellinger was too rich for Tampa’s blood. 

The one and only goal of a baseball organization should always be to win baseball games, and Tampa is watering down the operation by splitting its priorities between winning games and saving ownership money. You can only successfully play one of those games at a time, though. Since 1984, only one team has been ranked lower than 18th in payroll relative to the rest of the league and won the World Series, that being the anomaly that was the 2003 Marlins (Secret Base did a tremendous video on them here). Besides the 25th ranked Marlins, who were still ranked higher than this year’s Rays for the record, nobody has managed to toe the line between underspending and winning it all. The 08 and 2020 Rays came close, sure, but both were thwarted by star studded rosters in Philadelphia and Los Angeles respectively. Besides those two World Series losses, Tampa hasn’t even reached an ALCS in their 23 year history. For how often they’ve made the playoffs, that seems more like a pattern than a fluke. Playoff baseball is often touted as being “random” and it’s said that “just getting in” gives every team a real chance, but the numbers show otherwise. Unless you’re going to get a Linsanity run from 23 year old Josh Beckett, the teams unafraid to spend bring home the hardware.

Spending, especially in Tampa’s case, doesn’t always refer to luring marquee free agents to play their games in the Trop. When they’ve had chances in the past to retain fan favorite players in the pursuit of winning a championship, they’ve failed to do so time and time again. Ben Zobrist left the Rays after nine successful seasons in 2014. As a multi positional player with a consistent bat, Zobrist was the type of super-utility guy that most burgeoning franchises would have jerseys of in the team shop for decades, but after a trio of Top 20 MVP finishes in the 2000s and 2010s, Tampa was fine to trade him for John Jaso and Daniel Robertson. While this did prove to be a bad move on the field, as Zobrist played five more productive seasons and brought home a World Series MVP in 2016, even if it hadn’t it displays the type of anti-baseball operation the Rays have been running for over a decade. This is a sport that so deeply cares about its history and a fanbase that feels the same way, so it boggles my mind just how far Tampa is willing to go to avoid giving their fans any franchise icons or meaningful history to sink their teeth into, despite fielding good teams for over half their existence now. Their best ever player is likely Evan Longoria, and he’s played six seasons since he left! They could really use a guy like Charlie Morton these days, and he’s been in Atlanta on a relatively cheap contract collecting wins and a ring for the same money he made with the Rays!

The very core of my problem with the Rays isn’t that they’re overly reliant on analytics. It would be stupid to say that a team who spends less money annually than anyone barring the A’s, yet finds a way to win 85+ games more often than not doesn’t understand what they’re doing on the baseball diamond. The team’s problems are upstairs, where the ownership group isn’t willing to go the extra mile to capture a championship. When you only spend more than Oakland, Pittsburgh and Baltimore (who are also currently getting bodybagged by the 4th ranked Rangers), you’re imposing a disadvantage on yourself. Since the Rays came into existence in 1998, they’ve only crept above 25th in payroll six times: the first four years of the franchise, 2010, and 2022. 

Purchasing a baseball team as a means to make profit will always be one of those things that bothers me immensely. It represents an idea that something people should have a deep connection to, something that should consume fans’ summers and dictate moods and evoke feeling year in and year out can be treated solely as a business rather than a service for people that need it drives me insane. I know it’s an inevitability in owner-dominated leagues, but when you see owners like John Middleton and Peter Seidler who will do anything to pack out their home park, it’s hard to accept hyper-cheapskateism as the only option. If you can afford to purchase a baseball team, you owe the fans of that team better than to just pluck underprivileged 16 year olds out of the Dominican Republic and teach them how to hit a slider. There is no glory in playing poor, and both the history and future of baseball will prove that to be true as many times as necessary before a team like the Rays decides to finally pony up.