With the July 31st Major League Baseball trade deadline fast approaching and additional wild card teams being added to each league, trades this season are going to be bonkers. And along with these changes come more opporutnites for shitty teams to make the playoffs, which of course will result in a lot of dumb teams finagling bad trades in hopes of making the postseason.
This time of year the stories in the sports section are fairly predictable: Bad teams trade pending free agents for prospects; the Yankees taking on someone washed-up fatso who discovers magic (HGH) in the Bronx and becomes a NY Post headline; the Red Sox think they’re good and trade off pieces they’ll need later; and some team barely in the hunt will do something really stupid and everyone will say, “Oof, Marone.”
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One thing that has changed over the last few years is that people actually respect the Tampa Bay Rays. Once a laughable expansion team with obnoxious uniforms, the Rays have revamped their franchise into a competitive and savvy press darling. At 49-45, in what many think is the toughest division in baseball (the American League East), the Rays are eight and a half games out of first place but only one win from the wildcard spot. With a few key players injured, including the face of their franchise, Evan Longoria, the Rays have struggled to score runs. They normally don’t make blockbuster deadline trades but rather pedestrian moves that aim to shore up the holes in their roster. These are the type of non-sexy moves that nerds salivate over and causal fans seldom notice.
While the Rays have a great record of letting the right free agents walk, most notably Carl Crawford, and have avoided panic trades that would hinder them long-term, they still are just the fucking Tampa Bay Rays. No one buys their gear (your logo’s a cartilaginous fish? no thanks), no one really votes for them, and they are never on television. Despite being heralded as the smartest franchise in baseball, no one but geeks really fucking care.
When Jonah Keri put out The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First, it had every stat geek in sports singing the praises of the Tampa Bay Rays. Prior to Jonah’s 272-page blowjob of the Rays’ owners, the reconigzed geniuses of baseball executives were Athletics GM Billy Beane and Chicago Cubs President of Baseball Operations Theo Epstein. Billy has yet to win a championship with the Athletics despite a few storybook runs, and Epstein’s two championships are tainted by players who tested positive for performance enhancers and a payroll high enough to absorb his frequent free-agent blunders.
The Athletics and Rays have similar payrolls and similar franchise values, and neither team has a top-20-selling jersey, and yet sports nerds are supposed to believe that Andrew Friedman is the most brilliant mind in the game. If all of this praise is based on statistics, then we can break things out and come to the conclusion that the Rays are actually overrated in every possible way.
And I’d like to know then, stat nerds, by what metric are the Rays “better” than the Athletics? Yes, the Athletics have sucked for a while, but despite being shitty they aren’t spending more than the Rays to lose and they have the same amount of World Series trophies on their mantle. Winning and making money are the two most important things in professional sports, and the Rays aren’t particularly good at either. OK, they quiety compete and almost win year after year, an art the Atlanta Braves mastered decades ago. And they consistently groom above-average vanilla white boys with names like Chip Hudson. The Braves are middle-of-the-pack in payroll and many rate their farm system a notch below the Rays. The reason the Braves aren’t the sexy team to suck off is because they are an incredibly boring team—they don’t even have a douche like Luke Scott to hate or anyone with a cool nickname, unless you think Chipper counts.
