Sorry I didn’t get a post together this morning. Things have been a little crazy.
Remember Michael, the person that asks to set the meeting with Tattaglia, he's the traitor.
But, I just read Jonah Keri’s Rays piece for Grantlandwhile eating baby carrots at my desk and I have to wonder, did Simmons corrupt our guy or did he just sell us out to get some Boston readership? Something funny is going on here.
The piece starts by explaining all the highlights of the Rays turnaround that we have come to love to Bill Simmons’ fraternity brothers Grantland’s readers. But then, in a neck-snapping turn so abrupt it had me considering a call to 1-800-Ask-Gary, he concludes:
It doesn’t matter how much talent the Rays farm system produces and how many shut-down relievers they pull out of thin air. They have to spend more money if they want to knock off the Yanks and Sox.
Wait. What? Can we get an explanation at least?
Jonah has been so good to the Rays that I am going to assume, for now, that his original piece offered a detailed and nuanced explanation for this bizarre conclusion that was subsequently cut by the editor Simmons hired for wearing a Red Sox sweatshirt with a stain to the job interview.
Jonah knows the club too well to dismiss a proven process. Right?
I thought you were our guy Jonah.
i’d say that maybe you read it wrong and your eyes were playing tricks on you, but with all those baby carrots you were eating, there’s no way the eyes are at fault.
just sucking up to the boss, i guess. like when Andy got 3 beers a piece for him and his co-workers in Shawshank Redemption, but he doesn’t even drink. just wanted to feel part of the team, just like Jonah does at Grantland Prison. When the Rays come back this year and walk away with the wild card or the division, it will be too late for Keri to crawl through 500 yards of sewage and escape a free man, becaus eof this piece.
From this day forward, we will only refer to that particular site as Grantland Prison. The Beav comes through.
Good post and a great response from Brendan. Simmons wouldn’t be pleased with a Shawshank reference being used against him!
The article seemed a bit cobbled together, like it was originally longer and, as you suggest, large parts of it got left on Simmons’ henchman’s floor.
I didn’t care much for the suggestion that the team has five potential holes for next year. I guess it depends on what you mean by hole but I presume, for example, he is counting catcher here but I would counter there might be enough talent in the system now, it’s just a case of who plays when. I’d be pretty happy to pencil in Zobrist, Longoria, Jennings, Joyce, Upton, Rodriguez and the catcher group and that still leaves Fuld/Guyer/Ruggiano assuming Damon is gone and Kotchman falls off a cliff. Sure the roster needs work, but whose doesn’t?
I don’t want to hijack the comment board but the notion of ‘spending’ is also a bit flawed. Say they did re-sign everyone last year, would that have guaranteed the playoffs this year? One of the front office’s virtues appears to be there ability to never (or rarely, Pat Burrell grrrrr) overpay for anything. If the market isn’t there they will just pull back. Sometimes there’s more to it than “$42m is less than $72m therefore the Rays are cheap”. Being 100x smarter than me, and one of my favorite writers, I thought Jonah would recognize that more freely.
How much did the Dodgers spend? Would they win in the AL East? I’m with you.
I kinda don’t have much to disagree with on Jonah’s article really. Maybe my pessimism tank is empty after arguing about the Glazers most of the day, but he really didn’t say anything offensive to me personally (as a fan). He didn’t call the fans out for the lack of attendance being the main problem, he pointed out the many other issues I like to address when I’m being defensive (Trop, TV deal, etc) rather than “the fans don’t care”.
Really, it’s controversial to say that a $42M payroll probably won’t cut it, that ’08 was a one-shot deal re: winning that cheap, and that ’10 (a season that still featured a ton of homegrown talent but with spending up about 75% compared to ’08) is a more reasonable/sustainable model for success in the AL East?
I don’t know that it’s controversial. I think it is conclusory.
The Rays have won two division titles. One with a small payroll and one with a slightly larger, but still relatively small, payroll. If you are going to say that one model is obviously luck while the other is obviously directly corrolated to the money spent, then explain it.
You just dropped it in there like it came down from a mountain on a stone tablet.
You are of course right that it’s incredibly hard to compete without spending money but don’t you think a team’s payroll can be an overly simplistic way of looking at a team? You could add $5m a year to Longoria and Zobrists’ contracts and they’d still represent outstanding value. If that made the Rays payroll $52m or $62m or $100m with huge deals for Price, Shields, Upton, Jennings it wouldn’t change the product on the field for right now. Spending more would be great but when you have several team friendly contracts, it does distort the situation a bit, right?
The team needs more talent in some spots, no argument, but I’m not sure that money (or at least huge piles of it) is always the answer (it’s just the most obvious one). Rays fans just bristle a bit when they hear the payroll/bad attendance stuff on a regular basis.