If it's true you don't become an official big-league franchise until you
fire your first manager, then it's now safe to include the Tampa Bay Devil
Rays in all forthcoming editions of the American League Red Book.
But like all teams that get themselves messed up enough to fire their
manager 14 games into the season, they still have to address two questions
far bigger than where to forward Larry Rothschild's checks.
1) How the heck did they get themselves into this mess?
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If you really look
at (the Devil Rays), Ben Grieve is the only guy who could be a regular on a good club.
And he probably should be a DH. ” |
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— An AL scout |
And 2) now what?
How did they get here? To 4-10, to a .223 team batting average, to 24
unearned runs in 14 games? That answer isn't so hard.
This is just a team caught in that never-never land between the past and
the future. They run a lot of players out there who used to be good. They
also have a lot of players, either hanging around the Trop or burning their
way up the ladder, who are going to be good.
But they're not good players right now. And that's trouble.
"If you really look at that club," says one AL scout, "Ben Grieve is the
only guy who could be a regular on a good club. And he probably should be a
DH.
"And you look at their pitching staff, and they have a lot of guys with
the same look. Albie Lopez is legit. He's come into his own at long last. But
the other guys -- Paul Wilson, Bryan Rekar, Ryan Rupe, Travis Harper -- they're
all right-handed, they all throw at about the same velocity. They're all the
same kind of pitcher, with slight variations in stuff."
GM Chuck LaMar has done a good job of building the farm system to the
point it now features some of the best prospects in baseball (Josh Hamilton,
Jason Standridge, Carlos Crawford, just-promoted Aubrey Huff). But the Devil
Rays started their existence by hitching their fortunes to a ton of
high-ceiling high school players. And they're still waiting for the Matt
Whites and Bobby Seays to help them.
Some day, a couple of years down the road, this team could be the Marlins
-- young and talented and dangerous. But Hal McRae has a couple of hundred
games to manage between now and then. And some of them won't be much fun.
But it will help him for now simply that he isn't Larry Rothschild, a guy
who never had a shot.
Rothschild's players knew he was literally hours from being fired last
November, only to be saved by a change of heart by LaMar. And it became clear
in a hurry this year those players had either tuned him out, at best, or were
openly challenging him, at worst.
So "it got to the point," said one baseball official, "where it wasn't a
question anymore whether this was Larry Rothschild's fault. The situation in
the clubhouse had gotten so bad, they had no choice."
In other words, the Devil Rays were merely doing what they had to do
Wednesday when they fired their manager. But it was no instant cure for the
ills that led them to pull that trigger.
Jayson Stark is a Senior Writer at ESPN.com.
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