The Tampa Bay Devil Rays have packed as much excitement into the first month of their fourth season as the franchise had seen in its three previous campaigns combined. We're just shy of May Day, but the D-Rays have changed managers, promised a shakeup in the ownership group and gone through multiple starters at third base, second base and right field. The chaos hasn't done much for the team's record, which is 8-17 through Sunday, tied for the worst mark in baseball.
While April has been full of sound and fury, is anything at all being signified? Will replacing Larry Rothschild with Hal McRae in the manager's seat, or bringing in a new hire to take over day-to-day operations of the team, make any difference? Not as much as you'd think. This isn't a team loaded with good players that just needs a change to get it jump-started. It's a bad collection of aging, expensive, almost uniformly overrrated talent that has as much chance of becoming relevant as the XFL.
For the Devil Rays to get off the path laid by the last disaster of an expansion team, the Seattle Mariners, they need to start over, not just with the major-league roster, but with their entire developmental program. It's not just that the Devil Rays have had a lack of success in the AL. That can be expected from a new franchise. The problems run deeper, into a player acquistion and development program that has completely missed the boat on the most important skill in the game: control of the strike zone.
Beginning with the Expansion Draft in 1997, Tampa Bay GM Chuck LaMar has focused almost exclusively on players with tremendous physical skills. This concentration on great athletes saddled the organization with players who, while fun to watch, would not be productive hitters. The Devil Rays have ranked last, 11th, and last again in runs scored in their three seasons. They've ranked last, ninth, and last in on-base percentage. That's not a coincidence.
And while it may be fun to point fingers and laugh as Mike Kelly or Jose Guillen or Gerald Williams posts another unimpressive OBP, the problem runs deeper. It's not just that the major-leauge D-Rays can't score or put up decent OBPs. It's that nobody in the organization can.
The following chart compares the 2000 performance of the Devil Rays' minor-league affiliates (above rookie ball) to their leagues. In it, you'll see that at almost every level, the D-Rays performed below the league average in a number of plate discipline indicators. I've also included the affiliates' ranks in runs, walk rate, and OBP to give you an idea of how bad the problem is:
Lg Lg Rank in League BB
Level-Team League-Teams AB/BB AB/BB AB/K AB/K K/BB K/BB Runs OBP Rate
AAA-Durham Int.-14 10.4 10.5 5.5 5.4 1.90 1.84 2 1 9
AA-Orlando South.-10 9.9 9.5 5.1 4.7 1.93 2.01 14 7 8
High-A-St. Pete. Fla. St.-14 13.9 10.1 5.3 5.0 2.63 2.03 14 14 14
Mid A-Charles. Sou. Atl.-14 15.3 9.8 4.5 4.3 3.44 2.28 5 14 14
Low A-Hud. Val. N.Y.-Penn-14 10.4 9.1 3.7 4.4 2.80 2.06 11 11 11
The Devil Rays' affiliates were below the league average in walk rate at four levels, the four where the most teaching and development occurs. Their plate discipline at all three A-ball affiliates was awful, especially at Charleston.
These are not one-year fluke totals. In 1999, the four Devil Rays' affiliates below Triple-A were again all below average in walk rate, and the team's three A-ball affiliates finished last, 12th and 12th in their leagues in OBP. The Double-A Orlando Rays were in the middle of the league in runs and OBP, but eighth (in a 10-team league) in walk rate.
The Devil Rays' Triple-A affiliate in Durham shows up as an outlier in both seasons. The Bulls led the International League in OBP both times, and finished first in runs in 1999 and second in 2000. These teams have benefited from a lot of playing time by minor-league veterans like Steve Cox, Scott McClain, Brooks Kieschnick and others. With a roster mostly comprised of older players and non-prospects, it's hard to argue that development is occurring at Durham. In fact, the Devil Rays' reluctance to grant more opportunity to these players, and others like Aubrey Huff, is another indicator of the organization's disdain for players who can put runs on the board.
Seeing walks as something more than pitchers' mistakes, and plate discipline as a tool just as important as the traditional five on which scouts focus, has been one of the big changes in the game in the last 20 years. It's been a point of separation for the best organizations baseball. The Yankees' success for the past half-decade can be traced in part to a strong team OBP, while no story about the Athletics is complete without mentioning their plate discipline. The A's, in fact, take it further by instilling the importance of plate discipline throughout the organization. It's as much a part of their developmental program as wind sprints.
The Devil Rays have yet to do that. Their developmental program has looked a lot like that of a top-tier college football program, one that brings in the best athletes it can and makes a football team out of them. Baseball doesn't work that way: you need more than great athletic skills to succeed, and the great equalizer is control of the strike zone.
The D-Rays can change managers weekly; they can bring in John Hart or Whitey Herzog or Lee Iaccocca to run the franchise; they can run through every second-base suspect in the organization until they find one they like. Until they get some players who can do more than run fast, and until they make plate discipline a part of their player-development process, they will always make more news in April than September.
The team of writers from the Baseball Prospectus (tm) will be writing twice a week for ESPN.com during the baseball season. You can check out more of their work at their web site at baseballprospectus.com. Joe Sheehan can be reached at jsheehan@baseballprospectus.com.
| |
|
