The Fallacy of the Tampa Bay Rays

Nobody likes to admit how fun a crusade of being mean can be.

It’s a release, of sorts, for that little nerve cluster in your brain with an insatiable appetite for carnage. You have to keep it in check, of course, but being a meanie has, according to all the best scientists with all the best qualifications, benefits to your health.

I bet anyone outside the Dalai Lama knows and accepts this. 

It’s especially fun to be mean when you’re an insufferable, attention-starved, unyieldingly narcissistic fellow, most commonly referred to as a “writer”. Just look how long this intro is taking! 

But it hasn’t been nearly as long as the amount of time we’ve wasted talking about the Tampa Bay Rays, MLB’s resident decoy drone to distract from some fundamental issues that plague the sport’s existence.

They’re almost deserving of the praise they receive. Or rather, they’re deserving of a very specific kind of praise, which somehow gets associated with the Ultimate Praise. 

Allow me to explain in the way I wouldn’t have it other than: obnoxiously. 

You see, the Rays were big time sellers at this year’s trade deadline. They traded away great players like Zach Eflin, Jason Adam, Isaac Parades, and even their beloved Randy Arozarena, poses and all. That’s an extremely tough look for a team that was in the World Series not too long ago, and had the fourth-best record in all of baseball just last year. 

But it’s not this deadline in particular; the main problem I have is this is what the Rays always do and aren’t criticized nearly enough on a national level for what they stand for.

It feels like a sort of mass psychosis has infiltrated the baseball ecosystem: since when did having a solid season instead of actually winning a World Series become a satiable enough outcome?

Every other day, I’ll hear Stephen A. Smith and a swath of sports fans eviscerate the Dallas Cowboys for failing to get it done in the playoffs. You’ll see people slander Joel Embiid for “ring-chasing” by choosing to play for the country he’s spent most of his life in, learned to play basketball, met his wife, and where his son was born. People are crazy! Ringz Culture makes them that way. 

But in baseball…not so much? 

Moneyball seems to have worked not just as a crowning cinematic achievement, but as an aperture for teams and media to trick some of you hoodlums into thinking it’s a viable strategy.

We literally saw the Texas Rangers spend a ton of money and win a World Series title just last year, and we’re still pretending the way the Rays — or any other team of similar ilk (e.g. the A’s, the Guardians, the Brewers) — do things is Good and Fine. 

Of course, doing what the 2023 Rangers did to vault themselves from one of the league’s worst teams the year prior into a World Series berth the very next year isn’t some sort of guarantee. But nothing in baseball ever is.

Since 1998, only three teams (2003 Marlins, 2015 Royals, 2017 Astros) have won a World Series title that have been outside the top-15 in payroll, while 15 of them were in the top-10.

That doesn’t necessarily mean you need to spend $400 million on free agents or contract extensions, but there are far too many teams that have clear windows and choose to have a low-level free agent like Rowdy Tellez be their only acquisition.

It’s the most professional-looking allegory for kicking the can down the road in all of existence. 

What makes all of this more sad is that the Rays are remarkable and well-run in most ways.

In fact, this whiner-baby diatribe of mine isn’t entirely about the Rays, even. It’s about ignorance, and seeing the same narrative about how “it takes more than money to win!” is so frustrating.

The Rays clearly have some EXCEPTIONALLY talented and knowledgeable folks that do it better than nearly everyone else. Heck, this current state of Rays affairs is perfectly understandable.

The deadline did net the Rays some awesome capitol, and even a team that did spend lots of money would have trouble recovering from losing superstars Shane McLanahan (injury) and Wander Franco (being a piece of irradiated trash) the way they have. 

It’s just important to remember that spending on stars is important, and that the ending of Moneyball showed the A’s lost the last game of the season, not some candlelight dinner of the team being thankful some billionaire gets to buy another yacht.