The unfortunate Tampa Bay Rays are like a horse running a race; except this particular horse faces the added threat of having a limb chopped off every time they stumble or fall behind.
With that in the back of their minds, we see a Tampa Bay squad galloping anxiously into the start of 2010. Its a terrifying situation to be trapped in, but a whimpering bank account in the championship assembly line that is the AL East is a great way to wind up third place in a division full of first place teams.
The Rays will be weakened next year, with their teddy bear-faced Carl Crawford up for grabs at the end of 2010. The Yankees, us usual, are a curious, hideous, possum, sniffing out what the other teams have left on their front steps. Crawford wearing the uniform of a division rival and using his well-rounded power, speed, and defense against what would be his former team may be too much for the Rays’ last seven fans to take.
Here’s the problem. Everybody knows about this division. For two of its teams, the season is over before it begins. The other three have all been to the World Series in the last three years.
In the horse race of this AL East, the Rays have to use what they’ve got just to keep up. Their payroll is about to slip under $60 million, a far cry from the Uncle Scrooge-esque money pits that have kept the Yankees and Sox in the pennant races of the past. Should they falter here at the start, they would be forced to start cutting off key parts before they even got to the glue factory. And the first part is Carl Crawford.
“All that talent is going to go,” said Scott Kazmir, ex-Rays ace. “And there’s nothing they can do about it.”
Evan Longoria is going to be a Ray through 2016. By then, he could be the last guy at the party.
With Crawford’s contract up at the end of 2010, the next three years could be one big strike of the delete key for a chunk of Rays. Carlos Pena and Jason Bartlett are up in 2011, B.J. Upton and J.P. Howell follow in 2012, and Matt Garza and Ben Zobrist hit the chopping block in 2013.
Its a sickening process, putting a lot of pressure on the Rays to be good and stay good. It also requires the Yankees and Sox to not start out like they’ve got $210,876,714 and $165,695,833 riding on their seasons, respectively. Which they do. And Crawford, with C.C. Sabbathia already purring promises in his easy like an evil cat, is just the start.
All of which forces the already departed Kazmir into a sort of small-market, childlike denial: “They can’t get rid of him. They can’t.”
Seeing a young team that is fun to watch hit the ground and shatter into a million pieces would be tough to swallow, and for once, the MLB administration is looking to address this issue; of smaller teams with lots of talent being forced to sell their futures just to stay alive.
We, as fans, watch this story unfold with a ten-pond weight hanging from our hearts. It wasn’t long ago that the Rays were 100-loss also-rans; the caboose, the punchline, the AL East mutant child, quarantined to the basement and fed whatever meat scraps were left over from dinner.
And then, they built themselves up, with feisty young talent, happy to look the millionaire juggernauts in the face without flinching, and get themselves a league championship, proving you don’t need a big market team to get things done. Now, because of baseball’s toothy, sinister, business side, where the Yankees always win, the Rays stand to lose a big chunk of their personality to teams that can afford success in the Major Leagues.
So, like any tribe hoping for a solution, we turn to our leader with hope in our eyes, knowing that something must be done. Something needs to present itself so that teams with talent and youth and chemistry can prevent themselves from spending a year or two in the sun, only to wind up empty dumpsters in a parking lot full of Mercedes Benz.
Help up, fearless leader, Bud Selig!
“I’ve always believed in realignment,” Selig informs us.
Oh, crap.
Are we going to do this? We’re really going to let this happen? The game of baseball will be remodeled because the Yankees and Sox are too good? And not even the radical realignment Rosenthal’s throwing out there. What Selig’s talking about is “floating realignment,” which has every team playing in a different division each year.
In my high school, they changed the order of the last three periods every day, and nobody knew what the hell was going on. And there were just 600 of us.
When the Twins signed Joe Mauer, it was a move that showed the league mid-market teams could keep their superstars. But for every Mauer locked up, there will be a Crawford let go. Selig has a desire to expand the draft to an international level, to try and give teams a larger talent pool to skim from and try to level the playing field. But never has it been more apparent that the Yankees have all the money; they are locking all the doors and holding all the keys.
If it truly has come to this, that no one can face down the AL East, so let’s split it up and try from a different angle, then every win will almost feel cheap. We had to reshape the sport in its entirety to make it playable.
You know, in national parks, they sometimes start forest fires on purpose to revitalize the soil. In decades down the line, when realignment (Well, this realignment) is long over, will baseball really be better off? Will stars be safe on teams that don’t have rings but seem likely to get them, as long as their roster stays somewhat together? Or will we just find ourselves looking to torch the forest again and again?
Phillies and Mariners fans will face the same terror as Jayson Werth and Cliff Lee and have chances to be respectively torn from their clubs by the Yankees as well. Carl Crawford will not be saved. No hair-brained scheme Selig concocts will be fast or good enough to address this particular player’s small-market exit.
Because this is the AL East. This ain’t no place for a hero. Unless he’s from New York or Boston.
So, in the coming years, with a real solution years from plausibility, the Rays will be forced to answer that age old question: How far can you get on a three-legged horse?