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Let’s start this off with a very telling quote:

“Everyone’s kind of dumb­founded today. We just lost our cleanup hit­ter and we don’t know what hap­pened. It’s kind of a weird sit­u­a­tion. It’s a zoo around here today.”
–Devil Rays DH Aubrey Huff, on right fielder and cleanup hit­ter Danny Bautista announc­ing his retire­ment just a day after Roberto Alo­mar did (St. Peters­burg Times)

Now, see­ing this quote brings up two imme­date ques­tions. First, what’s wrong with Danny Bautista? Bautista had just come off a sea­son where he started 137 games, the most in his career. He was 32 years old at the time of his announce­ment, not nec­es­sar­ily the time that a player steps down in his career, espe­cially com­ing off his first full sea­son as a starter and sign­ing a free agent con­tract to be the start­ing right fielder in Tampa. Bautista suf­fered a seri­ous shoul­der injury in 2002, but out­side of that, had no real his­tory of injuries break­ing down his body any quicker than normal.

Bautista didn’t give any rea­son­ing as to why he was retir­ing, and he shouldn’t nec­es­sar­ily have to. When you make a deci­sion to leave your job (and this might sound hyp­o­crit­i­cal for how I’ve lashed out at Ricky Williams and his retire­ment) you shouldn’t have to explain your­self if you don’t want to. Bautista has made a few dol­lars over his career — enough that he should be able to live the rest of his career with­out hav­ing to work again. If that’s how he feels, so be it.

The more alarm­ing thing (and the thing I wanted to get to) was the fact that Tampa was seri­ously con­sid­er­ing (at least in Aubrey Huff’s eyes) Bautista as their cleanup hit­ter. While Bautista wasn’t nec­es­sar­ily a bad player (a decent defen­sive out­fielder, VORP of 14.4 last sea­son with Ari­zona), he’s more of an ideal 6–8 spot bat­ter on reg­u­lar teams. While he hits for a decent aver­age (a bat­ting aver­age no lower than .275 over the last few sea­sons), he’s not a player who takes a lot of walks, and is bet­ter suited near the lower part of the order.

So was Huff con­fused, or was the con­cern legit­i­mate? Let’s look at the pro­jected starters for the 2005 Tampa Bay Devil Rays (with Bautista in the mix)

C Toby Hall (.255/.300/.666)
1B Travis Lee (.275/.348/.807)*
2B Jorge Cantu (.301/.341/.803)**
3B Alex Gon­za­lez (.225/.263/.632)
SS Julio Lugo (.275/.338/.734)
LF Aubrey Huff (.297/.360/.853)
CF Carl Craw­ford (.296/.331/.781)
RF Danny Bautista (.286/.332/.733)
DH Josh Phelps (.251/.304/.754)
* 2003 sea­son
** over 50 games

Two things that jump out at you look­ing at this lineup. The first is that Alex Gon­za­lez as a start­ing third base option should never ever be con­sid­ered, and the other is that Danny Bautista isn’t the best hit­ter in this lineup, jus­ti­fy­ing a #3 or #4 spot in the order. Hell, he’d have a tough argu­ment for 5th best.

While Cantu is untested over a full sea­son and Lee is com­ing off an injury that robbed him of most of his 2004 sea­son, Bautista never showed much to jus­tify him being a go-to bat. While Gonzalez’s inabil­ity to hit and Toby Hall strug­gling to live up to his sup­posed poten­tial anchor­ing them to the bot­tom of the order, a more rea­son­able order might look like this:

SS Julio Lugo
CF Carl Craw­ford
1B Travis Lee
LF Aubrey Huff
DH Josh Phelps
RF Danny Bautista
2B Jorge Cantu
C Toby Hall
3B Alex Gonzalez

There’s sev­eral areas of flex­a­bil­ity here — Lee seems more of a fit in the #2 slot, but I put Craw­ford in the #2 due to his speed — he’s far from a lead­off guy, though. If Phelps turns the cor­ner and learns to hit righthanded pitch­ers as well as he hits left­ies, he could push Huff into the 3 and set­tle into the 4, push­ing Lee to the #5.

How­ever, look­ing at this, one can actu­ally see where a Lou Pinella would be bat­ting Bautista in the #4 slot. Keep­ing with the Lugo-Crawford top of the order, if one decides to take their best hit­ter and put him in the #3 spot (which many man­agers employ), that leaves three options for the cleanup spot — Lee, Phelps, and Bautista. Against righthanded pitch­ing, Phelps has bat­ted hor­ri­ble, so it comes down to Lee and Bautista, and both are rea­son­ably even options.

But how did Tampa get here? Granted, an injury to Rocco Baldelli put a major wrench into the works, but it’s not like Baldelli was a cleanup hit­ter, or even a player that would put Bautista out of the lineup — when Baldelli returned, Huff would switch from left to third base and get Alex Gonzalez’s hor­rid bat out of the lineup.

The Devil Rays used four play­ers for the major­ity of the sea­son in the cleanup posi­tion in 2004 — Huff, Baldelli, Tino Mar­tinez, and Jose Cruz Jr. Mar­tinez and Cruz have since departed — Mar­tinez because he was too expen­sive (he had an $8 mil­lion option for 2005 that was bought out for $1 mil­lion) and Cruz was traded — also pos­si­bly because he was too expen­sive. Cruz signed a two year deal with Tampa in 2004 that was sched­uled to pay him $2.5 mil­lion in 2004 and $3.5 mil­lion in 2005, both years get­ting a 500k bonus if Cruz reached 600 plate appearences in 2004 (which he did). With Cruz’s num­bers steadily declin­ing (and his defense appar­ently erod­ing — the for­mer gold glover made 10 errors in Tampa last sea­son), the Rays dumped his salary off to Arizona.

Would the Rays have dumped off Cruz had they known Bautista would be gone? Per­haps. But as it stands right now, the Devil Rays have two healthy out­field­ers on their 25 man ros­ter — Craw­ford and Huff. If the Devil Rays don’t turn face and recon­sider Jonny Gomes and Joey Gath­right (both of whom were recently reas­signed to their minor league clubs, the Rays have to pick two, pos­si­bly three out­field options out of Dee Brown, Tom Good­win, and Chris Sin­gle­ton. Good­win lost most of his value many years ago — out­side of a “vet­eran influ­ence”, he brings min­i­mum value as a hit­ter, and doesn’t have the range he once had as an out­fielder. Sin­gle­ton plays a decent cen­ter field, but didn’t play in the majors in 2004, and has a career OBP of .311. Brown, a Roy­als prospect who never panned out, has value as a backup out­fielder — in fact, he’s the ideal player to invite to camp and carry on the ros­ter — very liitle risk involved. But is he an every day starter? Not likely.

Enter Alex Sanchez. Cut loose by Detroit, Sanchez walks into an ideal sit­u­a­tion in Tampa. A career .292 hit­ter, Sanchez imme­dately becomes the best option the Rays have in camp. Sanchez can play cen­ter field, putting Huff in right and Craw­ford in left until Baldelli returns. But a closer look at Sanchez shows an undici­plined hit­ter (Sanchez walked SEVEN times last year) and a mediocre run­ner who uses pure speed instead of instinct (a career 68% bases­tealer) and has dif­fi­culty field­ing his posi­tion (a career field­ing per­cent­age of .975, includ­ing 9 errors in 78 games last season).

Is Sanchez really that much of a bet­ter option than Joey Gath­right? Gath­right had a cup of cof­fee with the Rays last sea­son and looked over­matched at times, but so does Sanchez. Both seem to be sim­i­lar hit­ters, with Gath­right hav­ing more upside.

Or per­haps Jonny Gomes? Gomes needs per­haps another year of sea­son­ing in AAA and would have to play left, push­ing Craw­ford over to cen­ter, but Gomes has the power bat that Tampa seems to need. If Gomes could be counted on for 20 home runs and a .240 bat­ting aver­age, it wouldn’t be a hor­ri­ble sit­u­a­tion — it’d repli­cate the num­bers that Jose Cruz put up last season.

An even bet­ter idea? Matt Diaz. Diaz, who turned 27 two weeks ago, bat­ted .332 for Durham (AAA) last year, hit­ting 21 home runs and play­ing a good right field. Diaz also has good speed, steal­ing 15 bases in 19 attempts last sea­son. For a lit­tle more than league min­i­mum, Diaz can get a shot at a start­ing posi­tion and see if he can take his game to the next level while allow­ing Gath­right and Gomes a full year at AAA.

Oh, wait. Diaz was des­ig­nated for assign­ment in the begin­ning of Feb­ru­ary when the Rays signed Travis Lee and needed a 40 man ros­ter spot — the same day they traded Cruz away.

As easy as it might be to blame the fail­ures of a fran­chise on their lack of money and “inabil­ity to com­pete”, short­sight­ed­ness and poor ros­ter man­age­ment will make sure that the Devil Rays aren’t com­pet­i­tive with teams even within their same finan­cial situation.