Is He Baseball's Most Brilliant Owner, or a Failure?

New York Times

06-08-2025

The Tampa Bay Devil Rays joined the American League as an expansion team in 1998 and immediately became an object of ridicule. Playing in a dingy, depressing stadium in six-color uniforms that could have been pajamas, they finished in last place every season but one for a decade — and next-to-last in the other one. By 2008, though, a former options trader named Stuart Sternberg owned the franchise and had hired a cohort of baseball novices to run it. Sternberg tweaked the colors and shortened the nickname to the Rays. And to the surprise of just about everyone, when his Rays arrived at Yankee Stadium for a doubleheader that September, they led their division.
Mike Mussina, a right-handed pitcher who was in the final weeks of a Hall of Fame career, started the first game for the Yankees. Nearly all right-handers are more effective against right-handed hitters, so teams usually prefer to send lefties up to bat against them. But Mussina, who would win 20 games that season, was an anomaly: Righties hit significantly better against him than lefties did. 'Everyone knew it about Mussina — they had the numbers — but nobody had the nerve to do anything different,' Sternberg told me. 'We said: 'Look, this is stupid. We shouldn't be putting lefties up against this guy. He's carving them up.''
The lineup that the Rays' manager, Joe Maddon, sent out to face Mussina included only one left-hander and two switch-hitters. Maddon asked the switch-hitters to bat right-handed. 'I haven't hit right-handed against a righty since I was a kid,' one of them, Ben Zobrist, remembers thinking. 'But my manager thinks it will work, so let's go with it.'
When Zobrist, an infielder and outfielder who started in the minors with the Houston Astros, arrived at Tampa Bay, he found a low-budget team willing to consider almost anything that might create a competitive edge. It was as if the Rays had taken Billy Beane's 'moneyball' — a concept introduced to baseball fans through Michael Lewis's 2003 book of that name — and stretched it as far as it would go. 'They were looking for different ways to be better so they could compete against the Yankees and the Red Sox,' Zobrist says. 'That was the approach of the whole organization. 'So what if our names aren't as big as the Yankee names? Why can't we figure out something that hasn't been figured out yet?'' In the fifth inning of that game, Zobrist doubled. Then he scored on a single to put the Rays ahead, 5-0. They won that game, and eventually the division. A month later they advanced to their first World Series.
A remarkable run followed. Since April 2008, only two teams, the Yankees and the Dodgers, have won more games. At one point, this poorly supported, low-revenue franchise managed to win 860 games over the course of a decade — that is, it averaged 86 wins a season while playing in the same division as the Yankees, Red Sox and Blue Jays. 'What they do down there, I think, is very special,' says Rocco Baldelli, the Minnesota Twins' manager, who played and coached for the Rays. 'Not just in baseball, but in the world of sports and even business.'
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