into granite. Pujols crushed the ball the minute he got to the minor leagues. He continued to mash in spring training of 2001, impressing St. Louis brass so profoundly that the Cardinals tossed him into their opening day lineup, despite Pujols having played only three games above A-ball to that point. He hit .329 that year with 37 homers, a .403 on-base percentage, and a .610 slugging percentage, one of the greatest performances by any rookie in major league history.
Arango never forgot his initial scouting report, and neither did Pujols. Late in Pujols’s third season, he reached 39 home runs.Arango called Pujols with a message: he and his wife had a bottle of champagne chilling that they would open as soon as Pujols cracked number 40. The next day Pujols called back. Arango already knew what he was going to say.
“I got forty,” Albert Pujols told one of the few scouts who had believed in him, “and forty-one too. You can go ahead and call the Devil Rays now.”
To be fair, twenty-eight other teams missed on Pujols too. But the D-Rays’ whiff on the greatest player of the past decade epitomized the team’s early struggles in building a productive farm system. Tampa Bay would eventually become known as a scouting and player development powerhouse, one built partly on high draft picks, but also on a smarter approach than the competition. That reputation would take a while to bloom, though. Before that, the D-Rays were a team that struggled to build the talent pipeline it needed to win at the major league level. Those failures were the results of poor choices, cheapskate spending habits, and in the case of the thirteenth-round pick turned future Hall of Famer, plain old bad luck. That and failing to listen to baseball’s equivalent of a foot soldier—the overworked, underpaid, underappreciated area scout.
For almost as long as there’s been commerce in this country, there have been debates on how to regulate commerce. Grant too much unfettered power to the largest companies and you risk widespread malfeasance and potential monopolies. Throw up too many restrictions and those companies suffer, the economy suffers, and people lose their jobs. These debates cover every industry imaginable and show no signs of going away: Should the government overhaul the financial sector to prevent the kind of market manipulation that built a housing bubble and a near economic collapse and made the biggest banks too big to fail? Should regulators blow up coal mining companies given the heavy environmental damage and lapses in worker safety the industry has caused, or lay the hammer to oil companies like BP that callously drill deep into the ocean floorwithout any feasible plan if disaster strikes? Or does the threat of an energy crisis make it necessary to allow energy providers to run their businesses any way they choose? Evaluating the boundaries and definition of free markets will always rank among our society’s biggest challenges.
Major League Baseball has no such dilemmas. It’s not a free market and doesn’t pretend to be one. To keep fans’ interest, both teams must have a reasonable chance to win on any given day. To address this issue, rich teams—typically those in the largest and most profitable markets—share hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue every year with poorer teams. Still, by comparison, the amateur draft looks like full-blown kibbutz living. The team that finishes with the worst record in the major leagues gets rewarded with the top pick in the draft the following year. Meanwhile, success is penalized: win the World Series and you’ll wait until the end of the first round to make your first pick. Picture the top producer at an investment bank getting a $5 bonus and the worst producer getting promoted to vice president and you’ve nailed the MLB draft.
Few teams have reaped baseball’s equivalent of government cheese for longer than the Devil Rays. For ten straight years, the D-Rays lost enough
Arango never forgot his initial scouting report, and neither did Pujols. Late in Pujols’s third season, he reached 39 home runs.Arango called Pujols with a message: he and his wife had a bottle of champagne chilling that they would open as soon as Pujols cracked number 40. The next day Pujols called back. Arango already knew what he was going to say.
“I got forty,” Albert Pujols told one of the few scouts who had believed in him, “and forty-one too. You can go ahead and call the Devil Rays now.”
To be fair, twenty-eight other teams missed on Pujols too. But the D-Rays’ whiff on the greatest player of the past decade epitomized the team’s early struggles in building a productive farm system. Tampa Bay would eventually become known as a scouting and player development powerhouse, one built partly on high draft picks, but also on a smarter approach than the competition. That reputation would take a while to bloom, though. Before that, the D-Rays were a team that struggled to build the talent pipeline it needed to win at the major league level. Those failures were the results of poor choices, cheapskate spending habits, and in the case of the thirteenth-round pick turned future Hall of Famer, plain old bad luck. That and failing to listen to baseball’s equivalent of a foot soldier—the overworked, underpaid, underappreciated area scout.
For almost as long as there’s been commerce in this country, there have been debates on how to regulate commerce. Grant too much unfettered power to the largest companies and you risk widespread malfeasance and potential monopolies. Throw up too many restrictions and those companies suffer, the economy suffers, and people lose their jobs. These debates cover every industry imaginable and show no signs of going away: Should the government overhaul the financial sector to prevent the kind of market manipulation that built a housing bubble and a near economic collapse and made the biggest banks too big to fail? Should regulators blow up coal mining companies given the heavy environmental damage and lapses in worker safety the industry has caused, or lay the hammer to oil companies like BP that callously drill deep into the ocean floorwithout any feasible plan if disaster strikes? Or does the threat of an energy crisis make it necessary to allow energy providers to run their businesses any way they choose? Evaluating the boundaries and definition of free markets will always rank among our society’s biggest challenges.
Major League Baseball has no such dilemmas. It’s not a free market and doesn’t pretend to be one. To keep fans’ interest, both teams must have a reasonable chance to win on any given day. To address this issue, rich teams—typically those in the largest and most profitable markets—share hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue every year with poorer teams. Still, by comparison, the amateur draft looks like full-blown kibbutz living. The team that finishes with the worst record in the major leagues gets rewarded with the top pick in the draft the following year. Meanwhile, success is penalized: win the World Series and you’ll wait until the end of the first round to make your first pick. Picture the top producer at an investment bank getting a $5 bonus and the worst producer getting promoted to vice president and you’ve nailed the MLB draft.
Few teams have reaped baseball’s equivalent of government cheese for longer than the Devil Rays. For ten straight years, the D-Rays lost enough
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