by Lou Piniella
But my last hire turned out to be one of the most important hires in the history of the Tampa Bay franchise: Don Zimmer. Zim was a longtime Saint Pete resident whom I’d known and respected from when he was briefly a coach with the Yankees under Billy Martin in 1983, and whom I’d periodically run into at the dog track or Tampa Bay Downs when I was home. Like me, he’d left the Yankees after a falling-out with Mr. Steinbrenner, after eight years and four rings as Joe Torre’s right-hand man, and I just felt he was a great person and a great baseball mind to have around. I said to Vince, “This is a guy who’s immensely popular here, who’s got an encyclopedic baseball mind. The players all love him and the coaches can all learn from him. He’ll be a great goodwill ambassador for the team, as well as a tremendous help to me. We need to hire him.” Vince didn’t hesitate. He gave Zim a contract for $100,000 along with the title “special adviser,” and I had myself an extra coach and a valuable asset. Like the man who came to dinner, Zim never left, working in the same all-purpose capacity as one of the faces of the Rays’ franchise until the day he died in 2014.
As to Vince’s commitment to winning, he explained that the team’s payroll my first year would be in the low $20 million range, including some deferred money, but he promised to increase it in $10 million increments until it reached $50 million in the last year of my contract. Even though the Yankees and the Red Sox in the AL East had respective payrolls of $132 million and $70 million in 2003 (and my “second son” Alex over there in Texas was making more than my entire team), I believed that with the gradual $10 million yearly increases, I could still compete with them. That first year I even deferred $1.1 million of my salary to help out on the payroll, which was still only $19.6 million. Still, being home and taking care of my family was a good situation for me, and I truly thought I could do the same thing in Tampa Bay that I did in Seattle. Before a game against the Yankees, at Yankee Stadium in April, after we’d made 16 errors in our first 11 games, I told my players, “It’s easy to say, ‘We’re a team with a $15 million payroll playing a team with a $180 million payroll, so how are we gonna beat them?’ If that’s how you feel, or what you believe, then don’t play. If you help them beat you, you get what you deserve. You have to make them beat you!”
That was before I knew the payroll disparity in the American League East would never get better for us. For unbeknownst to me, there were problems within the Devil Rays’ ownership. Though Naimoli was the majority owner and managing general partner, the five other primary partners, and specifically the Outback Steakhouse partners, Bob Basham and Chris Sullivan, had grown disenchanted with the way Vince was running the team. Of particular dismay to them were the onerous long-term contracts given out to the veteran sluggers Greg Vaughn, Vinny Castilla, and Jose Canseco, who all turned out to be busts. An in-house insurrection resulted in the Outback partners telling Vince they were withdrawing their financial support to increase payroll. I remember early on, Chris Sullivan telling me flatly, “You never should have come here.”
So I had sufficient warning, but it was too late. The more I realized what a mistake I had made, at least I was home when my dad, Lou Sr., passed away on February 27, in Saint Joseph’s Hospital in Tampa. He was eighty-six and his heart just gave out.
In the weeks leading up to my first spring training at home, I had made a study of the Devil Rays’ roster and had seen a lot of promise. By virtue of finishing last in their first five years of existence, the Devil Rays, under the guidance of GM Chuck LaMar, had done well with their high draft picks. Their entire prospective outfield for 2003, two first-round picks, Josh Hamilton and Rocco Baldelli, and a second-round pick, Carl Crawford, were all ready to blossom, while Aubrey Huff, a fifth-round pick in ’98, had a breakthrough 23-homer season in 2002. Equally promising was the catcher Toby Hall, a ninth-round pick in 1997 who had an excellent throwing arm and hit .258 with 42 RBI in just 85 games in ’02. In addition, LaMar had signed as free agents Travis Lee, a proven Gold Glove first baseman, and Marlon Anderson, an excellent second baseman who’d hit .293 with 11 homers for the Phillies two years earlier. So starting out, my everyday lineup looked more than decent, and in mid-May it became even better when LaMar signed Julio Lugo, a plus defensive shortstop who hit 15 home runs that first season for me.
What we didn’t have was pitching—and that became a nagging, futile situation my entire three years there.
That first spring we had a record seventy-two players in camp, half of them pitchers. It was a nightmare, way too many to fully evaluate everybody, but I think Chuck wanted me to get a look at as many players in the organization as possible. In all my spring trainings, I always made an effort to give everyone an opportunity to make the team, which is why I scheduled a lot of B games. But this really pushed the envelope. Not included in that original seventy-two was Wayne Gomes, a thirty-year-old right-handed pitcher who’d been released by three different clubs in the previous two years. Every day I came to the complex, Gomes approached me in the parking lot, asking for a tryout. I’m not sure if he was sleeping in his car or what, but every morning, there he was. Finally, I got tired of this guy bothering me and started feeling sorry for him, so I told Chuck to just give him a damn tryout. It was Chuck’s feeling that, in our situation, anyone who’d had any success in the majors was worth giving a look. By this time, Gomes had become a bit of a human-interest curiosity story for the writers and I told them, “I just hope this doesn’t turn into Campground for America.” Fortunately, we didn’t have any more vagabond walk-ons descend on us, and Gomes actually pitched pretty well at first, but then hurt his arm so we had to let him go.
The one player I was most eager to see that spring was Hamilton, the 6′4″, 240-pound left-handed slugger whom the Rays had made the first overall pick in the 1999 draft. Even though he had played only in A ball in 2002 and had been plagued by injuries throughout his four years in the minors, everyone told me he had supreme talent and could definitely be my right fielder in 2003. For the first couple of weeks of camp, I could see what they meant. He was playing well, working hard, and everything was very good—a five-tool talent. At one point I told Hamilton, Crawford, and Baldelli, “I don’t want you to worry about trying to impress. I recognize your talent. You’re all on my team.”
Toward the middle of spring, however, Hamilton started coming in late to camp, which led me to have a couple of talks with him. One day, he didn’t show up at all. Then, he was missing for three or four days, and we finally found him in a Bradenton crack house. We had no choice but to suspend him for the year. He never played a game for the Devil Rays.
In the years I played, drugs were really not that prevalent—or at least around my teams. Hamilton was a guy who would stand out on a field with a hundred other players on it. It never dawned on me that he could have a problem. This really caught me by surprise, and I had no idea how to deal with it. It was a failure on my part not to learn more about addiction. My attitude was, let the people who know about this stuff handle it. All I knew was that it really put a dent in our plans. Those three kids were the lure for me taking the Tampa Bay job. I envisioned building a competitive team around them. It wasn’t until 2008 with the Texas Rangers, after numerous drug-related setbacks and suspensions, that Hamilton finally began to fulfill his vast potential, leading the American League with 130 RBI. Two years later he was the American League MVP.
With Hamilton gone, I had to revamp my projected lineup, moving Ben Grieve to right field and replacing him as my designated hitter with Al Martin, whom we’d signed after he’d been twice previously released that spring. At $5.5 million, Grieve was our highest-paid player—seventeen players on my opening-day roster were making the major-league minimum $300,000—and with five fairly productive seasons in the big leagues, I looked to him as one of the team’s leaders. That’s probably why I got so upset with him on June 26 when he took a very questionable called third strike on a pitch from the Yankees’ Mariano Rivera for the final out in a 4–3 loss, and chose to
walk away without saying anything to the home plate umpire. From my vantage point in the dugout, the pitch was clearly high, and the replay confirmed as much. When Grieve got back to the dugout, I asked him, “Was that ball high?” and he said he thought so.
“So why didn’t you say something?” I demanded, to which he replied, “It didn’t matter.”
That was when I really lost it in front of the whole team.
I said, “Doesn’t matter? What the hell do you mean it doesn’t matter? It matters to me! And it matters to everybody else! You’re the highest-paid player on this team. These kids take their lead from you!”
Afterward, I told the writers, “Rivera’s a tough pitcher. I understand that, and I’m not expecting anything. But I am expecting if you think the ball is high to tell the umpire it’s high instead of walking off to the damn dugout. Getting a response like that after we busted our damn asses out there for nine innings trying to win a baseball game, it damn well does matter. It matters to me and matters to a lot of damn people in that clubhouse.”
I then added, “And when it matters to everybody, we’ll start winning more damn baseball games here.”
A big part of my being upset was that we’d lost 18 of our last 20 games to fall to 25–52—already 22 games behind in late June. Grieve was so shaken by my outburst he called the St. Petersburg Times’ baseball beat writer, Marc Topkin, later that night, insisting he never said “it didn’t matter.” His dad, Tom, who was an outfielder with the Rangers in the ’70s and was now one of their broadcasters, called me to express his anger for embarrassing his son. He really got on me, but he was merely defending his son. I later explained to him the circumstances and my reasoning, and I think he understood.
Barely three months into the 2003 season, the reality hit home that this was a far more impossible situation in Tampa Bay than it had been in Seattle ten years earlier. Our pitching simply couldn’t compete. Because we’d started executing in the field, we were in a lot of games, but we had no real stoppers in our rotation. At the end of June we had not been able to win more than two games in a row, which prompted me to issue a challenge to my players: “The first time we put together a three-game winning streak, I’ll dye my hair.” Not long after, we won three in a row, July 3–5, and I fulfilled my promise. The players brought in a hairstylist and they picked the color—a kind of ash blond. The stylist arrived at the clubhouse at nine o’clock Sunday morning, whereupon he spent about forty-five minutes dyeing streaks into my hair. Anita had begged me not to make it too drastic, but it really was quite dramatic, and when I looked in the mirror afterward, I thought, What the hell did I do here? The point was, I wanted to do something to loosen things up, to give the players a fun thing to shoot for.
The three-game winning streak was short lived. Beginning that Sunday, we lost six of our next eight games. From August 20 to the end of the season we went 12–26, finishing with 99 losses. The pitching staff led the majors with 639 walks and 95 hit batters, and had a collective ERA of 4.93.
I understood this was a young team that had never experienced anything remotely close to winning, and, to that end, I admit I drove them hard. I was especially hard on Toby Hall, my catcher, but for a reason: The catcher is the most important player on the field. Nothing happens in a baseball game until the catcher puts down his fingers. I had a lot of respect for Bill Parcells and how he went about things, and he was just as hard on his quarterbacks as I was on my catchers. They’re the guys who run the game. Toby had a very young staff to work with, and as the year went on, he got better and better. But in the end, our pitching betrayed the effort to change the losing culture in Tampa Bay.
“We had a bunch of young guys, many of whom were complacent about just being in the big leagues,” said Hall. “It just seemed like every other day, compared to ours, the opposing pitcher was a future Hall of Famer. It was very frustrating, and Lou was constantly on me to work to make our pitchers better. It finally all came to a head in a game in August against the Indians in Cleveland. We had just gone ahead, four to three, in the top of the eleventh inning, and now the Indians had a runner on third with one out and Casey Blake batting in the bottom of the inning. Our closer, Lance Carter, was pitching, and I called for a fastball low and away to guard against the sac fly. But Lance’s fastball came in high and Blake drove it into right field for a sac fly that tied the game. After the game—which we wound up winning—Lou called me into his office and aired me out. ‘How the hell could you call a damn high fastball in that situation?’ he screamed. I looked at him, feeling my blood boiling, and hollered back at him, ‘Do you think I have a damn PlayStation joystick back there to control the pitches to go anywhere I want? Look at the damn video and see where I set up!’
“I stormed out of his office. Lou never yelled at the pitchers, and I was tired of taking the bullet for them. The next day, John McLaren came up to my locker and told me Lou wanted to see me in his office. ‘Uh-oh,’ I said to myself. ‘I’m traded.’ But when I walked in, Lou was sitting there behind his desk with a smile on his face. ‘Son,’ he said, ‘close the door. I just wanted you to know I looked at the video and you were set up right.’ Then he got up from his chair, walked around the desk, and gave me a big hug. ‘I love you, Toby,’ he said. ‘I just want to make you a better player.’ From that day on, we never had another problem. And he absolutely did make me a better player.”
I told Toby many times that if the pitcher was not locating, it wasn’t his fault. His other job was to control the running game, and he did that extremely well. Toby had a cannon for a throwing arm. I really didn’t call many pitches as a manager, only doing so if my catcher looked over to me. That was another thing I learned from Billy Martin. Billy didn’t like opposing hitters teeing off on his pitchers’ fastballs. Whenever that did happen he’d yell over to our pitching coach, Art Fowler, “What was that?” and Fowler would holler back, “A slider!”
Year two in Tampa was only slightly better than year one. Over the winter we acquired Tino Martinez in a trade with the Cardinals to replace Lee (who’d left as a free agent) at first base. We also signed John Halama, my former number four starter with the Mariners, to give us some veteran pitching depth. But while the payroll did increase $10 million, to $29.5 million, I had expected the first-year payroll to be in the midtwenties, as Naimoli had indicated. Our fate was pretty much decided when we lost 19 out of 22 games from April 25 to May 19. We were on pace for a 117-loss season, and after a Tuesday-night game in Texas in early May, Bill Parcells, who was then coaching the Cowboys, visited me in the clubhouse.
“This is really different for me,” I told him. “Everywhere I’ve ever been, I’ve won.”
“If you can’t win here, you’ve got to get out of this thing, you know?” Bill said.
I knew. A week later, it was announced that Stuart Sternberg, a Wall Street investor and partner in Goldman Sachs, had purchased 48 percent of the Devil Rays from the Outback boys and the rest of the limited partners. The announcement further said that Naimoli would remain in charge of the team until sometime in 2005. I asked Vince what this was going to mean in terms of the payroll and he couldn’t give me an answer, other than for 2005, his hands were tied.
It wasn’t what I wanted to hear. But then at least things began to turn around on the field. We started June 18–32, and finished it 38–37, thanks in no small part to a franchise-best 12-game winning streak. In the middle of that streak, on June 16, I won my 1,410th game to tie the Tampa native and Hall of Fame manager Al Lopez. Even though I was never one to pay much attention to milestones or records, tying and passing Al on the all-time wins list was something that meant a lot to me. So, too, had breaking Al’s American League record of 111 wins with the 1954 Indians, when we won 116 in Seattle in 2001. Al was a true gentleman and an inspiration to all the kids like myself growing up in Tampa in the ’50s and ’60s. It was because of him I rooted for the Indians when I was a kid. Many years later, I’d play golf with him—“El Senor”—a
t the Tampa Terrace Country Club, and we were both proud of our Tampa heritage.
As encouraging as our play in June was, I knew we didn’t have the kind of pitching to sustain it. At the trading deadline, we sent our number one starter, Victor Zambrano, to the Mets for their top pitching prospect, the Long Island–bred lefty Scott Kazmir. It turned out to be one of Chuck LaMar’s best deals, although I wasn’t fully the beneficiary of it. In his first full season for me in 2005, Kazmir was 10–9 with a 3.77 ERA, but he was still learning and led the league in walks. Two years later, he led the AL in strikeouts and seemed on his way to stardom until he hurt his arm. The reason we traded Zambrano was because we’d gone 8–15 from July 4 to July 30 and we knew we weren’t going to be contending. It was an opportunity to get a prize pitching prospect for the future.
Although a 12-game losing streak from August 27 to September 10 sealed a seventh-straight losing season for the Devil Rays, there was a silver lining. The team was able to finish out of the AL East cellar for the first time, and it also won 70 games for the first time in franchise history. When we beat the Tigers, 7–4, on the last day of the season for our 70th win, I decided to throw a little impromptu party and ordered a few bottles of champagne for the players. It was a fun finale for everyone—with the notable exception of my old-school senior adviser. When Zimmer came out of the coaches’ room and saw all the champagne bottles, he was aghast.