Professor Maddon's class is again in session
NEW YORK – Joe Maddon, with his shock of white hair and horn-rimmed glasses, looks far more like a professor than a manager. He felt like one Wednesday night, too.
Because the clinic put on by his Tampa Bay Rays against the New York Yankees – a full-throttle, we-don't-give-a-damn-about-those-rings seminar of hitting, running and pitching in a 10-6 victory at Yankee Stadium – reminded the defending champions that in case they hadn't seen the American League East standings, the best team in baseball resides south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
The Rays are no longer a compendium of talent that didn't know any better en route to the World Series in 2008. They are a machine, well-oiled and fast-moving, a team whose gears grind to a halt for no one – not even in the Bronx, long their pox.
"I just want us to teach ourselves a lesson," Maddon said, "and that is that we can play well in this ballpark."
This ballpark. Any ballpark, really. The Rays moved to 29-11, a 117-win pace, and are now 16-4 on the road. No team is better away from home. No team, in fact, is that good at home. The only solution, it would seem, is for an enterprising policeman to charge the Rays with breaking and entering, because they've made a habit of coming into teams' houses and stealing their dignity.
Gone was the Yankees' after needing four ninth-inning runs to make the score respectable. Tampa Bay's three-hour, 45-minute evisceration started with a Jason Bartlett(notes) home run, ended with a Joaquin Benoit(notes) strikeout and included everything in between, from clutch hits to double steals to punchouts galore. The Rays can do everything, and they did.
"It's more of the liberal arts form of playing baseball," Maddon said. "It's not just about power or just about speed. You really want to be able to do all those different things. I want us to be able to play every component of the game well. That's what we preach. That's what we talk about. Athletically, we're able to do that. And why not?"
Might as well steal six bases and smash five extra-base hits if capable. The Rays stuff box scores full of agate type, and the Yankees cringed at three-hit games from Tampa Bay’s superstar (Evan Longoria(notes)) and rookie backup catcher (John Jaso(notes)). Yankees starter A.J. Burnett(notes), normally a Rays killer, coughed up six runs. And very quickly the crowd of 43,283 started to understand the hullabaloo that surrounds Tampa Bay. Maddon did his best to shrug off the Rays' dominance: "That's just how we play."
It really is that simple. No team can match the Rays' five-man rotation, the youngest of whom, 24-year-old Wade Davis(notes), traipsed into Yankee Stadium with 12 major league starts and struck out six of the first dozen hitters. Only the Yankees have outscored the Rays, and their group of walking wounded meant by the ninth inning they fielded a popgun outfield of Randy Winn(notes), Brett Gardner(notes) and Ramiro Pena(notes). Tampa Bay's bullpen, missing ace reliever J.P. Howell(notes) for the season, entered Wednesday's game sporting a 2.98 ERA nonetheless.
The Rays are the perfect team in the imperfect city. Crappy stadium or not, they deserve more than an average attendance of 22,281 through 20 home games. Perhaps they play so well on the road because they realize other fans appreciate the sort of team that saunters into Yankee Stadium fearless.
"We expect to win here," Rays outfielder B.J. Upton(notes) said. "You have to feel like you're the best team. You can't feel like you're the underdog, or you're beat. We are the best team, and we're only going to get better."
Seriously. At Triple-A Durham, the Rays are parking two of the top prospects in baseball, right-handed starter Jeremy Hellickson(notes) and center fielder Desmond Jennings(notes). If an injury hits, they boast one of baseball's best farm systems, from which they can pluck a player or dangle him as trade bait. Should the bullpen need reinforcements, they can pick from a quartet of Triple-A relievers with sub-2.00 ERAs, R.J. Swindle(notes) or Mike Ekstrom(notes) or Dale Thayer(notes) or Joe Bateman, who, incidentally, attended Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.
Maddon's liberal-arts analogy works on so many levels. He's been in Tampa Bay for five years now, and though his lessons are far from complete, he has impressed upon the Rays the most important: They don't have to be anything, they have to be everything. They can hit for power. They can steal bases. They can pitch deep into games. They can field cleanly. Individually, they're wonderful components. Collectively, they're a championship.
And so Maddon encourages each Ray to pick his own path, to educate himself in the fashion he was educated at Lafayette College.
"I probably would've put it in a simpler way than that," Upton said. "But that sounds about right."
Oh, it was right. Maddon sat in his office after the victory across from his boss and the architect of the game's best 25-man roster, Rays general manager Andrew Friedman, and he said: "This felt different." The Rays had won 28 other games this season, and yet none registered with such satisfaction.
The professor had witnessed a great lesson, and he knew it.
