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Patience A Virtue When It Comes To Draft Selections

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By CARTER GADDIS

The Tampa Tribune

Published: June 2, 2008

ST. PETERSBURG - The Rays will make their choice at the top of baseball's amateur draft on Thursday, and the question soon will follow.

How soon can he get to the majors?

There are as many answers to that question as there are players.

"It's always based on the individual," Rays director of minor league operations Mitch Lukevics said. "However, we'll always err on the side of caution when it comes to moving a player."

That's true for the Rays even if the player is considered a can't-miss prospect like last year's No. 1 overall draft pick, left-handed pitcher David Price, or Tampa Bay's first-round pick in 2006, third baseman Evan Longoria.

It's Lukevics' job to monitor the daily development of Rays farmhands and recommend promotions, demotions and other minor-league moves to executive vice president Andrew Friedman.

Pitchers in the majors this season with five or more starts spent an average of 3.9 years and pitched an average of 410 innings in the minors. Major-league position players with 25 or more games played this season averaged 4.3 years and 1,675 plate appearances in the minors.

While the Rays organization does not adhere to hard-and-fast numerical rules of development - no base level of innings pitched or plate appearances to be made - there are certain qualities that put some players on a faster track than others.

Lukevics readily acknowledges that much of the process is subjective. As a former White Sox minor-league pitcher himself, Lukevics (a second-round pick out of Penn State in 1975) is intimately familiar with the perils of impatience on the part of players and the fans who can't wait to see them in the big leagues.

Yet, as the Rays' organizational focus has shifted in recent years to a more deliberate developmental process, caution and common sense have become the guiding principals.

"It's easy to move a player up. Is it really the right thing to do?" Lukevics said. "And then, if it's not, and you have to move him back down, picking up the pieces is a real hard thing. To regroup and get the player back to where he once was and get him back on the journey, because it is a bump in the road."

During his time in the player-development department for the Angels, Rays manager Joe Maddon was big on that nebulous quality known as "makeup," which he broadly defines as a player's ability to handle life as a professional baseball player.

"You have to see a consistency in his performance," Maddon said, "but beyond that, you have to understand or know the kid well enough to know he's ready mentally to handle the next level."

Rays center fielder B.J. Upton, who was drafted No. 2 overall in 2002 and made his major-league debut in 2004, admits now that he wasn't ready, at age 19, for the game at this level.

"You've got to mature," said Upton, who spent all of 2005 and most of '06 with Triple-A Durham before cracking Tampa Bay's lineup for good on Aug. 1, 2006. "Talent's a big part of it, but knowing the game and being aware of what's around you and the things that you have to do to stay on the field are a lot different."

Rays pitcher James Shields, a 16th-round pick in 2000, grew so frustrated with his pace of development during his six-year minor-league career that he considered leaving the organization as recently as 2005. In retrospect, he's glad he went through it before reaching the majors in 2006.

"I'm a true believer that you have to fail to succeed," Shields said. "If you're always succeeding, you're eventually going to fail, and you're not going know how to deal with it. I think that helped me out a lot, as far as that goes. I failed tremendously. I failed three or four times. I learned from my failures."

Andy Sonnanstine, a 13th-round pick in 2004, made stops at every level before breaking in last season.

"It just kind of broadened myself as a person, socially and professionally," Sonnanstine said. "Taking a little bit from each pitching coach that I had helped me out. I knew I had to put my time in. I wasn't a touted prospect or anything like that. I think it helped me out tremendously."

Longoria, an All-American for Long Beach State, already was a polished player when he became a professional. He spent only one full season in the minors.

"I felt like every day in the minors I was trying to learn something new," Longoria said. "Whether it be something subtle about a pitcher or about my swing, you can pick up on a lot of things in a short amount of time. Especially in this game. There's so much to learn."

Reporter Carter Gaddis can be reached at (813) 259-8291 or igaddis@tampatrib.com.

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