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Sternberg Savors New Passion For Rays

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By JOE HENDERSON | The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 11, 2008

ST. PETERSBURG - You can make all the money anyone could imagine and have a life most anyone could envy. Stu Sternberg has those things.

But this is something special even by those standards. Having the Rays in their first American League Championship Series game against Boston is fulfillment of a vision Sternberg had when he took control of the team three years ago.

"The thing that gets me now is that we really had a belief of what baseball could bring to a region, but the populace didn't understand it – they hadn't been exposed to what baseball could mean," he said. "They're getting it right now."

It goes beyond a packed Trop for the Rays owner. This was about passion, about an area that had never come face-to-face with this kind of thing before. Not for baseball. It was always someone else's team playing in these things, but in just three years since taking ownership Sternberg has overseen a remarkable renaissance.

He sees the Rays hats that never used to be worn. The Rays shirts on every corner. The Rayhawk hairdos. The kids excited about baseball. The chatter on the radio shows.

He always thought it would happen, although maybe not this soon. But even when the Rays lost 197 games in his first two years as owner, the vision of what could be was always there. There would be excited fans. There would be playoff baseball.

"We won 100 games this year (counting playoffs) and I didn't think we could win 100 games (at the start of the year) – I'll say that," he said.

"But if you had asked me before the year if we could win 90 games, I would have said there was a reasonable chance of that. I'm not a dope; it was less than flipping a coin. But opposed to the year before, when there was no chance, the chances were reasonable that we could get to 90 wins."

Follow The Process

Most everyone believed the Rays would be improved this year, but few knew it would be by this much. As the season unfolded, though, Sternberg didn't allow his mind to be captivated by what might be to come. That's funny on the surface; Sternberg is very much the baseball romanticist.

He is also a businessman though, with a strong belief in process. You don't rush a process in his world. It plays out to the end, naturally, and hopefully with the desired result. But never rush it.

The process, in this case, was to allow personnel chief Andrew Friedman to acquire the pieces and then to allow Joe Maddon to manage them. Sounds simple enough, but we have seen plenty of owners over the years who couldn't resist the urge to meddle.

Sternberg monitors but mostly leaves the operation up to the people he put in charge.

With the success this season, you hear stuff now about other organizations copying the Rays' formula. Building a World Series contender on a $43 million payroll will spawn some imitators, or at least some envy.

Sternberg doesn't see it that way though.

"There's nothing in particular we've done that needs to be copied or can be copied. There's nothing necessarily unique. What we tried to do was take an amalgamation of what a number of franchises have done," he said.

"The key was really the patience we had and that the fan base had with us. It might have come a year or two before we thought it would, but we had a reasonable chance this year at success."

Built To Last

Well, a funny thing about patience. It sounds good on the back end but not always so hot while you're going through it. Sternberg took plenty of criticism during those first two years. A lot of the requisite words were used to describe an owner of a losing team, but mostly he was considered cheap by many.

Now that the process has played out, he's a visionary who has built a product that can endure. That's important. There is nothing certain in life and baseball, but the Rays will be in the conversation for the American League East for the next few years and that may be the most satisfying thing of all about this season.

He has built a baseball team. He has begun to turn this into a baseball town.

"This is a huge jump start. Everything else notwithstanding -- who knows what our record will be next year; we'll talk about that next year -– but we've got the nucleus," he said. "Practically every player in that clubhouse, we have the ability to bring them back next year.

"I'm pretty satisfied. There's more to be done, but I'm pretty satisfied."

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