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Rays Seem To Get Benefit Of Doubt

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By MARC LANCASTER | The Tampa Tribune

Published: March 28, 2009

PORT CHARLOTTE - Not sure if you heard, but the Rays sent David Price to the minors a few days ago.

It was one of those spring training starbursts guaranteed to generate talk-show and message-board buzz, with plenty of folks castigating the Rays for their decision not to break camp with a man presumed to be one of their five best starting pitchers in the big-league rotation.

That reaction was reminiscent of the outcry that emerged a year ago when the Rays made the equally predictable decision to have Evan Longoria open the year in Durham, but it wasn't quite identical.

This time, if you looked and listened a bit, there were dissenting voices. People who thought it might not be a bad idea to play it safer than might be absolutely necessary with a potential franchise cornerstone and bought into the front office's explanation about the need to conserve Price's 2009 innings.

And it wasn't just the anonymous masses offering up their opinions behind cryptic usernames on the Web.

Thanks to the high national profile Price attained with his work as a reliever in the playoffs last year, his demotion was even significant enough to command a slot on ESPN's "Pardon the Interruption" show the following afternoon. Co-hosts Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser tend to disagree with one another more often than not - which of course is the foundation of the show - but both came down on the same side when discussing whether the Rays made the right move by sending Price down.

"I believe it's very defendable," said Wilbon.

"I have no problem with it whatsoever," said Kornheiser.

To back up his argument, Wilbon cited the disintegration of Mark Prior's career in the wake of the 2342/3 regular-season and playoff innings he logged at age 22 in his first full season with the Cubs.

As cautionary tales go, that's a whopper. But there appears to be something else at work here.

Shows like "PTI" and sports-talk radio in general thrive on criticism. Any producer will tell you the calls from fans flow a lot more freely when the local team is winless than when it is undefeated. For even an undercurrent of pro-management opinions to have emerged in that environment is an intriguing development.

Could it be that the Rays' decision-makers have finally earned the benefit of the doubt after seemingly everything they touched the past couple of years ended up working in their favor?

Manager Joe Maddon doesn't spend a whole lot of energy worrying about how the Rays' baseball decisions will play for the masses, but he thought there might be something to that.

"I think maybe among the fan base or whomever, there's a little more credibility based on recent events," Maddon said. "We did a lot of things that people didn't like that actually worked out pretty well."

Not that the Rays would have made a different decision even if public opinion was running 100 percent the other way, he emphasized, "but I think people view us differently now in regard to the decision-making process."

If that is indeed the case, it's quite a turnaround. Who had any confidence that the Devil Rays would consistently make the right move during most of their first decade of existence? It was a pretty short list, if it existed at all outside Tropicana Field.

Should the fifth spot in the Rays' rotation prove a black hole during the first month or two of the season, the front office will feel plenty of heat. And of course all of the goodwill that has been accumulated would evaporate in a hurry if Price is summoned sometime in May and pitches lights-out the rest of the season but Tampa Bay falls just short of the playoffs.

For now, though, the Rays seem to have earned, from at least a segment of the population, the rarest of allowances in modern sports: trust.

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