ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Erik Neander just wanted to sit down for a minute. The Tampa Bay Rays’ president of baseball operations had already twice pushed back his previously scheduled meeting with the media before emerging from the tunnel by the dugout. It was roughly 90 minutes after he was scheduled to address the team’s late-night trade of Randy Arozarena. By that time, he’d also sent starter Zach Eflin to the Baltimore Orioles.
“I don’t know if I’ve had food today,” Neander said. “I had coffee. I had vitamins.”
The moves, four days ahead of Tuesday’s trade deadline, signaled something of an end to the Rays’ playoff hopes for 2024; if they’re not punting on the season, they’re at least running a draw on third-and-long.
“We are a worse team today than we were 24 hours ago,” Neander said before watching the Rays lose, 3-2, to the Reds in 10 innings . “That’s not something we can shy away from.”
The Rays said goodbye to, in Neander’s words, “a position player anchor and a pitching anchor.”
The moves are the type classically associated with the Rays — sending well-known players elsewhere and accumulating prospects. It’s also the type of move done with an eye on the future and the ledger — by moving those two players, the Rays shaved off roughly $30 million from next year’s payroll. In return, the Rays received five prospects and a player to be named. Of the five players acquired by Tampa Bay, none have to be added to the 40-man roster until 2026.
None of the five — right-hander Brody Hopkins and outfielder Aidan Smith from the Mariners, nor right-hander Jackson Baumeister, outfielders Matthew Etzel and Mac Horvath from the Orioles — are included in any of the leading publications’ top 100 prospects list.
The Rays, though, are well known for finding prospects they like more than perhaps the media does.
“We have a lot of confidence in our staff — our scouts, our analysts, our executives — how they all work together,” Neander said. “I think more than anything we’re going to go after the players that we believe have the best chance long-term to positively impact our major-league team. Sometimes those players are really well known, sometimes they’re not.”
Neander pointed to a move he made before the 2020 season when the team acquired Arozarena, then ranked the Cardinals’ No. 16 prospect by MLB.com, in a deal that saw the Rays send a top 100 prospect, lefty Matthew Liberatore along with another minor leaguer to St. Louis for a big-league bat in Jose Martinez.
“When we brought him in, it was ’the Jose Martinez’ trade,” Neander said of the Arozarena deal.
In December of 2022, the Rays signed Eflin to a three-year, $40-million deal, the largest free-agent deal in team history. Both Neander and manager Kevin Cash reflected on sitting in Eflin’s living room to recruit him as a free agent, persuading him to sign with the team he grew up rooting for. It was that emotional connection along with Eflin’s production with the Rays, 21-15 with a. 3.72 ERA in 50 starts, that made Friday’s decision particularly difficult, Neander noted.
Arozarena was perhaps the most impactful player in Rays history, bursting on the scene in the 2020 playoffs, winning the American League Championship Series Most Valuable Player Award and setting a record with 10 postseason homers that year. In 2023, he became the first player in big-league history to have three straight 20-homer, 20-stolen base seasons to start a career.
Arozarena is so associated with the Rays that he even attended Friday’s game against the Reds at Tropicana Field in the stands with his family.
Randy Arozarena, hours after being traded by the Rays to Seattle, is here in the stands with the fans, watching this game. Baseball is the best. pic.twitter.com/4ozUPsNJ3A
— Ryan Bass (@Ry_Bass) July 26, 2024
The sentiment of both the Rays’ executives and fanbase were trumped by simple probability. Coming off of a 99-win season in 2023, the team entered Friday a game over .500 at 52-51, but behind three teams in their division, 9 1/2-games behind Eflin’s new team, the Orioles, and three games behind the third-place Red Sox. They were just four games out of the third wild card spot and just a half-game behind Arozarena’s new team, the Mariners.
But in the end, the Rays would have to go 37-22 over the final 59 games to reach 89 wins, the total that the Blue Jays reached to make the playoffs as the third wild card. Those odds seemed too daunting to pass up on a chance to to move some big salaries. Eflin was going into the final year of his franchise record free-agent deal while Arozarena was set to become more expensive in the third of his four arbitration years.
“We compete against a lot of really good teams and I feel like our path to winning oftentimes comes with transactions that are, in the short term, very painful, and long-term, very gratifying,” Neander said. “You know that the gratification is never instant. Shoot, the recent ones where we’ve had instant gratification, the delayed gratification is usually better but they’re tougher up front.”
(Top photo of Randy Arozarena: Vaughn Ridley / Getty Images)
