PORT CHARLOTTE, Fla. -- Three thousand fans, many of them wearing Rays T-shirts or caps or jerseys, took advantage of the open house at the team's new facility here Monday morning. There was an energy in the building.
And all the players really did was take batting practice, and then sit in a horseshoe around manager
Joe Maddon and the coaching staff and listen to a 20-minute lecture. The crowd stood there, murmuring, and soaked it all in. All things considered, it was a very slow day.
But
Carl Crawford took it all very seriously, as he tends to do. His hitting group led off Monday; he and
Carlos Pena hit for eight minutes. Crawford wanted more, wanted his full complement of 15 minutes. Really, it was no big deal, because it's still February and Maddon has made it clear to his position players that he doesn't want them going too hard too fast after playing deep into October last fall.
Crawford was having none of that, however. As the next hitting group of
Evan Longoria and
Dioner Navarro and others started, Crawford stuck around, intent on getting some more swings. On pitch after pitch, the Rays' lefty-hitting left fielder carved line drives to left-center and to left. Finally, after Crawford was satisfied that he had had enough swings, he picked up his glove and jogged to the outfield.
He is a grinder in the best sense of the word, someone who works and pushes himself constantly, and after the Rays played in the World Series Crawford went home to Houston believing he could have done a whole lot more. Last season, he
had batted .273, his lowest batting average since 2002, with a .319 on-base percentage.
"I feel like I underachieved a lot," Crawford said. "I felt bad after the season I had, and I was glad I was able to bounce back in the playoffs and do even better."
In past offseasons, Crawford has worked out at Athletes' Performance Institute. But the surface API uses is artificial, and Crawford made a point this winter to do his running on grass, believing he could save some wear and tear on his body. Crawford stole 25 bases in 32 attempts, but a lot of the year, he was banged up, sore. And as he worked into leads off first base, he would be flat-footed.
"I'm going to get back to being on my toes this year," he said.
So at age 27, Crawford could be poised for a big season. The Rays use various metrics to evaluate their players, and what those numbers showed was that Crawford could've easily hit higher than the average he finished with, given the percentage of line drives he hit, given the number of times he seemingly hit into bad luck. Crawford seems to be using his low batting average to push himself, and as far as he is concerned he is what that number says he is. He's not using it as an excuse. But he did feel that maybe he didn't have a lot of offensive karma working for him.
"It's the weirdest thing I've seen," Crawford said. "I think teams just started to play me in certain spots, like they knew where I was going to hit the ball. The scouting reports are so good, and they seem to change from week to week. Sometimes you'd see the left fielder would be way up, and the center field and the right fielder were shaded over [toward left field]. Then the next week, when I got hot, you might see the right fielder closer to the line. It kept changing. I just had some bad luck."
The Rays have decided to push 10 of their pitchers way back in their preparation for the start of the season, as they try to account for the toll of innings that extended into October for their staff. The notion that teams that play deep into the postseason can often suffer a hangover the next season is not new -- within the sport, it's taken as a near-given that this is what happened with the Red Sox in 2005, with the White Sox in 2006 and with the Tigers in 2007.
But the Rays have taken some dramatic steps to address that issue. A lot of the Tampa Bay pitchers haven't even thrown live batting practice to hitters, at a time on the calendar when this is usually common practice. The Rays play their first exhibition game Wednesday -- but the earliest that any of the Tampa Bay starters will work in a game is March 7. When Maddon and pitching coach
Jim Hickey explained the decision to the pitchers, their reaction was uniform:
Great. More bullets saved for later.
Watched the very end of
Jason Isringhausen's bullpen session Monday, and he looked good, demonstrating some pop, putting the ball on the corners. The Rays have a lot of different bullpen options, a lot of guys who can close games; Izzy appears to be one of the options.
Other
relievers impressed, as well. The Rays' No. 1 pick from last year
is having a good time in camp this year, Marc Topkin writes.
One of Maddon's goals is to have more than one Tampa Bay Ray win a Gold Glove this year. While the Rays were generally regarded as the pre-eminent defensive team in the game last season, he sees room for improvement.
"As last season went along, we made fewer mental errors than we did earlier [in the season]," said Maddon, who wants to see the Rays maintain peak efficiency throughout the year.
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Buster Olney
