Wall Street Style

Tyler Kepner, in the latest of a long series of paeans by sportswriters to the canniness of the Ray yesterday, told us the team was run by Stuart Sternberg, another former bankster who, Kepner informed us approvingly, "applied Wall Street principles to running it."

Well, yeah, I guess that's true.  If you mean the prevailing "Wall Street principles" of investing nothing, producing nothing, attracting no one, and hoping to get rich on bailouts and algorithms.

Not to mention applying the pernicious notion, so pervasive in the financial world, that anyone in "business" can run any "business" (Hence the plague of the business school, and the beginning of the end of America's dominance on the world economic scene.)

So Stuart hired him a "uniformed analytics coach," one Jonathan Ehrlichman, "who holds a mathematics degree from Princeton, where he played club hockey."

The advantage of this?

"Since he comes from a non-baseball background, he's like a little kid:  'Why do you guys do that?' " infielder Matt Duffy said.  "And we'll say, 'Well:  this, this, and this.'  And he'll say, 'Well, why do you do that?'  The response to every answer you give is, 'Why, why, why?'  And that's where the dialogue starts."

Hmm, imagine if the same "principles" were applied to running a nuclear plant.  Or any real business.

This has all the makings of another "Moneyball" fad, in which Michael Lewis and Billy Beane's many other sycophants religiously ignored the facts that:

—The Oakland A's were actually built around a terrific starting staff, and three outstanding position players, two of whom were almost undoubtedly juicing.

—The team could never get to the World Series thanks to a lack of competence in the very areas Beane dismissed, namely fielding, fundamentals, and clutch hitting.

But hey, "Cheating and Pitching" doth not a New York Times bestseller or Brad Pitt movie make.

So, Stuart is a genius, the Rays were geniuses to pick up Tommy Pham and Yandy Diaz, and above all to come up with "the opener"....and to build a team in a state chock full of the most dedicated baseball fans in the world, that can't draw 15,000 a game, even when they're in first place.

They have a terrible park they barely maintain, subsidies from all the rest of baseball (meaning us fans, ultimately), and I'm sure Stuart's profit margins are through the roof.  If the best players—and executives—on his team keep leaving for more money elsewhere, so what?  I'm sure Princeton has lots of club hockey players waiting in the wings.

Once upon a time, there were another couple of entrepreneurs who took up another, seemingly hopeless major-league team, one that didn't have a home park of its own at all.  So instead, they built one, invested heavily, brought in many of the greatest players who ever lived, hired real baseball men, took chances all over the place, and ended up building the greatest, longest enduring sports dynasty in world history.

But according to our hometown paper—we're everything that's wrong with the game.