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Roger Mooney

Roger Mooney covers the Tampa Bay Rays for The Tampa Tribune, TBO.com and News Channel 8. He has covered the Rays since their first season in 1998, including 11 years for the Bradenton Herald. Roger has also covered Florida, South Florida and Florida State football, the Bucs and the Lightning.

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Friedman: No fit to be found

Posted Jul 31, 2008 by Marc Lancaster

Updated Jul 31, 2008 at 07:05 PM

The Rays didn’t make a move before baseball’s non-waiver trade deadline passed at 4 p.m.

Executive vice president Andrew Friedman, on a 6 p.m. conference call, declined to get into even the barest of details about any of the Rays’ activities today.

The bottom line, he insisted repeatedly, was Tampa Bay didn’t find the right fit despite numerous conversations and had no problems standing pat.

“As you guys know, we’re very open-minded and aggressive, and if a deal makes sense we’ve demonstrated time and again we’re not afraid to be aggressive,” said Friedman. “At end of the day, nothing lined up for us here.”

He continued later:

“We had conversations that went right down to the wire, and whenever you have that obviously you feel like there’s a chance, but it takes two teams. By definition, trades are difficult to make. We worked extremely hard the last couple weeks to try to find a fit and improve the team, but at the end of the day we didn’t find something that lined up for us.”

Friedman described the last 60-90 minutes before the deadline as “action-packed” and indicated some proposals came “out of the blue” but nothing worked out.

“We had a lot of different conversations in the days leading up to today,” he said, “and at the end of the day we didn’t feel like things that were an option made sense for us and others that we were trying to make an option obviously didn’t make sense for the other side.”

When I asked him about standing pat while the Yankees improved and the Red Sox arguably broke even by replacing Ramirez with Bay, he broke in with a protest—“Didn’t we break even, too?” Fair enough.

Asked how he felt about the Rays’ chances of making the playoffs now compared to before the various moves were made over the past week, this was his response:

“I feel the exact same. I think our pitching and defense is going to remain our strength, but I feel like offensively … there’s a lot more to come. We have guys who have fairly established watermarks and levels of performance, and as a nine-person unit, we feel like we’re going to score more runs. We feel very strongly about that.”

His closing thoughts:

“We’re in first place on July 31st – we control our own destiny. I feel like we have the talent on hand to continue what we’ve done through the first two-thirds of the season.”

Oh, more more thing I forgot: Friedman was asked if he anticipated much movement in August, when deals can be made by passing players through waivers. It’s a rather complicated process, but handily enough, Padres exec Paul DePodesta just posted a quick rundown of the procedures on his blog.

“We didn’t necessarily leave any conversations today that we felt like would be viable in August, but you never know,” said Friedman. “Things pop up all the time and it’s an even more difficult environment to get a deal done. We’ll monitor the market very closely and follow it and be involved and what’s going on, but I would say the chances are remote.”

Updating with some comments from Pirates general manager Neal Huntington. At a press conference not long ago, Huntington had this to say about the three-way deal that sent Jason Bay to Boston, Manny Ramirez to L.A. and four young players to Pittsburgh:

“It is something that took place relatively quickly. But the groundwork had been laid a while ago. It did come together quickly in the end.”

Asked if teams were bidding against each other for Bay, this was his response:

“We had a very interesting market for all of our players and we were talking on multiple fronts all at the same time. It made life interesting and challenging. What put us in the best situation is we didn’t have to make a trade. We chose to make a trade because we felt they were the best trades for us going forward. We felt we had the right deal and moved on it.”

Reader Comments

Por (kenny spindola) on July 31, 2008 (Suggest removal)

I’m sorry Andrew but you blew it, look at the Yankees and Sox and see why they are successful year in and year out, they do whatever it takes to win now. If you think that the offense is strong to carry us to the playoffs and to win playoff games on the road you are crazy… good luck, but if the Rays fall you are to blame