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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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Sternberg on payroll and other items

Posted Sep 21, 2010 by Roger Mooney

Updated Sep 21, 2010 at 09:10 PM

ROGER MOONEY
NEW YORK—Rays owner Stuart Sternberg talked before Tuesday’s game at Yankee Stadium about the 2011 payroll and the Rays place in the standings.

Here are a few of the Qs and As ...

On the preseason goal:
“We looked at the schedule and we saw that we had the Yankees for a bunch of games in September. The goal was to get to these games and have them count for something and obviously they do.”

Is the size of the lead in the Wild Card the biggest surprise?
“I think, yeah, I would think so. We really genuinely believed we’d be contending at this point, maybe even ahead, but to be ahead of both of those teams and the rest of the league, no.”

When told the Rays are only ahead of the Red Sox:
“I’m still living in the past.”

Is winning the AL East important?
“It’s important, very important. And I regardless of what anyone might say, I think it’s important to the Yankees. I know it’s important to them. They like to be winners. George (Steinbrenner) would never accept anything but, and clearly if you look at their bullpen usage yesterday, they want to win a baseball game as do we.”

Is baseball’s system working?
“Bud (Selig), fortunately, has a lot of institutional knowledge of history. Bud goes back to the ‘60s. I haven’t lived through everything Bud has, big market vs. small market, all the stadiums being built. I think the system works better. Does it work? Not fully. But it works better than it did 10 years ago. There’s no question about it. But there’s still, from my vantage point, there’s an enormous amount that still needs to be done.”

Like …?
“There are a ton of things. Look, it’s not just, you’ve got big market, small market, you’ve got how the players association feels about it, just the fact that you’ve got the designated hitter in our league and not in the National League, you know, something as simple as that, it’s sort of silly, and as you know I’m on record, and feel very strongly, we’d be more competitive without a designated hitter, plus I feel it’s a much better game. You can argue about that. … There are things like scheduling. We’re here competing with the Yankees, but if we’re in another division, we’re sort of coasting and no one is talking about how are you going to hold up and you have to play these guys so many times. There are teams in this league, I don’t even know if they play the Yankees seven times all year, let alone seven in September. And they wear you out.”

Can reaching the World Series positively impact the 2011 budget?
“No. … You could take the most optimistic scenario and we couldn’t come close to turning a profit this year. … What happened in ’08 we took some revenues in, specifically having a seven-game series with the Red Sox, and that goes toward something, it did contribute to what we did in ’09, but when people talk about the lift you get, it’s really about how you do after the season in selling tickets the next year.
“While we had gotten a pretty reasonable bounce of season tickets, it just fell back, as I talked about this year, in the beginning, they were terrible.”
“I’m not optimistic that we’re going to have the lift we had in ’08, which we needed to be double what it was, so I’m not optimistic we’re going to have that kind of bounce. It could happen, but it’s not going to you.
“No question. Nothing can change it, that can happen between now and April can change unless Joe Maddon hits the lottery and wants to donate it, or I hit the lottery.”

How low will payroll go?
“I don’t have a plan in mind what the lower is, I just know that it’s going down. So I think it was pretty easy for me in spring training to be forthright about it, no quibbling. Whether it goes down X, or X + Y, or Z, clearly if we get through the postseason, if there are seven-games series, if we get to the second round, if we get to the World Series, if the season tickets, it gives us more room, but there is nothing that can happen that can keep this payroll anywhere near what it approaches right now.”

How tough will it be to breakup this team?
“Worse than it hurts anyone else. … It’s who we are, it’s what we have to be. We took every shot we could at not having to have this happen along with the great fortune in 2008 and what looks to be some great fortune this year, we put everything in a position where we could keep adding, keep signings, more long term deals, things like that, but, it wasn’t meant to be.

The attendance drives the money train?
“You’re here (at Yankee Stadium) tonight, you were here last night, and there were 45,000 people spending a tony of money and they think they have the right to have better baseball players than we do, that they put a lot more money down and they fill their stadium up, do they have the right to have Hall of Famers and All-Stars where we don’t? Certainly you could put it on the system, but it’s not all the system.”
“Let’s say, for argument’s sake, we had 800,000 people show up and the Yankees had 4 million, should we be able to have Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter and Mark Teixeira and C.C. Sabathia? It’s more than the system.”

The Twins made it work:
“Look at what the Twins did, you know, they signed Joe Mauer. It was a foregone conclusion at the time with the Twins that Torri Hunter wasn’t going to be back, it was a foregone conclusion that Johan Santana wasn’t going to be back … it was a foregone conclusion that Joe Mauer would be gone. But you look at what happened in a few years, that franchise transformed itself … Same system. They were able to put a good product on the field, have some great players, had to let some great players go, but the system didn’t hurt them, it helped them get to that point where it seems to be working pretty well for them.”

On the Rays free agents:
“Regardless of what happens specifically with Carl, or any other players who have the ability to go out and earn what they can, we’re going to do our best to keep them and fortunately we have become at least a compelling place to play for players who want to come here, who want to remain here, who want to be here. But by the same token, you can’t begrudge a guy who wants to do as well as he can for himself and his family.”