The Rays Embrace The Churn

Surprisingly few members of the team's 2020 AL pennant-winning squad are still playing in Tampa Bay — but that's just how the Rays do their business.

Though the Tampa Bay Rays have recently lost a couple of games to the Houston Astros — a pretty talented team in their own right! — the Rays are rightfully the talk of baseball early this season. (I’ve already written about them a couple of times, in fact.) Tampa Bay is the first MLB team to start a season 20-5 or better since the 2003 Yankees, a stacked club that eventually went to the World Series. It wouldn’t be a shock to see the Rays do the same this fall.

But maybe the most incredible part about the Rays’ special season so far is how much they’ve already changed since last appearing in the World Series. We’re just a few years removed from Tampa Bay’s run to the 2020 Fall Classic, and yet many of the names who powered that version of the club have been replaced, leaving behind an even younger team in their wake.

Using the “percentage of team playing time” stat from my JEFFBAGWELL wins above replacement data — for the uninitiated, that’s the Joint Estimate Featuring FanGraphs and B-R Aggregated to Generate WAR, Equally Leveling Lists (basically just an average of the two most popular value metrics 😂) — which calculates each player’s share of total team plate appearances and/or leverage-weighted innings pitched, 15 of the 22 players who accrued at least 2% of the 2020 Rays’ playing time are no longer with the team, a list that runs the gamut from Willy Adames and Yoshi Tsutsugo to Blake Snell and Ryan Yarbrough. That share of regular players gone within three years — 68.2% — ranks 12th-highest among all World Series teams ever:

(Note: Unlike with the other teams on this list, Tampa Bay’s share can also climb higher if any of their other holdovers depart during the season.)

As we can see from this ranking, the Rays aren’t exactly the first team to turn their roster over after making it to the World Series. Going all the way back to the days of Connie Mack, baseball execs have never shied away from breaking up today’s winner in service of tomorrow’s cheaper alternative. It’s no coincidence that the top two teams above are the infamous fire-sale Florida Marlins of 1997 and (to only a slightly lesser extent) 2003.

But what separates the recent Rays from many of the list’s other entries are how young they were during their World Series run — they had baseball’s eighth-youngest roster in 2020, more than a full year younger than the average World Series team — and how good they ended up being after making all of their roster changes. Many successful teams that part ways with their core players do it simply because they are getting older; only three of the World Series clubs on our list above had a younger average age than the 2020 Rays did. Along similar lines, many high-turnover World Series teams just aren’t very good three years later (hence the high turnover!).

The Rays are unique among this group because they already had a good, young core that made a World Series run… and then shuffled through almost all of those players, only to build an even better, even younger core that seems capable of another postseason run within just a few years.

Of course, that approach has long been part of the Tampa Bay blueprint, allowing them to continually win on a modest budget. It also helps to have a Top-2 farm system (per Baseball America) in 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022, always giving the big club confidence to pivot to the next generation of talent on hand. But the Rays’ reemergence as a powerhouse this season represents perhaps the best execution of that approach yet — and proof that no matter how good you are now, you can always get even better down the line.