Shopping In the Bargain Bin for Tampa

"Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes." --Walt Whitman

Before you coronate the Red Sox in the AL East and pencil in the Yankees for Wild Card in 2011, allow me to introduce the Tampa Bay Rays. Thanks to a paired signing of post-expiration-date former Red Sox, the Rays may have postponed their departure from contention.

No one could be faulted for proposing that they wouldn't sign Manny Ramirez with Bernie Madoff's money. I personally swore him off with an eleven-foot pole. Still, getting him and a possible handler for .35 Jeters might be worth the plunge.

Here's how it's going down: the Rays inked Ramirez, 38, for meal money and matched him with fellow cast-off Johnny Damon, 37, whose deal cost $5.25 mil. Ramirez can stomach the pay cut because he won't endure one; the Dodgers must still pay $15 million for their post-playoffs indiscretion over the next two-and-a-half years. With former fellow Idiot by his side, perhaps Manny can find his happy -- and more importantly his motivated -- place.

Ramirez will DH if he can stay healthy, whose odds skyrocket as long as he DHs. In the last two years, Ramirez has managed to stay upright, or sufficiently interested, to accumulate a year's worth of at bats (631 PA). He has been a shadow of the Manny who terrorized AL pitching in the 90s and early 00s, posting  284/.399/.476. Compare that to Rays DHs last year though, .238/.322/.391, and suddenly a little brooding is a fun quirk. The difference is about two wins on the season, generally thought to be worth roughly $9-$10 million in baseball's trading stalls. The Rays got that for $2 million. And if Manny reprises his late-2010 White Sox debacle, .261/.420/.319, which was apparently hernia-induced, Tampa just flips him to a hopeful contender for some jetsam on the flotsam pile.

The Damon signing is a bit more of a commitment, but Johnny's got a couple of feathers in his cap: 1. He can play the field. 2. He's not crazy. 3. He's shown that his decline will be gradual. Damon batted .271/.355/.401 last year in Detroit's Hitting Suppressant Park. With average defense, which he's certainly capable of, he can replace Carl Crawford in a corner outfield spot and forestall most of the lost production. That's worth another $10 million, which the Rays got at half-off.

You may be remembering the Tampa Bay franchise that won the East and jettisoned key elements of its roster, but flipping Crawford, Matt Garza and what was left of Carlos Pena (OBP last four years -- .411, .377, .356, .325) for the two old guys, plus heralded rookie Jeremy Hellickson, could grade out as a wash. If any of the menagerie of farm acts contribute in The Show for Tampa, they might have even come out ahead.

The Rays still need relief help, and with their Calvin Griffith budgeting system they'll need more of this kind of creativity to land anything useful. If they can get improved production from the stable of young players -- Brignac, Upton, Jaso, Joyce -- they can challenge the Yankees for the Wild Card. This signing shows that considering the team's thin wallet, GM Andrew Friedman is worth a bunch of wins against a replacement GM, and that might be just enough to write off writing them off.

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