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Wednesday, April 18
Updated: April 19, 1:42 PM ET
Rothschild firing no instant cure to Tampa's woes




If it's true you don't become an official big-league franchise until you fire your first manager, then it's now safe to include the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in all forthcoming editions of the American League Red Book.

But like all teams that get themselves messed up enough to fire their manager 14 games into the season, they still have to address two questions far bigger than where to forward Larry Rothschild's checks.

1) How the heck did they get themselves into this mess?

If you really look at (the Devil Rays), Ben Grieve is the only guy who could be a regular on a good club. And he probably should be a DH.
An AL scout

And 2) now what?

How did they get here? To 4-10, to a .223 team batting average, to 24 unearned runs in 14 games? That answer isn't so hard.

This is just a team caught in that never-never land between the past and the future. They run a lot of players out there who used to be good. They also have a lot of players, either hanging around the Trop or burning their way up the ladder, who are going to be good.

But they're not good players right now. And that's trouble.

"If you really look at that club," says one AL scout, "Ben Grieve is the only guy who could be a regular on a good club. And he probably should be a DH.

"And you look at their pitching staff, and they have a lot of guys with the same look. Albie Lopez is legit. He's come into his own at long last. But the other guys -- Paul Wilson, Bryan Rekar, Ryan Rupe, Travis Harper -- they're all right-handed, they all throw at about the same velocity. They're all the same kind of pitcher, with slight variations in stuff."

GM Chuck LaMar has done a good job of building the farm system to the point it now features some of the best prospects in baseball (Josh Hamilton, Jason Standridge, Carlos Crawford, just-promoted Aubrey Huff). But the Devil Rays started their existence by hitching their fortunes to a ton of high-ceiling high school players. And they're still waiting for the Matt Whites and Bobby Seays to help them.

Some day, a couple of years down the road, this team could be the Marlins -- young and talented and dangerous. But Hal McRae has a couple of hundred games to manage between now and then. And some of them won't be much fun.

But it will help him for now simply that he isn't Larry Rothschild, a guy who never had a shot. Rothschild's players knew he was literally hours from being fired last November, only to be saved by a change of heart by LaMar. And it became clear in a hurry this year those players had either tuned him out, at best, or were openly challenging him, at worst.

So "it got to the point," said one baseball official, "where it wasn't a question anymore whether this was Larry Rothschild's fault. The situation in the clubhouse had gotten so bad, they had no choice."

In other words, the Devil Rays were merely doing what they had to do Wednesday when they fired their manager. But it was no instant cure for the ills that led them to pull that trigger.

Jayson Stark is a Senior Writer at ESPN.com.



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