For the future, you can feel free to email us at rayscoloredglasses@gmail.com with any questions related to the Rays or baseball in general. More importantly, though, we all really appreciate your comments on every piece, and when you have something to say, don’t hesitate to contribute to the conversation however big or small. Here’s what David Egbert and I talked about here, and please note that I’ve never met David before- this type of discussion can just happen naturally when you have people passionate about baseball wanting to talk about the issues that are meaningful to them. This is the second straight time that we’re doing this feature based on a discussion between David and I, but this is something that can happen between anyone at the site and we’re looking forward to seeing what else our conversations can lead to.

David Egbert: The Rays do an amazingly good job of developing staring pitching at the minor league level. However, they do a very poor job of developing relief pitching. Name the last relief pitcher that was developed in the Rays system. Had they spotted Jake McGee as a relief pitcher in the minors and honed either his slider or change or both, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.

Robbie Knopf: Interesting claim that could be worth looking into in a future post. I guess my one second rebuttal is that 1) McGee was a special case because his fastball was just so good, and 2) most relievers are failed starters and the Rays have just been so good developing starters that the electric arms that in other organizations might have gone to relief have stayed in the rotation.

RK: You don’t need to mold Torres. He has shown the ability to go from starting to relieving without a problem so far (he excelled in a relief role in September of 2011 after starting all season) so you might as well keep his trade value and versatility at the maximum while a spot in the major leagues remains elusive for him. If Cesar Ramos (and/or McGee) keeps struggling, the Rays will call him up and convert him then. It’s not like Torres is about to be the Rays’ closer–he’ll probably begin as a long relief/low-leverage lefty kind of pitcher and then work his way up in the majors.

DE: I respectfully disagree. However, we still have not addressed the issue of why the Rays don’t seem to have a track for relievers in the minor leagues. They sure have a great model for starters. I know Andrew Friedman does great job of finding gems in the garbage pile but it just seems that they throw roster fillers into the bullpen in the minors. It seems to not match up with “the Rays Way”.

RK: Who are the Rays’ relief prospects? Zach Quate and Lenny Linsky are two of them, but shoulder injuries have set them back at this point. Maybe Jeff Ames and Parker Markel are two more, but you give him a chance to start for as long as possible. Why are there so few of them? Because of the Rays’ approach in the draft, going for high-upside high school players. The Rays have no problem signing relievers on the market so instead that would rather go for players with the potential of being a starter than drafting more conservative and selecting college players with the ability to move into relief. With that in mind, players are much more likely to flame out if they fail as opposed to ending up in the bullpen, with most of them being only being converted into relief when there’s no other option and most of them just continuing to fall apart. The Rays don’t need relief prospects so they don’t have them. Maybe that will change, but the Rays would rather have as many players available to start and decide roles as team need dictates them to do so.

DE: I would add Nick Sawyer and maybe Adam Liberatore to that very short list. You are obviously right about the Ray’s current thinking. I would just seem that with a guy like Parker Markel where you would reach a point at high A or AA where you say this guys got talent but not enough to make our rotation and switch his track. Thanks for another good discussion, Robbie. You are closer to the scene that I am and I appreciate your insight.

RK: You’re definitely right about Sawyer (although he’s a major outlier as a 40th round pick who burst onto the scene), and Liberatore could be a LOOGY. Great discussion once again.

The first thing that immediately stands out about that first statistic is that results over the last five years don’t have very much to do with how good the Rays’ system is now, and also that even if players from those drafts have nto yet made the major leagues, several of them are very promising prospects. But that’s still a pretty alarming stat- no player the Rays have drafted since they began contending has made the major leagues, and clearly the Rays have taken a step back from the level of their draft picks from before, something that does make sense because the Rays draft much later in the first round than they did previously. But combine poor drafts with a sub-par international presence, and you would think that the Rays would have a pretty bad farm system. Instead, it’s the exact opposite. What’s going on?

We know that from 1998 to 2007, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, as they were then known, were not a good team by any stretch of the imagination. Their major league team was terrible, escaping the AL East cellar just once with one 4th place finish and losing 100 games three times. Their horrific performance gave them a lot of high draft picks, and indeed they did have several star players even as their overall team was almost unbelievably bad year after year, but the could never put anything together. But what the Rays were able to do was turn those few good players into several key pieces of their team through trades. Aubrey Huff turned into Ben Zobrist. Victor Zambrano, one of their few impact international signees, turned into Scott Kazmir. Delmon Young yielded  Matt Garza and Jason Bartlett. And most recently, James Shields and Wade Davis turned into Wil Myers and Jake Odorizzi. Then you can add in the Kazmir trade to Los Angeles, the Garza trade to the Cubs, and the Bartlett trade to the Padres all giving the Rays contributing players to their team. A series of perfectly-executed trades followed by more excellent trades of the players they acquired a few years later gave the Rays an impressive group of prospects and young players in their system even when the majority of their drafting and international signing was not doing so well. Pair those players with a couple excellent high draft picks (i.e. Evan Longoria, David Price, Carl Crawford, and B.J. Upton), a few high-upside draft picks drafted in the later rounds who eventually panned out (e.g. Matt Moore, Jeremy Hellickson, Wade Davis, and Desmond Jennings), and a multiplicity of great under-the-radar free agent signings (e.g. their entire bullpen and Carlos Pena), and suddenly the Rays had themselves a very good team. Even when their draft picks and international signings were not working out on the whole, the Rays have always done an excellent job trading away their major leaguers at peak value to refurbish their system. The Rays would have loved to draft better on the whole, but they take full advantage of every player on their team that lives up to his potential, getting all the production they can from them for their major league team and then dealing them away for highly-touted to create a revolving door of more players with the ability to keep the process going.

The Rays’ success at the major league level has also allowed them to be very cautious with their prospects and take them very slowly through the minor leagues. The Rays’ would have hoped that players like Tim Beckham would have made the major leagues right now, but the Rays’ drafting tendencies these days are not towards players with the ability to make the majors quickly. They have focused on drafting high school players with significant potential and then have allowed at whatever pace suits them best to help them become the best players they can possibly be in the future. They know that their MLB team is good and that if they need more talent at the upper levels of their system they can always make trades. The Rays’ drafts over the past few years have given them several extremely talented prospects in their system- and although they may not be ready for the majors over the next couple years, the rest of baseball could be in for a rude awakening when these players have made their way through the minors and are ready to make a major league impact.

You can be concerned by the Rays’ lack of major league production from their last few drafts and their lack of topflight international talents in their system, but at the end of the day, it means very little. It’s certainly not the ideal, but the Rays have proven the last several years that they will continue to find ways to continue to stock their system and keep the future of their ballclub looking bright. Just look at the Rays’ results in the major leagues and how highly-touted their minor league system remains to be, and it’s clear that the Rays don’t have anything to worry about.

The Devil Rays aggressively started Rupe with the Double-A Orlando Rays in 1999, and he continued to impress, managing a 2.53 ERA in 5 starts and 26.1 innings pitched. There were some warning signs- Rupe’s strikeout to walk ratio remained impressive at 22-6 and he allowed just 1 home runs, but those 22 strikeouts were a rate of just 7.5 per 9 innings, well below his 1998 rates, and his walk rate has also gone up to 2.1 per 9 innings. Rupe’s potential was evident, but he had work to do in order to reach his potential. However, the Rays honestly could not care less about the foreboding signals because they wanted to contend and their major league rotation was an absolute mess. By the end of 1999, the Rays’ rotation of Wilson Alvarez, Rolando Arrojo, Bobby Witt, Dave Eiland, Bobby Rekar, and Tony Saunders, all of whom received 9 or more starts, combined for a 5.34 ERA (88 ERA+), with only Alvarez managing an ERA under 5.15. There’s no positive way to spin that- but the Devil Rays were going nowhere and they should have just punted the season while giving their top prospects like Rupe time to develop. Instead, the Devil Rays were desperate enough to turn their rotation around that they called up Rupe to the major leagues after just 5 Double-A starts and not a single game at Triple-A. The results, actually, were pretty good. Rupe went 8-9 with a 4.55 ERA (108 ERA+, 8 % better than average), a 6.1 K/9, a 3.6 BB/9, and a 1.1 HR/9 in 24 starts and 142.2 innings pitched. There was clearly still work to be done, but it was still impressive that he found a way to hold his own, especially with the pitchers around him collapsing left and right. However, there were clear flaws with his game. His FIP was just 4.80 as his strikeout to walk ratio was below 2-to-1 and flyball tendencies led to a homer rate that was too high. That wasn’t something that would be improved simply by facing major league hitters. Trial by fire wasn’t something his self-confidence was going to be able to take.

Rupe never threw very hard, topping out at 88-89 MPH with his fastball. He was able to throw it for strikes but was never able to command it down in the zone despite his 6’6″ frame. When Rupe was successful in his rookie season in 1999, he attacked hitters with a changeup around 80 MPH with good arm action late bottoming-out action that gave lefties fits and was even a weapon for him against righties when he had it going well. His third pitch was a sharp slider that he used to force weak contact and even work in as another put-away pitch when he was able to get on top of it and get it to look like a strike before breaking sharply. Those three pitches were the foundation of Rupe’s promising career as a mid-rotation type of starter. Entering the 1998 MLB Draft, Rupe’s lack of fastball velocity hid the fact that his overall arsenal was quite impressive. But to become a consistent major league starter, Rupe would have to improve his fastball command and get more consistency on his secondary pitches. That never had a real chance to happen as the D-Rays rushed him to the major leagues and never gave him enough time to develop.

In his rookie season in 1999, Ryan Rupe was incredibly inconsistent. In his fourth major league start on 5/23/99, Rupe was absolutely unhittable, going 9 innings allowing just a 7th inning single and a hit batsman and striking out 8 without walking a batter, in a game the D-Rays would lose 4-0 in 10 innings (by no fault of his whatsoever). It would be one of nine starts that Rupe would make where he went 7 innings allowing 2 runs or less and one of four games where he struck out 7 or more batters. However, he also allowed 5 or more runs eight times and walked as many batters he struck out if not more eleven times as well. He had his moments when he was hitting spots with his fastball and hitters didn’t have a chance on his secondary pitches. But the inconsistency that plagued Rupe in his rookie season was something he never was able to fix and was only exasperated as the league got a better look at him- in his final four major league seasons from 1999 to 2003, Rupe went just 16-29 with a 6.41 ERA (72 ERA+) in 60 starts, 5 relief appearances, and 334.1 innings pitched. Rupe should have spent 1999 between Double-A and Triple-A and at least the start of 2000 back in the minors before finally making his big league debut. Maybe the results would have been the same if Rupe had followed that path instead of the one he took- considering Rupe missed time in 2000 with a blod clot, his career may have even turned out worse. But we’ll never know how things would have turned out and all we can do is look at the numbers and try to figure out how a talented pitcher went from top prospect to solid major league pitcher to total flameout in just a two year span.

The signature pitch of the Rays organization these days is the changeup. Ryan Rupe was a forebear of that, with his outstanding changeup being the reason for his success in 1999 and his inconsistency with it the rest of his career a major reason he came apart so quickly. When you think changeup these days, different baseball fans will think of different players, but for Rays fans, the first two names that pop into their heads are James Shields and Jeremy Hellickson. Shields and Hellickson were different situations compared to Rupe as draft picks out of high school, but Shields spent five full years in the minors before breaking into the big leagues and Hellickson spent six. Both of them were seemingly ready for the major leagues sooner than the Rays gave them a chance- Shields went 8-5 with a 2.97 ERA and a 110-34 strikeout to walk ratio in 115.1 innings at Triple-A in 2005 while Hellickson was a ridiculous 9-2 with a 2.45 ERA, and a 132-29 strikeout to walk ratio in 114 innings between Double-A and Triple-A in 2009 and had to essentially repeat that type of performance at Triple-A the next year before the Rays finally called him up. Rupe was never going to turn into the type of pitcher that Shields and Hellickson have become. However, from 2006 to 2009, the first four years of his major league career, Shields went 43-36 with a 4.01 ERA (111 OPS+), a 7.1 K/9, a 1.9 BB/9, and a 1.2 HR/9 in 118 starts and 774.1 innings pitched. Ryan Rupe could have become that same type of pitcher.

Rupe’s fastball velocity was a few ticks behind where Shields’ was at that point of his career (Shields has gained velocity as his career has progressed), but he had the potential to force more groundballs if he could harness the downward angle his height gave him in his delivery, had a nice changeup that was nowhere near Shields’ caliber but could have gotten closer with more time in the minor leagues, and his slider was a much better pitch than the curveball Shields throws. Ryan Rupe had a chance to be a solid number three starter in the major leagues for quite a while if only he had come up with the Rays ten years later when the Rays had shifted their organizational philosophy to take their prospects along extremely slowly to give them all the time they need to reach their potential. Now, instead of potentially being a 37 year old pitcher finishing off a productive MLB career, Rupe is only a symbol of exactly the type of future the Rays do everything in their power to help their young pitchers avoid.