Nine Innings is a series of questions with players & personnel from around Major League Baseball. In this edition, Shi Davidi talks to Rays president of baseball operations Matt Silverman.
The first shocker to hit the Tampa Bay Rays this off-season was the departure of Andrew Friedman, their long-time president of baseball operations, to the Los Angeles Dodgers. Soon after, manager Joe Maddon exercised the opt-out in his contract and bolted to the Chicago Cubs.
Left to hold things together amid the sudden and drastic upheaval was Matt Silverman, team owner Stuart Sternberg’s right-hand man, tabbed to take over from Friedman after serving as club president since 2005.
A Harvard economics graduate who worked in the real estate division for Goldman Sachs before teaming up with Sternberg on acquisitions for the Wall Street giant, Silverman’s knowledge of the organization made for a seamless transition, and the Rays had a winter full of moves true to past form.
They diversified assets by trading the likes of Ben Zobrist, Matt Joyce, Wil Myers, Yunel Escobar and Ryan Hanigan to acquire players ready to contribute immediately like Steve Souza Jr., Kevin Jepsen, Rene Rivera and John Jaso plus others for down the road.
“We’ve maintained the philosophy and principles that have been in place for the last 10 years under Stu’s ownership,” Silverman says. “We are always balancing present and future and we looked at this off-season as an opportunity to bolster our farm system while maintaining a major-league club that has talent and has a chance to go out there and compete for a playoffs spot. It’s not easy to do, it’s tough to maintain that balance, but I’m pretty pleased with the way we executed our off-season plan and hopefully we’ll be reaping the benefits for years to come.”
Here are Silverman’s nine innings with us:
1st – A trademark of the Tampa Bay Rays over the past several seasons is sound, fundamental and opportunistic baseball. Is that more a product of the players you target, or the process of development in the farm system?
“It’s certainly a combination. Our player-development system stresses fundamentals and we want players who come up through our system to hit the ground running when they get to the major-leagues. When we bring in players from the outside, it’s something we also value, and it takes a consistent message from our coaching staff to continue to drive that home.”
2nd – Another trademark is the steady stream of young pitching that has underpinned the team’s success. What’s the organizational approach to gathering arms?
“We always try to enhance the depth of our pitching, whether it’s at the major-leagues or the minor-leagues, and try not to get to a point where we’re short-staffed. We’re in a spot now where we’ve had a series of injuries and we’re going deeper into our system than we would have expected, and that’s where the arms come in as insurance for us. It’s not a specific drafting philosophy, but we are patient with our young arms, and want them to be ready to perform when they get called up.”
3rd – You’ve had a good track record of keeping pitchers healthy although there have been some injuries last year and this season. What impact has that had on your guiding principles with pitchers?
“We’re always looking deeper and always looking for ways to help our players prevent injuries, and to make sure that when they do have them, they get back healthy and maintain their health. Just because we’ve had a number of injuries in a short period of time doesn’t change our outlook, but certainly it’s going to make us look even harder to make sure we’re doing the right thing for our players.”
4th – What are the biggest differences in the change from your position as team president to president of baseball operations?
“The biggest difference is the level of detail that I’m personally involved with. I worked very closely with Andrew in baseball operations for many years but the number of decisions that I impacted were smaller. Now in this role, there are multiple decisions every single day, and really I’ve gotten to know our baseball operations staff and have great admiration for all that they’ve done. It’s a great group of guys and gals, and it’s the collective strength of this group that has gotten us through this transition, and put us in a position to maintain success.”
5th – Losing talented people like Friedman and Maddon is difficult, but in what ways can change, even unwanted change, be beneficial for a franchise?
“Our owner, Stu Sternberg, talked about this recently when the season started, that while it was change that we weren’t seeking, and change that we didn’t necessarily want, it can be a good thing. It certainly provides new opportunities for people, it forces people out of their comfort zone, and sometimes you can get good results from that shakeup. Again, it was something that wasn’t desired but we embrace the circumstances that came about and I hope we’ll be stronger for it looking back a few years from now.”
6th – The last time the Rays hired a manager, Joe Maddon, a long-time managerial candidate awaiting an opportunity, got the job. This time you went with Kevin Cash, who is relatively new to coaching, let alone managing. What was the process in going from one extreme to the other?
“Each manager’s path to getting that position is a different one, some guys were players, some guys weren’t, some guys paid their dues in the minors, others had different ones. It’s hard to comment on that specifically. I think with Kevin, we knew he was coming into a stable clubhouse environment with most of the coaching staff coming back, and that gave us a little bit more comfort in taking someone with less experience than say an established or former major-league manager. With Tom Foley at his side, Jim Hickey, Derek Shelton, the rest of the staff, it was an easier integration for him. That made it easier for us to extend ourselves and put our faith in Kevin.”
7th – Some Blue Jays fans will remember Cash from his days as a catcher and he later spent a year in advanced scouting with the team, a role perhaps a bit atypical for an eventual manager. What benefits does some time in scouting offer a manager?
“It’s also atypical for a manager to catch pitches between innings, which he’s done when we had both of our catchers in the field. Kevin brings a diversity of experiences to this position and the fact that he has been on the scouting side and has worked with a front office is a differentiator for him, but what really attracted us to Kevin is his workmanlike spirit, the way he communicates with players, the way he relates to players and the way he can bring together a clubhouse.”
8th – With the way your baseball ops department functions, is it more important for the manager to have a deeper understanding of front-office dynamics to aid in the cohesion of the group?
“It’s certainly important for there to be a good relationship between the front office and the manager, but the most important relationships are between the manager and the coaches and the players. These guys live together for six months out of the year, it’s a family, and we believe Kevin is the kind of guy who can keep spirits up, can keep the players motivated, can keep this group together and that’s why we placed a lot of trust in Kevin, his ability to do that, along with the rest of the coaches.”
9th – Finally, do you ever miss Wall Street?
“I do not miss Wall Street at all.”