LaMar is 'a C with a chance to get better'

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By GARY SHELTON

© St. Petersburg Times,
published July 19, 2001

ST. PETERSBURG -- Turn left at the negativity. Follow the slings and arrows down the corridor. Step around the blame. Go around the corner from the barbs. Take a right at the scrutiny.

It's easy to find Chuck LaMar's office.

Follow the criticism.

This is where he sits, the man with the largest target in Tampa Bay imposed on his back. This is where all the discontent leads, the comments that are deserved and those undeserved, the critiques that are fair and those unfair. It leads to the desk of LaMar, the man to blame.

There have been easier times to be LaMar, the Rays' general manager. The team he constructed has spent most of the season deconstructing. The criticism mounts, and it points more directly at his office than ever before. The pressure builds.

Now, it is trading season, and LaMar is in the cross hairs. He is caught between yesterday's edict from above ("Spend the money!") and today's ("Save the money!"), between the baseball evaluators and the accountants. He has to move his high-priced veterans, and the world knows he has to trade them. If you were an opposing general manager, would you offer market price? Or would you wait until sale prices are slashed further?

"We aren't negotiating from strength," LaMar says, picking his words carefully, "Everyone knows that. When you aren't negotiating from strength, it makes things more difficult. It doesn't make them impossible."

For the record, no one is asking you to feel sorry for LaMar. Especially not LaMar. It has become fashionable to blame him for all shortcomings of the franchise, up to and including whether you had enough popcorn in your bag the last time you went to a game. Around the Rays, the common refrain is that it's Chuck's fault, even when it's not. Consider the sign at Wednesday's game: "Keep Fred, "Chuck' LaMar."

LaMar sat in his office Wednesday night and gazed out the window, across the mostly empty leftfield bleachers and toward the field. His lips were drawn tight. He looked tired. Wouldn't you? No one likes to be the bad guy. All the criticism, all the battles, wear on a man.

It does not roll off his back. He does not turn the other cheek. In the face of critics, LaMar can be combative, stubborn, argumentative. Thin-skinned, say those who would criticize the way he takes criticism.

"I take the criticism of this organization personally," LaMar said, "and I don't apologize for that. The people who say they don't take it personally? They're lying. When you want to do a job as badly as I do, when it's as important to you as this one is, it bothers you when it seems like so much of the media is looking for negativity."

That said, the Rays are in last place. You don't have to push LaMar to admit that some of the criticism is deserved.

"I've made mistakes," he said. "I don't blame anyone else for this," he said. "It starts with me. I've always thought that when you make mistakes, you should be criticized. You're paid not to make mistakes."

By profession, LaMar is an evaluator. So you ask him a gun-to-the-head question. How would he grade himself?

LaMar looks at his desk. He is quiet for several moments except for his left hand thumping upon his right. Perhaps he is running through the all-too-familiar litany of Abeau-Alvarez-Castilla-Williams-Guzman that grade-school children memorized long ago.

"I'm trying to stay away from a C," he said, "because I hate taking the middle ground. But if you judge everything, I think it's right in there. But it's a C with a chance to get better, not one going the wrong way. Because this organization is still going to turn things around.

"I would downgrade myself, No. 1, because when I took this job, I wish I had had the experience to insist that we would stick to our long-term goals, that we wouldn't try to be something we aren't. I wish I had had the experience to do that, to convince people that we weren't ready to spend the money we didn't have."

That remains the Rays' albatross, that winter of '99 when ownership decided to chase big names with the hope of goosing attendance. It's that spending spree from which the Rays are still trying to recover. There were too many dollars given, too many years on too many contracts for too little talent (which is how, frankly, a weak team competes for free agents). And when it didn't work, the money dried up, and it became LaMar's job to jettison anyone making even a medium-sized paycheck. It was the move into big money that seemed to increase the scrutiny of the Rays, too. Suddenly, they had bombed to the tune of millions of dollars. Had the Rays stayed with kids and castoffs, would it have gotten this bloody this quickly? Who knows? But it felt more innocent in those days, didn't it?

So how much criticism does LaMar deserve? A good portion, he'll admit. After all, most of the fingerprints on this franchise are his.

"You want the fans to speak their minds," LaMar said. "It's better than apathy."

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