Tampa, Florida					Monday, September 06, 2010

Lou Piniella Leaving for Another Job? Phooey!
Sunday, February 13, 2005
TAMPA—There was a story making the rounds of baseball the other day that Lou Piniella was considering taking another big league baseball managing job. Well, he may have considered the New York Yankee job had it been offered, but, well, maybe not. He’s been there and done that, for two and a half interesting years the mid-Eighties, and prior to that 1974-84 as a player, two of them world championship years, so, again, he’s been there and done that, and more in Pinstripes. Truth is, it wasn’t so, that rumor, and is not likely to have mattered, if it had been true. Lou Piniella loves his present circumstance, except for the heart problem his 84-year-old hard-working dad has been having lately. Lou loves it in Tampa Bay, except for the fact that this team he is building has been having a terrible time—the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Indeed, have been just awful much of the time since their birth as an expansion team of owner Vince Naimoli, until the second half of the 2004 season when the Rays streaked and fulfilled a Piniella Promise of his second year, that he would not finish last, that the Rays would be better, not lose another 100 games as they had the first two after coming from success at Seattle. They did better in 2004, finishing out of the American League-East cellar, ahead of the Toronto Blue Jays, in baseball’s toughest division. In case you forgot this is the team of the American League champion Boston Red Sox and the Yankees. Improved Baltimore is in there, too. But, Piniella, a proven manager, player, teacher and competitor, did indeed improve on that 2003 Rays record, as pledged, and now believes his young team sprinkled with new veterans will be better still this year just unfolding. Now, Piniella has been saying that right along, as he took his new broadcasting team and some players on luncheon caravans around Florida, except for the one held in Tampa last week, the day his dad had new heart problems. Piniella had to miss the caravan stop he probably like most. See, Piniella is more than just a native of Tampa. He’s a Tampa Treasure. He’s in the Tampa Hall of Fame. He’s been honored repeatedly. And, hey, wife Anita is a former Miss Tampa and a beauty. Point of this is to explain why Lou Piniella is just right for the job and the job is just right for Piniella, a genuine big league playing hero and manager, on the baseball side, and a genuine local boy that has made good. And he flat loves living in his old home town. Well, part of the time. Anita said she and Lou had bought a home at Treasure Island, a part of the St. Petersburg beaches community, closer to work (Tropicana Field on I-275 South in mid-town St. Pete) than is their Tampa home in Avila, an upscale residential reserve build around a marvelous golf course where his neighbors include Naimoli, Eddie DeBartolo, and other celebrities such as Jose Posada, Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Fred McGriff, and an awful lot of others of the rich and famous. Asked then why she didn’t sell the Avila place and live at Treasure Island she had a solid answer: “Then I couldn’t say we also had a place at the beach.’’ So, there we have the Piniellas back home working and living at home in Florida which they so love. We have them back home where their families live as well. They have them where their childhood friends are. And, they spring train in St. Petersburg as well as playing the season there. Moreover, for what is the Yankee spring and regular season headquarters really is in Tampa, as his old high school, as are his old youth	baseball teams, as are his old college, the University of Tampa, and where as a kid he watched the Cincinnati Reds train about two miles from the Piniella family home, and not far from where they spring trained for so long. Remember Lou Piniella was the Red’s manager, too, including the year the Reds beat the Oakland Athletics of Tampa and growing-up buddy, Tony LaRussa. So, it was that Lou appears to have the Rays improving at a good pace, though “remember we still have those Yankees and Red Sox in our division—the toughest in baseball,’’ said Rays Coach Tom Foley substituting for Piniella at the Tampa Chamber the other day on the Rays Caravan stop. Foley (and Lou would have) demonstrated the movement he thinks is solid by presenting to the Tampa audience reliever Travis Harper, infielder Jorge Cantu, catcher Kevin Cash, pitcher Doug Waechter, pitcher Dewon Brazelton, pitcher Jeff Neimann (2004 first round pitcher pick out of Rice, who is 6-7), and Coach Hernandez, another Tampa native and Tampa Catholic graduate. It was an interesting and impressive Rays group. There is the common belief, one Piniella does not dispute, that he has not been given the money to make the moves he had been promised by ownership and Rays’ lifetime general manager, Chuck LaMar, who seems to float above problems unruffled and undiminished in hopes and and by the Rays inabilities, lack of money and wins. Now, those of good cheer look wistfully at the recent investment of a New York financier, Stuart Sternberg, feeling he may move in with his cash and do something about the pursuits of players who make a lot of money, and demonstrate the same discontent of the frustrated fans with the status quo. So the get-ready-to-rumble, to some new degree anyway, at the Downtown Tampa Hyatt, except for the illness of the elder Mr. Piniella, a longtime Tampa cigar salesman, was upbeat and well-received, and had a very young audience. Though Manager Lou could not be there, clearly expectations are good, at least better, for the Rays in 2005. And why not? Manager Lou told Tampa Tribune baseball writer Carter Gaddis, a hard-worker, that, look, I didn’t come here to retire as a manager. I came here with one purpose in mind. And that’s getting this organization moving forward, working with the front office, working with everybody else in the organization—our coaching staff, our young players, our veteran players. And so far we have added 63 wins and 70 wins (in his first two seasons). It’s modest, but it is an improvement. We need to continue to improve.’’ Oh, the Rays’ payroll is the lowest in baseball, and the record is what it is, but Rick Vaughn, the indefatigable director of public relations likes to remind all that the Tampa Bay Buccaneers once had a terrible team, began their life in the National Football League with 14 straight losses, but won the Super Bowl two years ago, and that, hey, the Tampa Bay Lightning of the National Hockey League won the Stanley Cup in 2004 and still have the Cup in their trophy case, even for an extra year with the NHL in a work stoppage. So asks, Vaughn, if there are NFL and NHL championship rings on the fingers of the Bucs and the Bolts, why not the MLB title rings on the fingers of Tampa Bay Devil Rays? And does anybody need to remember that there are an awful lot of World Series rings on fingers hereabouts now, notably out at Piniella’s Avila, as well as around Tampa? Only thing is they have a big NY on them, including two often wore by Lou himself, not one yet with a Devil Ray on it, whatever that would look like. ##
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