The Rays Tank: Spring Training Day Two

"A lot of it has to do with under the hood type stuff, actually. The different things we want to see each guy make improvements with. The kind of stuff that we talk to them about within these meetings that we’re going to have over the next couple of days regarding becoming more complete baseball players. It’s going to be more about that. If someone hits .350 and the other guy hits .220, that’s not necessarily going to be the reason why you choose one over the other. There’s different things we’ve been looking at, whether you’re talking about physical mechanics or maybe just some baseball stuff, whether it’s baserunning or instinctive kind of things. We’re looking at a variety of different topics with each guy. As it moves forward, please don’t just look at a batting average and think that this guy’s winning the war right now, it goes a lot deeper. With us, as you very well know by now, it’s about defense and we want to make
sure whomever it’s going to be … obviously, we talked a lot about how much we like Reid, no question. We thought that Sean did a really good job when we gave him that opportunity at the end of last season. There’s a lot of different things to look at regarding making a decision. A lot of it is going to do with the discussion that we have with each guy and then seeing who fulfills that little checklist."

Wonder which position players haven’t sauntered into camp yet?!?!

Business leaders get together to discuss the Rays

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The Heart Gallery
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On if the Rays can duplicate their defensive success from 2011:
Friedman: "Well, we were phenomenal last year defensively. A lot of it gets to the pride that they take in it. Joe had the great idea to put up the gold glove in the clubhouse and we’ve stressed how important it is to us organizationally. That being said, last year not only did we have gifted defenders, the way we utilized information, the way we were active with our positioning, I think we’re going to have to continue to do that, in that we caught line drives at a very, very high rate last year, and a lot of that gets to positioning … and ability. I think, with that, it’s difficult to say we’ll definitely exceed that. More than that, we have really good, gifted defenders around the diamond. It’s part of the fabric of this organization, part of our DNA, and something that will continue to be for the foreseeable future – or I guess until every other team starts doing it. Then we’ll probably have to go a different direction. That was something that we talked about at the end of last season. If we could improve our offense while maintaining our high level of defense, obviously that was optimal. It’s easy to say, more difficult to do, so we were fortunate to line up on that. We think we have improved our offense and are going to maintain that high level of defense."