The Two Circles That Changed My Life
A difficult baseball game became the perfect opportunity to teach my son one of the most valuable Stoic lessons: focus your energy on what matters and what you can control.
The Tampa Bay Rays Are the Best Team in Baseball
I don't care who wins the World Series.
The Tampa Bay Rays are the best team in baseball.
I realize this is not technically how sports work. We have standings and playoffs and trophies precisely so middle-aged men don't get to arbitrarily decide who the champion is from their couches.
But I've been watching the Rays for years, and I've seen enough.
They are consistently good.
They do it without the biggest stars. Without the biggest payroll. Without the biggest crowds. And in a division filled with teams that have advantages the Rays simply don't have.
And somehow, they keep showing up.
They keep winning.
Why Are the Tampa Bay Rays So Good?
That's what makes the Rays fascinating.
They don't have the luxury of solving problems with money.
The Yankees can sign an expensive free agent. The Red Sox can. The Blue Jays can. The Dodgers have taken the concept to almost comical levels. If there's another great player available, apparently the solution is simply to acquire that guy too.
I'm a Mets fan, so I can't exactly complain about other teams spending money. My team spends plenty.
In fact, I recently wrote about why the 2026 Mets are so bad, and one of the conclusions I came to was that they aren't really a team at all.
They're a collection of talented players wearing the same uniform.
The Rays are almost the exact opposite.
Money is an enormous competitive advantage.
But individual contributors don't create a great team.
A collection of great baseball players isn't necessarily a great baseball team.
The Rays have to be good at something much harder.
They have to be good at building one.
They find players you've barely heard of. They develop them. They put them in positions to succeed. Sometimes those players become stars.
And then comes the cruel part.
Eventually those players get expensive.
Tampa Bay often can't keep them.
So they trade them, acquire more young players you've never heard of, develop those players and start the whole damn thing again.
Most organizations would call this rebuilding.
For Tampa Bay, it's just Tuesday.
They Don't Even Get the Underdog's Applause
This might be my favorite part.
Usually David at least has the crowd behind him.
The Rays don't always get that either.
Their attendance has famously been sparse. There have been playoff games with empty seats. When the Yankees play in Tampa Bay, there are so many Yankees fans in the building that it can feel like a Yankees home game.
Imagine that.
You have less money than your competitors.
Your best players become too expensive to keep.
You play in one of baseball's toughest divisions.
And sometimes your own ballpark sounds like it's cheering for the other team.
Fine.
Go win anyway.
There's something incredibly lovable about that.
Baseball Has Seen This Before
I was watching Ken Burns' Baseball recently when the story of the 1941 Brooklyn Dodgers came up.
Brooklyn hadn't won a pennant in more than 20 years. Larry MacPhail rebuilt the roster with an assortment of players who didn't necessarily look like a juggernaut individually.
There were reclamation projects who were past their prime but still had the cagey wisdom that comes from having seen everything. And there were "take a flyer" young players like Pete Reiser, who was making next to nothing and wound up winning the National League batting title.
Put all those pieces together and Brooklyn won 100 games and reached the World Series.
They lost to the Yankees, famously helped along by Mickey Owen's dropped third strike in Game 4.
And watching the story, I couldn't help thinking:
I've seen this team before.
They're playing in Tampa Bay.
The tools have changed. Front offices have analytics departments now. We have WAR and Statcast and exit velocity and enough data to determine the launch angle of a hot dog leaving the concession stand.
But the principle hasn't changed much.
Great teams are built, not collected.
The Dodgers Are Supposed to Win
This is also why I find myself enjoying it when baseball's Goliaths lose.
It's probably the same reason professional wrestling needs a heel.
Somebody has to be the guy you're hoping gets knocked out.
The Dodgers have become almost comically perfect for the role.
More stars. More money. More acquisitions. Another superstar becomes available and somehow the answer is, sure, we'll take him too.
It almost feels like cheating.
Technically, it isn't. They're operating within baseball's rules, and they're extremely good at it.
(Although Shohei Ohtani deferring $680 million of his $700 million contract feels like a pretty big bend of the spirit of those rules.)
But come on.
Nobody wants to watch Goliath buy a bigger sword.
We want to see if David can still hit him with the rock.
That's why there's something deeply satisfying about watching a team with a fraction of the resources beat one of baseball's financial superpowers.
Money can buy an extraordinary amount of talent.
It can't guarantee a great team.
My Mets have been kind enough to demonstrate this principle repeatedly.
The Best Teams Build Systems
This is the part of the Rays that I admire most.
Their real advantage isn't any particular player.
It's that they have built something capable of surviving the loss of that player.
Think about how difficult that is.
If your organization requires one extraordinary person to function, you don't really have a great organization.
You have an extraordinary person.
The Rays have built a system.
Players come.
Players develop.
Players leave.
The Rays keep playing good baseball.
There are plenty of low-payroll teams in baseball. Most of them aren't the Tampa Bay Rays.
Being poor isn't a strategy.
Being resourceful is.
That's an important distinction.
The Rays aren't great because they have less.
They're great because they've become exceptionally good at figuring out what actually matters and putting their resources there.
That's a very different thing.
The Definition of Enough
Maybe that's ultimately why I like the Rays so much.
They're the baseball version of something I've come to believe about life.
Enough isn't about having everything you want.
It's about understanding what you have and using it well.
The Rays could spend their entire existence complaining about the Yankees.
They'd have a pretty good case.
They could point to payroll disparities. Attendance. Revenue. Free agency. Geography. Their stadium situation. Every star they developed and couldn't afford to keep.
All true.
None of it gets you an extra run.
So they build another team.
I think the Rays will win a World Series someday.
I hope they do.
When it happens, people will finally get to call them champions.
I don't need to wait.
Championships tell us who won in October. They don't always tell us who built the best organization.
Give me the team with less money.
Give me the team without a roster full of famous names.
Give me the team playing in front of empty seats and opposing fans.
Give me the organization that loses great players and somehow finds the next ones.
Give me the team that consistently gets more from what it has than anyone has a right to expect.
Give me the Tampa Bay Rays.
They've always had enough.
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