Rays clubhouse more like art commune
Under the benevolent eye of skipper Joe Maddon, spear and boar meet bat and ball
ST. PETERSBURG, FLA.— Most baseball players use their lockers for gear: mitts, bats and jerseys. Luke Scott, the designated hitter with the Tampa Bay Rays, uses his to display a mounted boar’s head.
The boar is adorned with sunglasses and a trucker hat that reads “Jesus Is My Boss.” If anyone is curious enough to ask him about it — and many visitors are — Scott points to a six-foot, metal-tipped spear that stands next to a collection of dog tags and a coffee-table book on Scottish history.
“He was 12 yards away, and I just took the spear and threw it,” Scott said. “Splat! Right through him.”
In the deepest corner of the Rays’ clubhouse at Tropicana Field, Scott exercises the vast freedoms that manager Joe Maddon affords the entire team. Maddon’s players can wear their baseball caps at funny angles. They can talk politics. They can stage impromptu dance parties.
Scott, 35, a nine-year major league veteran from DeLand, Fla., with a .249 batting average and nine home runs this season, has chosen to express himself in one of the more unusual ways: by fashioning his locker into a teetering tower of knickknacks.
“I wouldn’t even call it a locker,” outfielder Sam Fuld said. “It’s more like a city. It’s a little village.”
Scott, who went on the 15-day disabled list Saturday with back spasms, benefits by having two stalls: one for baseball and one for everything else. Still, he crams as much as humanly possible into both.
There is a framed photograph from the film Gladiator, a gift from a friend who works at the stadium as a security guard. (“A fellow patriot,” Scott said.) There are a dozen bottles of nutritional supplements. (A fitness fanatic, Scott blamed a calf strain earlier this season on drinking too much alkaline water.) There is a blown-up cover from Time maga- zine of Osama Bin Laden with a giant X through his face. (“Self-explanatory,” he said.)
There are flags and posters, a wellworn copy of the Bible and a Wolverine figurine still in the box. There is stuff beneath stuff piled atop more stuff.
“We probably spend more time in our lockers than we do at home,” Scott said. “So I just decided to bring a few things.”
Matt Silverman, the Rays’ president, said he had not seen the “most recent iteration” of Scott’s locker, which was an important distinction: the locker has grown like a Chia Pet.
“But that’s the individualism that Joe promotes,” Silverman said, “and that’s one of the reasons why players feel so comfortable here. You can be yourself.”
Maddon is not big on old-school baseball ritual. As a product of the 1960s and ’70s, Maddon considers himself “anti-regulation.” In fact, he said, he has only a couple of rules. One is that he expects his players to run hard to first base. Another is that he wants his pitchers to work on their defence.
“I truly believe that the more freedom the players feel out there, the greater discipline and respect you’re going to get in return,” Maddon said. “If your employees have to come in and be concerned about a bunch of tedious nonsense, it’s going to prevent them from performing as well as they possibly can. God, if I added to the tediousness of the day to any of these guys, I’d feel awful.”
So it goes that the Rays’ clubhouse is baseball’s version of an art commune. Want to display your bobblehead collection? Go right ahead, Jose Molina. Feeling the urge to wear that sweet fedora? Knock yourself out, Fernando Rodney.
The players punctuate every victory with a clubhouse dance party, complete with strobe lights, during which someone — a player, a coach, an extended family member — invariably loses his shirt. And while most managers enforce a strict dress code when their teams travel to road games, Maddon stipulates only that his players “feel hot” with whatever they choose to wear on the plane. He emphasizes high character over coats and ties. “Joe’s like, ‘I don’t care how you look,’ ” outfielder Ben Zobrist said. “‘Do the right things, and people will embrace you.’ And that’s kind of how our team functions. You can celebrate and have a good time as long as you play well. When you’re not playing well, nobody’s going to want to see that.” Players cited team chemistry as a huge component to the team’s success, although Tampa Bay has slumped lately, losing seven of 10 games before rebounding with a win on Sunday over the Jays. Still, the Rays, who have advanced to the playoffs three times in the last four seasons, remain in solid post-season contention, with a 70-52 record that had them percentage points ahead of the Oakland Athletics in the American League wild-card race.