nightmare-fuel reliever clock<\/a>. Over the last handful of seasons, though, their signature move has been one that eschews collecting value in tiny drips and drabs and snatches it, instead, in great, abundant armloads\u2014literally. The sport has seen the slow return of reversibility in the movement from starter to reliever, but no team has successfully made more pen men back into starters than this one. It\u2019s not even close.<\/p>\nRasmussen was the first success story in the group, but any celebration of that win had to wait quite a while. Tampa Bay acquired him in the Willy Adames trade with the Brewers in May 2021. Milwaukee had been using him purely as a reliever, with good reason: he was already damaged goods. Rasmussen had two Tommy John surgeries very early in his career, and was living on borrowed time by his mid-twenties. That was how the Brewers approached it, at least. Tampa let him work in the pen for a month or so after the deal, but then they moved him into their starting rotation. He was just a four-seamer\/slider guy at the time, and the transition made little sense, on its face. It worked, though. That August, he added a cutter, which became a huge part of his arsenal the following year. Piece by piece, ever since, he\u2019s built a deep starter\u2019s arsenal and blossomed into a front-line arm\u2014except, of course, that the Brewers had been (kind of) right. He blew out his elbow again in 2023 and underwent his third major surgery. It seemed like the gambit had gone kaput.<\/p>\n
Yet, here Rasmussen is, now. In the meantime, when they might reasonably have gotten discouraged and backed off, the team doubled down on the strategy, almost beat-for-beat. They traded for Jeffrey Springs in February 2021. They let him stay in the pen that year, but in 2022, they moved him to the rotation. Springs thrived there\u2014until he, too, needed Tommy John surgery in 2023. No matter. The Rays kept him in the rotation on the other side of a long recovery process, then dealt him to the Athletics, where he\u2019s kept that gig (though not exactly thrived in it). Completely undeterred, they traded for Zack Littell in May 2023 and converted him to a starter that July.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s tempting, to the outside eye, to blame the Rays for the surgeries Rasmussen and Springs required, at least in part. The roles each were in had much to do with sheltering them from known injury risks; it felt like the Rays put them in harm\u2019s way in order to maximize the value they got from each. On the other hand, they dramatically increased each hurler\u2019s earning power, too, and they signed each of those two to (team-friendly) extensions that guaranteed them some money they might never have seen going year to year as relievers. Littell turned from an eminently forgettable and replaceable middle reliever to a legitimate (if back-end) starter, and he never did get hurt on the Rays\u2019 watch. He got paid $5.72 million in his final year of arbitration eligibility, after getting just $1.85 million the year before\u2014the result of having pitched more innings in 2024 than in any two previous seasons of his career.<\/p>\n
Jax might be the most interesting case study, so let\u2019s circle back to him in just a moment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Image credit: IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect We\u2019ve gotten the one outlier out of the way. Freddy Peralta…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":427730,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[84504,64909,168111,135,3815,137,136],"class_list":["post-427729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tampa","tag-drew-rasmussen","tag-griffin-jax","tag-starter-conversion","tag-tampa","tag-tampa-bay-rays","tag-tampa-headlines","tag-tampa-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=427729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427729\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/427730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=427729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=427729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=427729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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