He's kicking butts and getting his butt kicked

May 20, 2004|On baseball, Globe Staff

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. -- As a recently diagnosed diabetic, Lou Piniella was advised to quit smoking. He says he's been off the butts for four months, and is this close to kicking the habit. "Once in a while when we come in after we got beat," he said, "I feel like chewing one."

The Devil Rays were supposed to be better this year. How many Chamber of Commerce breakfasts and how many Rotary luncheons and how many country club cocktail crowds heard Piniella make that pledge this winter, that this would be the year Tampa Bay did something other than finish in last place in the American League East?

Instead, the Devil Rays are as bad as ever, which is a hard thing to say about a team that lost 99 games last season, Piniella's first as manager of his hometown team, and considered it progress.

The Devil Rays have played almost a quarter of their 2004 schedule, and have yet to win back-to-back games, the only major league team that has yet do so. They're only the third team in the last 72 years to go so deep into a season without winning two in a row. In their last 22 games, they'd lost 19, their worst stretch ever over 20-plus games.

At 10-28, the Devil Rays have the worst record in baseball. Worse than the disappointing Royals and Mariners, worse than the nomadic Expos, worse than the Schilling-less Diamondbacks.

"Sooner or later you come to the realization that this thing is not working," Piniella said. "How often do you want to get punched in the mouth?"

In Tuesday night's 7-3 loss to the Sox, Piniella's cleanup man was Julio Lugo, a shortstop of modest proportions who until last year had never hit more than 10 home runs in a season. "People see that," Lugo said, smiling at what he imagined was the reaction to that strategem, "and they're going to think I got stronger."

You do things like installing Julio Lugo as your cleanup man when the pitching staffs of seven National League teams are hitting for a higher batting average than the .157 posted by the half-dozen players Piniella has used as his designated hitter this season. Lugo was the seventh player Piniella has tried in the No. 4 hole. By contrast, Manny Ramirez has been the Sox' cleanup hitter in all but three of their 40 games this season.

"He's swinging the bat better than anyone else we got," Piniella said about using Lugo in the 4-hole, "as far as driving in runs."

Like just about everything else the Devil Rays have tried this season, the Lugo experiment didn't pan out. With runners on second and third and the score still close (2-1, Sox) in the sixth, Lugo popped up on Tim Wakefield's first pitch, ending the inning. In their next at-bat, the Sox scored five runs.