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Rays CEO Ken Babby on the “forever” ballpark, the Rays way, and the Yankees’ character | 13th & Park
Description
Tampa Bay Rays CEO Ken Babby joins Adam Goodman on 13th and Park for a wide-ranging conversation on what it takes to build a winning organization on a limited budget, why culture and chemistry are the Rays' real secret sauce, and what it felt like to celebrate a postseason series win over the New York Yankees in a champagne-soaked clubhouse just one year after acquiring the team. Babby traces his unconventional path from intern at the Washington Post to minor league owner of the Akron Rubber Ducks and Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp, and explains how 15 years of testing ideas in the minor leagues became the blueprint he brought to Tampa Bay.
Babby offers a candid look inside the Rays' baseball operations culture, crediting president Eric Neander and manager Kevin Cash, the longest-tenured manager-front-office duo in the game, with building a clubhouse where players choose to have dinner together on the road and play dominoes on the plane. He makes the case that Kevin Cash's unflappable calm is as important to the team's success as any analytics model, and reflects on what watching trade deadline decisions from the back of the room taught him about how elite organizations actually work.
The conversation turns to the Rays' long-awaited Forever Home, a new ballpark in Tampa that will be built adjacent to Steinbrenner Field. Babby describes a facility designed to feel like an open-air ballpark while delivering the climate-controlled comfort Florida demands, and calls it unlike anything currently in North America. He also walks through the remarkable off-field partnership with the Yankees, including the moment New York publicly backed the Tampa ballpark project and gave the Rays the home clubhouse at Steinbrenner Field for an entire season rather than displace their division rival.
The episode closes with a close look at the technology reshaping baseball, from the ABS challenge system to the replay review that overturned a would-be Anthony Volpe home run in Game 3 of the ALDS, a call Babby says exemplifies commissioner Rob Manfred's commitment to always getting the outcome right. Babby draws a through line from his early days checking box scores in the Washington Post to running one of the most creative franchises in the sport, and makes clear that for the Rays, the best is still ahead.
Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:33 Beating the Yankees
3:56 The Washington Post Years
6:21 Minor League Lessons
8:54 Players and the Clubhouse
11:08 The Rays' Secret Sauce
13:45 Small Ball and Team Chemistry
16:09 The New Tampa Ballpark
19:51 Technology and the ABS System
22:27 The Game 3 Replay Call
24:27 The Yankees Partnership
27:42 Rooting for the Rays
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