Thursday, September 25, 2008

Scouting your team to head off mistakes

Another creative idea coming out of Tampa Bay where the Rays hired a former major league infielder as the club's "quality assurance coach."

His primary responsibility: "Scouting the Rays every day as another team would scout them."

Said Rays manager Joe Maddon: "Everybody talks about quality control. But that means evaluating things after they've occurred. Quality assurance means we're evaluating things in advance, trying to head off our mistakes."

By the way, for those who aren't baseball fans, the Rays won their 96th game of the season last night and are now one win away from clinching the AL East title.

Coach Maddon says confidence is the key:

"When you start believing in yourself that strongly, a lot of weird things happen for you, in a positive way. You have to believe it can happen for you, and our guys do."