Lou Piniella must be the biggest blowhard in sports. I’ve never seen a man who so obviously needed to be fired.

Piniella, now in his third season as manager of the woeful Devil Rays, had this to say on the heels of Saturday’s 18-2 loss to the Pirates, which capped a 1-12 stretch and a four-game skid that saw the Rays outscored 59-25:

“This was supposed to be the breakout year […] The problem is, we got a new ownership group here that’s changed the direction of where we’re heading. They’re not interested about the present, they’re interested about the future, and that’s their right. When other teams are getting better presently, and we’re not, you’re going to get your butts beat, and that’s exactly what’s happening. I’m not going to take responsibility for this.”

Piniella, in his great concern for the present, has at various times during his tenure insisted on such winning moves as playing Julio Lugo every day at shortstop and Al Martin at designated hitter despite their questionable backgrounds, fairly negligible contributions, and the presence of younger players who could have used their playing time. During Piniella’s three years, the Devil Rays have called up top prospects like Carl Crawford and Rocco Baldelli before they were ready, while keeping prospects who were ready, like Jonny Gomes, on the farm for too long. The Devil Rays also traded away Joe Kennedy, a young lefty who posted a 6.13 ERA in his last season under Piniella and then proceeded to run up a 3.66 mark in Coors Field the next season. Nor were they able to get anything out of Ben Grieve or Josh Phelps, both of whom showed promise as young hitters before arriving in Tampa.

Let’s assume that Piniella bore no responsibility for any of this. The broader issue here is one of organizational philosophy. Piniella came to a team whose roster featured at most four players who were either quality big-leaguers or looked likely to become so. At some point between then and now he was given to understand that the team would start spending some money. Does he have a right to complain if they don’t do so? Perhaps, but there is another angle to this story.

Tampa Bay General Manager Chuck LaMar is now in his 10th year in charge of the Devil Rays. The team has never lost fewer than 90 games, and is at this point quite possibly the least successful franchise in major league history. LaMar is routinely called the worst GM in the game, and written about as if he not only has no clue what he’s doing but, more damningly, has no vision and no plan for turning his team into a winner.

That’s nonsense. LaMar has a real plan: Draft athletically talented high school kids with good character and teach them how to play winning baseball. It isn’t the most fashionable philosophy these days, and it’s not the one I would use to build a team, but it happens to work, provided an organization can rely on good scouts, good instructors, and the patience to see a plan through. It’s how the Atlanta Braves win year after year; not coincidentally, LaMar worked for the Braves from 1991-95, first as director of scouting and player development and then as assistant GM.

The Devil Rays’ problem, then, is execution. Their blunders are legendary. In the 1997 expansion draft, they picked Bobby Abreu from the Astros’ system, then traded him for veteran shortstop Kevin Stocker, who was out of the league by 2000. They spent their early years playing washed-up veterans like Wade Boggs, Greg Vaughn, and Jose Canseco, which apparently put ownership off spending any money at all.

When given the choice in 1999 of selecting the top high school pitcher or the top high-school hitter in the country with the first pick of the draft, they chose the hitter, Josh Hamilton, supposedly on grounds of character. Hamilton became a drug addict and has essentially washed out of baseball. You may have heard of the pitcher, Josh Beckett, who was a World Series MVP at 23.

While moves like these made the Devil Rays the laughingstock of baseball, they have maintained their commitment to a plan they feel will bring them long-term success. They have also made some innovative investments in state-of-the-art medical care, which have helped establish them as the healthiest team in the game, able to get more out of injury risks like pitcher Scott Kazmir than other teams would.

They deserve credit for that, just as they deserve credit for the awesome talent they’ve started developing. They may be mocked for their anachronistic devotion to high-school track stars and football players, but you draft 10 of those players in the hopes that one turns into a star, and several have indeed shown superstar potential. Outfielders Crawford and Baldelli are potential franchise talents, as are minor-league shortstop B.J. Upton and outfielder Delmon Young.

You could say the Rays got lucky with high draft picks. Another equally plausible explanation is that they put a plan in place that has taken many years to pay off. The Braves after all, began to build from within in the late 1970s, and their dedication to drafting and development didn’t start to pay off until the early 1990s.

The Tampa Bay plan won’t pay off with a manager like Piniella, though. Exactly how are young men like Crawford and Baldelli supposed to develop into winning players under a manager who denigrates their teammates and admits that they have no chance to win? How are prospects like Upton and Gomes supposed to learn if they’re jerked up to the majors on a whim only to be sent back down just as quickly when the manager decides he doesn’t like them? Why should fans believe a great team is in the making if the manager doesn’t?

In all likelihood, the Devil Rays aren’t going to turn into a great team any time soon, if for no other reason than that their habit of calling up their best prospects before they’re old enough to drink will see those players signing elsewhere before they’ve even hit their primes. And while you can give Chuck LaMar a lot more credit than he usually gets, he ultimately has to take the blame for the profound shortsightedness and utter stupidity of so many of the decisions that have been made under his watch.

Still, the D-Rays finally have a real shot at building an exciting, talented team, and it’s sad to see that possibility ruined by a sour, cantankerous man with nothing good to say about anything going on around him. It will take a long time for the Tampa organization to gain any credibility; the first step in doing so will be to shove a check in Piniella’s hand, tell him to get lost, and find someone who appreciates that the fruits of 10 years’ worth of failure and patience are finally flowering.