Junior Caminero is already forcing the Rays into unfamiliar territory.
The Tampa Bay third baseman has gone from rising talent to full-blown star in a hurry, and that reality came into sharp focus earlier this week during his conversation with ESPN’s Jeff Passan. The discussion touched on plenty of baseball ground, including his LIDOM Game 7 home run heard around the world and his thoughts on Cleveland trading him. But the most revealing part came when Passan shifted to labor talk, the looming lockout and the kind of money players like Juan Soto and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. have already landed.
Passan walked Caminero through the numbers and the history behind those mega deals, making the case that Caminero belongs in that same financial neighborhood. Caminero didn’t push back. He acknowledged that his contract potential is right there with Soto and Vladdy.
That’s the reality Tampa Bay now has to deal with. At 23, Caminero is already smashing records at a wild pace, whether it’s home run marks for players 23 or younger or the stretch where he hit seven homers in six games. He’s become a national name, the Rays’ franchise centerpiece, and the WAR leader on the American League’s best team at the All-Star Break.
For a club that has long made a habit of extending its own, Caminero presents a different kind of problem. Tampa Bay has usually worked one of three lanes with young players: lock them up before they’ve even reached the majors, as teams like the Mariners did with Colt Emerson; wait until a rookie has shown enough to justify a major commitment, like JJ Wetherholt recently did; or strike just before free agency, the way the Blue Jays did with Guerrero Jr.
Caminero doesn’t fit neatly into any of those boxes. He’s far beyond prospect status, but he’s also no longer the kind of hidden gem Tampa Bay could quietly secure on the cheap. The Rays know what they have now, and that changes everything.
This is a franchise that has done this before. Evan Longoria signed multiple extensions.
So did Kevin Kiermaier and Chris Archer. Keeping homegrown talent has always been part of the Rays’ DNA.
But Caminero is a different test. He’s too big a star to be treated like a bargain, and Tampa Bay’s budget likely won’t allow the kind of commitment that a player of his stature would command. That leaves the Rays in a bind they haven’t really faced before.
For now, the best thing they can count on is more moments like the ones Caminero has already delivered. Long term, though, his future in Tampa Bay is far from certain.
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The most striking example is still the one Houston fans cannot quite get over, because the path that brought Yordan Alvarez there was so unlikely it has become part of baseball lore. Elsewhere in the All-Star mix, players like Clement and Griffin were reminders that a stalled career can still be revived, whether through a change of scenery or a long route back to relevance. For Toronto, it all serves as a useful backdrop to the kind of pitching and roster-building the club is betting on now, even if one of the nights biggest stories was how thin the line can be between a forgotten transaction and a franchise-changing one. [Read more 🡒]