There's a new Ray of hope in Tampa: sweet-swinging Evan Longoria, the best of baseball's deepest crop of prospects -- and reason enough for a certain magazine to stand behind last year's prediction of future success

Young and Dukes didn't match the hype, but Longoria (above) has the look of a keeper. Al Tielemans/SI

By Ben Reiter

No, he is not even distantly related to her. No, his girlfriend's name is not Toni -- it's Savannah, and they've been dating, off and on, for seven years. No, he can't recall ever being involved in anything more scandalous than the time in high school he was required to pick up trash for four hours on a Saturday as punishment for shooting spitballs in class.

Evan Longoria's laid-back SoCal mien won't allow him to get too worked up about the uninspired gibes that come from having a name so similar to a certain actress's -- the chants of "EEEE-va! EEEE-va!"; the playing of the Desperate Housewives theme song when he steps to the plate in opposing ballparks. He's nowhere near as disgruntled as, say, Michael Bolton, the character in the 1999 cult comedy classic Office Space who angrily declared, "There was nothing wrong with it until I was about 12 years old and that no-talent ass clown became famous and started winning Grammys."

All that Longoria will allow is that "it's kind of a funny coincidence, but it does get pretty old." Carl Crawford, Longoria's Tampa Bay Rays teammate, believes Longoria won't have to worry about the cracks much longer. "He's going to make Evan Longoria the manliest name you can possibly think of," says Crawford, "once he shows what he can do on the baseball field."

While his negligee-favoring doppelgänger continues to dominate the Maxim Hot 100 list, Evan Longoria, 22, has soared up some lists of his own since he was drafted third overall out of Long Beach State by the Rays in June 2006. The 6' 2", 210-pound third baseman is generally considered to be among baseball's three best prospects. (He tops Scouts Inc.'s list, and both Baseball Prospectus and Baseball America rank him in the top three.) His skills are so obvious that teammates and opponents alike keep coming back to one phrase in particular to describe him.

"He's the real deal," says a player development executive for a National League club. "We had him ranked as the best college bat in the nation the year he came up -- great bat speed, balance -- and he's proved that out."

"He's got light-tower power," says Gary Gaetti, the former big league slugger who was Longoria's hitting coach last season at Triple A Durham. "But he's a good hitter too, and he uses the whole field. He's one of the better players I've ever seen coming through the minor leagues. He's the real deal."

"He looks as smooth at third base as anybody I've seen out there," says Rays centerfielder B.J. Upton. "My brother [Justin Upton, the first overall pick in 2005] played against him in Double A, and he called me and said, 'Dude, this guy Longoria you've got -- he's the real deal.' "

In the 171 games in which he played in 2007 (Double A, Triple A, the Arizona Fall League and with Team USA in November's World Cup) he had 33 homers, 115 RBIs and 42 doubles, while maintaining an on-base percentage above .400. And all signs indicate that his ascent will continue in Tampa Bay sooner rather than later. While the Rays say that they want to see how Longoria performs during spring training before naming him the Opening Day starter, they have already shifted last year's third baseman, Akinori Iwamura, to second. "For having played only a year-plus of pro baseball, he's extremely advanced," says Rays general manager Andrew Friedman. "But what's most important here is what's best in terms of his development, and whether that's at Triple A or on the big league level, or a combination of the two, remains to be seen."

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