2018 MLB Thread

Fudge Nuggets · April 19, 2018

50 minutes ago, clapclapclap said:

You can open a second window for audio and mute the video window. Which works great for a half inning, after which the video audio turns itself up at each commercial break and coming back from each break. So stupid.

Perhaps that can be worked around by opening the radio side on a separate device, but I haven't cared enough to try that.

Thanks, but won’t work throug a Roku. I just wish they would leave stuff well enough alone. If it ain’t broke, don’t fuck with it.

B00M · April 19, 2018

15 hours ago, WBT said:

Hey Manfred, go fuck yourself. This is great.

That Twins Indians game in Puerto Rico would have been so much better to watch if the announcers would ever talk about the fucking game. It was 0-0 forever, and they spoke constantly about ludicrous rule changes (putting a runner on 2B in extra innings -- WTF!?) and players like Roberto Clemente without ever managing to even tell a good story. If they had seemed even remotely interested in what was happening on the field, it would have been far less boring.

spystud13 · April 19, 2018

That might be the greatest triple play in history. Holy fuck, Gattis.

Rustic Horn · April 19, 2018

Rustic Horn · April 19, 2018

Phillies wearing throwback powder blues tonight....

Goo Punch · April 20, 2018

Those look awesome.

Beau Vine · April 20, 2018

2 minutes ago, Goo Punch said:

Those look awesome.

Yep, the blue Phillies were the best of those blues that so many teams used to wear.

Completely unrelated, but here's Stark's theathletic column for the week:

Quote

Here in the Useless Info Department, we try to keep our eyes on the field every moment of every day. It’s just been a little tougher than usual this month – because we keep having to wipe the sleet off our windshield!

So how much of a nightmare has the weather been for our favorite sport so far? We thought we’d let you know just how much, in that helpful way of ours…

USELESS IN-FROST DEPARTMENT

If you live in the Midwest or Northeast portion of our otherwise spectacular American land, you may have noticed something:

Your favorite team never actually plays.

Oh, sure. I exaggerate. It plays once in a while. But in order to do that, it has to set a franchise record every darned night for Most Guys Playing Baseball in Ski Masks.

The Summer Game, huh?

We’re only three weeks into the season. But already, the standings tell us there’s some weird, weird stuff going on. How can you have a sport in which one team (Texas) has already played 20 games while another, in the same league (Minnesota), has only played 13 games? Granted, that wasn’t on purpose. But holy wind-chill factor. What a mess.

So our Useless Info investigators have been looking into all these weather-related schedule fiascos. And here’s what they tell us:

— The season is now 21 days old. The meteorological powers that be have already wreaked such havoc that we’ve only had four days where all 30 teams have managed to get in a game.

Only one other time, in the two decades since baseball expanded to 30 teams, has there been a season like this – in which there were this few days, over the first three weeks, where every team was able to play a game. That, the Elias Sports Bureau reports, was in 2007 (also four).

Compare that to the previous three seasons (through 21 days):

2017 – 9
2016 – 7
2015 – 11

—  Remember when the box-score page used to be filled with “ERs” and “RBIs?” Now all we can find is “PPDs.” We’ve seen 25 games “postponed” in the first three weeks of this season – with a week and a half still left in April. That’s already the most postponements before May 1 in over a decade – since there were 26 banged in 2007.

—  Meanwhile, in balmy Minneapolis, the White Sox and Twins had three straight games snowed out over the weekend. According to Elias, it’s the first time two teams had that many consecutive games disappear on them because of weather since the Mariners and Twins had a four-game series wiped out by snowflakes in April 2007.

—  So between dodging snow plows and spending an off day Monday in Puerto Rico, the Twins went an incredible 116 hours and 5 minutes without a pitch being thrown. In case they’re interested, all the other teams scored 417 runs in those 116 hours and 5 minutes, while the Twins were busy tweeting photos of their local winter wonderland.

— Of course, we could probably make a case that not playing has worked out better than actually playing for some of these teams. And by “better,” of course, we mean: “warmer.” According to baseball-reference.com’s awesome Play Index, there have been 27 games in the first three weeks featuring first-pitch temperatures in the 30s.

You know how many games like that there were all last season? Exactly one!

You know how many there had been in the previous four seasons combined? How about 25!

You know how many other times in the last 50 seasons there were even 20 games in the 30s over the entire season? How about none. (The previous record was 19, in 2003.) Take a look at this year-by-year list of games with temps in the baseball-like 30s:

2018 – 27
2017 – 1
2016 – 8
2015 – 4
2014 – 12

And the most on record in any of the last 50 seasons:

2018 – 27
2003 – 19
2007 – 18
2013 – 17
1996 – 17

Brrrrrrrr.

—  Hey, ever heard that old expression, “You could wake that guy up in December, send him out onto the tundra and he’d hit a line drive?” Well, here’s your official Mr. Tundra of 2018 – the Tigers’ Nicholas Castellanos!

According to our friend, Bill Chuck, Castellanos leads the major leagues with nine hits in games that started with a temperature of 39 degrees or below. That’s more hits than Carlos Santana, Chris Davis or Randal Grichuk have all year, by the way. In any weather!

But in case you thought it was only trouble if a game was scheduled in the great outdoors, well, think again. In other postponement news ….

DOME SWEET DOME OF THE WEEK

Ever seen a game in the beautiful Rogers Centre in Toronto? If you have, perhaps you’ve noticed something. There’s a roof on top.

But a lot of good that did for the Blue Jays and Royals on Monday – when they managed to have their game postponed inside a domed stadium, thanks to a giant icicle that plummeted off the nearby CN Tower and put a hole in that fabled roof.

So maybe you’re wondering: How rare is it for a game to get postponed in a domed stadium? Thanks for asking. We have your answer, for every dome currently in existence. (We excluded postponements related to 9/11.)

Arizona and Seattle – 0
Miami – 1 (hurricane)
Houston – 3 (hurricanes)
Tampa Bay – 3 (hurricanes)
Milwaukee – 1 (power outage in 2001)
Toronto – 2 (2018 icicle, 2001 roof damage)

But none of those compare with the strangest dome postponements ever. For the top three in that prestigious department, we turn to our friend and favorite dome authority, Richard Griffin, once a public-relations legend for the Expos, now a fabulous baseball columnist for the Toronto Star. His top five reasons for games that got called off in domed stadiums:

1. 1986 Fire in Montreal – A workman lit a cigarette with a torch one day, up on the tower being used to add retractability to the roof of Stade Olympique. And guess what happened? Yup. The scaffolding caught fire – smoking out an Expos-Padres game, to the disappointment of dozens. Even though the tower eventually got finished, Stade Olympique never did quite master the art of retractability. (More on that later.)

2. 1991 Beam Issues in Montreal – A 55-ton concrete beam fell off the side of the stadium in September, forcing the Expos to embark on a leisurely 26-day road trip to finish their season. At least, Griffin once quipped, it inspired “the official Olympic Stadium cocktail – Beam on the Rocks.”

3. 1994 Tile-out in Seattle – A falling tile in the late, great Kingdome caused the Mariners to postpone two games in July and head on the road for what would have been 2 ½ months if a strike hadn’t stopped the season in mid-August. Griffin recalls the Mariners then adding a new ground rule: “Tile goes to the runner.”

4. 1987 Indoor Rainout in Montreal – So there were the Expos, playing the Cardinals one day with the roof open, when it started to rain. No problem. The Expos had a retractable roof. Oops. Big problem: Their awesome $1-billion retractable roof wouldn’t close. Turned out, Griffin said, they forgot to read a small footnote to the roof-closing instructions – the one that mentioned you couldn't open or close the lid with winds higher than 20 miles per hour. Hate when that happens!

BARTOLO WATCH OF THE WEEK

In this week’s adventure in Bartolo Colon-watching, our svelte hero went to the mound in Houston last Sunday night and did exactly what you’d expect a 44-year-old pitching artiste to do:

He took a perfect game into the eighth. Against the defending World Series champs.

I know life in our household pretty much froze in its tracks as Bartolo took the mound in the eighth, just six outs away from becoming the oldest man ever to throw a no-hitter. So here come a few fun little Bartolo nuggets:

— As the Elias Sports Bureau reminded us, only four pitchers in their 40s have ever thrown a no-hitter: Cy Young, Warren Spahn, Nolan Ryan (twice) and Randy Johnson. And Colon was eight months older than Ryan was when he became the oldest man ever to pitch a no-hitter in 1991 (44 years, 90 days). Oh, well.

— But even though Bartolo then lost that no-hitter on a Josh Reddick double, that was the only hit he did allow – meaning he still ranks fourth on the list of oldest pitchers in the live-ball era to go at least seven innings and give up no more than one hit. Here’s that awesome list, according to baseball-reference.com:

Jamie Moyer (46 years, 240 days) on July 16, 2009
Randy Johnson (45 years, 221 days) on April 19, 2009
Nolan Ryan (45 years, 111 days) on May 21, 1992
Bartolo Colon (44 years, 326 days) last Sunday

— And now our favorite Bartolo note of the week: This was the second time he’s thrown at least seven innings of one-hit ball in his 40s. (He also did it last year as a Brave.) Naturally, that’s more times than he did that in either his 20s (once) or his 30s (once)! Because of course it is.

By the way, the first time he ever had a game like this? It was Sept. 18, 2000, at Yankee Stadium. Luis Polonia broke up the no-hitter with one out in the eighth. Luis Polonia sighting!

JARLIN THE MARLIN

Until this week, you’d probably never seen the names Jarlin García and Bobo Holloman in the same sentence. And you probably thought you never would. But baseball is beautiful, friends, in its ability to manufacture the awesome randomness that allows us to connect those dots.

Jarlin García spent the first 70 outings of his big-league career as a relief pitcher. But it’s the last two – where the Marlins finally gave him a chance to start – that made history.

In the first start, April 11 against the Mets: 6 innings, zero hits.

In the second start, Tuesday against the Yankees: 5 innings, 1 hit.

Whoa. That’ll work.

— Elias tells us that Jarlin the Marlin’s 10 straight hitless innings, to kick off the first two starts of his career, tie the record for that sort of thing – a record set by (yep) Bobo Holloman in 1953.

—You should know that in their next inning, Garcia got the first out before allowing a hit – unlike Holloman, who actually gave up four straight hits and got yanked. So technically, Garcia went 10 1/3 hitless to Holloman’s 10 and ought to hold that record. Alas, baseball doesn’t count partial innings toward hitless streaks for starters. So apply that asterisk at your very own risk!

—But even cooler, there are only four other active starters who have ever spun off two starts in a row of at least five shutout innings with either one hit or no hits allowed. Good group:

Max Scherzer, Chris Sale, Matt Harvey and Rich Hill.

—And even cooler than that, there have been just six starters in the entire live-ball era to spin off back-to-back starts in which they allowed no hits in one start and one hit in the other, in the same week (in either order):

Scherzer (June 14-20, 2015)
Kent Mercker (Sept. 4-9, 1993)
Dennis Eckersley (May 30-June 3, 1977)
Jim Tobin (April 23-27, 1944)
Dazzy Vance (Sept. 8-13, 1925)
Howard Ehmke (Sept. 7-11, 1923)

And now there’s Jarlin García. He’s no Johnny Vander Meer. But he’s not exactly filling up the hit column!

MOOKIE OF THE WEEK

You can’t stop Mookie Betts. You can only hope to contain him. All he did Monday, in a game started by Shohei Ohtani, was lead off the game with a homer and then go on to hit three home runs. Wow.

That would be dazzling enough – except for this: It’s the second time the Mook-meister has thumped three homers in a game while hitting leadoff. And that puts him into rarified territory.

Leadoff men in history who hit three homers in a game more than once: Mookie and Alfonso Soriano. And that’ll do it for that list.

—But there’s also this…

3-HR games out of the leadoff spot:
Mookie Betts – 2
All other active AL hitters combined – 1 (Brian Dozier, on 9/5/16)
All other AL leadoff men since 2000 – 2 (Dozier and Melvin Upton Jr.)

Just so you know, 1,213 players have hit leadoff for an AL team since 2000. And Betts has reeled off as many three-homer games as the other 1,212 put together.

THE 200-200 MAN

With the 200^th plunking of his career this week, Chase Utley has joined one of the coolest clubs ever – the 200-200 Club (200 homers, 200 HBPs)! Here’s the member roll:

HBP HR

Craig Biggio 285 291

Don Baylor 267 338

Chase Utley 200 259

Just missed: The great Frank Robinson – with 586 homers, and a mere 198 plunkings. I’d love to know how many of those homers came after those HBPs. I’d guess, oh, 198!

THE ASTROS K KLUB

Is there a more dominating rotation in our midst than the Houston Astros? They’re already up to six games this season in which one of their starting pitchers piled up 11 strikeouts or more (from four different pitchers yet). And that puts them on pace for an incredible 51 starts of 11 or more. Wait – 51?

That would nearly double the record for this sort of thing, set by the 2001 Diamondbacks. That team did it 26 times – all 26 by Randy Johnson (16) and Curt Schilling (10).

The only other rotations that even did it 20 times in a season: The 2002 Diamondbacks (22 –21 of them from Johnson and Schilling, with the other coming from Brian Anderson) and the 1973 Angels (21 times –19 of them by Nolan Ryan alone).

Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is some serious swinging and missing!

STRANGE BUT TRUE FEATS OF THE WEEK

You know how hard it is to hit a ball over the fence and have it not be a home run? Deven Marrero of the Diamondbacks can tell you all about it. He was just starting to enjoy his home run trot at Dodger Stadium last Saturday when Alex Avila, the runner on first, decided he wasn’t sure if the ball had made it over the fence – so he headed back to first to tag up. When Marrero passed him on his way around first, it turned his picturesque three-run homer into a two-run single. And he was called out (theoretically) advancing to second.

If he ever wants to commiserate, he should know there is only one other active player who has been called out after a ball he hit over the fence. That would be Marlins catcher J.T. Realmuto, who performed this very same feat, by passing Marcell Ozuna on his own way around first, on May 9, 2016. Over… and out.

— Charlie Blackmon has seven home runs for the Rockies this year. They all have one amazing thing in common: He has hit none of them at Coors Field. And that would be a record – for the Rockies, anyway. Or at least it ties a record held by Ian Stewart, who also hit his first seven on the road in 2010. We’re now officially suspending all talk of Blackmon’s home/road splits.

— All right, what are the odds of this? Last Thursday, the Padres got one-hit by the Giants – and the only hit was by a pitcher (Clayton Richard, who was actually pinch-hitting). Four days before that, the Reds got one-hit by the Pirates – and their only hit was by a pitcher (Tyler Mahle). So when was the last time you saw two games like that in the same week? That, of course, would be never.

In fact, according to Elias, the last time there were even two games like that in the same season was 83 years ago, back in 1935. Orville Jorgens of the Phillies busted up a Hal Schumaker one-hitter for the Giants on April 28. Then, on June 28, Mace Brown of the Pirates got the only hit off Roy Henshaw of the Cubs. And why do we bring you those names? Because who among us wouldn’t be looking for any excuse to type the names Orville Jorgens and Mace Brown?

—   Speaking of pitchers who enjoy showing up their own hitters, only our buddy Doug (Kernels) Kern would notice that on Monday, the Brewers got one extra-base hit – and it was by a relief pitcher (Jorge Lopez).

That’s the first time that’s ever happened in almost five decades worth of Brewers games. But the great Dave Smith, founder of Retrosheet, combed through every game in the last nine seasons and only unearthed one other time any team had pulled that off: April 29, 2014 – when a Donn Roach double represented their only extra-base hit in a game at AT&T Park.

—  Finally, there’s the ultimate one-man show: Eric Thames. On Tuesday, the Brewers beat the Reds, 2-0, and all the runs came on a two-run homer by Thames. On Wednesday, the Brewers beat the Reds, 2-0, again – with all the runs coming on a two-run homer by … right you are, Eric Thames.

So we know what you’re thinking: How often do two teams play back-to-back games where the only runs scored in either of them come from a home run by the same guy in each game? We ran that question past the Elias Sports Bureau. And you tell us which is more amazing:

Is it that it’s only happened twice in all the seasons since 1900?

Or is it the fact that the one other time it happened was, well, three weeks ago – when Joe Panik did it in the first two games of the season?

So never in 118 consecutive seasons…and then twice in three weeks!

Have we mentioned lately that baseball is tremendous?

dbecks · April 20, 2018

The Red Sox have 116 runs this season.

The Indians have 116 hits.

Beau Vine · April 20, 2018

Rosenthal from theathletic, pretty fucking fascinating:

Quote

Fernando Tatis Jr., the game’s No. 8 prospect according to MLBPipeline.com, wanted to give himself every possible chance to succeed.

For Tatis, a shortstop at Double A with the San Diego Padres organization, that meant hiring a personal trainer, eating better food, getting a better apartment — things that all cost money. So last off-season, he agreed to a contract with Big League Advance (BLA), a company that offers select minor leaguers upfront payments in exchange for a percentage of their future MLB earnings.

Jóse Osuna, a Triple A outfielder with the Pittsburgh Pirates, made the same financial choice as Tatis in the spring of 2017, saying the additional money from BLA enables him to play under less pressure while supporting his wife, Karla, and daughter, Karla Sophia, 3.

Another Triple A player, who requested that his name not be used, signed with BLA while at High A at the start of the 2017 season, then enlisted a financial advisor to help him make investments with that money to secure his long-term future even if he fails to reach the majors.

Michael Schwimer, a 32-year-old former pitcher for the Philadelphia Phillies who is the president and CEO of BLA, said the goal of his company is to help minor leaguers guard against uncertain futures. The upfront payment from BLA is not a loan — if a player busts, he owes the company nothing.

“I tell every investor, ‘If you invest in the stock market and you lose, you’re losing money on Apple stock or whatever,” Schwimer said. “If you invest in Big League Advance and lose, you have changed someone’s life.”

Yet, in the view of many player agents, the players’ union and Cleveland Indians catching prospect Francisco Mejia, who is suing BLA, the company is far from an altruistic venture.

Mejia’s suit, first reported by ESPN.com, alleges that BLA used “unconscionable” tactics to persuade him to give up 10 percent of his future earnings for three separate payments totaling $360,000. BLA, which denies any wrongdoing, filed a counterclaim asking the court to dismiss Mejia’s case, uphold his contract, award damages caused by the public disclosure of his contract provisions and issue a permanent injunction against Mejia prohibiting him from further revealing details of the contract, Schwimer said.

At least two other agencies also are considering filing suit against BLA on behalf of clients, according to sources. One prominent agent, who spoke on condition of anonymity as his agency considers whether to take legal action against BLA, called the company, “a very, very bad thing for players that needs to be regulated by the league and the union.”

“They use predatory tactics against certain types of players,” the agent said. “We find it offensive and detrimental to the players in many ways. I predict it’s going to lead to an abundance of lawsuits and turmoil in these players’ lives when they realize what they’ve been talked into, often against their agents’ advice.”

The union, responding to inquiries from agents, issued a memo — a copy of which was obtained by The Athletic — to all certified and limited certified agents on Jan. 19, 2016. David Prouty, then the union’s general counsel, said in the memo that the union “categorically” did not endorse or approve of BLA and its products and warned the future earnings the company sought from players were “significant.”

BLA’s actions, which sometimes include bypassing agents and contacting players directly, also have drawn attention from Major League Baseball.

Responding to complaints from players, MLB informed Baseball America during the 2017 Arizona Fall League season that BLA representatives were using media credentials issued by the publication to recruit players, sources said. Schwimer said MLB told him only that BLA “falsely impersonated Baseball America employees,” a charge both Schwimer and officials at the publication said was not true.

Baseball America, they said, had hired BLA to conduct video interviews and provide other content. After hearing from MLB, Baseball America asked BLA to return the credentials, and BLA complied. MLB then informed BLA that its reps were not allowed in areas with private access to players at major league ballparks, sources said; agents often face similar restrictions, depending upon the park.

In a letter to Dan Halem, MLB’s deputy commissioner for baseball administration and chief legal officer, Schwimer said, “at no point did any BLA representatives use the access granted to them by the media credentials to sell the BLA product or otherwise solicit AFL players.” Schwimer told The Athletic he has sought repeatedly to meet with MLB officials to discuss the matter and explain how his company works. MLB will consider meeting with BLA in the future, sources said.

Michael Schwimer with the Phillies in 2012 (Getty)

“We were unaware of any players complaining about our behavior to MLB, but it is something we take very seriously as we pride ourselves in our relationships with players,” Schwimer said. “We will work with MLB to address and resolve the issue. It is certainly never our intention to inappropriately communicate with any player.”

Schwimer said BLA recently signed its 100th player and has raised more than $100 million from investors since 2014. The company’s board includes Paul DePodesta, a former major league executive who is now the chief strategy officer for the NFL’s Cleveland Browns, and Marvin Bush, the son of former President George H.W. Bush and former First Lady Barbara Bush, who is the managing partner of Winston Partners, a private equity firm.

“Any allegation or accusation that would suggest we have ever acted in an unethical or unprofessional manner is simply not true,” Schwimer said. “The reason we have such an incredible board and investor base is because they understand we act with total integrity and total honesty at all times.”

Schwimer said the saddest thing he saw during his professional career was after a game in 2009, when he was pitching for the Phillies’ Class A affiliate in Clearwater, Fla.

He had worked out following the game and was one of the last to leave the park. As Schwimer walked to his car in the poorly-lit parking lot he heard a curious rumbling. What he saw shocked him.

“It was one of my teammates in the dumpster looking for food so he could eat the next day,” Schwimer said.

Schwimer, who had received a mere $5,000 bonus as the Phillies’ 14th-round pick out of the University of Virginia in 2008, already was acutely aware of the financial challenges minor leaguers faced.

Those challenges drew increased attention last month when Congress, as part of a $1.3 million trillion spending bill, decreed minor leaguers to be seasonal employees not subject to overtime laws. The section of the bill known as the “Save America’s Pastime Act” requires minor leaguers to be paid minimum wage for 40 hours a week during the regular season. Such players, like their major league counterparts, are not paid during spring training.

The difference is that the major league minimum salary is $545,000, while minor league salaries are a tiny fraction of that amount. Triple A salaries range from $11,825 to $14,850 for a 5 1/2 month season, depending upon a player’s experience. Double A salaries start at $9,350, while High A and Low A salaries range from $6,050 to $8,400. As recently noted by The Athletic’s Levi Weaver, the federally-recognized poverty line for single-individual households is $12,140 per year.

The disparity in major- and minor-league pay gnawed at Schwimer during his playing career. At one point, he approached the late Michael Weiner, then the head of the players’ union, about “bridging the gap.” According to Schwimer, Weiner told him, “I’m sorry. We don’t deal with that. Part of our job as a union is to protect the players we serve. And we serve major league players, not minor leaguers.”

Schwimer, who majored in sociology at Virginia but had a passion and aptitude for statistics, said he developed the idea for Big League Advance in 2013, the year he suffered a torn labrum after getting traded by the Phillies to the Toronto Blue Jays. He began raising money for the company in 2014-15 and offering deals to minor leaguers in ‘16.

The idea of helping minor leaguers achieve a measure of financial security also appealed to DePodesta, the former GM of the Dodgers who is perhaps known for his time as Billy Beane’s assistant with the Oakland Athletics during the “Moneyball” years.

“Professional baseball players accept an enormous amount of career risk to pursue a dream,” DePodesta said. “It’s a dream many of us have, but few have the chance to pursue, so these guys chase it. Their sacrifice is startling — school, friends, family and even things like having a say over where you can live — and the tough part is that so few of them actually make it. So few!

“For me, some of my most cherished takeaways from baseball were conversations with or notes from players who didn’t make it. Players who told me they treasured their time as part of the organization, that they greatly appreciated all that was done for them both on the field and off, that they knew how much we cared about them and that they will continue to look upon it as the most formative experience of their lives going forward. That’s just special. I wanted to be able to continue to help those guys who have both the boldness and passion to chase that brass ring, even if they fall short.”

The concept behind BLA is similar to that of Fantex, a company that awarded upfront money to major leaguers such as Los Angeles Angels left-hander Andrew Heaney, Baltimore Orioles second baseman Jonathan Schoop and Philadelphia Phillies third baseman Maikel Franco in exchange for a portion of future earnings both on and off the field. The union does not formally object to such deals but advises members who are considering them to hire a financial advisor and securities lawyer in addition to an agent.

Schwimer said BLA uses a propriety algorithm to value every player in the minors. The system might determine that a player merits an $800,000 offer in exchange for the maximum 10 percent of his future earnings. The player might opt to accept a lesser payment at a lower proportional percentage – say, $160,000 for 2 percent or $80,000 for one percent.

Whatever the player decides, the more money he earns, the more he must return to BLA — a player who signs for 10 percent of his future earnings will owe the company $10 million if he earns $100 million, $20 million if he earns $200 million, and so on. Tatis, who did not reveal the terms of his deal, said, “If I’m a successful player and make big money, I’m not going to care about giving that money away. That will be nothing if I make all that big money.”

Schwimer, who said he requires all potential signees to review BLA contracts with an attorney, compared his company’s business plan to that of a Silicon Valley startup.

“In just about all of our deals, if a player doesn’t make it to the middle of arbitration, play four or five years, he is still making money on this deal,” Schwimer said. “Really the only way to lose money on the deal is if you play five years or more, become a superstar. Then you’re going to be paying for all the other players.

“It’s the exact same thing as a Silicon Valley startup, where if you’re a tech investor, you’re going to invest in a hundred tech startups hoping to find the next Facebook or Google or whatever. You’re going to lose money on 90 percent of them. But the 10 percent should pay for them, plus a lot more money than you lost.

“We know we’re going to lose money on the vast majority of deals we sign with players — we know that. But we hope to hit on a few guys who are wildly successful.”

A player’s deal with BLA does not affect his agent’s commission; the player will pay the agent the same fee, generally between 3 and 5 percent of his earnings. Yet, Schwimer acknowledges that, “all agents hate us,” exaggerating perhaps only slightly.

The complaints of player representatives include:

*The potential for exploitation.

Some agents say young players often fail to see the big picture — the future income tax they must pay, the agent fees that no longer might be deductible, the payments to BLA they will need to make not just once, but every year.

Schwimer disputes any notion that his company misleads players, saying he wants the players to have as much information as possible. Agent Storm Kirschenbaum, whose clients include Colorado Rockies outfielder Mike Tauchman, Boston Red Sox right-hander Marcus Walden and Detroit Tigers right-hander Warwick Saupold, said Schwimer takes a professional approach.

“He is not a pushy salesman,” said Kirschenbaum, who has clients working with BLA. “He played the game. He understands the risk and benefit of doing the deal. He presents the offer and that is it.

“He takes a step back. He will answer questions for you. But they are not going to put the player in an uncomfortable position. I think that is why they’ve had success.”

*The targeting of Latin players.

The agent who talked about “predatory tactics against certain types of players” was referring to Latins who come from disadvantaged backgrounds and might be more vulnerable to short-term financial inducements at the expense of long-term earnings.

Schwimer does not deny the BLA roster is heavy on Latin talent, but declined to reveal the exact percentages of Latins compared to North American-born players. He did say that the numbers would be more proportional if Latins and North Americans were subject to the same entry rules as amateurs.

Latins are eligible to sign with major league clubs when they are 16, while North Americans do not become draft-eligible until their senior year of high school.

*BLA’s bypassing of agents to make direct contact with players and their families.

Schwimer said the company will talk with family members at a player’s request, adding parents occasionally will contact the company seeking offers for their sons. But he could not recall an instance of BLA initiating such a conversation.

Schwimer, however, does not deny bypassing agents, saying they were “bold-face lying” to players to dissuade them from taking his deals.

“We started going directly to players. We did this to make sure they understood,” Schwimer said. “Keep in mind, the very first thing we told the player is, ‘We want to work with your agent. I just want to let you know what we have on the table.’

“At those meetings, I’ve had players tell me, ‘OK, I’m ready to sign this.’ We say, ‘Absolutely not. We will not sign you now. You need to get advice from your family, your agent, representatives’ . . . We’ve lost players because of it, but I don’t care. That does not bother me. What bothers me is if any player ever would sign with us without really understanding it.”

Many players reject BLA deals. They might consider the offer too low. They might prefer to bet on themselves rather than sacrifice future earnings. Not every agent, however, opposes the concept. Kirschenbaum and others believe it can be quite beneficial for players in certain circumstances.

“It’s clever,” Kirschenbaum said. “It’s a great idea to have outside-the-box financial options for players. It’s their money. It’s their ability to take that risk, their option to entertain and accept that risk.

“If they understand and become educated, after going through the exercise of reviewing the contract with Big League Advance, go through our analytics of what we think they will earn throughout their career and what money could potentially be left on the table — it’s ultimately their decision.

“I’m not going to be the one to say no to a player who may be in a financial crisis, who may have a family issue or may have his own family that he wants to build a house for. Life is going to throw curveballs at you all day long. Sometimes a baseball career is not going to afford you the opportunity to do things at that time in your life where Big League Advance would step in and provide that opportunity.”

The agents who dislike BLA, Schwimer said, are afraid of losing clients, afraid that a rival agent eventually will tell a player — in Schwimer’s words — “Your idiot agent told you to do this deal with Big League Advance. Now you’re going to lose so much money. Come sign with me. I would have never told you to do that.”

Lost in the argument, Schwimer said, are the players who will not reach the majors after signing with BLA, but leave baseball in a better financial position.

“All the agents care about are the players who make it. They don’t care about the players who don’t,” Schwimer said. “We are the only people who care about the 90-plus percent who don’t.”

To an extent that might be true, considering that only players on 40-man rosters are eligible to join the union. BLA, however, is not offering deals to most of the 90-plus percent. One agent said BLA has shown a knack for identifying lesser prospects who reach the majors, as well as potential stars such as Tatis and Mejia.

Tatis, the son of former major leaguer Fernando Tatis, signed with the Chicago White Sox for $700,000 in July 2015, then was sent to the Padres in the James Shields trade in June 2016. He is off to a slow start at Double A, batting .196 with one homer and a .541 OPS through 53 plate appearances. But with his BLA money, he upgraded not only his training regimen in the U.S. but also his off-season practice field in his native Dominican Republic.

He will worry later about any future obligation to BLA.

“I’m not afraid,” Tatis said. “I’m not going to spend that money stupidly. You’ve got to be smart with your decisions, with what you’re going to do.”

VolenteHawk · April 20, 2018

Good read. Thanks for sharing.

Beau Vine · April 20, 2018

Then I'm going to predict that you'll really like this one from theathletic:

Quote

KANSAS CITY — In one version of the story, it was a tape recorder. In another, a sharp piece of office supplies. For years, nobody could say for sure. They watched the famous video tape, and they listened to the F-bombs. They replayed it slowly, frame by frame, like a managerial Zapruder film. The sports writers still weren’t sure, even Alan Eskew, the baseball beat man who took the foreign object to the face.

This much, we know: The flying object left a bloody, 1 1/2-inch gash on Eskew’s right cheek. It required a trip to the trainer’s room and a tetanus shot. It is, a quarter-century later, the most famous media injury in the history of the Royals, the bloody symbol of a wild managerial tirade. And 25 years, Eskew is almost certain: It was probably an ashtray.

“Which they don't have anymore,” he said. “I guess I should have ducked.”

He didn’t duck, of course, because he never saw it coming. Nobody did. Not the scribes. Not the effin’ players. Not the radio host who lit the fuse on a powder keg.

On the night of April 26, 1993, Eskew and a group of reporters shuffled into the office of Royals manager Hal McRae. It was just minutes after a 5-3 loss to the Detroit Tigers. The Royals were in the midst of another sluggish April, stumbling to a 7-12 start.

What happened next is franchise lore, a beautiful maelstrom of flying telephones and tape recorders, of bleeps and bloodied reporters, of awkward silence and an opened vodka bottle.

The meltdown came to underscore the managerial career of McRae, the former designated hitter known for his takedown slides, toughness and take-no-shit persona. It would live on in the world of YouTube and social media. Yet 25 years later, the men inside the room say this is only half the story.

“Hal was one of my favorite players,” Eskew said.

“He managed just like he played,” former Royals pitcher Mark Gubicza said.

“He was great to cover,” said Rick Plumlee, a former beat writer for the Wichita Eagle.

On that night 25 years ago, the reporters laid their tape recorders down and crowded around the manager’s desk. They had a deadline to meet and a loss to document. And moments later, a radio host named John Doolittle spoke up with a simple question:

“Did you consider Brett for Miller with the bases loaded in the seventh?”

If you’re a Royals fan of a certain age, you’ve probably read a story written by Alan Eskew. Even if you don’t know it. He arrived on the Royals beat in the summer of 1979, five years after he started as a cub reporter at the Topeka Capital-Journal. He covered the team for close to two decades, riding the tiger in the golden days of newspapers, when every local paper sent a beat writer on the road.

He flew on the team charter. He cranked out copy and met deadlines. He was so diligent about each little germane detail that he eventually earned a simple nickname: “Scoop.”

It might have come from Clint Hurdle, or maybe it was manager Dick Howser. He can’t say for sure. But “Scoop” it was. He loved the life, loved everything about it, the travel, the deadlines, the playoff runs, the fulfillment of a childhood dream while growing up in Dallas.

“I wanted to be a sports writer since I was in the eighth grade,” he said.

These days, “Scoop” still covers most Royals home games for The Associated Press. It’s not glamorous work, of course. He chases injury updates. He scours for little nuggets that go out over the wire. Not many fans are waiting for his tweets or consuming his coverage in real time. It’s old-school ball writing. He loves it.

In the world of sports writing, Eskew is a familiar character — grizzled, kind, diligent, a part of the Royals in the same way as an old, weathered bat bag. Most people in the organization can’t remember when he wasn’t around; when he wasn’t asking about an injury in a soft, stilted twang. Look hard enough, though, and just about every beat has a Scoop.

“He’s a classic,” said Gubicza, who pitched for the Royals from 1984 to 1996.

And in the early days, Eskew found himself dropped into the midst of a fascinating story. The Royals were a perennial American League power, lording over the AL West in the late 1970s and early 80s. In his first summer, George Brett had just turned 26; second baseman Frank White was 28. The club made the World Series the next season, dethroning the Yankees in a tense American League Championship Series. Brett battled hemorrhoids during the World Series. There was always something to write about.

In the clubhouse, the writers navigated an established roster. It wasn’t easy for a young reporter. But there was one veteran who always offered insight, who loved to talk hitting, who delivered frank and honest assessments. His name was Hal McRae, designated hitter.

“He taught me more about hitting than anybody,” Eskew said.

McRae was 33 years old that first summer. He had played in two of this three All-Star Games. He had wiped out Willie Randoph in the 1977 ALCS, a brutal body-block that stopped a double play and, in time, necessitated a prohibition on takeout slides. They called it “the Hal McRae rule.”

He was blue-collar to his core, a proud, self-made man who demanded the same level of intensity from anyone in his orbit. When he was hired to manage the Royals midway through the 1991 sesason, he brought the same ethos to the clubhouse.

“Hal didn’t take shit from anybody,” said Jeff Montgomery, the former Royals closer.

By the night of April 26, 1993, Scoop was in his 15th season covering the Royals. McRae was slogging through another turbulent opening month. The year before, the club started 1-16, a historically bad stretch that torpedoed the season. In 1993, they had started 2-9 before winning five of seven. And then came a Monday night game against the Tigers, the Royals trailing 5-1, the team loading the bases for designated hitter Keith Miller with two outs in the seventh.

“Did you consider Brett for Miller with the bases loaded in the seventh?”

Twenty-five years later, the videotape is grainy and edited and less than a minute and a half long. It only exists because a reporter from a local television station in Lawrence just happened to be holding the only camera in the room. All the Kansas City stations had gone home.

It is still the best record of what happened. It has more than a million views on YouTube. The story goes that six months after the tirade, legendary golfer Tom Watson was visiting KCTV-5, a local CBS affiliate, and had one request:

“Show me the tape,” he said. “Show me the raw.”

The copies of the raw are now sprinkled all over town, VHS tapes sitting on dusty shelves at radio and television stations. Todd Leabo, a vice president at the radio station 810 WHB, needed two minutes to locate the tape in his office last week. “Here it is,” he said, pulling it off a shelf. Moments later, he popped it into a Zenith VCR in an editing studio. The sound began just after Doolittle finished asking two questions:

The first concerned whether McRae should have asked his son, Brian, the Royals’ center fielder, to bunt earlier in the game. The second was simple: Did McRae consider pinch-hitting George Brett, who was sitting that night, for designated hitter Keith Miller, a utility man in his seventh season?

“No, no,” McRae said, sitting at his desk. “Don’t ask me all these stupid-ass fucking questions. No.”

On the tape, there is a slight pause, and then McRae stands up, dressed in a blue turtleneck and sliding shorts, throwing his hands into the air. Moments later, the objects start flying.

“I’m tired of all these stupid-ass questions every fucking night,” he said, his voice rising. “Why in the fuck would I hit Brett for fucking Miller?

“Miller started the fucking game. He’s playing against left-handed fucking pitchers. Brett is not playing against left-handed pitchers. Why in the fuck would I bat for Miller? Do you think I’m a goddamn fool?”

At this point, McRae slaps a full drink off his desk before grabbing a black rotary phone and spin-throwing it across the room. A second later, his right hand disappears from view, obscured by another reporter. Look closely, though, and you'll see that this is where he grabs a mysterious object and wings it across the room, to where Eskew was standing.

Smack.

“Scoop!” McRae said, raising his hands again. “Excuse me. Excuse me.”

Eskew barely remembers what came next. The reporters slunk into the hallway, sheepishly looking around. Dean Vogelaar, the club’s director of PR and the one man in a tie, fiddled with a toothpick and looked at the ground. The blood started to drip down Eskew’s cheek. For a moment, he passed by the camera a second time, like the victim in a horror movie.

“It stung,” Eskew said. “But I didn't know I was hit until it was like, ‘Oh, I'm bleeding.’ ”

A still of Eskew from the infamous video of McRae's rant.

Jeffrey Flanagan, then a beat writer for The Kansas City Star, put it like this: “It was like a car wreck. It takes a while to process what happened.”

McRae was not done. His office trashed, the press corps scattered, he grabbed a handle of vodka in his hand and returned back to the hallway, looking out toward his players in the clubhouse.

“I’m sick and tired — I’m fed up with every fucking thing!” he shouted. “No shit from you guys, no shit from you players.

“And they can do any motherfucking thing they wanna do. I’m sick and tired of all this bullshit! Now,” he said, turning back toward his office door, “put that in your fucking pipe and smoke it.”

In the moments after the tirade, after the videotape ends, Eskew returned to the clubhouse, his face still bloody. He wanted to interview Gubicza, the losing pitcher. He still had a story to write.

All around the room, reporters scrambled about. Flanagan found a phone and begged his editors to give the meltdown big play in the next morning’s newspaper. McRae retreated to his office to talk to Lee May, his good friend and one of the team’s coaches. Eskew kept interviewing players until somebody convinced him to go back to the trainer’s room.

“I missed deadline by 20 minutes,” he said.

In 1993, the news cycle moved at a slower pace than today. There were no cell phones, no social media. Players read about their teams in the morning paper. Back in the clubhouse kitchen, some players hardly knew the scene had taken place.

“Things didn’t go viral then like they do now,” Montgomery said. “It wasn't like we saw it immediately. But we knew something was going on.”

That night, the news of the incident began to spread, first in the clubhouse, then cascading around the city. By the morning, news directors at every television station in the city were on the hunt for video. There was talk that one camera had been in the room, an unexpected one from Sunflower Cable in Lawrence.

“It got to a point where when we called them that next morning to get it, they didn't realize what they had,” said Al Wallace, a long-time reporter at WDAF-TV, the local Fox affiliate. “So they just gave it out to everybody. They didn’t even put their logo on it. Then by the middle of the afternoon, they were like, ‘Shit.’”

The footage would go national, finding its way to ESPN. The same morning, Eskew’s phone wouldn’t stop ringing. A radio station wanted to interview him. So did a writer from The Associated Press. People wondered if he might press charges. Eskew just wanted to lay low before hopping on the team charter later that day. He said nothing, save for a column for the Topeka Capital-Journal. He stayed away from the ballpark. He had already talked to McRae.

The night before, after filing his story, Eskew took an elevator down to the Royals’ clubhouse. McRae was still sitting with May. He welcomed him back to the office and Eskew sat down. “What the hell happened?” May said.

McRae offered a short apology, and Scoop accepted, delivering just one request: Crab cakes during the next trip to Baltimore.

Twenty-five years later, Hal McRae is a 72-year-old with failed kidneys and grandkids that he loves to spoil. He lives in Bradenton, Fla., with his wife Jo. He suffers through dialysis three times per week.

He doesn’t have a lot of thoughts about his famous moment. It was all so long ago. Yet for a few minutes earlier this week, he thought back on that night in 1993 and let out his trademark cackle.

“They were stupid questions,” McRae said, laughing.

He regrets that it happened, of course. But if people developed any perception of him based on one tirade, if it colored his reputation, he didn’t much care.

“I just never gave it a lot of concern to listen to what other people said,” he said.

Even 25 years later, he doesn’t see much humor in the incident. He remembers the questions clearly, though. There was one about bunting his son, Brian. Why would he sac-bunt when the Tigers would have just walked No. 3 hitter Wally Joyner? There was the one about Miller and Brett. “Keith was a good ballplayer,” he said. In truth, though, the tirade had nothing to do with one night, or one question.

“It was just a build-up,” he said. “It wasn’t one night or one question. It was an accumulation of frustration.”

Something strange happened after the meltdown, though. The video spread around the country. He apologized. The Royals stopped holding postgame press conferences in the manager’s office. The sound from that night has lived on for 25 years. But as McRae sat in his office that night, he felt a weight off his shoulders.

“I actually felt better,” he said.

In the months after the tirade, the Royals found a spark, finishing 84-78. If not for the strike in 1994, the club might have made the playoffs for the first time in nine years. McRae might have managed in Kansas City for another two to three seasons.

Instead, the changing economics of the game spurred a rebuild in Kansas City. McRae was a casualty of the moment, departing before the 1995 season. When he thinks back on that era, he uses two words: “Unfinished business.”

A quarter-century later, McRae is at home, the Royals are rebuilding again, and Miller is an agent whose clients sometimes see the video and ask questions.

“I get teased about it all the time,” Miller said. “People would say: ‘Gee, you really caused a lot of problems when you were over there.’”

But for every time it appears on television, for every radio drop or YouTube view, the writers that were there still have one regret: It didn't capture what it was like to cover McRae.

“The image he had around the rest of the country then was he was this maniac,” said Flanagan, who now covers the team for MLB.com. “And he wasn’t. He was just a cool, cool manager. He was funny. His cackle was the best cackle I’ve ever heard. He’d rather laugh than do anything.”

In those years, McRae would take Flanagan for afternoons at the dog track. He never bothered with the odds. He just picked the numbers he liked. It was a different era, of course, but the writers came to appreciate his style. If you asked a question, you got an answer. (Well, usually).

“There was no BS,” said Plumlee, another former writer.

McRae would receive just one more chance to manage, a hopeless situation in Tampa Bay in 2001 and 2002. But one day in 2001, he returned to Kauffman Stadium for a road series. In the hours before the first game, McRae sat at his office desk for a pregame media session. One reporter appeared in the back, wearing a catcher’s mask. It was Scoop.

“Alan was one of the good guys,” McRae said, laughing again. “If I was going to hit someone, I wouldn’t hit him.”

Alan Eskew this season — his 40th covering baseball in Kansas City (Photo: Rustin Dodd)

One morning in March, Alan Eskew stood inside the Royals’ clubhouse at spring training. A notebook clutched in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, he gazed toward one side of the room. He was searching for Burch Smith, a Rule 5 pick. He had questions.

In his 40th season of covering baseball in Kansas City, Eskew’s hair is a little grayer, his waistline a little wider. Some of the players could be his grandkids. He is still here, though, a staple on a professional baseball beat, stalking the premises with a tape recorder and an inquisitive mind, known to everyone by the same nickname.

“Scoop!” yelled former Royals outfielder Amos Otis, entering the back doorway of the clubhouse. Otis, 70 and a Royals Hall of Famer, was decked out in full uniform, palling around camp with former teammate Freddie Patek. They sauntered past

“You remember this guy?” Otis asked Patek, pointing his thumb at Eskew.

“Oh, yeah,” the former shortstop said.

“OK,” Otis said. “I didn’t know if you’d recognize him without that blood running down his face.”

Everybody laughed. Otis and Patek kept walking through the clubhouse.

Eskew spotted his interview subject and went back to work.

Beau Vine · April 20, 2018

Also, Grant Brisbee, National Treasure, from this day last year, just because I'm in the mood and this is again fuuuuuuuucking fuuuuuuuuunny:

Quote

Hello. I am 17 years old and extremely immature, and I put together a baseball team filled with major leaguers from the past and present. There is nothing particularly notable about this roster, so I don’t even know why I’m doing this.

C - Smoky Burgess
1B - Ripper Collins
2B - Ray Rolling
SS - Bud Harrelson
3B - Andy High
OF - Bake McBride
OF - Jim Greengrass
OF - Ducky Hemp

Bench - Fatty Briody
Bench - Joe Strain
Bench - Manny Mota
Bench - Packy Rogers
Bench - Jay Faatz

SP - Lil Stoner
SP - Smoky Joe Wood
SP - Herb Score
SP - Dick Burns
SP - Tim Lincecum

RP - Jung Bong
RP - Tobi Stoner
RP - Donn Roach
RP - Nellie Pott
RP - Josh Smoker
RP - Emmitt Bowles
RP - Bruce Hitt

Manager - Dallas Green
Pitching coach - Rich Dubee

Honorable mention, minor-league edition: Blunt. That’s it, just Blunt.

Extremely honorable mention, minor-league edition: B.J. Weed

Anyway, happy tax day!

(UPDATE: An eagle-eyed emailer let me know that Jackson Hellahungry was, in fact, entirely made up and not an actual baseball player. We at SB Nation regret the error.)

Can't stop laughing for some reason...

UTexasFight · April 20, 2018

Albies ambushes a 100mph fastball third pitch of the game for a deep solo shot

APMP · April 21, 2018

I think Arian Foster did something similar to Big League Advance. Difference was that fans could invest. I was scared off by his injury history though.

Beau Vine · April 21, 2018

Kinda dusty in here.

Quote

Brandon Puffer was the 743rd player chosen in the 1994 MLB Draft, and was still pitching in rookie ball when the Minnesota Twins cut him loose in May of 1996. In the years that followed, Puffer backed his way up through the minors. He was a fairly effective 23-year-old closer for the Clinton Reds of the Class A Midwest League in 1999, and got cut anyway. When he signed with the Somerset Patriots of the independent Atlantic League in May of 2000, Puffer had been released by four teams and thrown just eight and two-thirds innings above A-ball. It wasn't until 2002, when he made the Houston Astros' bullpen as a 26-year-old rookie, that Puffer was identified as a Future Star.

Jung Bong threw his first minor league pitch when he was just 17 years old, and his path through the minors was as direct as Puffer's was circuitous. The Braves signed him out of a high school in Seoul, South Korea and held onto him; Bong made steady progress through the Atlanta Braves farm system over five seasons, and made his Major League debut when he was just 21 years old. He was hit hard in a spot start in April and sent down the next day; he spent the rest of the season working as a swingman in Double-A. The Braves saw enough in Bong's 2002 performance to make room for him as a long reliever in the big league bullpen the next year. A young baseball card editor at Topps saw, again, a Future Star.

Or, anyway, he saw an opportunity. Future Stars cards, and please forgive the baseball card jargon here, tended to feature players projected to be stars, in the future. There is no reasonable reason why Jung Bong or Brandon Puffer should have been featured on one of the Future Stars cards inserted in the 2003 Topps Baseball set. For one thing, they were not on the same team. A second, more salient, reason would be that there was no universe in which these two might have been projected as future stars. There is only one reason why the two of them, Jung Bong and Brandon Puffer, would have wound up on the same card. You have probably already figured out what it is.

Read More: "Spreadsheets Are Dope," Or The Allure Of The DIY Fantasy League

"Bong Puffer is fucking funny, right?" Wayne Walker said. "I puffed a few bongs at that time, on my free time," he added. "Never before or at work, I was serious about that. But after? Hell yeah. NYC weed delivery was legit. Thirty minutes or less."

It was the summer of 2002, and Walker's time as one of the two baseball editors at Topps was winding down. The 2002 Topps set, which is known within the company as The Flagship, was the first set that he edited at Topps, and 2003's was his last. In July, he would leave the company and move to the Czech Republic with the woman who would later become his wife. As usual, Walker relied on Jim McKenna, who edited Topps' more prospect-oriented Bowman products, for some help pulling together the players that would be featured on the ten-card, twenty-player Future Stars subset. In the fullness of time, some of those pairings have come to look better than others. None of them looked like Bong Puffer, even at the time, which was something Walker understood when he put it on the checklist and pulled the necessary photos.

I asked Walker how serious he was about trying to get this particular card through the company's various editorial backstops and into the set. "About making Bong Puffer? One hundred percent," he said. "It was happening. Unless JP vetoed it."

John Perry, then Topps' basketball editor and Walker's close friend, was charged with shepherding the Topps baseball set through its final stages after Walker left. "I told him," Walker said, "'when you get these sheets for proofing, you might notice that one of the Future Stars cards looks different. One has two guys from different teams.'" Walker suggested to Perry that, should he catch any heat regarding the card, he could "plead overwork" from having to handle his own product lines as well as Walker's. "I told JP that he could blame it all on me," Walker said. "He was all good with that."

The back of Wayne Walker's perfectly aged Bong/Puffer card. Image courtesy of Wayne Walker

"There's a card in Topps' 2003 baseball Series I that's on the hot list of many dealers and collectors," John Leptich wrote in the East Valley and Scottsdale Tribune in January of 2003. "While most common 2003 cards are being weeded out, No. 331 is getting a bundle of attention and creating quite a buzz. The Future Stars card shows photos of Houston Astros rookie pitcher Brandon Puffer on the left, and Atlanta Braves rookie hurler Jung Bong on the right. Fired-up collectors refer to the joint effort as the Bong-Puffer card."

While the other attention that the card got was slightly more understated in its expression, the operative word is slightly. "You got it, it's the 'Bong-Puffer' card," Keith Olbermann said on his ABC radio show. "Unclear if its publication will cause Topps' reputation to take a hit."

Walker, by this point, had married his fiancee and was reading about his cardboard brainchild's lite infamy from Prague, where he would live for three years teaching English. "I remember being pissed that they set it as Puffer/Bong and not the other way around," Walker said. "But JP couldn't exactly send that note out on the proof, you know?" The ordering was, I was told, a strategic choice; it is one thing to try to sneak a Puffer Bong card past the quality assurance department, but Bong Puffer just seemed like pressing your luck.

The response within the company was muted: "That's funny, now don't ever do it again," one person who was in the room said. Topps had made errors in previous years, generally of the swapped-photo variety, and it had also engaged in what Walker called "baseball card malarkey." The Bong Puffer card, however off-brand its entendre, fit into a broader tradition of pursuing this prehistoric version of virality. "There was no disciplinary action taken," said Frank Amadeo, who was the company's Creative Services Manager at the time. "Remember, those subject lists were brand manager approved and sometimes combinations that would cause an eyebrow raise were done to create buzz." When Perry left Topps at the end of 2004, shortly before I was hired, it was under his own power, for a job at Fleer. The Bong Puffer card was already fading from memory.

Claude Raymond had his best season in 1966, when he served as the closer for a 72-win Houston Astros team. In his Topps card from that year, the Quebecois reliever is photographed with his eyes cast upwards through horn-rimmed glasses the size of cruise-ship portholes, as if watching his catcher assess a harmless foul pop; an empty ballpark sprawls behind him, sun-bleached and vacant. It is impossible not to notice that the fly on Raymond's uniform pants is down. Raymond is seemingly more focused in his 1967 Topps card, this time striking a pose that suggests he has just released a pitch. Again, the fact that he is standing in foul territory in an empty spring training stadium takes away somewhat from the verisimilitude of the thing. Again, Raymond's fly is yawning open; the neat script of his reproduced autograph on the card serves as a sort of cursive underline.

Reasonable parties can disagree about what this says about Claude Raymond's sense of humor or attention to sartorial detail, but the collectible market has spoken. Raymond's ridiculous baseball cards are exactly as valuable as any other common card from those sets, which is to say that ones in very good condition are rare and fairly valuable and ones that are not, which are not, do not. The player on the front of the card has some impact on a card's value to collectors, but what really makes baseball cards valuable to collectors—the only thing, really, that consistently does it—is scarcity. There is no more convincing testament to how unprepared the business was for the brief and retrospectively hilarious period in the 1990's when otherwise functional adults saw baseball cards as a viable financial investment than the fact that card companies responded to all that new demand by furiously printing many hundreds of thousands of the same cards.

It was only later that the companies learned to build scarcity into their sets, which they did most effectively by creating numbered parallel versions; where there were untold thousands of white-bordered base cards in the world, there were discrete numbers of parallel versions with different-colored borders, all of them shrinking towards an exceedingly scarce one-of-one version. In later years, Topps took to cutting up the metal printing plates used in producing the cards and inserting those into packs, each marked 1-of-1 and affixed with a sticker certifying their authenticity. On baseball card forums like BlowoutCards, you can find collectors debating whether they are truly one-of-ones, given that there are actually four different printing plate cards for every player, one for each of the four color process used in producing the cards.

The icon himself. Image courtesy of Wayne Walker

By this grim logic, nothing is more important about a baseball card than how difficult it is to find. When Billy Ripken showed up on his 1989 Fleer card with the words FUCK FACE written on the knob of his bat, the result was a bit of crude art. Fleer scrambled to fix it, creating more than twenty flubby alternate versions in which the profanity was obscured by various scribbles, blobs of white out, black boxes, airbrushing, and a notch cut into the card by a power saw. "To the best of my knowledge, the 'Circle Scribble' versions are the toughest [to find]—by far," said Jon Pederson, who runs BillRipken.com, a website dedicated to the card. "There are four distinctly different varieties of 'Circle Scribble,' each with varying levels of black airbrush coverage." He estimates that fewer than 100 of those cards are out there in the world; he himself has seen fewer than 40. The original card, which is the only one in which the legendary words are clearly visible, is the least valuable of the many variations; an estimated 100,000 of those FUCK FACE cards made it into packs, which makes it the easiest one to find.

Topps never withdrew the Bong/Puffer card; there was nothing to correct, really, beyond the central goofy fact of its existence. It's less an error card and more on the order of Claude Raymond's poker-faced x-y-z moments, although in this case the punchline is the existence of the card itself. There doesn't seem to be any real collectible market for it at all, although someone on BlowoutCards offered to pay $25 for a black border parallel of the card back in 2015; he received no replies. Of course, what the Bong Puffer card is or isn't worth has nothing to do with its value to that lone seeker on BlowoutCards or to Walker, who keeps a heroically tattered copy of it in his wallet to this day. The reasoning of the market does not and by definition cannot account for this type of value.

"The collector mentality is, by definition, irrational," said Jeff Katz, the author of Split Season 1981 and a contributor to the SABRs Baseball Card Committee. "So few things are truly rare and worth scrambling for ... they trigger memory and emotion, which is where the real value is." Understood this way, there is no such thing as a common card—every one of these disposable things is tied to a memory or a moment that imbues it with something that is not otherwise there to find, and which is specific to the person who treasures it.

"It's funny," Walker said. "I've been an ESL teacher over the years, and the card has come in handy, just to explain what a baseball card is to foreigners." The card has stayed in Walker's wallet for nearly 15 years in large part for sentimental reasons, but there's something practical about it, too. Whenever he needs to, he can reach into his pocket and show someone exactly what a baseball card is.

shnsajax · April 21, 2018

Yankees will be 7.5 games out of first after tonight.

spystud13 · April 21, 2018

Probably shouldn’t throw it there on 3-0 to him, Marcus.

WBT · April 21, 2018

Little Gurriel with another hit

Goo Punch · April 21, 2018

Holy shit, Danny Farquhar suffered a brain hemorrhage during last night’s game:

TheFlagship · April 21, 2018

Time to see what the kids got

spystud13 · April 22, 2018

Has any team been penalized for mound visits yet?

Edited April 22, 2018 by spystud13

spystud13 · April 22, 2018

On 4/18/2018 at 2:02 PM, spystud13 said:

There are somewhere between 360-390 position players in the sport, there is no worse player than Carlos Tocci. Holy fucking Tebow, he is fucking horrendous.

Quite possibly the fakest injury in MLB history. The dude is fucking HORRID.

Delino DeShields has been activated from 10-day DL. Carlos Tocci placed on 10 day DL with bruised left hip. DeShields in lineup today.

The whole Rule 5 bullshit needs to be abolished.

Rustic Horn · April 22, 2018

shnsajax · April 22, 2018

Fuck, Kris Bryant drilled in the head/face in the first. Leaves the game.

Dewey · April 22, 2018

Fuck, Kris Bryant drilled in the head/face in the first. Leaves the game.

96mph, up and in, again. 7th time has been hit so far. Chili got the hook.

Sent from my SM-G960U using Tapatalk

TheFlagship · April 22, 2018

Brandon Belt had a 21 pitch at bat today! 21! (He got out)

Dewey · April 22, 2018

Of course Colon was invovled in the last 20 pitch at bat, 20 years ago.

Sent from my SM-G960U using Tapatalk

texifornia · April 22, 2018

A's up 3 on the Sox B8. If we're the team to swipe a series from them I won't be able to stop laughing.

Rustic Horn · April 22, 2018

1 hour ago, TheFlagship said:

Brandon Belt had a 21 pitch at bat today! 21! (He got out)

texifornia · April 22, 2018

21 minutes ago, texifornia said:

A's up 3 on the Sox B8. If we're the team to swipe a series from them I won't be able to stop laughing.

HAHAHAHA IT HAPPENED thank you Daniel Mengden

Player · April 22, 2018

HAHAHAHA IT HAPPENED thank you Daniel Mengden

Maniacal laughter for winning a series.

In April.

Openly admitting that you root for Oakland.

Kissing aggy ass.

texifornia · April 22, 2018

I really don't like Boston and when you're an A's fan you have to find joy in the little things.

Tailleur17 · April 23, 2018

The Dodgers are 9-10. This pleases me.

SuingToGetAMessageBoard? · April 23, 2018

5 hours ago, Rustic Horn said:

Pitcher ended up going 2.0. He should get .5 WAR for that AB alone.

BigOrange1 · April 23, 2018

1 hour ago, Tailleur17 said:

The Dodgers are 9-10. This pleases me.

10-10 now.

SuingToGetAMessageBoard? · April 23, 2018

Fernando Tatis hit two grand slams in one inning in 1999, a bit of trivia I was familiar with. Just learned: off the same pitcher! What did it take to pull a guy in the late 90s?

(that pitcher being former Ranger great Chan Ho)

Rustic Horn · April 23, 2018

spystud13 · April 23, 2018

Damn, didn’t know this one.

Quote

the less famous $1.12 million a year that Bruce Sutter gets annually through 2021, with an additional $9.1 million bill due in 2021!

Beau Vine · April 24, 2018

If you don't read the column by Grant Brisbee, National Treasure (tm), every Monday, then you must hate baseball.

https://www.sbnation.com/2018/4/23/17261908/mlb-sean-manaea-no-hitter-evan-gattis-triple-play-brandon-belt-21-pitch-at-bat-shohei-ohtani

Beau Vine · April 24, 2018

On ‎4‎/‎20‎/‎2018 at 4:10 PM, Beau Vine said:

Rosenthal from theathletic, pretty fucking fascinating:

From Fangraphs today, the BLA CEO actually talking about the lawsuit:

Quote

I spoke with BLA Chief Executive Officer Michael Schwimer about his company, the Mejia lawsuit, and what the future might hold. Schwimer, it should be noted, was good enough to spend a full hour being grilled by an attorney while simultaneously fathering his two young children, an arrangement most reasonable people would consider to be less than ideal.

Big League Advance

Schwimer himself is a former major-league pitcher, owner of an abbreviated 48-inning career with the Philadelphia Phillies marked by a lot of strikeouts (9.62 K/9) and a lot of walks (4.25 BB/9). After leaving the game, he started Big League Advance. Schwimer said he started BLA because of his own experience in the minor leagues. “I was reffing basketball games [to make ends meet],” Schwimer told me. “I was babysitting.” Schwimer believed there was a better way, and BLA was born.

According to Schwimer, BLA trades capital for a percentage of a player’s major-league career earnings. “This kind of business has been around for hundreds of years in boxing and golf,” Schwimer said, citing Upstart and Thirteenth Avenue as examples of companies that have made similar deals with students. (Upstart, it should be noted, is a personal loan company.) Schwimer told me the purpose of the company was to help minor leaguers, particularly given the low pay and long odds of making the major leagues.

The capital is intended to be used by players for one of two purposes. First, players can use it to improve their chances of making the big leagues, and Schwimer cited specifically the opportunity to use the money to “eat healthier.” Alternatively, Schwimer talked about creating a safety net for minor leaguers whose careers don’t pan out. “We’ve already had players getting released. We’re helping them start their second lives,” he said. As for the money itself, Schwimer said it isn’t a loan — players are only required to pay the money back if they make the major leagues, and then only the agreed percentage of their major-league earnings.

BLA’s clientele is primarily minor leaguers; Schwimer told me that, of the firm’s 99 clients, “over 90%” are current minor leaguers, and “75% were outside the top 300 prospects when they signed with us.” Schwimer wouldn’t identify any of those 99 clients besides Mejia but did say that they include some “players and prospects ranked way higher than Francisco Mejia.”

Schwimer said that BLA has a proprietary method of identifying minor league players, which looked for “Ben Zobrist types, Moneyball guys.” Schwimer wouldn’t disclose how that model worked, but did say it was “different than anything else around.” That includes, by the way, Fantex: Schwimer told me that BLA and Fantex have completely different business models, with Fantex focused on major leaguers, while BLA uses proprietary methods to identify minor leaguers of interest. Schwimer also bristled at the suggestion that his company was analogous to a payday lender for minor-league players. “We are the exact polar opposite of that,” Schwimer said. “We let the players choose what percentage they want to give up.”

Thus far, Schwimer described his company in less-than-stellar terms. “We’ve raised more than $100 million in two years [of doing business] and returned less than $350,000,” Schwimer said. Schwimer said that, nevertheless, BLA has started to see returns from a handful of major leaguers who signed deals with BLA while in the minors, all of whom had “paid in full.” Based on that, Schwimer said that he was optimistic that the business model could be successful. “If we lose money on 80% of our investments, we’re in great shape,” he said. And Schwimer did say that his business was growing. “We’ve got 10 players wanting to do deals with us every day.”

The Mejia Lawsuit

Our discussion of Mejia’s suit against BLA began with me asking Schwimer why the contract itself, and BLA’s counterclaim, called for the existence of the contract itself to be confidential. I returned to that question no fewer than four times during our conversation, and, to his credit, Schwimer’s answer was consistent each time. “I don’t care at all [about disclosing the existence of the contract],” he said. “That was never the issue.” In fact, Schwimer said several times that he “encouraged” BLA clients to tell teammates about their deals so as to provide a larger customer base for BLA.

Instead, Schwimer focused on the terms of the contract, on which he said he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and six months developing with the aid of the law firm Morrison Foerster (known in the industry — and on their own website — as “MoFo”). It’s the terms of that contract which Schwimer said he wanted confidential, worried that competitors might be able to backwards engineer their business model and formula. Interestingly, however, Schwimer said that the contract Mejia signed is no longer used, having been replaced by a new contract drafted by Zwillgen, the firm which employs BLA’s current litigation counsel, attorney Jeff Landis.

I asked Schwimer why, if the Mejia form contract had been retired, BLA still considered it a trade secret. Schwimer provided two reasons. First, he indicated that although some changes had been made between contract versions, much of it remained the same. Second, Schwimer said that the equity percentage and payment for that equity were confidential — specifically for the players’ protection. “[The players] all think they’re better than everybody else… [T]hey all think they’re hall of famers,” Schwimer said. And although he said that mindset was needed to make the big leagues — Schwimer said he needed it, for example — he was concerned about players bidding based on what other players received.

Schwimer also said that the confidentiality provisions were “all for the players’ protection… [T]hey don’t want people knowing they have this capital.” Schwimer did concede, however, that it was for BLA’s protection as, well. Schwimer, as can be seen, is remarkably guarded when it comes to disclosing the inner workings of his company.

Schwimer provided a very different narrative of events than what is contained in Mejia’s complaint. According to Schwimer, Mejia did, in fact, have three different contracts with BLA — and, in fact, was among their first clients. But Schwimer said that Mejia was represented by counsel of his own choosing each time, and BLA never paid for Mejia’s attorneys or went to his house. “We don’t even know where Francisco lives,” Schwimer said. Schwimer contends that Mejia was represented by his ISE agents at the first negotiation, which was $100,000 for 3% of Mejia’s career earnings. Thereafter, Schwimer says Mejia approached BLA twice more without his BLA representation and asked for more capital, using a separate attorney and cutting his ISE attorneys out of the picture each time. Schwimer said that the contract was explained to Mejia in Spanish and said the terms are always explained to every client in their native language. In fact, Schwimer said, that after the third contract, Mejia sent a text to BLA saying, “I love you guys.”

According to Schwimer, things went south between Mejia and BLA after the catcher asked for a fourth deal, proposing $500,000 for an additional 1% after the 2017 season, saying another company had offered those terms. Schwimer balked at that deal. “At the absolute most, we might do an extra 2% at a much higher valuation, really only to help him out.” Schwimer says that, after BLA turned down Mejia’s proposal, Mejia sued his company and blindsided him in the process.

I asked Schwimer point-blank if Mejia was lying in his complaint. “Absolutely yes,” he said. “Where we said ‘denied’ [in our Answer], then obviously we’re saying that [that allegation is] a lie.” I then asked Schwimer if he would be pursuing a sanctions motion against Mejia based on that position. “I haven’t even spoken to anyone about that,” Schwimer said.

The Future

One matter about which I was curious is whether Schwimer plans to change any of BLA’s business model in the wake of Mejia’s lawsuit. “Absolutely not,” he said. “Integrity and character, that is what we live by.” Schwimer made clear that he and BLA are seeking no future earnings in their counterclaim and that he is seeking only to keep the terms of the contract under wraps so as to prevent competitors learning their trade secrets. But Schwimer did tease that this story wasn’t over. “One of the best prospects in all of baseball is demanding to go on the record [defending BLA],” Schwimer said, though he wouldn’t reveal who that was. He did say, however, that we wouldn’t have to wait long to find out.

One thing is for certain: these companies aren’t going away. So long as minor-league pay is a problem, companies which offer deals like BLA’s will provide an attractive alternative, particularly for players who aren’t the proverbial bonus babies. I found Schwimer to be credible, but questions do remain. His story and Mejia’s are so different that they both can’t be true, and Schwimer seemed to recognize he’s in for a protracted court battle, even acknowledging he won’t be filing a motion to dismiss. “Unconscionability is a pretty tough thing,” he said.

TheFlagship · April 25, 2018

It’s Acuna time in ATL.

Beau Vine · April 25, 2018

2 hours ago, TheFlagship said:

It’s Acuna time in ATL.

Yeah, he was just tearing up AAA, so these four weeks convinced the Braves that he actually belonged on the major league ros...

Wait, he was slugging .304 in AAA? These stupid service time games need to go ASAP.

BTW, I think this was in the shaggy thread, but here's a great way to see how the top prospects are doing:

https://www.mlb.com/prospects/stats/top-prospects

Check out what Little Vlad is doing in AA at 19 years old.

Beau Vine · April 25, 2018

I basically remember it being impossible to hate RIck Monday when I was a kid. Unless you were an Expos fan...

Edited April 25, 2018 by Beau Vine

Beau Vine · April 26, 2018

This is REALLY great:

https://www.mlb.com/news/worst-no-hitters-in-baseball-history/c-273929232

These are the worst no-hitters in baseball history

Beau Vine · April 26, 2018

Stark from theathletic:

Quote

Anthony Rizzo had it right. More right than he even realized.

Is it time to shorten the baseball season? It’s absolutely time.

Would it be better for everyone – players, owners, fans, popcorn vendors, schedule makers, sunscreen sales reps – if baseball seasons lasted 154 games instead of 162? Heck yeah, it would.

Would the world be a better place if Opening Day didn’t arrive in March, if the World Series ended before November and if just about every Monday in the season was a day off? Can you say, “Kumbaya?”

So logic will prevail, right? This will definitely be happening, right? It’s way too logical not to, right?

Not so fast.

At the moment, in case you hadn’t caught wind of this, MLB and the players’ union would have a tough time agreeing on which Starbucks to meet at for coffee, let alone a dramatic schedule change. We regret to announce it’s going to take more than logic, and more than Anthony Rizzo, to shrink the schedule any time soon.

But when the time arrives to negotiate the next labor deal in 2021, this will be a serious topic. Because it should be.

“It’s pretty simple,” says one longtime baseball official. “We play too many games. Mark that as ‘settled.’”

But by “settled,” he doesn’t mean “done,” obviously. He just means there is far more agreement on this general concept than you’d think. And because there is, there has been way more conversation about this idea, going back almost a decade, than you might think.

So where has that conversation gone – and where is it likely to go from here? Let’s try to answer those questions.

HOW MANY GAMES?

In a simpler world, with no TV deals and no bills to pay, it would be easy to argue baseball would be better off playing 120 games or 140 games. But we don’t live in that world. This sport is not lopping 22 to 42 games (or anything close) off its calendar any time soon.

Instead, the focus has been on two numbers which the commissioner, Rob Manfred, mentioned last week in an interview with the Associated Press – 154 games and 158. You can bet that both of those numbers will be in play when baseball gets around to revisiting this idea.

The 158-game concept actually made it (briefly) to the bargaining table in the negotiations leading up to the 2011 labor agreement, sources say. But it quickly got pushed right off that table by the bigger scheduling question of that day – the shift to two 15-team leagues and all the ramifications that came with it.

Five years later, however, MLB actually did extensive background research on the pros and cons of a 154-game schedule, several sources tell The Athletic. Presumably, the owners did all that work because they expected players to push for that change.

Well, surprise: It never came up. The union got focused on other issues and never proposed it. But even if it had, a group of large-market teams raised such vociferous objections that there might never have been a deal to be made.

Nevertheless, here’s something you should know: If you polled the 30 teams, a big majority would be all in – even now. The challenge is getting that vocal minority to buy in.

“Basically, eight teams wouldn’t do it,” says one source who was in on those 2016 discussions. “They said, ‘We can’t make up all those lost gates or all the TV revenue. So you need to make us whole.’”

No one would identify all eight of those teams. But an educated guess would be this group: Yankees, Dodgers, Red Sox, Cubs, Giants, Cardinals, Angels and Mets. Big attendance. Big regional TV deals. Major money on the line.

Twenty-two teams had minimal or even no objections. If you’ve noticed all the empty seats at many ballparks around America this April, it wouldn’t be that difficult to understand why.

“On some of those Monday games,” says one executive, “for some of these teams, it costs as much to open the gates as they make to play the game.”

So you wouldn’t have to twist many arms to get those teams to give up those games. It’s all about getting the holdouts on board. We’ll get to them shortly. But first …

WHERE DO THE PLAYERS STAND?

Shoveled any snow lately? Brian Dozier has.

“One day [a mere week and a half ago], we got close to 20 inches in Minnesota,” the Twins second baseman reports. “We literally couldn’t open the doors to my house. It was halfway up the door. So we had to get to the garage and open the garage. And it was literally the first time I ever shoveled snow, being a Southern guy. My wife filmed me doing that.”

But if he was shoveling snow, one thing he obviously wasn’t doing was playing baseball. That’s because it feels like the Twins almost never play baseball. Due mostly to meteorological nightmares beyond their control, they’ve only played 18 games – and six home games – in four weeks. You think they’re opposed to figuring out some different way to draw up this schedule?

“I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining,” says first baseman/DH Logan Morrison. “But there has to be a better, smarter way to go about this, because playing baseball in 20 degrees is not smart, healthy or fun. That’s what it boils down to. No fan wants to come watch us play in 25-degree weather.”

If you asked players if they could be magically transported to a planet where the sun would shine, the wind-chill factor was never a topic and there were regular off days that would allow them to rest up, recover and recognize those fellow family members who live in their household, who among them wouldn’t sign up for that?

“Sure, it’s attractive,” says Twins reliever Zack Duke. “But I feel like (if players proposed that) the first thing that would happen is them saying, ‘You’re playing less games, so we’re not going to pay you as much.’ And obviously, that would be an issue.”

Yes, in pretty much any job in America, you can guess the reaction if the boss were to announce: “Guess what, everybody? We’d like to pay you less money.” Baseball is no different. But there are ways to accomplish this without docking money from every paycheck.

As Rizzo himself said when he broached this subject on ESPN 1000 radio in Chicago, existing guaranteed contracts could be “grandfathered” while future contracts would factor in shorter seasons. Or, according to executives we’ve surveyed, there are other ways the players could, in Manfred’s words, be “participants in the process” – with adjustments to, say, future minimum salaries, arbitration or other, indirect benefits.

In fact, people involved in past labor talks believe it’s highly unlikely MLB would start the conversation by saying: “Give us back that money!” That dialogue would be more like: “Do we agree this would be good for the game? Then let’s figure out ways to share the burden.”

And do players agree this could be good for the game? Listen again to Anthony Rizzo.

“I think we play too much baseball,” he said. “Yes, guys are going to take pay cuts. But are we playing this game for the money or do we love this game? I know it’s both, but in the long run, it will make everything better.”

Well, not everything. It can’t fix the weather in years where it’s this historically horrendous. But playing fewer games has so many potential benefits, it’s almost incredible that this sport has ignored exploring them for so long. How about these, for instance:

—A better, more flexible schedule with less insane travel, more off days and less interleague play.
— Less reason to start the season in March.
—More hope of finishing the postseason before Halloween.
— A different postseason format.
— Pitcher health.
— Fewer injuries overall – in an industry that pays players half a billion dollars a year to hang out on the disabled list.

“We sometimes forget the players actually are our game,” says former Rockies GM – and current MLB Network analyst – Dan O’Dowd. “And anything we can do to help them be better players, we should look at doing.”

So what exactly should they look at doing? He has some thoughts….

HOW COULD THIS WORK?

How could baseball utilize a less-is-more schedule to accomplish those aims? O’Dowd has been a proponent of the 154-game plan for years. Take a look at his proposal and see what you think:

— A 154-game schedule.

— Every Monday off, starting with the third week of April. His thinking here is that players need a few weeks of consistent baseball to get into the rhythm of the game. Then, once the no-Mondays plan kicks in, he believes players would benefit most from a “predictable” day off.

— Day games on Sundays, night games on Tuesdays. The idea would be to provide players as long a gap between games as possible, to give them “a legitimate break from the grind of the season.”

— More early-season games in warm weather and domes. O’Dowd is well aware that teams would complain about being loaded up with April home games. There would be financial compensation from MLB to make it worth their while.

— Early-season international round robins. Here’s another potential idea for avoiding those April snowouts. He envisions a four-team or six-team round robin in locations with good weather or domes, with a “guaranteed money return” to make up for lost home dates.

— Adding traditional doubleheaders once the weather warms up. O’Dowd also is a longtime fan of an idea he calls “Doubleheader Day in America.” Every team in baseball would play a doubleheader that day. MLB could sell the concept to a national sponsor. (Double Mint Gum, anyone?) And it would create even more off days and more flexibility to construct a better, more manageable schedule.

—A longer all-star break. This wouldn’t necessarily be every year. But he envisions scheduling the WBC as a weeklong, one-and-done tournament over the all-star break every three or four years, at a time of year when there would be no other sport competition on TV. I’d watch!

— Use Mondays to sell the game in other ways. With no games on Monday, O’Dowd would take those Mondays and use them to highlight baseball in other forms: Turn the draft into a big national Monday night event….Find ways to showcase minor-league baseball and college baseball….Maybe a showcase for marquee high school prospects….Or cook up other types of creative, non-game programming that might appeal to a different demographic. Then baseball would sell that package nationally and use the proceeds to help teams make up for lost TV dates.

Just to be clear, he would exempt ESPN Sunday night games, other national TV games and holidays from this format. So there would be flexibility where it’s needed. But don’t consider the complications. Consider the benefits.

“We currently have 24 days off, including the four games over the all-star break, so this would provide an additional eight days – or 32 total,” O’Dowd says. “I have no doubt the quality of play would increase and the repetitive injury risk of our sport would decrease.”

For what it’s worth, baseball has seen studies that support that theory, which suggests a significant cut in the injury rate is a real possibility. But beyond what this could accomplish in reducing injuries, “getting away from the game mentally is just as important as getting away from it physically,” O’Dowd says. “I forgot to mention these guys are husbands, fathers, brothers and sons. This adds to the small windows of opportunity to have a balanced life.”

He recognizes that his plan isn’t perfect. And ideas like this don’t solve every problem. In fact, the ripple effects might actually create a new problem or two. But is there any reason baseball isn’t thinking long and hard about these sorts of concepts? We can only think of one….

MAKING UP THE DOLLARS

What’s the only obstacle to making this happen? Take a wild guess.

It isn’t the integrity of the record book. It’s what it always comes down to.

The dollar signs.

It’s about those eight teams – the ones that don’t want to give up a single home date, let alone four a year – and how this sport can find a way to compensate them for the money that wouldn’t flow into their accounts if games start disappearing off the schedule.

So how much money are we talking about?

Let’s look at the Yankees, since they led the AL in attendance last year.

Start with this – money paid out by the average family of four in a trip to Yankee Stadium: About $301. That figure comes from Team Marketing Report’s Fan Cost Index. It includes tickets, parking, refreshments and a trip to the souvenir stand. Now let’s apply the Shorter Schedule Math.

If you cut the schedule to 154 games, that’s four lost home dates. Now multiply that by the Yankees’ average attendance last year (39,385 per game). It comes to over $12 million – just in lost stadium revenue.

Would they miss that $12 million? Who wouldn’t? But that’s assuming they would actually lose it – because you know how easy it would be for them to make up that money? Here’s how easy:

They’re losing 5 percent of their home dates, right? Now let’s apply more Shorter Schedule Math.

TICKET MATH: The average price of a ticket to a Yankees game, according to the Fan Cost Index? That would be $47.62. So how much would they have to raise the average ticket price to make up every penny of that 5 percent lost ticket revenue? How about a whopping $2.38.

HOT DOG MATH: Let’s say a Yankee Stadium hot dog costs $5. So how could they make up every dime in lost hot-dog revenue? By hiking the price of a hot dog by a staggering 25 cents.

We could keep going here, but you get the idea.

The bigger challenge, clearly, is TV money. Most teams guarantee their local cable sports network between 140-145 games a year, with the assumption that teams like the Yankees would lose the rest to national TV. But cutting eight games off the schedule could make it impossible for them to air enough local TV games to live up to their contract. And that’s a problem with no easy solution.

But how hard has baseball even tried to find that solution? It hasn’t.

“It’s never been a negotiation,” says one of the officials quoted earlier. “It’s never gotten that far.”

So how about, one of these years, it does get that far? Is there an answer? Of course there’s an answer. Once upon a time, we heard that teams like the Yankees and Dodgers would never agree to revenue sharing, either. How’d that work out?

Lots of issues – in life and baseball – seem impossible to solve until you look seriously for ways to make them possible. It’s time for this sport to start searching for ways to make a better, saner, shorter schedule possible.

It’s too late to save Brian Dozier from shoveling snow on game day. But it’s not too late to fix the schedule. Just ask Anthony Rizzo.

VolenteHawk · April 26, 2018

26 minutes ago, Beau Vine said:

This is REALLY great:

https://www.mlb.com/news/worst-no-hitters-in-baseball-history/c-273929232

These are the worst no-hitters in baseball history

Posnanski is great.

Seasick Sailor · April 26, 2018

Not bad, Rook:

Goo Punch · April 26, 2018

1 hour ago, Beau Vine said:

This is REALLY great:

https://www.mlb.com/news/worst-no-hitters-in-baseball-history/c-273929232

These are the worst no-hitters in baseball history

Without looking I remember Edwin Jackson having a pretty bad no-no.

GopherRock · April 26, 2018

Francisco Liriano's no hitter was pretty bad if I remember right.

https://www.sbnation.com/2011/5/3/2152529/francisco-liriano-no-hitter-twins-white-sox

Fozzz · April 26, 2018

lmao

https://deadspin.com/espn-fawns-over-the-intelligence-of-trevor-bauer-who-i-1825545707

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