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2024-25 MLB offseason thread


Beau Vine

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On 1/19/2025 at 11:20 AM, Helobious said:

I have a ton of family in Cali (Central Valley/San Jose area). I like it there alright. Is it better than NYC? Fuck no. Yes I’ve never been to NY in the winter but a ball player wouldn’t have to be there then either. 

Migrant farm workers?

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23 minutes ago, TonyTexas said:

Migrant farm workers?

My dads family was when he was a kid. During picking season they’d leave Texas and go to Cali, Washington, Nebraska, etc to work on farms. A couple of his siblings liked that part of California so much they moved there as adults and have been there ever since.

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On 11/15/2024 at 1:01 PM, UTPhil2006 said:

I've never been more sure this is how @tx 3 putt ends up in jail 

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An 11-year-old collector in Los Angeles has scooped up a one-of-a-kind baseball card featuring National League Rookie of the Year Paul Skenes.

Topps announced Tuesday that the card, which features the Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher's autograph and a patch from a game-worn jersey, had been found.

Now comes the fun part: seeing what it is worth on the open market. 

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26 minutes ago, Scraps said:

Got damn the first time i clicked on this it somehow took me to a debate between a fat fuck latino and a white douche about a better lineup...all time latinos or all whites....and i watched the whole dumbass thing
 

Well who won

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Major League Baseball’s competition committee has unanimously passed two minor on-field rule changes for the 2025 season, reports Evan Drellich of The Athletic. The first involves defensive positioning, while the other relates to an infrequent baserunning scenario.

Regarding the defense, the rule change now allows a hitting team to accept an awarded base if a defensive player violates the shift ban and is the first player to field a batted ball. Teams are required to keep two infielders on either side of the second base bag. Previously, if a fielder violated the shift ban — likely a middle infielder starting on the opposite side of the base — the hitting team could either take an automatic ball or accept the result of the play. They’ll now be able to take the free base or the play result. If they accept the free base, any runners would move up one base. The fielder will be charged with an error, while the hitter will not be credited with an at-bat.

The change is designed to increase the penalty for teams violating the shift ban. The league felt that teams could push fielders slightly beyond the bag in hopes of getting away with a violation. The rationale would be that if the violation went unnoticed by umpires and opposing teams, the shift could result in an out. If the violation were detected, the automatic ball was unlikely to be that costly. Drellich notes that there were two shift violations that resulted in an automatic ball last season. Those would be errors under the new rule.

The baserunning rule only comes into play in very specific circumstances. If a player deliberately overruns the second or third base bag to beat out a force play, a longstanding rule is that the runner is to be called out for abandonment. Players are only really incentivized to do this if they’re the trail runner when there was a runner on third base with two outs. If they feel they’d be forced out if they slow down or slide, they may instead run through the bag. While they’d likely be tagged out a second or two later, negating the force play would allow the runner who’d been on third base to score.

Now, the replay official can determine whether the runner from third base touched home plate before the trail runner officially abandoned the bag. That’s defined as having both feet on the ground beyond the base. If the lead runner had not scored by then, the run will not count. The rule also includes an adjustment to replay review. Previously, if the umpire had incorrectly called the trail runner out on the initial force play, a successful challenge by the hitting team would call the runner safe even if the runner had gone through the bag. In that scenario, the replay official can now call the runner out by abandonment.

MLB’s competition committee is composed of six owners, four player representatives, and one umpire. The owner majority essentially gives the league unilateral power to make on-field rule adjustments. That has been to the players’ consternation in the past, though these changes are so marginal that they didn’t encounter opposition.

Bolded is funny. 

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New article came out saying Safeco or whatever suppressed offense by 11%, greater than Coors 10% inflation rate. But it turns out “ballpark factor” probably isn’t a real thing and is just heavily swayed by the offensive quality of the home team:

IMG_5052.thumb.jpeg.88347a650610a4504fab78127178423a.jpeg

 

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1 hour ago, Helobious said:

New article came out saying Safeco or whatever suppressed offense by 11%, greater than Coors 10% inflation rate. But it turns out “ballpark factor” probably isn’t a real thing and is just heavily swayed by the offensive quality of the home team:

 

 

The offensive quality of the home team is accounted for in the calculation of park factors: 

https://www.baseball-reference.com/about/parkadjust.shtml

Also, saying that the park hasn't physically changed is just ignorant, as they've completely changed center field in the last 10-15 years, plus they seem to be playing with the roof open a lot more often than they did when it opened.

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JoePos:

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In July 1992 — more than 30 years ago — Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent spoke to a group of living Negro Leaguers in Cooperstown. This was more than 30 years ago, and even then, so few of the great Negro Leagues players were still alive.

This is what he said:

“We of baseball acknowledge our part in the shameful history of exclusion in this country. Baseball treated you badly, and on behalf of baseball, I extend my sincere apologies. … We owe you very much. For you kept baseball alive in your Black community and in doing so, you did baseball a magnificent service.”

Vincent did not realize until he saw it in The New York Times the next day that he had unknowingly become the first Baseball Commissioner to apologize for the segregation of the sport and acknowledge the extraordinary contribution those players made to baseball.

Fay Vincent died on Sunday at 86, and the few stories out there about him focus (naturally) on his short and turbulent tenure as Commissioner. He was catapulted into the job when his great friend Bart Giamatti died of a heart attack. Vincent fought with Pete Rose. He fought with George Steinbrenner. He presided over a World Series interrupted by an earthquake. He anticipated some of the steroid issues that would taint the game later but was unable to do anything to prevent it. He tried to move the Chicago Cubs to the National League West. He was forced out by owners who wanted him to fight harder to destroy the players’ union.

But if you want to talk about the most lasting and important thing Fay Vincent did — I think it was that statement to the Negro Leaguers in 1992.

“I grew up in a segregated world,” He wrote in his book “The Last Commissioner: A Baseball Valentine.” “My block of Orange Street in the New Haven of my boyhood was all white. My church was all white. When Jackie Robinson made his major league debut in April 1947, it made little impression on me. He played for the other league, and as a boy of nine, I didn’t care what the National Leaguers did.”

When he began to work in baseball, he met some of the great Negro Leaguers of the past. Slick Surratt. Double Duty Radcliffe. Joe Black. Larry Doby. Buck O’Neil. They opened his mind. They widened his world. Surratt was the first person to ever mention to him a Negro League star named Oscar Charleston.

I had never heard of him.

“Never heard of him?” They’d say. “He was the greatest Negro League player ever.”

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They said he could run the bases like Ty Cobb, could hit for power like Babe Ruth, and could play center like Tris Speaker. One season, 1921, he batted .434; in another he hit hit .445! Off the field, he would brawl with Klansmen, opposing players, umpires, anybody who got in his way.

He is the ultimate baseball legend.

 


Vincent was not Commissioner for very long, but in his short time, he tried to get a pension and health insurance for Negro Leagues players. He also used his position to let people know just how good those Negro Leagues players were. Three decades later, when MLB officially classified the Negro Leagues as “Major League,” well, that was a process started by Fay Vincent.

Even after he was run out of the game, he never fully stopped loving baseball. Yes, he felt bitterness. Yes, he readily admitted that in the years after the owners fired him, “I lost my capacity to think of baseball in the sweet terms the game deserves.” Yes, he titled his book “The Last Commissioner,” because he felt that in the years since he was pushed, “I don’t think we’ve had a real commissioner.”

But in time, he was a baseball fan again. He wrote a series of oral history books where he conducted interviews with players from different eras …

The Only Game in Town (Baseball of the 1930s and 1940s)

We Would Have Played for Nothing (Baseball stars of the 1950s and 1960s)

It’s What’s Inside the Line That Counts (Baseball Stars of the 1970s and 1980s)

In the first of those books, he interviewed Buck O’Neil, and that reminds me of a call I got from Vincent way back in 2007. This was shortly after a Special Committee voted in 17 Negro Leaguers into the Hall of Fame but did not vote in Buck. Vincent was a non-voting member of that committee. He called to say that he had pleaded with the other members to reconsider Buck’s whole life as a baseball player, manager, scout, and spokesperson for the game. They still did not vote him in.

“If Buck O’Neil is not a Hall of Famer, I don’t know who is,” Vincent told me. And then he told me about a call he’d had with Buck after the vote. Vincent found himself trying to apologize, but Buck wouldn’t hear of it.

“He told me, ‘Fay, you’re my friend,’” Vincent said, and I thought I heard his voice crack a little. “What an honor that is — to be Buck O’Neil’s friend.”

 

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