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2018-2019 MLB Offseason Thread

Beau Vine

By Beau Vine
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MAROON
MAROON

best comment i read so far about the contract length.   "There are Phillies fans not yet born that will be throwing batteries at him in the later years of this contract".

Beau Vine
Beau Vine

From Levi Weaver's column in The Athletic:  

Beau Vine
Beau Vine

Gammons rambles way too much and it's like his editors are afraid to touch his work, but I like him because he loves baseball.  Not just MLB.  Gammons loves BASEBALL. And he hit this one out of t

spystud13

spystud13 2,371

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Dig the honesty. 

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"Look, it was a bad deal, and that's on me," said Stearns, referring to the July 31 trade that sent Jonathan Villar plus a pair of top prospects to the Orioles for Schoop. "We made a trade for a player who we thought was going to be here for basically a year and a half, and that was wrong."

https://www.mlb.com/news/brewers-non-tender-jonathan-schoop-2-others/c-301303452?tid=282421090

 

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WBT

WBT 20,712

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12 hours ago, Beau Vine said:

Take a look at the Fordham roster.... and yeah, that's who you think it is:

DtWwxiCWkAscm--.jpg

I guess Vinny was a glove first cf since he was ph for in the 9th.  He's a couple of years younger than h.w. but I guess both were in the military before going to college

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Pig Bellmont

Pig Bellmont 8,745

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13 minutes ago, Beau Vine said:

Scherzer, Strasburg, Corbin coming at you.

Shocked he didn't sign with the Yankees (or Mets).

Supposedly Yankees would only offer 5 years. Nats paid $140mm over 6 to get him. I don’t think the Nats are done yet either. I can see them signing a big bat assuming Harper is gone 

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Beau Vine

Beau Vine 54,496

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Stark (longer than even usual) on the shift:

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What if baseball banned The Shift?

We don’t ask that question because we’re looking for clicks. We don’t even ask it because we’re trying to get invited to the potentially epic End of the Shift party at Matt Carpenter’s house. We ask because it feels, all of a sudden, as though that could be a real possibility.

We know, first off, that this is going to be a big winter in baseball’s never-ending quest for more action and better pace. We also know that support for that Kill the Shift idea starts at the top.

Just check out a collection of Rob Manfred’s Greatest Shift Quotes sometime. The commissioner has been contemplating “eliminating shifts” since the week he took the job back in 2015. And now, we’re hearing, support for that idea is building.

At last month’s owners meetings, baseball’s competition committee gave the commissioner “strong” backing to try to “put something in place” to limit shifts, according to sources who spoke directly with members of the committee. So next up, it’s time to run this – and more – past the players’ union.

Until those conversations actually happen, it’s impossible to know where this is leading. The commissioner has been avoiding talking specifics for months. And shifts won’t be the only topic on the table. (We’re betting, for example, on silverware, refreshments and pitch clocks.)

But when we consider all the potential pace-of-play/pace-of-action changes that owners might like to impose, isn’t limiting shifts right at the top of the players’ most-likely-to-be-approved list?

Hitters hate shifts almost as much as they hate 93-mile-per-hour change-ups. And a surprising number of pitchers hate shifts, too – or at least hate them every time they give up a ground ball to short and nobody with a glove is standing there. So if baseball seriously pressed to limit The Shift, why wouldn’t a majority of players vote: YES? Or possibly even: HELL, YES?

“I think it’s a lay-up to get approved by the players,” says one front-office man.

We can’t be sure of that, of course. It could only be a lay-up as part of a much larger conversation, in which both sides give and both sides take and multiple ideas are in play. And in that context, nothing is “a lay-up” these days when these two groups get together.

Nevertheless, it’s not impossible – maybe even by Opening Day 2019. So what if baseball banned The Shift – or at least limited shifting in some significant way? How would the game change? Let’s examine that fascinating question.

Why is this a topic?

First, a quick look at how we got here. Some key factoids and figures:

  • Did you know there were nearly 8,000 more shifts on balls in play in 2018 than in 2017, according to Sports Info Solutions. Yessir, we said 8,000!
  • Did you know there were nearly 28,000 more shifts this year than there were just five years ago? Yep, we said 28,000!
  • Did you know that there were fewer ground-ball hits in 2018 (13,213) than there have been in any season since baseball expanded to 30 teams in 1998 – and over 1,200 fewer than we saw as recently as 2015? Uh-huh, we said 1,200!
  • Did you know the chances of a left-handed hitter reaching base on a pulled ground ball to the right side have dropped to their lowest rate since Sports Info Solutions began keeping track a decade and a half ago? That Reached Base Rate (which is basically OBP, but includes errors) was a measly .192 this year. That’s a drop of 43 points just since 2011!
  • And did you know there were fewer singles this year (26,322) than in any season in this millennium – and nearly 3,000 fewer than just a decade ago? Yeah, we said 3,000!

That isn’t all The Shift’s doing, obviously. It’s a product, largely, of The Shift Epidemic plus The Launch Angle Epidemic plus The Strikeout Epidemic.

But you can make a case that those are all related developments. And there are people in the game who are emphatically making that case – though not everyone agrees with them.

“Why would they want to change rules that have been in place for a long time, to tell people where to stand?” Braves hitting coach Kevin Seitzer wondered. “I don’t understand why we need to change the rules just because [hitters] won’t make an adjustment.”

OK, here’s why: A number of people inside the game, including some members of the competition committee, have concluded that teams and hitters have reacted to The Shift by saying, “Let’s hit the ball over those shifts.” (See: “launch angle.”) They’ve also concluded that those uppercut swings are fueling the tsunami of strikeouts.

And, finally, they’ve concluded that teams are never going to react to The Shift by saying, “See where nobody’s standing on the other side of the infield? Let’s hit it there.” The Shift has been A Thing for about a decade now. Yet the cool factor of the opposite-field single hasn’t spread across the land – and shows no signs of doing so.

So why are they talking about limiting or banning shifts? That about covers it!

What a new rule might look like

It’s difficult to spell out the specifics of a rule that has never existed and has barely been talked about. So even sources who would have to hammer this out aren’t certain exactly where this is going.

But what’s most likely is a rule that simply reinforces one basic principle: Each team must have two infielders on the left side of second base and two on the right side.

Could they set up on the outfield grass? Probably. Could one infielder stand three inches from the second-base bag? Of course. Would that infielder be allowed to charge over to the other side of the bag after a pitch is thrown? Unclear – until these rules get written.

“So when is an infielder an infielder?” wondered one coach who is involved in communicating front-office data to his team’s players and coaching staff. “Would we have to have four infielders?”

Sorry. Can’t answer those questions yet. It all has to be negotiated. And the specifics have yet to be thrashed out. But as one source involved in these discussions put it: “The answer to pretty much every one of these questions is: ‘We’ve gotta start somewhere.’”

So would this work?

Let’s ask again: Why would baseball ban or limit The Shift? Because the powers that be believe this sport needs more action. That’s why. And more guys running around the bases = more action.

But would banning The Shift actually produce more guys running around the bases? We asked the bright minds from Sports Info Solutions to delve into that.

  • They looked at all “full shifts” – situations in which a team played three infielders on one side of second base.
  • Then they examined what would have happened if those teams had been forced to play a “partial shift” – in which the second baseman or shortstop would play as close to the middle as possible without crossing over.
  • Finally, they broke down every play in which a ground ball or short line drive was hit into a “full shift” – over the last three seasons and then just in 2018.

Here is what they found:

YEAR(S) BALLS INTO SHIFT HITS* WOULD HAVE BEEN HITS
2016-18 22,971 5,181 6,317
2018 9 2,034 2,551

They also broke down those results this way:

YEAR(S) AVG. VS FULL SHIFT* AVG. VS PARTIAL SHIFT**
2016-18 .226 .275
2018 .224 .280

(* – versus three infielders on one side of second base)
(** – if there had been two infielders on each side, with one up the middle)

So what is all that telling us? They’re onto something, that’s what. There would absolutely be more guys running around the bases if baseball were to limit The Shift. As in, about 500 more hits per season (most of them singles) – and a 50-point jump in batting average on ground balls and short liners.

But hold on. It’s possible the difference could be even larger – because this data assumes everything else stays the same. In fact, when there are men on base, nothing stays the same.

“Everybody wants to put things in buckets,” said Cubs manager Joe Maddon. “Very ordinary buckets, with very simple layers on the bucket…And [they estimate] 50 points higher without the shift. But you don’t know that until you actually play it and [see] how guys react to these moments.”

Think about the difference, Maddon said, between a ground ball into The Shift with a man on first, nobody out, versus a ground-ball single against no shift. It’s the difference between a double play (two outs, nobody on) and a rally (no outs, first and third). Changes everything.

“So it’s so hard to measure the mind-game component of all of this,” Maddon said. “I know they can run different methods through the simulator. But it’s hard to understand how the mind is going to react….

“I understand this is based on previous data and looking at how balls have been hit in the past. But when the hitter goes up and sees it differently, how’s he going to react if he’s more confident because he’s had more hits lately? And the pitcher, how’s he going to react because ‘I’m giving up more hits now than I did in the past?’… Who knows what he’s going to think? The thought process changes. And that’s the part, to me, that would be interesting to find out.”

Which hitters would be helped the most?

Ted Williams…Barry Bonds…David Ortiz. The shift originated with them – or, at least, with guys like them. So banning The Shift would be a bonanza for left-handed hitters, right? Well, not necessarily.

We asked Sports Info Solutions to run that study above just on left-handed hitters. And, surprise! The left-handed numbers versus full and partial shifts weren’t much different than the overall numbers.

2016-2018
Grounders/short liners into full shifts: 16,190
Actual hits in those situations: 3,502 (.216 batting average)
Expected hits if partial shifts: 4,322 (.267 batting average)

2018 only
Grounders/short liners into full shifts: 6,185
Actual hits in those situations: 1,323 (.214 batting average)
Expected hits if partial shifts: 1,684 (.272 batting average

In the new 2019 edition of “The Bill James Handbook,” Sports Info Solutions broke down the hitters who have lost the most hits to the shift. The 2018 leader – Matt Carpenter (minus-23) – hits left-handed. But the leader over the last three seasons – Albert Pujols (minus-50) – hits right-handed.

Nevertheless, just on sheer volume alone, left-handed hitters deal with many more shifts than right-handed hitters. According to the Bill James Handbook, there were 29 hitters who faced at least 300 shifts in 2018. Exactly one of them – Edwin Encarnación – hits right-handed.

But if The Shift does get banned, there’s one group of left-handed hitters that would be way more ecstatic than others. You know who we mean.

“The guys this would help,” said one AL executive, “are left-handed power hitters with no speed who pull a ton of balls. Those guys have been really crushed by The Shift – in performance and value.”

“If this actually happens,” quipped an NL exec, “David Ortiz might have to attempt a comeback.”

MOST SHIFTED BATTERS

HITTER PA FACING SHIFT AVG. VS SHIFT*
Kyle Seager 490 .188
Matt Carpenter 488 .161
Freddie Freeman 479 .256
Anthony Rizzo 476 .225
Matt Olson 472 .260

(*on ground balls and short line drives. Source: 2019 Bill James Handbook)

But now the bad news

So have we established that limiting shifts would create more hits, more guys running around the bases and more left-handed sluggers who wouldn’t hit .182? We have. That’s the good news.

But now the bad news: The goal here would be to create more “action,” right? And 500 more ground-ball hits a year sounds like a lot. But guess what? That isn’t exactly going to turn baseball into an arcade game.

Remember, those 500 extra hits would be spread over about 2,400 games. So let’s do the math. That only comes to three extra hits, in the entire sport, per night. For the average team, it’s about 17 more hits a season. That’s not even three extra hits per team per month.

Also remember that almost all of those hits would be singles. When we ran that past one AL manager, he mused, “I wonder if singles impact run-scoring as much as we assume.”

Well, that answer isn’t merely no. It’s a more emphatic no than you probably realize.

We asked our friends at Sports Info Solutions to look at the impact of the single in modern-day run-scoring. Guess what they found. Never in history has a single been less impactful than it is now.

If we measure the value of a single by wOBA, we find that value peaked 100 years ago! After that, it declined gradually with the arrival of the live-ball era and then, essentially, plummeted in the last decade.

Value-of-singles-by-year.png

Although the rate of run-scoring in innings with more than one single remains about where it was a decade ago, SIS found that was mostly fueled by the uptick in homers. When it examined run-scoring in innings with no homers, on the other hand, it discovered that rate has now also dived to a modern low ebb.

Runs-in-innings-with-no-singles.png

“The reason the value of a single has gone down is that strikeouts are up,” said one big-league pitching coach. “So in this era, bunching hits is really hard to do. In our coaches’ room, we’ll sometimes ask, ‘How do you beat an ace? How do you beat a Max Scherzer?’ And it’s not by singles….You’re not going to bunch three singles in an inning against Max Scherzer. You’ve got to get a guy on and hit a ball in the seats. And that’s part of why singles are devalued. It’s just so hard to hit multiple singles in the same inning.”

Would this defuse the launch-angle craze?

Then there’s the other big goal in limiting shifts – the theory that, by bringing back the good old-fashioned ground-ball or line-drive single, you’ll see less obsession with launch angle.

Well, good luck on that. You know that line of thinking that launch angles came about as a strategy to combat shifts with uppercut swings? It’s not that simple.

“For 100 years,” Seitzer said, “guys have been trying to hit fly balls and line drives into the outfield – in the gaps and out of the park….That’s because launch angle and exit velocity are critical in this game. That’s where extra-base hits come from. If a flat line drive is zero degrees (of launch angle), we want 10 to 20 degrees if you’re not a power guy, and 12 to 25 degrees if you are a power guy. I tell guys, ‘A 25 launch angle and 103 (miles per hour) off the bat, you usually wind up trotting around the bases. And that’s pretty cool.’”

“If they’re thinking this will kill Launch Angle Mania, I don’t think that’s true at all,” said the pitching coach quoted earlier. “The reason for Launch Angle Mania is, with the athletes who play in the infield and the ability to position infielders based on the information we have now, ground balls are outs. So you don’t hear guys saying, ‘We’ve got to launch.’ They just don’t want to hit the ball on the ground because they’re outs.”

Now it may be true that, if this sport banned the shift, those ground balls wouldn’t all be outs anymore. But is that enough incentive for hitters across this sport to stop launching and trying to flatten out their swings?

“I don’t see it,” said the same pitching coach. “At the end of the day, you’re still putting [two athletic infielders] on each side of the bag and you’re positioning them exactly where you know most of these ground balls are going to go. So they’ve still got to try to get the ball in the air.”

But will that be true in every count and every situation? It might not.

“I still think that with two strikes, you’ll see some of these left-handed hitters shorten up,” said one executive who would vote to ban shifts. “I honestly think they’ll say, ‘Let me shorten my swing and try to get a single here,’ as opposed to, ‘If I hit the ball in the air and it goes anywhere other than over the fence, they’re going to catch it.’”

Is it really worth killing the shift?

So finally, we ask: Suppose this sport really goes down this road? Suppose that – over the high-decibel objections of front offices everywhere – players and owners miraculously agree that banning The Shift is an idea that’s worth a shot?

Wow.

This wouldn’t be just some minor tweak, like six mound visits per night. Wouldn’t this be the most dramatic rule change in baseball since the mound was lowered – half a century ago?

“I can’t think of any rule change as radical as this, because you’re dictating where players can play,” said Phillies pitching coach Chris Young. “You’re dictating where four guys are allowed to stand 165 times a game – or however many pitches are thrown in a game. That’s more radical than the DH rule. The DH comes up like four times a game. This is every pitch in every game, and you’re dictating where major league baseball players are allowed to stand – or not allowed to stand – every pitch.”

So will the data-driven front offices howl at the top of their lungs? You know they will. Will they look for ways to circumvent this rule – by attempting to re-define what is considered “an infielder?” Of course they will.

But is that a reason not to try this? That, ladies and gentlemen, is the heart of this debate.

“Certain clubs will say, ‘You’re killing our creativity,’” said an exec of one team. “But ultimately, I don’t think you’ll see clubs protesting outside the commissioner’s office. I don’t think you’ll see us marching down Park Avenue to say, ‘Bring back The Shift.’ We do what we’re told.”

Once upon a time, this exec said, he was one of those people screaming in indignation when the commissioner floated the idea of banning The Shift. But the more he has thought about it, his opinion has evolved – dramatically.

“All sports have rules on how a play starts up and how you position your players,” he said. “In the NFL, you can’t have your fastest guy start 10 yards behind the line and then sprint forward before the snap. The NBA has changed its zone-defense rules like 30 times. So if you think about it that way, it doesn’t seem too burdensome to me to say two guys have to stand on each side of second base….

“I can think of other rule changes that would change the way fans feel about the game. But this one, I think everyone would make the adjustment in a month. I don’t think the average fan tunes into a game to see what cool shift the Astros are playing tonight.”

Based on the numbers and the projections, there are legitimate questions about how much impact this change would really have – on action, on pace, on the experience of watching a game. But there’s a larger question hanging over this debate:

Has baseball reached the point where it’s simply time to show its customers – and potential customers – that it’s open to the kind of changes other sports have been making for years?

“In the NFL and the NBA, they make changes all the time,” said one source who has been lobbying for this sort of move. “They try stuff. They tweak stuff. They make changes to create more offense and more action, and if it doesn’t work, they try something else. And when it does work, fans seem to love it. I just wish there was a climate in our sport where we could get to that point. Let’s try stuff. What do we really have to lose?”

“Listen,” said Joe Maddon, “I’m at the point now where whatever MLB wants to do, or attempt to do, on different things, I’m going to be on board. I did watch maybe an inning or two of the postseason, and I totally understood what they were talking about, how slow everything was. The pace was very, very slow. And now I get it. We’ve been involved with the playoffs the last three years, four years, and I was not able to watch all this. So now I saw it. Now I get it.”

We’ve never heard more people inside the game – people who love the game – say stuff like that than we’ve heard over the last year. They may love it, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. That doesn’t mean that great baseball strategy equals great entertainment strategy.

So maybe banning The Shift wouldn’t fix baseball. Maybe it wouldn’t have as dramatic an effect on offense as some people think. Maybe it would even make games longer, not shorter. But maybe it would also send a message that baseball needs to send: It’s time to change.

And once the dust from that change settles, you know what? It will still be baseball.

“I’m pretty sure nobody is tuning into the World Series for ‘Dodgers! Red Sox! See The Shift!’” said one of the execs quoted earlier. “It’s to see offense, balls in play, runners running around the bases. That’s what people want to watch. And at this point, it’s all we should care about as an industry.”

 

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Brew

Brew 3,049

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Kelly is the only real loss there as he was Yadi’s replacement. They are covered up with pitching and then Young has been terrible at the plate. The problem is that historically they don’t pay in free agency, so what’s the plan past next year?

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Beau Vine

Beau Vine 54,496

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Loria's son-in-law/lackey is available to run his mouth now and there's no chance anyone else in MLB will hire him:

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In two interviews in recent days, former Miami Marlins president David Samson revealed the Marlins planned to sell the team to Jorge Mas last summer if he had been able to come up with the agreed-to financing, nearly traded Jose Fernandez less than a year before his death and accused another team of medical fraud.
 

Samson, now able to speak candidly after his Marlins contract expired on Oct. 31, addressed myriad topics in conversations with the Miami Herald last week and an interview on the local hour of Dan Le Batard’s ESPN Radio show on 790 The Ticket on Wednesday morning.

Among the highlights:

▪ Samson told us that after Jorge Mas bid $1.2 billion for the team last summer, that he informed Mas he would be sold the team if he could reach that figure, even if the other bidding groups bid the same.

“We chose Mas to sell the team to,” Samson said. “We thought he was going to get the team at $1.2 billion.”

Why? Because Samson said the Marlins preferred selling to a local owner if all things were equal because as a local owner, Mas “would have been what the Marlins never had. Local ownership would have been better for the team.”

But ultimately, Mas did not reach the $1.2 billion figure, Samson said. “Mas and Derek Jeter and Bruce Sherman had the same bid but Mas wasn’t able to finance the bid,” Samson said.

Mas, by email Wednesday, said Samson’s comments are accurate.

“I was told by both he and Jeffrey Loria that if I met/matched price I would get team over other bidders,” Mas said. “I understood $1.2 [billion] was number to get team. Decided we couldn’t get to number and make it work with what we had planned to invest in team ...

Everything happens for a reason ... MLS project is going to be great for our city ... unbelievable support and passion for soccer.”
 

Mas is now involved in ownership of Miami’s new MLS team.

▪ Samson said Sherman and Jeter got the team only because they offered the most money, disputing any thought that owner Jeffrey Loria wanted Jeter to get the team.

“Jeffrey had absolutely no preference during the process,” Samson said. “He left me alone to complete the process and get the best deal possible. There was a time where I thought Jorge was going to get the team, but at the end of the day, the timing wasn’t right for him.”

▪ He said the Marlins nearly traded Jose Fernandez to Arizona before the 2016 season, less than a year before he died in a boating accident, because he had turned down an extension that winter and ownership had no confidence he would sign with the Marlins when he became a free agent after the 2018 season.

He said the Marlins’ 2015 contract offer to Fernandez topped $30 million, the largest ever for a pre-arbitration pitcher. Samson couldn’t recall the exact terms.

The proposed 5-for-1 trade with Arizona would have sent pitcher Patrick Corbin, third baseman Brandon Drury and center fielder AJ Pollock, among others, to the Marlins.

“Arizona turned it down,” Samson told me. “We thought it was going to happen but we never had any agreement.”

▪ Samson told me that during the sales process — which Samson handled on behalf of owner Loria — Jeter implied Samson would be retained as president but Samson always doubted Jeter would do that.

“I was led to believe I would be retained but it was not relevant in the process,” Samson said. “There were direct conversations about me staying, but I knew he was doing it to curry favor to think it would help him get the team. I assured him being the highest bidder was the only thing that would help him get the team.”

He said he learned he wasn’t being retained when he got a text alert telling him that the media [including Le Batard and then the Herald] were reporting he wouldn’t be retained. He said he called Sherman or Jeter immediately, and Jeter eventually called back and confirmed that he would not be retained without giving him a reason.

He told Le Batard on Wednesday that the craziest thing Jeter told him during the sales process “was how excited he was to work with me.”

The new owners had to pay Samson for a year after dismissing him, per terms of his contract with Loria. That contract ended on Halloween.

▪ Samson said it didn’t bother him when Jeter, before the sale closed, asked him to inform Andre Dawson, Tony Perez, Jeff Conine and Jack McKeon that they would not be retained as Marlins special assistants.

“I thought it was a mistake; I still think it’s a mistake to turn your back [on those four] for the sole reason they were associated with me,” Samson told me. “To make an obvious and blatant effort to distance yourself from an owner and while doing that distancing yourself from four people who will always be a part of Marlins history seems like a silly mistake. And then they tried to cure it by making such an insulting offer for them, which all of them declined.”

On Le Batard’s show Wednesday, Samson said new ownership then “tried to get him all back at 25 grand [per year]. It’s embarrassing.”

▪ He said Jeter wanted to be the team’s control person “but that was not a deal that was going to happen. Control people need to put up more money” than Jeter, who according to documents, contributed $38 million of the $1.1 billion cost to buy the team.

“That’s what Jeb Bush wanted; that’s why Jeb and Derek Jeter broke up,” Samson said.

Samson said he told Jeter “that I would not submit a bid for approval by the ownership of the other 29 teams — with Derek as control person and the reason was I did not have the votes.”

On Le Batard’s show, Samson cracked: “I am very thankful that Bruce Sherman enjoys Derek Jeter so much” because the sale wouldn’t have happened without Sherman’s money.

Samson joked that Sherman paid the money “to have ability to get [Jeter’s] cell number.”

▪ He said to both Le Batard and me that the San Diego Padres kept two medical files on players — a legitimate one and a fake one.

“It’s not an allegation; it’s a fact,” Samson said.

Padres spokesman Craig Hughner, issued this response Wednesday evening: “The comments made this morning by a former club official were inaccurate and wholly inappropriate. Over two years ago, a situation unrelated to the Marlins was settled and discipline was issued following a thorough investigation by MLB. We have moved on fully in accordance with the guidelines, and we have no desire to respond further.”

The Marlins acquired Colin Rea in a multi-player trade with the Padres in the summer of 2016 but returned him to San Diego and restructured the trade after he sustained an elbow injury in his first start. The Padres hadn’t disclosed key medical information about his elbow.
 

“The Padres lied,” Samson said. “They had an entire medical file on a player and didn’t disclose it. Two sets of medical records is what they had. [Padres general manager] A.J. Preller shouldn’t be allowed in the game. It’s beyond comprehension that he’s still working. They did it to the Red Sox. There are a lot of things you mess with, but you don’t mess with that.”

Major League Baseball suspended Preller late in 2016 for his failure to disclose medical information in a trade with the Padres but he didn’t receive additional discipline for the Marlins trade.

▪ Samson said he once thought he might have a physical altercation with Giancarlo Stanton in the clubhouse.

“He accused me of purposely trying to put a team in danger by putting them on a plane which was not worthy of flight and I thought

Stanton and I would have had a physical altercation, which would have been funny because he’s three times my size,” Samson told Le Batard.

Samson told Stanton he was flying on the plane too and “I told him I value my life way more than I value yours. Right now, shut up, put your uniform on and try to win a God damn game.”

He said he and Stanton have a good relationship and Loria did not know he would sell the team when they gave him his 13 year, $325 million deal in November 2014.

“That contract is not an overpay by any stretch when you look at what players are making,” Samson told Le Batard. “We gave him an out after six years and by doing that, we were able to pay him less the first six years. Our goal was to make him an offer he couldn’t refuse. He didn’t want to be a Marlin. But we made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.”

▪ Samson offered several colorful comments on some former Marlins.

“Heath Bell made AJ Burnett look like a great guy, and think about how hard that is,” Samson said. “Jeffrey said, hey, we’re signing Heath Bell. When you sign a free agent who says they don’t need to meet with you first, it says you overpaid. We offered the third year and $7 million a year. He said of course I’ll take it because I stink.”

Samson said in Milwaukee, he once “caught” then-Marlins pitcher Ricky Nolasco “eating pizza in 3 in the morning the night before a start. He tried to run away, like a five year old away from his father. I’m like, ‘Ricky, go to bed.’ He got shellacked by the Brewers the next day. You have four nights to go out and you get hammered the night before you’re pitching? You run away like I’m not going to see you?”

 

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