Category Archives: ‘Weekly’ Hit Ground Ball

Matt Smith’s Monday morning column, looking back at the previous week in MLB and looking ahead to the ‘early’ games scheduled for the week ahead

Yelich gets $215m Beer Money from Brewers

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Christian Yelich and the Milwaukee Brewers brought hope to many a so-called small-market fanbase this week in coming to terms on a new nine-year, $215 million contract. It’s a 7-year extension on top of his current deal and could keep him with the Brew Crew until he is 37 years old.

It’s fair to say that, had Yelich continued his recent MVP-type form over his remaining seasons before hitting free agency, he could have made a lot more money. But by all accounts it was Yelich who sparked the talks. 

“It’s a large sum of money and people are always going to ask the ‘what-if’s’ — did you leave [money on the table] or not? — but I play the game to win, and to be a part of a place that I feel comfortable and I take pride in representing. For me, this is that place.

“That’s how I made this decision. It wasn’t one that I took lightly. I spent a lot of time talking about it with my family and my representatives. At the end day, we felt that this was right.”

Yelich, as reported on MLB.com.

There are two parts to the story, of course. One is in the Milwaukee Brewers stepping up to lock down a true franchise player, and you have to give some credit to their principal owner Mark Attanasio in being prepared to do this, as the team has ‘had a go’ in previous years such as in the CC Sabathia and Zack Greinke trades. 

But the main story comes back to Yelich and what he wanted to do in being prepared to accept less money to stay somewhere he and his family are happy, in the knowledge that the money he will earn should still be more than he’ll never need. 

It doesn’t mean other players are wrong to look at it differently and want to get top dollar at free agency. Because they have the fortune to play this great game for a living, it’s easy to overlook that for almost all players free agency is the first time they’ve had any say whatsoever in where they get to play their baseball. 

Had Francisco Lindor ended up with the Dodgers or the Yankees as a prospect years ago, with no say himself on it, he wouldn’t have had to worry about a home-town discount on a contract extension. He’s hardly being greedy to think ‘if I was with another team I could get $100m more, so why not go to free agency in two years’ time’. However, the Yelich deal does add another factor to the situation.

We can all look askance at billionaire ownership groups coining it in and we should constantly hold them in suspicion when they start pleading poverty. But is it really true to say ‘every team’, including the Brewers, Indians, A’s and Rays can afford your Bryce Harper style $330m deal, or Gerrit Cole $324m? Maybe it’s not just carrying water for the owners in saying no, however, a multi-year deal such as Yelich’s ($215m with some deferrals) absolutely is possible for every single team. 

If the player, such as Lindor, wants to get full market value then I’ve no issues with that whatsoever, but if you love where you are from a playing point of view and a personal point of view and they offer you $200m+ guaranteed, it’s a big decision to turn that down.

More on the White Sox, AL West, and NY Yankee injuries

I will be a complementing my Weekly Hit Ground Ball columns with a regular video series on our Oakland A’s UK YouTube channel looking at news from around the Majors, or as I like to refer to it, “The Other Lot”.

The videos will cover the main news story or comment piece written about here, the Yelich contract extension in this case, with some additional commentary on other topics that caught my eye from the past week.

Sometimes they will be pre-recorded productions, as with this debut episode, and sometimes they will be recorded as a live-stream on our YouTube channel on a Sunday morning. Subscribe to the Oakland A’s UK channel to be notified when new videos are published and when live-streams begin.

Here’s the first video, handily embedded below:

Electronic Strike Zones and VAR

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I’ll start this column by referring you on to someone else’s. I had jotted down some notes on this topic a week ago, but didn’t have the chance to write up the article. Then Jayson Stark, one of my favourite baseball writers, published a column on The Athletic looking at what the 2020s might bring in MLB and included some of the points I was going to make.

This does mean that the column can serve two purposes: one in explaining my own thoughts on the issue of electronic strike zones and two in recommending The Athletic as a great value subscription website, which I planned to do anyway given the news this week that their baseball writing staff added ex-ESPN prospect expert Keith Law to the roster.

Anyway, I can bring another angle to the seemingly inevitable change in MLB that, at some point in the next few years, balls and strikes will cease to be called by the Home Plate Umpire and instead be left to a computer. That angle comes in the form of the scourge of the 2019/20 English Premier League season: VAR (Video Assistant Referee).

The basic element of offside, with a few caveats as explained in the laws on the FA’s website, is that an attacking player is ruled offside if “any part of the head, body [not including hands and arms] or feet is nearer to the opponents’ goal line than both the ball and the second-last opponent” at the precise moment a forward pass is played.

Whilst referring to someone as being “just” on or offside is commonplace, sticklers have always noted that this is not true. The ruling, as per the letter of the law, is absolute: you’re either onside or offside.

This is the same as baseball: we may refer to a high strike, a borderline strike, a pitch “just a bit outside”, but when it comes to the laws of the game it is a binary position: a strike or a ball.

The thing is, the application of what is a black-and-white decision when written in black-and-white has never been black-and-white in practice.

It is impossible to apply the offside law with exacting precision, not through a “human element” of mistakes but that the fluid nature of the game means the assistant referee is rarely able to be exactly in line with the defenders, that the act of the infraction (exactly when the pass is played) is in another part of the pitch (i.e. you can’t look at both at once) and that the assistant referee is usually in motion at the time too.

All of this has meant that whilst the law is absolute, its application and, most importantly, how it affects the game has always had a level of tolerance built into it. The practice in the EPL of applying the law exactly using VAR, pausing the footage at the precise moment the pass is played and then accurately plotting points on the bodies of the attacking player and the defender, has proved that this unwritten tolerance is an essential part of the law functioning as intended.

Consequently, it is probable that the law will be amended in the summer to correct this, either in amending the offside law overall or in defining what a “clear and obvious” mistake amounts to in the context of a review for a potential offside.

That brings us to the electronic strike zone and Jayson Stark’s comment that its ultimate introduction likely will be done in conjunction with a change to the definition of the strike zone.

Presently the zone is specified in the Definition of Terms section of MLB’s Official Baseball Rules (annoyingly published as a pdf) as follows:

“The STRIKE ZONE is that area over home plate the upper limit of which is a horizontal line at the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants, and the lower level is a line at the hollow beneath the kneecap. The Strike Zone shall be determined from the batter’s stance as the batter is prepared to swing at a pitched ball”.

Right from the off, we should accept that the definition is more fluid than that of football’s offside, not least because the actual area changes based on each individual hitter’s height and batting stance. What we end up with, though, is a definition of a strike zone that, when you really consider it, doesn’t seem like the strike zone we are all used to. For example, the top of the zone is usually judged (not just by the umpire, but those playing and watching) as just a bit above the belt.

None of this is to rail against the use of technology: if it’s cost-effective and reliable then why not take advantage of that for things like the strike zone and offside which are ‘yes/no’ decisions rather than requiring an element of judgement?

The point is, applying the written rule with electronic precision will fundamentally change the strike zone as we have always known it. Change isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but, as Stark notes in his article in referring to the trials that have taken place so far, it should not be underestimated how significant the impact will be. Pitches that have never been called strikes, and what players and fans have never thought of as being a strike, will suddenly become so.

Just as we’ve seen with offside in the EPL, decisions are going to be ‘right’ but the effect they have will feel wrong. And whilst there are usually only a handful of significant offside decisions to review in a single football game, there are usually a couple hundred ball/strike calls (taking out fouls and swinging strikes) to make in a baseball game.

Even though pretty much everyone is unhappy with the way VAR is ruling on offsides, or how VAR is being used incorrectly in the eyes of the International Football Association Board (Ifab), it’s equally accepted by most that changing anything mid-season would be wrong. That’s a fair and logical position to take, although if you think of it that way in regard to an electronic strike zone it becomes painfully clear how disastrous it would be for MLB if they had to stick with a zone no one likes for a full season when it is introduced.

The lesson learned here for baseball is that full and effective testing is of paramount importance. In particular, they shouldn’t underestimate the potential need to adjust the strike zone definition as part of implementing the system so that the end result is something that looks and feels ‘right’.

They’ve got years of pitch data, the type that is already used to assess umpires, so that should be the first part of the process to determine how the average zone is called and how the current definition needs to be adjusted to make it match.

They should then ensure MLB players have ample opportunity to trial the zone, installing it in big league ballparks (if it doesn’t use technology already there) so it can be used in pitcher side-sessions and batting practice-type scenarios, and so that they can provide feedback. We all know there will be biases within that – pitchers wanting a bigger zone, hitters wanting a smaller one etc – but this would at least tease out where there’s broad consensus of anything that stands out.

It also needs to be trialled for fans and the media. As we’ve seen in the EPL, if the vast majority of people vehemently hate what they’re seeing, piously telling them the decisions are correct doesn’t solve the matter and, in fact, only means the benefits are wiped out and and leads to a clamour for the system to be scrapped entirely.

The best way to do that would be to use the system in the couple of exhibition games teams play in MLB stadiums in between Spring Training ending and the MLB regular season beginning. Ideally you’d do that the year before (e.g. exhibition games in 2023, refine it behind the scenes during 2023, then launch in 2024 – years chosen just as an example rather than an expected timeline).

And the final lesson MLB can learn from football is not to give the new system a name, like VAR. Sport is a great way to bring people together, but rival fans uniting to provide an expletive-ridden soundtrack to games about the new technology probably isn’t quite the way authorities would like to see that being demonstrated.

Christmas shopping spree

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A week ago I wrote the following:

“The MLB Winter Meetings have begun in San Diego and plenty of people are speculating about what big free agent news will be announced over the next few days (likely very little, based on recent years)”.

You could say I was a long way off the mark with that comment, although maybe I can latch onto the final caveat to save a bit of face.

Over the past two off-seasons there has been considerable discontent among players as to how the free agent market has failed to develop in the way they expected. Both times the fall-out descended into an argument with teams on one side and players and agents on the other. It takes two sides to make a deal. Whether it was the players being greedy or the teams being cheap depended on which side of the fence you were shouting from.

The first month and a half of the 2019/20 off-season can’t help but make you lean towards the players and agents on this one.

Take Mike Moustakas as a prime example. He had to accept one year deals in each of the previous two off-seasons due to finding no multi-contact offers to his liking. This time around he’s signed a four-year contract with the Cincinnati Reds. Whilst we do have to take the qualifying offer, and resulting loss of a draft pick, into account, that doesn’t go far enough as an explanation as to why he suddenly is now worthy of a multi-year commitment. The difference this time is in a greater number of teams looking to add a quality infielder.

It comes back to a topic I discussed just over a month ago, that of the essential element of competition that drives a free agent market. The impasse in the past two off-seasons has come from teams not upping their offers because they knew that they didn’t have to as part of winning the bidding, whilst players and agents were waiting for better offers that they thought should come, but never did.

This year, things have changed.

The Philadelphia Phillies were one of the few teams to make a big push a year ago, not least in the Bryce Harper contract, and the end result was making it eight consecutive seasons without a play-off appearance. The Phillies were never going to stand still after that disappointment and they’ve acted by bringing in Joe Girardi as manager to replace Gabe Kapler and then signing Zack Wheeler to a five-year, $118m contract and Didi Gregorius to a one-year, $14m contract.

Their NL East rivals, the Washington Nationals, were not going to take their foot off the gas after winning the World Series either. Having lost Harper last year, and rightly expecting to lose Anthony Rendon this year, there was no way they were going to let Stephen Strasburg be tempted by another team’s offer. That was why they blew everyone else out of the water with their seven-year, $245m contract offer that Strasburg accepted on Monday. It’s a huge commitment in a pitcher who has had injury problems in the past and, by all accounts, was not looking to leave Washington anyway, but the Nationals were not prepared to take any chances. They could afford to offer that contract, so they did.

This immediately ignited the market for Gerrit Cole. Strasburg’s deal took the other outstanding starter off the board and also helped to set the parameters for the contract Cole clearly was going to command.

A year ago, everyone was waiting for the New York Yankees to jump in and ramp up the bidding stakes for Manny Machado and Bryce Harper. There was no waiting around this year. The Yankees’ record of making the World Series at least once in every decade from the 1920s on came to an end in their ALCS defeat to the Houston Astros. With no Bronx Fall Classics in the 2010s, and a team with a great offence and bullpen but questionable starting pitching, there was no way that the Yankees would allow Cole to go anywhere else. No messing about: they put the largest ever contract for a pitcher on the table, nine-years, $324m, to make sure he became a Yankee.

And that then put the LA Angels on the clock. It was already a source of embarrassment for owner Arte Moreno that his team had squandered the first eight full seasons of Mike Trout, genuinely in the running to be considered the greatest player of all-time by the end of his career, by turning it into just one Division Series defeat. Having given Trout the most lucrative contract ever (12 years, $426.5M) to stay with the team for years to come prior to the 2019 season, there was no way that the Angels could get through this off-season without signing a big-ticket free agent.

With Strasburg and Cole off the market, the Angels immediately offered Anthony Rendon a seven-year, $245m contract. Just as the Nationals couldn’t let Strasburg leave and the Yankees couldn’t let Cole sign elsewhere, the Angels were prepared to offer whatever it took to make sure they didn’t miss out on Rendon.

This is what happens when teams with big pockets are motivated to out-spend each other to win now. Whatever Rob Manfred may try to claim, that has not been the context in which the free agent market has played out over the past two off-seasons.

It’s made for an exciting Winter Meetings and sets up the rest of the off-season perfectly.

Villar faces the Baltimore Chop

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As the Thanksgiving weekend continues in the States, spare a thought for Jonathan Villar.

On the one hand it looks like he’s about to lose several million dollars; on the other it looks like this is because he’ll be cut by the Baltimore Orioles.

To give thanks or not to give thanks, that is the question.

Villar was one of the very few positives to come out of the Orioles’ dismal 2019 season. After being acquired in a trade with the Milwaukee Brewers at the 31 July 2018 deadline, he seemed to find some new life in Baltimore and put together a season this year that called to mind his 2016 campaign with the Brew Crew.

He kept producing whilst everything was going wrong around him, most notably in trading groundballs for flyballs. Looking at his batted ball percentages on Fangraphs, Villar went from 55.9% grounders and 24.4% flyballs in 2018 to 48.9% and 31.3% respectively whilst his line drive rate stayed almost exactly the same (19.7% then 19.8%).

With it came a career high in home runs (24) and also in strike-outs (176) and when you consider his base-running exploits (40, 3rd most in the Majors, but being caught 9 times) you get the sense that he thought, if the team’s going to lose anyway, he might as well get plenty of healthy hacks and take some chances on the basepads in for his own sake.

Villar’s problem is that he played well enough to earn a sizeable raise from his $4.8m salary of 2019 in his final year of salary arbitration. MLB Trade Rumors estimates that Villar would get in the region of $10.4m and the Orioles have no interest in paying him that much money.

In a familiar refrain from recent articles here, you can understand the logic from the cold financial perspective. Despite Villar’s contributions, the Orioles still lost 108 games in 2019. To put it flippantly, they will still be perfectly capable of losing 100+ games in 2020 without Villar so why not save the money?

It would be more palatable if Baltimore had been able to find a trade partner for Villar’s services, as they attempted in recent weeks, as that way the player would still get his arbitration-driven salary and the Orioles could at least justify it as a baseball decision. However, the route they are now taking really has nothing to do with baseball.

As Baltimore couldn’t find a trade partner, their options were to keep hold of a good MLB player and look to trade him in the months ahead as new opportunities emerged (e.g. as a result of injuries on other teams) or to simply decide they’re not interested in having to pay a good MLB player a good MLB player-type salary and to get rid of him.

Villar is not an ex-Oriole just yet, he’s currently been put on waivers so that other teams can make a claim for him, although the most likely way it will play out is that he’ll become a free agent. In fairness to Baltimore, their reluctance to pay Villar $10m+ obviously is shared by other teams and reflects his season-on-season inconsistency, but looking at the situation from some other perspectives does once again turn the attention back to the non-competitive landscape in MLB right now.

The Orioles will have significant revenue coming into their coffers, in particular from local and national TV deals, regardless of how bad their team is in 2020. There is no threat of relegation or incentive to finish higher up in the standings (e.g. prize money based on your win-loss record), you can be as terrible as you like and still reap the rewards.

Where their bottom line is affected is in game-day revenue. Funnily enough, getting anyone beyond the die-hard loyal fans into the ballpark when you’re not fielding a competitive team is somewhat tricky.

In 2019, only the two Florida teams got fewer fans through the turnstiles. Baltimore drew 1,307,807 over 80 home games (16,347 average). That has been part of a downward slide in attendance as the team has racked up losses in recent years. In 2016 the Orioles earned a Wild Card with an 89-73 record and placed 20th in MLB in attendance at 2,172,344, an average of 26,819 in the 81 home games played. In 2017, Baltimore slipped to 23rd (2,028,424 total, 25,042 average), then to 26th in 2018 (1,564,192, 20,053 – technically only playing 78 home games with 3 single-ticket double-headers).

Put it together and across the four seasons the Orioles have seen their average attendance drop by 10,500, with approximately 800,000 fewer ticket sales.

Again, their low attendances in 2019 came despite the likes of Villar playing well and one or two players of that ilk are not going to make a huge difference to whether a family decides to spend some of their hard-earned money going to Camden Yards. Yet, there is a difference between making a few individual player decisions like this and taking an overall decision essentially not to bother even trying to put a watchable team out on the field for seasons on end.

You can also look at it from Villar’s point of view. He was traded to Baltimore without any say in the matter. We can’t replay the season and see what might have happened had he gone to a team that was competitive in 2019, maybe he wouldn’t have got to play so regularly, but if he had performed like this on a team more in the play-off mix then they likely would accept paying him the money to keep him around for 2020.

It’s one of the curious aspects of how MLB works that players are locked into the system, through their initial 6 MLB seasons at least, and their fate is not just determined by their performances but on which team they end up on.

We’ll see where Villar ends up next and what he makes of the opportunity that comes his way, but what we don’t need to wait for is an assessment on what it means for Baltimore’s approach. Whilst MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred does not like it being put to him that teams aren’t trying to win, it’s hard to argue with the claim when teams so blatantly show that they have no interest in paying for Major League talent.

A $26m question

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New York Yankees fans have been front and centre in hunting down video evidence for the ongoing investigation into the Houston Astros’ sign-stealing. This public service, surely not motivated by any bitterness towards their ALCS opponents, has helped to put the Bronx Bombers on the side of the good in the ongoing saga.

So it was gracious of the Yankees’ Front Office to restore normal order this week by engaging in some classic Evil Empire behaviour.

When the Yankees signed outfielder Jacoby Ellsbury to a 7-year, $153m free agent contract in the 2013/14 off-season it had the feeling of being a potential Part 4 in Boston’s Reverse the Curse of the Bambino story. Parts 1-3 were the ultimate acts, winning World Series championships in 2004, 2007 and 2013. Ellsbury was a key contributor to the 2013 triumph, having got a ring in his 2007 rookie season too, and it was all-too obvious for the Yankees to take him away from their AL East rivals when he hit the free agent market that off-season.

Ellsbury had certainly earned his standing as a leading free agent during some very successful years in Boston and the Red Sox likely would have been happy to keep him on a less-substantial contract. The Yankees were determined to make him a fixture of their outfield for years to come whilst taking him away from their rival, much as they had done with Johnny Damon during the 2005/06 off-season, and so splashed-out on a lengthy and lucrative deal to get their man.

And so Part 4 was brought into effect. Not that anyone thought the Yankees had bought a lemon, just that Ellsbury was the type of speedy player that tended to be more affected by the passing of time than most. It’s probably a stretch to pin the last two seasons lost to injury on that, injuries can happen to any player, but the way his contract has played out (okay for the first 4 years, not so for the rest) has not come as a complete surprise.

The majority feeling was that the Yankees had over-committed as part of exerting their power in taking away a key Boston player. It was a deal that always looked likely to come back to bite them, and so it has.

However, the Yankees are doing their best to fight the forces of fate. ESPN’s Buster Olney reports that they have ripped up the final year of his contract, plus the buy-out clause on an option year for 2021, due to Ellsbury “receiving unauthorized medical treatment”. In other words, the Yankees think they’ve found a way to wriggle out of paying the $26m they still owe him.

The claim is set to be challenged rigorously by the Players’ Union, not just for Ellsbury’s own case but as part of the precedent it may set in allowing a team to renege on a contract.

The full details haven’t been disclosed, so, joking aside, it’s fair to reserve judgement at this point. For all it looks like the Yankees are trying to pull a fast one, if they have clear evidence that the treatment Ellsbury underwent has made his condition worse then there may be grounds to justify their actions.

It’s an interesting case more widely within the ongoing debates around Minor League pay and plans to reduce the number of affiliated Minor League teams.

In a British sporting context, there’s a clear starting point that you are contracted to a football team, for example, and therefore your grounds to seek independent treatment, or even independent coaching, are not great. That doesn’t mean you don’t get a say, especially when it comes to getting second opinions on medical treatment and potential surgical procedures, but it rightly has to come with full disclosure and involvement with the team that is paying your wages.

Whilst it’s not exactly the same in the States, that same principle would apply to Jacoby Ellsbury’s case. The Yankees can’t force him to do whatever they like, yet as the organisation paying him a (supposed) guaranteed $21m a year to play baseball they undoubtedly have the right to a strong say in anything affecting that, and equally in Ellsbury being obligated to involve them in any such decisions.

However, what obligation should players have lower down the pecking order, such as in the Minor Leagues? A team can trade you with no notice or say at all, and even decide to terminate your contract at little financial cost, so why would you not follow your own path if you thought it best for your career?

The answer, of course, is that the 30 MLB ownership groups don’t give you a huge amount of choice. Where else are you going to go, other than taking your chances in the Independent League or hope for one of the small number of opportunities in Japan or Korea coming your way? This is the way the system works and if you want to play ball then, to a large extent, you have to play ball with whatever your current organisation wants you to do.

Ellsbury has earned millions already so he is not going to garner a lot of sympathy from the masses, even though being denied an expected $26m is a substantial issue irrespective of how much money you’ve already got in the bank.

The devil will be in the detail as to exactly what treatment he had, the effect of it, what he told the Yankees and why he went down the route of seeking alternative provisions outside of the Yankees’ control. Going against the wishes of the Yankees’ medical professionals behind their backs, if true, would be something that the team, or any other team in that situation, would be within their rights to take action against.

The case does prompt wider questions though at a time when the entire eco-system of Major League and affiliated Minor League Baseball is an ever-increasing battleground.

Like anyone else, players have obligations to their employers that they have to abide by, knowing that not doing so can put them in breach of contract. The reasonableness, and ultimate lawfulness, of those obligations in a business that is effectively a monopoly of 30 employers is an altogether more complicated matter. The antitrust exemption that MLB teams have operated under since 1922 gives them a huge amount of power in controlling the employment opportunities and rights of people wanting to play baseball professionally in North America.

How responsibly they are wielding that power is up for debate; a debate that those who fall under that power are becoming increasingly motivated to challenge.

Sign (stealing) of the times

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The Oakland A’s Mike Fiers doesn’t look like a trouble-maker, weird facial hair shenanigans aside.

However, his decision to not only talk to The Athletic about the Houston Astros’ use of cameras to steal signs, but to allow them to name him in the piece, was a bold move.

The Astros, and other teams, have been the subject of such rumours before. For an ex-team member to categorically state it happened is no longer a rumour but a credible allegation that requires detailed evidence to dispute it. Much as some Astros fans have piled on Fiers and tried to come up with reasons for him to lie, that only washes for people desperate to avoid the truth.

A current Major Leaguer, still plying his trade as a professional, has little to gain and a whole lot to lose by making up such claims. Quite simply, there really is no viable explanation for Fiers to put his name to those comments if he was telling lies. The social media attack on Fiers in the immediate aftermath has only encouraged amateur investigators to trawl the MLB.TV archives and to create a bounty of evidence that has the Astros caught, suitably enough, ‘bang to rights’.

That hardly brings the matter to a close, though. The suggestion is that the Astros are not the only team up to such tricks and even that their influence has spread directly. Houston were followed as World Series champions in 2018 by the Boston Red Sox, led by ex-Astros bench coach Alex Cora, whilst the New York Mets have just appointed 2017 Astros player Carlos Beltran as their manager. New York Yankee fans throwing stones at their 2019 ALCS conquerors would also do well to remember that Beltran was a special adviser with their team this year.

The question therefore is how will MLB investigate this matter and what will be suitable punishments if teams and individuals are found guilty?

The precedent we have comes from September 2017, clearly a vintage year for tech-based cheating, when both the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees were fined for similar offences, suggesting any influence Cora or Beltran had on their post-Astros teams was likely preaching to the converted. You don’t need to look far beyond baseball for proof that piddling fines to billion dollar businesses do not change behaviour.

Given how prominent, and evidence-based, the claims are directly against the 2017 Astros it seems difficult to imagine that MLB won’t hit them with a significant fine, maybe even with a draft pick or two being taken away. The only problem MLB has is that the Astros are not going to take that lying down and, in some ways justifiably, will expect similar punishments for other teams too.

All of which suggests to this cynical baseball writer that a classic MLB ‘fudge’ is on its way.

It’s hard not to look back at the so-called steroid era and see comparisons. In contrast to the revisionist history that former MLB Commissioner Bud Selig likes to espouse, baseball collectively turned a blind eye to drug use for years and that both encouraged use to grow (‘if they’re getting away with it, we can too’) and forced use to grow (‘I don’t like it, but we can’t compete if we don’t join them’).

The same is happening with using technology to steal signs. If some teams are doing it and gaining an advantage with no penalty, others will feel that they can, or maybe even should, do it too. And just like with the mess of the steroid-era, once such flagrant cheating forces MLB to open their eyes and publicly do something, they know that those who they target for penalties will be able, and probably willing, to take everyone else down with them.

There’s no doubt that what the Astros and others were (are?) doing is against the rules, although it is fair to ask if the rule should be changed to allow it. Jason Foster of Sporting News thinks so and whilst his first attempt at explaining this rightly drew criticism, he has a valid point in accepting that technology will be used and moving with the times.

I can’t help but disagree with it. All of the technology and data available undoubtedly is there to be exploited as teams and players prepare to do battle, but the whole point of sport is that it ultimately comes down to individuals competing against each other in the moment. Allowing sign-stealing through cameras and relaying the details is little different to allowing a quiz show contestant to be fed the answers through an earpiece.

All of the drama, the suspense, the excitement, and much of the skill, is taken away and little is left to captivate, enthral and entertain anyone beyond a small minority who want to see their team (or contestant) win regardless of the methods used.

The counter-argument that allowing cameras simply means teams have to do better with their signs falls down pretty quickly. Whatever you feel personally about the effect, there’s no doubt that MLB games are taking longer and that this puts casual fans and newcomers off the sport. We’re already seeing the delays caused by teams having to cycle through combination signs due to the fear of opponents stealing them. Doing it when runners are on second is fair enough; do we really want every single pitch thrown in every single game to be delayed because the catcher can’t just put down two fingers for a curveball?

The solution of going down the NFL route and using radio communication is not a solution at all. The point of the signs is that the most important person, the batter, can’t see them. The catcher can’t simply cover his mouth and say “curveball” with the batter right beside him and using codes or combinations verbally only adds the same delay as combination signs does already.

The current system keeps the game flowing and adds a fair element of competition. If a runner on second base, with everything else he’s thinking through at that point, is able to get an idea of the signs and try to share them then that’s a fair duel. Allowing the home team to set up cameras and decode signs shifts the sporting balance too far and the protective measures that it forces is only causing more delays to the pace of play.

New technology will always arrive and lead to new ideas for teams to try, legally or not. For every sport, the response has to focus on what are the essential elements that make it a great challenge to play and a joy to watch and how these are impacted. Allowing home teams to use cameras may be “smart and savvy”, as Jason Foster puts it, but it doesn’t make the game better from a playing or spectating point of view. In fact it does quite the opposite.

MLB’s current stance on outlawing such sign-stealing is correct and that means they have to take strong action against teams found guilty of breaking the rules. It remains to be seen whether they will or not.

Play Fair, but Play to Win

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As we reflect on the first week of nothingness that amounts to a typical seven days in the MLB off-season of late, the biggest news story of the week in British sport makes for an interesting contrast.

Saracens, the English rugby union club, have been handed down a significant penalty for repeated breaches of the Premiership’s payroll cap.

The team has been given a 35-point deduction, putting them bottom of the league table on -26 points three games into the season (a plight that would almost certainly lead to relegation for any other club, but Saracens probably will just escape that fate) and a £5.36m fine ($6.86m).

For context, the standard payroll cap in the league is £7m, so the fine is equivalent to 75% of their payroll. In some ways, a bit like the Boston Red Sox being fined $160m. The penalties are being contested, yet experts do not fancy Saracens’ chances of overturning the ruling.

The full story can be found in this BBC Sport article, but in essence the team has been accused of flouting the salary cap by setting up investment opportunities (businesses etc) with players. This has allowed them to keep hold of their best players by signing them to contracts of a reduced rate and topping up their remuneration in a way that, they argued, did not constitute a salary and therefore was exempt from the payroll cap calculations.

In short, the team’s owner Nigel Wray has been found to have been using crafty methods to pay players more money.

This is not an accusation you are ever likely to see being levelled at an owner of an MLB team.

MLB is effectively a combination of 30 ownership groups, all of whom having a strong vested interest in keeping their costs down. The quiet and contentious free agency market of recent off-seasons is seen as a direct consequence of teams choosing not to spend money on players beyond the very top-tier of the free agency class.

In this context, the comments from Atlanta Braves’ General Manager Alex Anthopoulos this week about how he has checked in with the other teams “to get a sense of what the other clubs are going to look to do in free agency, who might be available in trades” were hopelessly naive.

Anthopoulos likely was not inadvertently revealing a great conspiracy, instead referring to the obvious intelligence gathering clubs will do to get a sense of what opportunities might present themselves; however it was no surprise that the MLB Players’ Association jumped on the comments and cried “club coordination”.

Relations between MLB and the MLBPA are at their lowest point for many years and the ability of the two sides to come to agreement when the current Collective Bargaining Agreement expires after the 2021 season is in real question.

We are regularly told by MLB Front Offices, and others doing their bidding, that the current climate is a by-product of every team being smarter, using advanced analytics to make rational decisions around contracts and transactions. There is some truth to this, indeed a team could quickly point to the two biggest free agent deals of last year’s off-season (Bryce Harper’s 13 year, $330m contract with the Philadelphia Phillies and Manny Machado’s 10 year, $300m contract with the San Diego Padres) and that neither team even finished with a winning record in the first year of those ‘franchise-changing’ acquisitions.

However, a rational market shouldn’t over-power the fundamental objective of the teams as sporting entities and businesses: competition.

For example, it may be rational and smart to have a general stance that signing a free agent pitcher to a contract longer than four years is a risky proposition, yet good MLB players are a finite commodity. It only takes one team to think ‘we’d prefer not to go above four years, but that player could really make a difference to us’ to push the bidding to five years and beyond. That is the very definition of a properly functioning free agent market.

The fundamental issue in MLB currently is that every year a significant number of teams are ducking out of acquiring good talent, whether justified as ‘retooling’ or them being in full tanking mode. The result is that most free agents are not presented with a ‘normal’ pool of teams competing against each other to acquire talent, and they are therefore not benefiting from the inflationary effect that this is supposed to have.

It’s not that teams are being smarter with their offers, it’s that the market isn’t forcing them to stretch the slightest bit beyond the lower bounds of a potentially acceptable offer for fear of a competitor being willing to offer more. In a marketplace that is restricted to a 30 team (employer) monopoly, that is a huge problem. For the players, at least.

A balance is always necessary in a sport so that there is hope for all teams and that the league is not simply determined by a small group of big-pocketed clubs. In the case of Saracens rugby club, it appears that they have broken the rules agreed to by all and rightly deserve a punishment for it.

Yet in the context of the current MLB landscape, it shouldn’t be overlooked that at heart the Saracens’ owner was motivated by wanting to put together a great team (which he has done) and financially compensating those players accordingly. He was motivated by a desire to build as competitive a team as he was able and to bring success on the field.

How many of the 30 MLB ownership groups could say the same?

Weekly Hit Ground Ball: London, Yankees and Red Sox

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Although we’re a few days on from Tuesday’s MLB London Series press conference, the excitement created by it is still palpable.

Many of us have known for several years that MLB was serious about bringing games to London and, more recently, that a 2019 series between the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees was almost certainly going to happen.

That didn’t make the announcement any the less thrilling, though. There have been false dawns in the past and so the potential for it to be postponed to another year, and then maybe cancelled altogether, couldn’t be completely shaken off.

The sight of MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred and co making it official, and confirming a 2020 series is on track too, not only gives all in the UK baseball community something to look forward to, but something to rally behind to raise the profile of the sport more widely. This blog post from BaseballSoftballUK puts it into context perfectly.

And don’t forget to contribute to the latest Batflips and Nerds survey if you haven’t done so yet.

Configuration of the playing field

Yankee fan (and Norwich City fan, so I’ll forgive him) Dave Clarke put together some potential field dimension plans for the London Stadium on Twitter.

Since Dave’s efforts, the preliminary dimensions of the field have been reported in various sites Stateside, such as this report at TheStar.com:

“The centre-field fence will be an inviting target, just 385 feet from home plate under the preliminary configuration of the stadium, which will accommodate 55,000 spectators.

The closest centre-field wall in baseball is at the Red Sox’s Fenway Park, where the 17-foot high wall is 390 feet from home plate. It quickly juts out to 420 feet in right-centre field and is adjoined by the Green Monster to the left. The wall at London Stadium will be between 12 and 14 feet high between the power alleys.

The power alleys will be 375 feet and the foul lines 333 feet with an eight-foot fence running between the alleys and the foul poles. Dimensions will be finalized in September”.

During the A’s-Yankees games on Saturday, the A’s broadcasters Glenn Kuiper and Ray Fosse made reference to it when Aaron Judge flied out to centre field at Yankee Stadium with a shot that almost certainly would have been over the wall in London. The dimensions of a make-shift stadium will always be a compromise, but let’s hope it produces a good contest and isn’t too homer friendly (much as seeing homers hit in the stadium would be fun).

Yankees and Red Sox show what to expect

It was likely no mere coincidence that the Yankees and Red Sox were playing a series against each other in New York when the London Series was announced.

They showed how good those games could be by producing a dramatic series, with the Yankees taking the first two – the second involving a four-run rally in the eighth off Craig Kimbrel to make it 17 wins out of 18 for New York and to lift them to the top of the AL East – only for the Red Sox to salvage a 5-4 win from the series on Thursday thanks to a J.D. Martinez home run in the eighth inning after the Yankees had scored four in the seventh to level the game.

We know we’ll get two competitive games in London next year, but the one hesitation I had with the news of it being the Red Sox and Yankees coming across the pond was in respect of the length of the games.

One of the comments I hear from Brits who don’t follow baseball is the preconception that games take a long time and if ever there were two teams that could make a nine-game inning last four hours or more it’s the Red Sox and Yankees. Even if it’s an exciting game for the rest of us, the casual observers would likely see that as a negative.

The games from this recent series lasted 3.30, 3.42 and 3.21 (with a 55 minute rain delay).  The average game time for a nine-inning contest so far this season has been dead-on 3 hours and it’s probably safe to assume an extra half an hour on top of that when these two teams come together.

It’s part of the ‘every pitch matters’ intensity of the games that shows MLB at its best – several players commented on the atmosphere at the recent series being akin to a play-off game – and so long as it doesn’t stray too far into the four-hour territory, few people will have reason to grumble.

Playing the game so you can’t lose

Years ago (not sure now in these app-betting days) I knew a few football fans who would put a couple of quid on the opposition winning when going to an away game, on the basis that if their team didn’t get a point or three they could at least soften the blow by having a ‘free’ takeaway that night from their winnings.

The fantasy baseball equivalent is getting the benefit of a player performing well against your chosen real-life team, or the other way around.

We have four potential starting pitcher slots in the BGB Fantasy League on any given day and I had five of my pitchers scheduled to take the mound on Friday. I decided to put former A’s pitcher, current Yankees pitcher, Sonny Gray in my line-up (benching Lance Lynn, which was not a difficult decision considering how he’s pitched for the Twins so far this season) so that if he pitched well against my A’s – which seemed a given – then at least it would be a boost to my fantasy team.

Just as those football fans didn’t care about their stake going to the bookies when celebrating an away win, I brushed aside the fantasy match-up impact of Gray’s night ending with 5 earned runs conceded and another L to his name.

Weekly Hit Ground Ball: ManaeaMania

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We had seen a few no-hitter attempts early this season, not least a three-day run in the second/third week.

Shohei Ohtani was perfect through 6.1 innings on Sunday 8 April (more on that in a moment), the Royals’ Jake Junis then also took a no-no into the seventh inning on the Monday, before the Blue Jays’ Aaron Sanchez did the same on the Tuesday.

All attempts had ended as just that, an attempt rather than a celebration.

That was until last night and Sean Manaea’s no-hitter against the red-hot Red Sox.

Boston had won the series opener on Friday 7-3 and so this A’s fan wasn’t sure quite what to expect when I looked at MLB At Bat this morning. Manaea has been the lone bright spot in an otherwise faltering starting rotation, so if anyone was going to be able to give the A’s a chance to grab a victory it was going to be him. He more than lived up to that by no-hitting the best offence on the best team in MLB so far this season.

Let’s get this point out of the way: there were a couple of calls that looked to have ended the no-no but were turned around in Manaea’s favour.  Taking away Benintendi’s single due to running outside the baseline seemed fair enough when watching the highlights this morning.  Awarding an error on Marcus Semien rather than a hit in the fifth inning on a pop-up in shallow centre field was more debatable, to the point where Manaea admitted after the game that he assumed it was a hit and got a shock when looking at the scoreboard from the dug-out a couple of innings later.

However, given the way Manaea pitched the only people who could begrudge him that bit of good fortune would be Red Sox fans, and they’ve got plenty of good things coming their way this season to soon forget about it.

Most of the attention in the AL West during April has focused on another starting pitcher.

Shohei Ohtani’s scheduled start against the Royals last Sunday was postponed due to bad weather, moving his next appearance to a Tuesday night showdown against Boston.  Plenty of baseball writers rejoiced at the news, excited to see what Ohtani would do against a strong batting line-up after his two impressive appearances against the A’s.

It didn’t go well for Ohtani, not making his pitches and leaving early with a blister, so that would lend some credence to the point being made by the writers that it was just the A’s who were being carved up by Shohei’s splitter previously. Yet, those comments were more a reaction to simply looking at a win-loss record and failing to go any deeper.  If we look at some of the main MLB Team stat rankings this morning, they show the following:

Batting Average

1. Boston – .282

2. Oakland – .268

On-base

1. Boston – .350

2. Oakland – .346

Slugging

1. Boston – .478

2. NY Yankees – .443

3. Oakland – .442

Home runs

1 LA Angels – 41
…..
Jt4. Oakland – 27

…..
8. Boston – 26.

Going a bit more advanced we can see that Boston lead the way on Fangraphs with a 5.0 team batting WAR.  Who’s right there behind them in second on 4.9?  Yes, those Oakland A’s.

Now there’s a bit of me being a slightly precious A’s fan in all of this, but there’s a genuine point here that once you ignore the lack of big names you’ll find that Oakland not only have a good batting line-up this year but had a good one from the second half of last season onwards, when the likes of Matt Chapman and Matt Olson were called up to the Big League roster. The A’s team batting ranked 7th in the Majors on Fangraphs WAR for the second half of last season after being 27th in the first half.

The big issue the A’s have is with their starting pitching.  Coming into Spring Training they had a group of 8 or 9 guys battling for five spots and Manaea was the only one who you felt much confidence in not simply holding down a spot for a while but actually performing really well whilst doing so.

Depressingly, two of the candidates (Jharel Cotton and top prospect AJ Puk) have recently undergone Tommy John elbow surgery and Paul Blackburn is on the 60-day DL with a forearm strain, so the Opening Day roster rotation was largely determined by who the A’s had healthy, with former A’s Trevor Cahill and Brett Anderson being brought in late in Spring Training on free agent deals as relatively inexpensive attempts to patch things up once they got up to speed.

The frustration with this as a fan was in looking at the A’s line-up and what could be a decent bullpen and seeing a potential outside challenge for the second AL Wild Card – a welcome step forward from the last three seasons – dissolving into another long 90-loss campaign.  The early signs were not good with starting pitchers failing to go far in games, the bullpen being overworked as a result and series being lost.

That was except for the starts of Sean Manaea and he’s showed perfectly over the past week how he might lead the way for the rest of the rotation.

Manaea started things off last Sunday by going seven innings in a 2-1 win against the Seattle Mariners, a day after the bullpen had to pick up from starter Kendall Graveman only going four innings. Then the Chicago White Sox came into Oakland for three games and the A’s took the first two on the back of Daniel Mengden going eight innings and Trevor Cahill pitching an excellent seven innings on his season debut.

Game three was a different affair, Andrew Triggs lasting just 1.1 innings and then seven relief pitchers having to cover the next 12.2 innings of a near six hour, 14 inning 12-11 victory. A merciful day off on Thursday led on to Graveman lasting five innings in Game One against Boston on Friday (pitching a bit better than his 6ER line suggested) and the bullpen once again needing to cover four innings of work through necessity rather than some optimal pitching strategy.

All of which brought things back around to Manaea last night.  The A’s needed him and he pitched a no-hitter against the best team in the Majors.

Would I call him an ace? At any given time there’s probably only 10 to 12 true aces in MLB and whilst he helped the A’s get the better of one of them, Chris Sale, last night, it would be fair to say he’s not yet quite in that bracket.

But he is a lot of fun to watch pitch, not least due to his excellent change-up, and if you want to define an ace purely in respect of what he means to his team as the leader of a pitching staff, Manaea looks like he’s stepping up into that role in his third Major League season.

There’s no doubt that Ohtani’s talent and story make him the star young pitcher in the AL West, but hopefully this no-hitter will make a few more people realise that Manaea’s worth watching too.

Weekly Hit Ground Ball: Rookie Managers Making It Look Easy

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Alex Cora and Mickey Callaway must have their feet up in their respective manager’s office thinking that this managing malarkey is easy.

Cora’s Red Sox sit astride the Major Leagues with a 12-2 record heading into Sunday’s games, with Callaway’s Mets close behind on 11-2 having had their nine-game winning streak brought to an end by Milwaukee yesterday.

Meanwhile, it turns out the Phillies’ manager Gabe Kapler might not be completely clueless – as some declared after his first three games – as his team have won five games in a row to second behind the Mets on an 8-5 record.

The Nationals’ Dave Martinez (7-8) and Yankees’ Aaron Boone (7-7) are holding steady in the early going too, which just leaves veteran Ron Gardenhire among the new managers for 2018 for whom the start of the season is proving to be a struggle.

Gardenhire has been in the game long enough not to be too envious of those whippersnappers. There are only 30 MLB manager jobs at any one time and even being in charge of a rebuilding Detroit Tigers is a post to be proud of.

However, it is interesting that so many potentially plumb positions ended up in the hands of rookie managers.

Sport teams generally will change a manager when things have gone badly, with the manager holding responsibility for the team’s performance and being the easiest big part to change as opposed to making significant changes to the playing staff.

That often leads to an ‘opposite ends’ approach to the recruitment of managers, especially in football.  If a ‘back-to-basics’ experienced British manager gets the boot then a younger continental manager is just what’s needed.  If relegation looms with said younger continental manager’s brand of ‘tippy-tappy’ football not working in England, well of course you need a ‘back-to-basics’ experienced British manager to shake things up.

It’s not quite the same in baseball as the manager here has a different brief to work towards (accepting manager/head coach roles vary among football clubs too), yet you still see that approach being taken and, to varying degrees, that goes for the six new managers in MLB this year.

The situation in Washington was the most extreme. Ex-manager Dusty Baker has his critics from previous managerial stints, yet it’s difficult to see quite what he did in his two years at the helm with the Nationals to deserve to be pushed aside over the off-season rather than to continue with the team. They won 95 and 97 games in 2016 and 2017 and whilst consecutive 3-2 Division Series exits were bitterly disappointing when expectations of a World Series were so high, in the cold light of day there wasn’t much about those series defeats that you could pin on Baker.

His departure was a classic case of the team wanting to change something to get over the Division Series hump and Baker being the easiest option.  They changed from a 68 year-old with 22 MLB managerial seasons of experience to Dave Martinez, a 53 year-old who is taking on his first MLB managerial job after serving an apprenticeship under Joe Maddon at the Rays and Cubs.

The changes in Boston and New York were more understandable.

The Red Sox won 93 games and the AL East before being knocked out of the play-offs by a formidable Houston Astros team, so it was hardly a disaster on the field last year. However, it never seemed like a happy camp under John Farrell and so bringing his five-year reign to a close and moving on to the dynamic young Alex Cora looked like a shake-up move at somewhere that needed a shake-up.

The same could be said for the Mets, although in their case the 2017 season undoubtedly was a disaster.  Terry Collins had outstayed his welcome so bringing him back for 2018 was never going to work. Mickey Callaway’s glowing reputation from his five years as pitching coach under Terry Francona in Cleveland made him an obvious candidate to take over at a team whose fortunes are so heavily invested in the form and fitness of their starting pitching.

Aaron Boone was a left-field choice for the Yankees, yet fits into the ‘opposite ends’ idea by virtue of his excellent communication skills – shown to all in his work with ESPN – being cited as a crucial factor in his appointment. Joe Girardi had served a decade as the Yankees’ manager and many on the New York beat had started bemoaning his increased willingness to say very little in his managerial briefings long before it was announce he would not be returning for 2018.  It wasn’t simply the New York press wishing for someone more quote-worthy – although I’m sure that makes their lives much easier – but more that their experience was indicative of what they were picking up from players too: that Girardi was failing to inspire his team any more.

Those four situations are all about winning now, which is different to the roles that Gabe Kapler and Ron Gardenhire are taking on. In Philadelphia, they are firmly on the way up with a young team and so switched the 66 year-old Pete Mackanin for 42 year-old rookie manager Kapler.  In Detroit, they are at the start of a rebuild and decided that the experienced head of Gardenhire was what was needed at this point to move on from first-time manager Brad Ausmus, whose four-year tenure produced mixed results.

These are early days in the 2018 season and none of us can be certain how the six managerial appointments will pan out over the next few years, but it is likely we can take a good guess at the type of manager they will be replaced by when that time comes.

That is, someone the opposite of who they are replacing.

The Sunday Smasher

The Bangles sang that “It’s just another manic Monday”.

In MLB the song goes: “It’s just another Shohei Sunday”.

The Angels’ Japanese star is back on the mound today and after he went six perfect innings against the A’s last time out, he now gets to face the Kansas City Royals who have the worst record in MLB so far this season.

In other words, this has ‘potential no-hitter’ written all over it.  Or it will produce a big shock of the Royals being the line-up to knock Ohtani out of his stride. Either way, it will be worth watching.

First pitch from Kauffman Stadium is at 19.15 BST and the game is available to watch on MLB.TV.