‘The Natural’

In some ways it was just one more home run, but for Ken Griffey Jr, his family, millions of baseball fans and a guy named Joe, it was much more than that. On Monday 9^th June, Griffey struck a 3-1 curveball from the Marlins’ starter Mark Hendrickson into the right-field seats at Dolphin Stadium. Bridging the gap between career home runs numbers 599 and 600 hadn’t been easy, but it was worth the wait. Continue reading →

Flaming fastballs and flying fists

There are many parts of baseball that Brits need to become familiar with when they start watching the sport. Two that can take a bit of getting used to are the sight of pitchers deliberating throwing at a batter and bench-clearing incidents in which everyone runs on to the field to have a shoving match. More often than not, the two go hand-in-hand. Continue reading →

A Brucie Bonus

The Jay Bruce fairytale shows no signs of letting up just yet. After impressing everyone during his first four games in the Majors, he surpassed himself last night in game number five by delivering a walk-off solo home run in the tenth inning against the Braves.

There’s no doubt about it: the Reds needed a shot in the arm. Prior to their game against the Pittsburgh Pirates on Tuesday night, Cincinnati were looking up at the rest of the NL Central with a 23-28 record. Their 2008 season was beginning to look like a continuation of their disappointing form in 2007, despite the many changes that had been made in an attempt to avoid this fate. Continue reading →

Tick, Tock.  Tick, Tock …

Like the White Rabbit in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, MLB Commissioner Bud Selig is frantically rushing around, looking at his watch and muttering “Oh dear! Oh dear! The games are running too late”.

All thirty MLB teams were informed this week of plans to crack down on the many little factors that can slow the pace of a game. Batters won’t be able to amble to home plate when it’s their turn to stand in the batter’s box, pitchers will have to deliver their pitches more promptly, batters won’t be granted time once the pitcher has started his delivery, and the home plate umpire will be breaking up those all-too frequent powwows on the pitching mound. Continue reading →

Interleague weekend

Here we are in mid-May and baseball traditionalists are already having their tails pulled.  The weekend has been given over to Interleague play for twenty-eight teams (with the Cubs and the Pirates sitting this round out), providing match-ups between genuine local rivals, ho-hum games between teams with no links whatsoever, and a topic of conversation that can ignite heated rows in an instant.

Continue reading →

Unpredictable pitchers

The eternal frustration of fantasy baseball is that however much research you put into preparing for a draft, to a great extent your success depends on predicting the unpredictable. The same applies for a GM of an MLB organization, only they are playing with real money, real human beings (and their families) and will really be facing the sack if it all goes wrong. Continue reading →

The complex case of Cameron 

When Mike Cameron stepped up to the plate against Jason Marquis on Tuesday, it was the end of a long and frustrating wait for his season to start. Watching him smoke a 1-1 fastball into left field for a double, you got the feeling that the Brewers’ new centre fielder was looking to make up for lost time.

Cameron spent the first twenty-five games of the season kicking his heels thanks to a suspension, handed down as a result of him failing two drug tests last year for a banned stimulant. The player has since blamed the positive tests on tainted supplements. The Brewers finalized their one-year deal with Cameron in January, fully aware of the positive drug tests and impending suspension. When the signing was announced, his new manager Ned Yost extolled Cameron’s virtues, stating that he “could not find one person, back from his [Cameron’s] high school coach to players who have played with him, that would even say he is a ‘good guy.’ A ‘great guy’ was the worst that I could get out of anybody”. Those sentiments, alongside the guaranteed $6m they will pay him this year, let you know that the Brewers don’t think any less of the player despite his transgressions. Continue reading →

Rays dreaming of a Disney ending

Major League Baseball made a visit to Disney Land this week, but thankfully it was no Mickey Mouse affair.

The Tampa Bay Rays played a three-game series against the Blue Jays at the Disney Sports Complex in Orlando, following their series against the Rangers at the venue last season. The new environment proved to be a success on the field for the Rays as they swept Toronto and increased their Major League record at Disney Land to 6 and 0.

That success was repeated off the field as well. The Rays and Blue Jays pulled in crowds of 8,269, 8,989 and 9,540. While these are low for Major League standards, they were close to sell outs in the small stadium and sell out home crowds are something of a novelty to the Rays. Over the course of the 2007 season, the Rays’ average home gate was just over 17,000, which leaves plenty of spare seats considering Tropicana Field has room for just under 44,000 spectators. The Rays’ Disney Land experiment was an attempt to drum up some extra publicity and to reach out to the wider Florida community. Continue reading →

Beware the knuckleball

While Mariners manager John McLaren will not agree, the injury that has sent Erik Bedard to the 15-day DL this week has been reason to rejoice for some baseball fans. That’s not through any lack of sympathy or respect for the former Oriole, it’s because the injury has created a spot in the Seattle rotation for a unique talent: R.A. Dickey.

Dickey doesn’t just have a great name, he has a great knuckleball and there aren’t enough good knucklers around these days. Tim Wakefield is still taking the mound every fifth day for the Red Sox, and Charlie Haeger is trying to pitch his way back on to the White Sox’s roster, but apart from them you will be hard pressed to find many exponents of the knuckling art.

And that’s a real shame. Immortalized in the Hall of Fame by Phil Niekro and immortalized in Ball Four by Jim Bouton, the knuckleball is a pitch with a certain mystique and charm. Unless you are trying to hit it. Or even catch it. Continue reading →

The price of Young talent

“It doesn’t change anything”.

So said the Arizona Diamondbacks’ centrefielder Chris Young when asked for his thoughts on signing a lucrative multi-year deal this week. The D-Backs locked up their young star for at least the next six years in the sort of move that is rapidly becoming the industry standard. Indeed, no sooner had baseball fans tried to imagine whether $28 million would “change anything” for them, than the Indians were announcing a similar deal with their ace starter Fausto Carmona. Rest assured, life’s good for young ballplayers right now.

Up until recently, many young players had to wait until they became free agents at the end of their sixth Major League season before they could start commanding sizeable contracts. Yet the financial landscape of the Majors has shifted. The free agency market has reached insane levels with average starting pitchers like Carlos Silva able to receive multi-year deals worth $12 million per season. At the same time, and partly as a consequence, General Managers have become unwilling to trade impact players unless they receive offers that knock them off their feet. With top talent so hard to acquire, it is imperative that teams keep hold of their best players for as long as possible.

In the case of Chris Young, Arizona have ‘bought out’ his first year of free agency and hold a club option for a further year taking them to the end of the 2014 season. They therefore now hold his rights for two additional years on top of the standard contract.

This doesn’t come cheap, but the figures are comparable to the wages of Premiership footballers. If the D-Backs pick up that option year, Young will earn £61,000 per week over the next seven years. Carmona’s deal is a bit more complicated (a four-year deal with three club option years), but potentially he will earn a similar sum over the same period.

Teams are keen to secure these type of deals because they provide stability from both a financial point of view and in terms of the relationship between themselves and the player.

Ryan Howard’s situation is a great example of the alternative. Few can doubt that he is an exceptional talent and that he should be earning a sizeable salary, but the Phillies’ attempts to finalize a multi-year deal before he hit arbitration were unsuccessful. Consequently, the two parties had their first round of arbitration hearings this off-season which saw the Phillies losing their case and being ordered to pay Howard $3 million more this year than they had wanted. And the cost wasn’t just financial: arbitration hearings are often an unpleasant experience and the process could prove detrimental in any future attempts to negotiate a long-term deal between the two parties. It’s little wonder that the Brewers are currently trying to agree multi-year deals with Prince Fielder and Ryan Braun before they become eligible for arbitration.

Some would say these deals and the Ryan Howard salary ($10 million for 2008, which is the best part of £100k per week) are bad for baseball. The fact that teams can pay young players significantly less than their value on the free agent market is held as one of the reasons why smaller market teams can compete with the massive payrolls of the Yankees, Red Sox and their ilk. Yet we have to adjust our mindset to take into account exactly how much money even the lowest payroll teams are now raking in. MLB Commissioner Bud Selig is quick to remind us that MLB generated a record $6.075 billion in gross revenue last year. For all of the benefits of new stadiums and massive media coverage, it is the talent and skill of the players that really generates fan interest and therefore generates that revenue. Surely it is only right that they should receive their fair share?

Think of it this way. Under the current system, the Brewers are able to pay Fielder and Braun salaries (£6,538 and £4,442 per week respectively) in 2008 that are significantly lower than what the top players receive in the second-tier of English football (accepting that the young Brewers’ salaries exclude the value of their draft bonuses). To say they are getting Fielder and Braun on the cheap would be a massive understatement.

They may seem fantastic (some would say obscene) sums to you and I, but Young and Carmona deserve the contracts they signed this week because of the revenue that their talent generates. The fact their respective teams were so delighted to announce these deals is conclusive proof of this fact.

Week Two wrap-up

The D-Backs have an eight-game winning streak on the go and their 9-2 record is the best in the Majors. The surprising St Louis Cardinals (9-3) lead the NL Central, although their schedule (recent opponents: the Nationals, Astros and Giants) may have had a lot to do with their hot start. The same can be said for the NL East leading Marlins (7-4). Elsewhere, the Red Sox and Yankees are beating each other, while the Orioles sit atop the AL East. The A’s have won five straight against tough opposition (Toronto and Cleveland) to lead the AL West and the Tigers (2-9) are shockingly the worst team in baseball as the White Sox (6-4) sit first in the AL Central.