Monthly Archives: November 2012

Longoria extends contract with the Rays

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Tampa Bay Rays fans, and indeed many neutral baseball fans, will be delighted at the news of the Rays signing third baseman Evan Longoria to a contract extension.

The financial terms are very favourable to the Rays and that’s why they were able to make the commitment, giving them the opportunity to keep Longoria with the team until at least 2022.  The mighty dollar so often wins the day in sport – as it does in life in general – and we’re conditioned to accepting that the big teams will come along and sweep up the stars of those with less money to spend.

The Rays’ deal with Longoria is a welcome exception to this general, and entirely understandable, trend.

The contract hinged on Longoria’s willingness to take the guaranteed money rather than to play out his career and see how the dice rolled.

Two incidents don’t necessarily make a pattern but there is probably something to the fact that this below-market contract is the second one that Longoria has signed with the team.

The Rays caused something of a stir when they gave their third baseman a contract extension just six games into his Major League career in April 2008. Some traditionalists lamented the fact that Longoria ‘hadn’t earned the contract’, whilst others looked at the contracts other players were signing and thought Longoria was mad to value six years of his career at ‘only’ $17.5m.

Whilst no one would doubt that Longoria has earned his new contract, his sanity might still be questioned when comparing his latest deal to the sums the likes of Prince Fielder and Joey Votto have commanded over the last year.

We all weigh up risk and reward differently, taking stock of different factors and establishing our own comfort level. If the two contracts are a reliable guide, Longoria is the type of person that values certainty over too much risk when it comes to his finances.  Some people will always be prepared to gamble to gain more, but most of us will have a threshold beyond which the additional reward no longer makes the added risk worth assuming.

The Rays and Longoria were able to come to an agreement on a financial point that they were both happy with, adding to all of the other factors that lead to two sides wanting to extend an existing contract.

We can look at Longoria’s finances by using the essential Cot’s Baseball Contracts site. I’m going to add in his contract values converted into British pounds at the current rate. What this lacks in terms of accuracy of the real monetary value to Longoria over the lifetime of his contract, it adds in terms of putting the figures into some perspective in the here and now.

By the end of the 2012 season, Longoria had earned at least* $11.5m (£7.2m) via a $3m draft-signing bonus and his Major League salaries since his debut in 2008. His initial contract extension guaranteed him a $6m salary in 2013 plus at least a buy-out sum of $3m on a club option for 2014, so before signing his new contract he was guaranteed to earn at least $20.5m (£12.8m) out of his baseball career.

The Rays then held three club options over the next three years worth a combined $30m.  In signing his second contract extension yesterday, Longoria turned those three option years into guaranteed money ($3m of which was already guaranteed via the aforementioned 2014 buy-out), thereby taking his running total up to $47.5m (£29.64m) up to the end of the 2016 season.

Longoria is also now guaranteed $100m over the next six seasons from that point, meaning that by the time he reaches the end of the 2022 season he would have earned at least $147.5m (£92m). There’s no doubt that if his health and form remain strong he could earn significantly more money than that by hitting the free agent market at least once, but he could also earn significantly less.

Longoria will be 35 years old at that the end of the 2022 season. He may have a couple more years of baseball left to play by then; conversely injuries may have brought his playing days to an end several years before.

In signing this new contract Longoria guaranteed himself an additional $127m (£79.2m) regardless of what happens. If disaster strikes tomorrow and he suffers a knee injury (à la Victor Martinez one year ago) that causes him to miss the 2013 season and to perhaps never return to the same level of performance, he and his family will still be set for life.

Longoria clearly doesn’t feel he’s making a mistake in signing the contract and ultimately that’s all that matters. If other people feel that he is making a mistake to leave so much potential money on the table, well, I’m sure I’m far from the only person to feel that it’s a mistake I’d be extremely happy to make.

Good for Longoria, and good for the Rays.

* I’ve put the caveat ‘at least’ as I’m just using the base guaranteed salary values and therefore this doesn’t include any bonuses, nor any money earned through endorsements etc.

Big League Tour and Big League news

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The European Big League Tour rolled into London for the first time a week ago and if the comments on Twitter from numerous attendees are anything to go by, it was a fantastic event. It was described as a “magical day for Herts youngsters” on the Herts Baseball Club website report and hopefully will prove to be an inspiration for many, young and not so young, that attended.

Guthrie’s on his bike

Money is far from being the key priority when dreaming of the Majors, but one of the Big League Tour contingent showed that it’s a dream job that pays well.  Jeremy Guthrie re-signed with the Kansas City Royals on a three-year contract worth $25m (averaging out at just under £100k per week). Maybe he’ll use a few of those dollars to buy up a couple of Boris Bikes for him and his wife to ride around KC on.

Pitcher deals

Guthrie’s deal was one of several recent free agent signings.

Continuing on the pitching front, Hiroki Kuroda reportedly turned down more lucrative offers before agreeing a one-year/$15m deal (£180k per week) to stay with the Yankees. Relievers Jeremy Affeldt (three-year/$18m with the Giants), Brandon League (three-year/$22.5m with the Dodgers) and Joe Peralta (two-year/$6m with the Rays) all similarly decided to sign on for longer with their current teams, whilst former Twin Scott Baker has moved leagues and joined the Chicago Cubs on a one-year/5.5m contract despite missing the whole of the 2012 season after undergoing Tommy John surgery.

Hunter and the hitters

As for the free agent hitters, the Detroit Tigers, looking to bounce back from the disappointment of a World Series defeat, moved quickly to fill a gap in their outfield. Torii Hunter has joined the team on a two-year/$26m contract (£156k per week) after spending the last five years with the Los Angeles Angels. Former Tiger Gerald Laird will take over David Ross’s catching back-up duties in Atlanta after he signed a two-year deal with the Braves worth around $3.5m.  Ross left the Braves to join Boston and the Red Sox made another roster move this week by agreeing terms on a two-year/$10m contract with outfielder Jonny Gomes who spent 2012 with the Oakland A’s.

Toronto turnaround continues

One of the more intriguing hitting options on this year’s free agent market was Melky Cabrera.  He looked set for a bumper payday heading into August whilst having a career year with the Giants, only to see it all unravel when he received a 50-game drug suspension. No one knows quite what to expect from Melky in 2013, but the Toronto Blue Jays decided they wanted to be the ones to find out as they signed him to a two-year/$16m contract (£96k per week). Meanwhile the Verve’s ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’ plays quietly in the background.

Cabrera joins the gaggle of former Marlins in a revamped Blue Jays lineup that will be led by a new-old manager.  In something of a surprise move, Toronto ended their managerial search by turning back the clocks and re-hiring John Gibbons. Gibbons managed the team for parts of five seasons between 2004 and 2008 before being fired and replaced with Cito Gaston, himself an ex-Blue Jays manager getting a second term in the Toronto hot seat.

Gibbons’ most successful season came in 2006 when he guided the team to a second-placed finish with an 87-75 record. That wasn’t enough to earn a postseason place, but expectations will be high that 2013 could see Toronto return to the playoffs for the first time since completing back-to-back World Series triumphs in 1992 and 1993.

Nobody should be too quick to hand out postseason spots based on offseason performances though. The Miami Marlins ‘won the offseason’ last year and that certainly didn’t create a story with a happy ending.

Awards

The other major story in the Majors over the past two weeks has been the annual round of awards being announced.

The Dodgers’ Clayton Kershaw put forward a very impressive case to win back-to-back NL Cy Young Awards, but few could begrudge seeing veteran knuckleball pitcher R.A. Dickey taking the honour after his incredible season with the Mets.

Things were not so magnanimous when it came to the AL MVP Award.  There were two excellent candidates in Mike Trout and Miguel Cabrera and the build-up to the announcement descended into a bitter debate between those in the advance statistical camp (favouring Trout) and the traditionalists (favouring Cabrera and his triple crown).

Cabrera got the nod from the Baseball Writers’ Association of America (BBWAA) voters and it’s a real shame that both he and Trout’s seasons got dragged into a debate not of their making. Whilst my vote would have gone to Trout (I’ve yet to read a convincing argument to dispute that hitting, fielding and base-running combined he performed better than any other player in the AL – in fact the Majors – in 2012, and that’s what the MVP Award should be about in my book), Cabrera had a great year too.

Off-season viewing

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Every season I have the same idea that I singularly fail to act upon.

One of the many benefits of the annual MLB.TV subscription is that, as the name suggests, it lasts for the full year rather than just the season. Whilst live baseball may be thin on the ground over the winter months, MLB.TV allows you to go back in time and watch any game from the 2012 season that you like.

The only difficultly is knowing which of the 2430 regular season games, plus the postseason games, to watch next.

This is where my unactioned idea comes in. My plan is always to keep a running log of exciting games – those that go back and forth and provide plenty of drama – so that I can pick them out over the offseason without needing to do any research that would then probably jog my memory as to why the game was added onto the list (memorable moments, which team won etc).

Those exciting games can then be added to the ‘obvious’ highlights (no-hitters etc) to create a schedule of great baseball to enjoy until Spring Training comes around again.

I never end up making this list and it’s only when I get to the end of November every year and have watched the most notable stand-out games that I wish I had done it yet again.

Thankfully, this year Dave Studeman at the Hardball Times website has come to the rescue. He has put together a list of the 150 most exciting games of the 2012 season. As you would expect from the Hardball Times, this isn’t a list put together haphazardly.

Studeman has created an ‘excitability score’ “derived by combining the average swing in Win Expectancy per inning (times nine innings) plus the average leverage index of each play”. As he explains, “by combining action (swings in WPA) with intensity (average leverage index), we were able to identify the games that are most likely to keep you on the edge of your seat this offseason”.

That’s my offseason viewing sorted then!

BaseballGB’s Matt Smith joins Board of Electors on the British Baseball Hall of Fame

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By Joe Gray:

The British Baseball Hall of Fame’s Board of Electors are delighted to welcome BaseballGB site editor and chief writer Matt Smith into their numbers. Matt will begin his role as an Elector from the 2013 class onwards.

Matt’s BaseballGB website was founded in April 2007, building on a WordPress-hosted blog created in February 2006. Its purpose is to publish on all aspects of baseball from a British perspective. As part of the site’s remit, Matt has written dozens of articles on domestic and international British baseball. In addition, Matt has helped with the chronicling of British baseball history, writing two chapters and contributing historical research assistance on two more for the 2012 Project COBB book Nine Aces and a Joker. Matt is without doubt the most prolific British-based baseball writer of the modern generation.

Marlins misery continues

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I was writing up some notes on Tuesday evening for my next MLB round-up column and it was a relatively modest list of news items. Knowing that I might need a distraction from the England friendly, I decided to leave writing it to Wednesday evening.

I was very glad I had made that decision when I looked at MLB.com over breakfast on Wednesday morning.

The Toronto Blue Jays and Miami Marlins have agreed a blockbuster trade that will greatly raise the spirits of Blue Jays fans and further demoralise a Marlins fan base that has been kicked in the teeth time and time again.

ESPN’s Jerry Crasnick summed it up perfectly: “The franchise that knows no shame — and has a long and illustrious history of slashing and burning — has sunk to new and previously unimaginable depths”.

There is a place for considered rebuilding by teams that don’t have the highest payrolls. Sacrificing a few years to build up a collection of good young talent is a sensible strategy and we’ve seen recently how it has turned around the fortunes of the other Florida team, the Tampa Bay Rays.

However, what the Marlins are doing is little short of disgraceful from a sporting perspective. They are making a mockery of being called a Major League team in a way that is especially distasteful considering their circumstances.

What sort of an organization moves into a new $515m ballpark, in part paid for with $360 million in public money, and then completely blows up their roster – the Marlins have now dealt pretty much all of the estabilshed players earning more than the MLB minimum salary – less than a year after it has first opened?

Attendances didn’t rise as much as hoped in the first season of the new Marlins Ballpark, but it wasn’t simply the poor facilities in their previous home that were putting people off. The owner and Front Office have alienated many potential fans and the team often wasn’t performing on the field, giving fans an excuse to spend their money elsewhere.

The underlying problem here is that whilst we can all lambast the Marlins, because of the way MLB works they are exploiting an understandable strategy.

There is no penalty whatsoever for owner Jeffrey Loria and his Front Office to act in this way. They’ve got their ballpark and they’ll continue to rake in millions of dollars in revenue sharing money. If they didn’t think their team would really be competing for a playoff spot over the next couple of seasons, why bother to spend the money on the Major League payroll?

You could say they owe it to the fans and the integrity of the competition, but since when did such thoughts get in the way of making money?

It doesn’t feel right and it’s not right, yet MLB aren’t going to do anything about it so why should Loria care?

The safeguard against such behaviour in football is the threat of relegation. You cannot punt a season or two because if you go down your revenues plummet over night, as does the value of the business.  With no true pyramid from which to promote another team, that’s never going to be an option in MLB.

I suspect there may be owners among the larger spending teams that would be quite happy to see some of the pooled money taken away from teams like the Marlins that are doing precious little to contribute to the pot, but we all know that’s not going to happen any time soon either.

The only potential way to stop a team acting in this way would be some sort of contractual clause that effectively forced an owner to sell the team in certain circumstances, such as lowering the payroll below a specific level.  Whilst the MLB Commissioner’s Office does wield some power, for all intents and purposes it is there to do the bidding of the 30 ownership groups. The owners would have to approve such a clause and that’s as likely as a Norfolk Bronze turkey buying shares in Bernard Matthews.

MLB did effectively force former Dodgers owner Frank McCourt to sell the team against his wishes recently but that sorry saga showed exactly how unfair the system can be. McCourt was a complete and utter embarrasment during his ownership and no sane person would let him run a bath, never mind one of the most historic sports teams in the world.

McCourt’s ultimate punishment was to sell the team, that he bought for $430m, for $2.15bn. Just like Loria, he’ll happily take all the negative publicity on his shoulders whilst trousering all the money.

One team’s blow-up is another team’s opportunity though and, to end on a positive note, the bounty received by the Blue Jays will make the AL East even more interesting in 2013.

Only a few days ago I was being a bit rude about General Manager Alex Anthopoulos in likening his signing of Maicer Izturis to buying a toaster. In fairness to myself, I didn’t know at the time that he was buying a toaster to complement a brand new fitted kitchen.

Kick off the offseason

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My plan for the offseason is to keep on top of all the main MLB stories with two columns or so per week rounding everything up, with individual articles on a piece of news where I’m so inspired.

Without further ado, here’s a review of what’s happened so far in the early stages of the 2012/13 offseason …

The Weiss is Right

The Colorado Rockies appointed former MLB shortstop Walt Weiss as their new manager this week.

Weiss becomes the latest ex-Big Leaguer to gain a managerial job despite having extremely limited experience in the role. He spent a number of years in the Rockies organization as an instructor and adviser before moving out of professional baseball and managing a High School baseball team this past season.

His 14 year Major League career and Front Office experience, combined with an excellent reputation as a thoughtful and likeable pro, will give him instant credibility with his new playing staff in a way that a person with years of Minor League managerial experience – but without Major League credentials – might take a long time to earn.

Mike Quade always seemed to be facing an uphill battle when he became the Chicago Cubs’ manager following Lou Piniella’s retirement with 37 games of the 2010 season to play. Quade never made it to the Majors as a player and despite – or possibly as a result of – amassing over 1,000 Minor League victories as a manager he carried with him a ‘Minor League’ tag that was always there for a player or media member to point to at times of trouble.

Quade was sacked at the end of the 2011 season having been a proud Cubs manager for 199 games.

Weiss will take over from Jim Tracy whose bright start with the team proved to be a false dawn. Tracy earned plaudits – including the NL Manager of the Year award – for the Rockies’ dramatic turnaround after he was appointed mid-season in 2009 and led them on to the National League Division Series. He took over from Clint Hurdle, who had been with the team for over six seasons, and the team was clearly underperforming in the early stages of the season.

Sometimes a team just needs to hear from a different voice after several years with the same leader and we’ll never really know quite what difference Tracy made that season. What we do know is that the Rockies’ record took a noticeable dive in each of the next three seasons, culminating in their 64-98 season this year that cost Tracy his job.

A quick glance at the Rockies’ pitching stats from 2012 reminds you that Weiss is inheriting a roster that needs plenty of work, but you would hope that the strong links he has with the organization will buy him the time needed to improve the team bit by bit over the next few seasons.

The Cardinals (Mike Matheny) and White Sox (Robin Ventura) both brushed aside a lack of managerial experience when making appointments over the 2011/12 offseason and the Marlins recently followed suit with their appointment of Mike Redmond.  It is good to see new managerial talent getting a chance rather than the same old names travelling around the carousel.

No change in Washington

Barack Obama won a new term in office in the U.S. capital this week and Washington’s baseball team decided to stick with their current leader too. Davey Johnson will return as the Nationals’ manager after guiding them to an NL-best 98-64 record in 2012. The only slight surprise is that the contract is just for one further year before Johnson moves into a ‘consulting’ role in 2014.

The free agency market gets underway

If you were hoping for a big bang to kick off the free agent period then the Toronto Blue Jays signing utility infielder Maicer Izturis to a three-year/$9m contract (just over £36k per week) would have left you distinctly underwhelmed.

Blue Jays fans are unlikely to be rushing out to buy season tickets in response to the news. Izturis is a handy player to have on your roster, as he has proved with the Angels in recent years, but he’s not the sort of player you would expect a team to rush out and grab from the shelf straight away. General Manager Alex Anthopoulos may be the type of person that would queue for hours to get in first to the Harrods sale only to walk away with a toaster.

Having written that, a quick check on their website shows that toasters in Harrods start at £169. That makes spending $9m on Izturis seem a little less wasteful, at least.

The new free agency rules agreed as part of the Collective Bargaining Agreement last winter meant that only nine potential free agents received a ‘qualifying offer’ from their previous team. All of the offers were turned down as the team had to offer a one-year contract worth at least $13.3m (£161k per week) and the only players you would be happy to pay that much are those that will be able to command more lucrative multi-year contracts on the free agent market.

Only eight of those players will actually hit the market as David Ortiz has agreed a two-year/$26m to stay with the Red Sox. Although he missed half of last season through injury, Ortiz showed that he is still a dangerous hitter when healthy. Boston followed this signing by agreeing a two-year/$6.2m contract with catcher David Ross this weekend.

Ross has been Brian McCann’s back-up in Atlanta over the last four seasons and the Braves will now be shopping for another capable catcher, especially as McCann is coming off his worst Major League season (20 homers but only a .230/.300/.399 batting line) and may not be fit to start 2013 after offseason shoulder surgery.

Grandal grounded

One catcher that definitely will not be playing at the start of next season is the Padres’ Yasmani Grandal. He received a 50-game suspension this week after becoming the latest player to test positive for testosterone.

Grandal grabbed everyone’s attention back on 2 June when he hit two home runs in his first Major League start. It’s a shame for the Padres that their catcher has now hit the headlines for the wrong reasons.

L.A. largesse

Reporting on the Los Angeles Dodgers spending money promises to be a regular feature of these offseason columns. Their latest proposed outlay is on Korean left-handed pitcher Hyun-Jin Ryu. The Dodgers bid $25.7m (£16.2m) to win the right to open exclusive negotiations with the player, following the same ‘posting’ process as most Japanese players go through. The Dodgers now have 30 days within which to agree a contract with Ryu.

Mike Redmond enters the Marlins’ madhouse

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There are only 30 Major League managerial gigs. If you aspire to leading a team at the highest level, especially as a young manager looking to make his mark, a vacancy at any one of them is a huge potential opportunity.

Mike Redmond was announced as the new manager of the Miami Marlins last week and he will come to the job full of enthusiasm and a belief that he can succeed where others have failed.

However, joining up with the Marlins is not the easiest of starts for a rookie manager.

There are great surprises and sorry disappointments in every MLB season and the Miami Marlins were firmly in the latter category in 2012.

This was supposed to be the start of a wonderful new era for baseball in Miami. The team was finally moving into a new ballpark, they splashed the cash on the free agent market by signing Jose Reyes, Mark Buehrle and Heath Bell and they set it all off with a new name, logo and uniform.

The message was clear: the days of the Florida Marlins fielding cheap teams in front of small crowds was over.

The first statement of intent in the Marlins’ magical offseason was the heist of a big-name manager from another team. Ozzie Guillen was taken from the Chicago White Sox and given a lucrative four-year/$10m contract.  In one of his first acts when the 2012 season began, gaffe-prone Guillen offended the sizeable local Cuban-American community by stating his admiration for Fidel Castro. He survived calls for him to be sacked but was given a five-game suspension by his team.

Perhaps we should have realised straight away that the dream was going to turn into a nightmare.

The hope and optimism quickly disappeared. After all the pre-season changes, the Marlins ended up losing 3 more games than they had in 2011 (69-93 rather than 72-90). They finished the season with Hanley Ramirez, Anibal Sanchez and Omar Infante all playing for other teams after being traded away and the rumours came true soon after the season ended when Guillen’s tenure was brought to an abrupt end.

The Marlins are not shy about giving managers the boot. The Atlanta Braves won 14 of their 18 games against the Marlins in the season just gone, on their way to a Wild Card berth, and manager Fredi Gonzalez must have found each victory a little sweeter than the standard variety considering he was kicked to one side by the Marlins’ top brass during the 2010 season, only to be picked up by the Braves to succeed the legendary Bobby Cox.

Gonzalez’s predecessor didn’t have trouble finding another job when he was sacked either. Joe Girardi won the National League Manager of the Year award in his first – and only – year in charge of Florida in 2006. Girardi got into an argument with owner Jeffrey Loria and was discarded, an episode that damaged Girardi’s standing so badly that he became the New York Yankees manager in 2008 and has been in situ ever since, capturing a World Series along the way.

It’s enough to make you think that maybe it’s not the manager, ballpark and uniforms that are the problem with the Marlins.

You can’t sack an owner though, so it falls to Mark Redmond to battle against the madness and to turn the team around. There is talent on the roster – the disappointing Heath Bell has already been jettisoned to the D-Backs – and good reason to believe that improvement is a very realistic proposition so long as expectations are suitably restrained.

Redmond was the back-up catcher on the 2003 World Series-winning Marlins team and by all accounts knows the owner and president of baseball operations, Larry Beinfest, well so he will be going into the situation with his eyes wide open.

This is also a man who, during his playing career with the Marlins, tried to help his team get out of a slump in form by taking batting practice stark naked.

Maybe Redmond has just enough madness in him to make the Marlins’ madhouse a winner again.

Colon coming back again

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I always go through a post-World Series lull every year, a gradual come-down from the drama and excitement of another season coming to an end.

Thankfully it never lasts long because the Hot Stove immediately starts to simmer, creating an endless supply of rumours and actual moves.

So far we’ve already had several managerial changes (with more to be completed as vacancies are filled), players being traded, potential free agents signing contracts to stay with their current employer and other free agents moving onto the open market ready to see where they may be plying their trade next.

The news I want to concentrate on today was announced on Saturday: the Oakland A’s re-signing starting pitcher Bartolo Colon to a one-year contract.

The move wouldn’t seem a surprise when looking back at his 3.43 ERA in 24 starts for the A’s last season. Colon was a solid, if not spectacular, starting pitcher for Oakland and keeping a guy like that on your roster makes complete sense. Yet, of course, the story here is the main reason why he made his 24th start of the season on 18 August and then didn’t make another.

Colon received a 50-game ban after testing positive for synthetic testosterone.

The A’s decision to bring the player back is interesting in what it says about their view on his reputation and potential future performance.

In reputation terms, the A’s are taking the pragmatic business decision here, as explained by General Manger Billy Beane, that “when he serves his suspension, he’ll have paid his dues as laid down by the labor agreement”. In other words, Beane doesn’t think it’s right to take an additional moral stance and once Colon has paid the prescribed price for his transgression that should be the end of the matter.

That’s the safe, and sensible, way to go. Take a moral stand against one player and you’re leaving yourself open to justifiable cries of hypocrisy. The A’s were happy to sign Manny Ramirez to a minor-league contract last winter (big news at the time for the A’s, which goes to show how low our expectations were and how incredibly they were exceeded) so why shouldn’t they sign Colon?

More to the point, the pragmatic approach appears to be the way the majority of sports fans view the topic. While most fans want to see sports free from drugs and are in favour of significant penalties for those that are caught, it seems to me that the ‘drug cheat’ pantomime villains projected by elements of the press do not reflect the more nuanced response from fans.

When Mark McGwire was announced as the St. Louis Cardinals’ new hitting coach back in October 2009, many words were devoted to explaining how his presence would be a terrible distraction for the team. After the initial, and entirely understandable, media questioning at his first few days in Spring Training were over, McGwire got on with his job and by all accounts has done it very well over the last three seasons. Recent news reports suggest that he will be joining the Dodgers this offseason.

Maybe years of being let down by heroes has created a resigned weariness to it all or maybe fans are more ready to accept that there are people that cheat (i.e. try to gain an unfair advantage) in many different ways in sport, as they do in every walk of life (Starbucks avoiding tax, teachers allegedly “fiddling” exam grades etc). That doesn’t make it right, and clearly cheating comes in different levels of severity, but taking too high-and-mighty a view doesn’t help anyone.

Catch them, punish them, and move on.

There are still some cases where a suspension can make most onlookers feel that a career is likely over. When a veteran player nearing the end of his career gets caught, the odds of him returning aren’t great because the assumption will be that he needed to take drugs to stave off the effects of Father Time.

Bartolo Colon seemed to be an extreme example of this. His career had appeared to be over after he pitched in just 19 games combined during 2008 and 2009 and then sat out the entirety of the 2010 season. Few gave him much of a chance of making the Yankees’ Major League roster when they signed the 38 year old to a Minor League contract prior to the 2011 season, but he surprised everybody by pitching well for the Bronx Bombers and then carried on that form with the A’s in the season just gone.

The announcement of Colon’s suspension was taken as a ‘light bulb’ moment for many, including the Yankees’ General Manager Brian Cashman. “In Bartolo’s case”, he said, “as well as he has done last year as well through this year, at his age, after coming back from that surgery, makes you scratch your head”. The implication was clear: Colon’s comeback didn’t make much sense until he failed a drug test.

But that’s the most interesting part of the A’s re-signing him.

Would Oakland be bringing Colon back if they thought that his performances over the last two seasons were heavily influenced by illegal means? If the answer is no, which you would have to guess it would be considering the frequency with which he’ll be tested next season as a first-time offender, then maybe the A’s aren’t quite so convinced that his comeback was the product of illegal help.

Which would call into question precisely how ‘performance-enhancing’ the drugs were and, indeed, whether anyone – including Colon himself – can ever really know.