Monthly Archives: November 2015

Rookie Roberts becomes the Dodgers’ new manager

The one remaining MLB managerial vacancy has just been filled.

The Los Angeles Dodgers have decided to appoint former outfielder Dave Roberts as their new manager, succeeding Don Mattingly who has changed coasts to take over in Miami.

The news has been warmly welcomed by those who know Roberts based on his good nature and he’s got a great opportunity to take on a team built to win.

However, it is curious that a team in that position should hire someone with no managerial experience.

Roberts does have MLB playing experience, of course, and recently served as bench coach to Bud Black in San Diego. That all counts for something, but doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll make the right strategic calls during games, nor does the generally positive quality of being an all-round nice guy necessarily mean he’s the right person to keep this roster of players on the right path.

I know I’ve banged this particular drum several times recently, yet I do struggle to understand the seemingly haphazard way in which MLB teams appoint managers and coaches.

Maybe they really aren’t that important and the difference between one potential candidate or another doesn’t justify getting worked up about it? Certainly it’s the quality of available (i.e. non-injured) players that is the most important factor in a team’s potential in a given season. A manager can only do so much with strategy and pep talks.

Yet if you’re the Dodgers, with the highest payroll in MLB and a host of experienced players on board, why wouldn’t you want the best manager you could get? If he adds 5% above the other candidates, that might be the 5% that makes all the difference.

An MLB manager position is an elite role. The Dodgers clearly were preparing to part ways with Mattingly for a while and in that situation a company would normally have a clear vision on what qualities they were looking for in a replacement and who was currently out there that could fulfil that brief. Normally that would mean sounding out potential interest and then head-hunting the person you want to appoint.

Instead, the Dodgers’ search involved interviewing a wide range of candidates and then whittling them down.

In the news article linked to above, MLB.com’s Ken Gurnick stated that Roberts was “initially considered a long shot until dazzling management in his interview”. Well done to Roberts for earning his new role, but “dazzling” in an interview is very different to making the right relief pitching call in a tight game or being able to get into the head of a talented young player like Yasiel Puig.

If this all seems overly negative then I’ll happily concede that every great managerial career starts with a team taking a chance and giving that person their first opportunity. Roberts may prove to be an inspired appointment, and I’ll wish him the best of luck, but there’s reason to question whether pairing a man who has never been a manager before with a team built to win a World Series is the wisest decision.

MLB sizing up the London Olympic Park for 2017

Regular visitors to BaseballGB will already know that MLB has been looking at the potential of bringing some games to London, with talks going on for over a year as to how that may be achieved.

The Telegraph has now picked up on the story as plans to use the Olympic Stadium in London have progressed to a more advanced stage. MLB aren’t formally commenting on the rumours at the moment, but there are positive signs that we may get to see some MLB games in the UK in 2017, which will be a real treat for baseball fans here and across Europe.

To add one more detail to the story, I noticed a few weeks ago that Murray Cook, who does a variety of work in relation to MLB and baseball grounds-keeping, was in London recently.

One place he visited while here was the 2012 Olympic Stadium, at the time set up to host an England vs New Zealand rugby league fixture.

This may have just been part of Murray’s wider outlook on his profession and looking at different venues and how they can be adapted for different sports. However, it’s likely he was undertaking a bit of reconnaissance work around converting the stadium for baseball purposes. MLB International’s Clive Russell is quoted in the Telegraph article (a quote from 2012) that “[the] stadium, the way it’s built, actually is big enough for a baseball game … It’s not perfect, but it has some real potential”.

As I’ve previously noted, outside of getting a suitable venue, the main hurdle for MLB in bringing games to Europe is how to fit the travel and time-difference issues within the jam-packed regular season schedule, as the previous international game route of playing games during Spring Training in March isn’t a realistic option due to the less-than-ideal weather risk.

The most likely scenario will be for the games to take place around the All-Star break in mid-July (the 2017 All-Star Game will be in Miami).

Nothing is guaranteed until deals have been agreed and signed, but there’s definitely reason for baseball fans to get a bit excited about the prospect of MLB coming to the UK in July 2017, if not within a few years of then.

Trades completed and qualifying offers accepted as the 2015/16 MLB offseason begins

It’s been an active start to the MLB offseason, with a couple of notable trades and three potential free agents becoming the first group to accept a ‘qualifying offer’ from their existing teams under the current system.

The idea of the qualifying offer is that it allows a team the chance to keep hold of a player that they’ve had for at least one full season rather than see them leave as a free agent with their contract having come to an end. In practice, that’s not really the way teams see it. They expect the player to leave and get a multi-year contract elsewhere; however by putting a qualifying offer on the table the team will then get an extra draft pick for the following year’s amateur draft as compensation.

The offer is set by MLB based on the average salary of the highest earning 125 players in the league that year. This year the qualifying offer was set at $15.8m, essentially £200k per week at current conversion rates, so it’s a sizeable salary on its own and teams will normally only offer it when they don’t expect a player to take it (i.e. it being judged they will be able to get a contract worth much more than $15.8m on the free agent market).

The Baltimore Orioles will be fine with catcher Matt Wieters accepting their qualifying offer. Had he not missed significant time due to elbow surgery over the past two seasons, Wieters likely would have been off and away, so getting at least one more season from him is a bonus for Baltimore. The Los Angeles Dodgers have more than enough money to make pitcher Brett Anderson’s $15.8m worth paying too.

The one team that perhaps isn’t quite so content is the Houston Astros. Outfielder Colby Rasmus is a decent player, as highlighted by his home-run hitting exploits in the playoffs a month ago, so he is hardly a booby prize, but it certainly looks like they were hoping to get a draft pick out of the offer rather than expecting to give a fair chunk of money to him, bearing in mind they look likely to have a relatively modest payroll again in 2016. That’s the risk you take with making the offer though.

Money is plentiful in MLB so for many teams those sort of risks are ones that can be absorbed easily enough. It’s a different proposition with trades though. The risk there is that the players you give away come back to make you look foolish for years to come.  Still, if you want to sign a good player, you have to accept that you’ll need to part with good players (or more commonly good prospects) to get them.

The two biggest trades of the week resulted in the Los Angeles Angels acquiring shortstop wizard Andrelton Simmons from the Atlanta Braves and the Boston Red Sox getting elite closer Craig Kimbrel from the San Diego Padres. The initial reactions suggest the Padres got a good haul of young talent for Kimbrel – less than one year after they gave up several prospects to acquire him from Atlanta – whilst the Braves’ return for Simmons was slightly underwhelming. As always with trades, only time will tell quite how they will be judged in the end.

There are two main subplots from the trades.

The first is that Dave Dombrowski has been brought into the Red Sox’s organisation as President of Baseball Operations with the intention of the team being aggressive in turning around their fortunes in short order. For a club with such significant resources, both financial and in terms of talented staff, it is incredible that they’ve produced a team that’s finished bottom of the AL East in three out of the last four seasons, even if the glory of their 2013 World Series triumph in the other year has dulled the pain of those losing seasons quite considerably. It should be expected that Boston will be one of the most active teams this offseason as they look to get back to the play-offs.

The second is that the Atlanta Braves’ decision to move to a new ballpark for the 2017 season onwards has had a far-reaching impact on the player market. First baseman Freddie Freeman is the only notable player left from their successful 2013 squad now that Simmons has been traded away. Kimbrel will be playing for the Red Sox under the four-year contract that he signed with the Braves back in February 2014 when it looked like he would be with the team for years to come, whilst this year’s free agent class is led by outfielder Jason Heyward who will be testing the market after being traded to the St Louis Cardinals a year ago by Atlanta.

The success of the Chicago Cubs and Houston Astros this year has shown the value of stripping everything down and starting again, just as the Braves are now doing. However, teams normally take this route in response to being left with an ageing and expensive roster well past its best. The difference in Atlanta’s case is that their 2013 team had a core of players who looked like being at the heart of a consistent contender for a good few years.

Some dreadful bad luck with injuries to their pitching staff played into the thinking that they should regroup and look to the future, but maybe that will prove to be a mistake. With the two Wild Card format and the apparent absence of any real dominant force in the game at present time, it’s becoming more the case that if there is a realistic chance of making it to the playoffs in a given year, teams will go for it rather than waiting for a perfect year that may never come.

The Braves have now amassed a deep group of prospects from which they hope to form the nucleus of a winning team in a few years’ time, yet they may find they gave up on a group that had a better chance of adding another World Series to the sole 1995 triumph since the franchise moved to Atlanta in 1966.

The unpredictable nature of baseball is summed up by pitcher Kris Medlen. He pitched brilliantly for the Braves as they won the NL East in 2013 and was one of the core players at the heart of the team, before he suffered an elbow injury in Spring Training 2014 requiring Tommy John surgery and a long spell on the sidelines. The Braves are now in a rebuilding spell, whilst Medlen has just earned a World Series ring as a reliever with the Kansas City Royals.

MLB offseason begins with managerial merry-go-round

While the Kansas City Royals and their fans will be basking in the glory of winning the World Series for weeks to come, the rest of baseball has already turned its attention to taking the title themselves in 2016 or in the years ahead.

The Washington Nationals are one of the teams in the sooner-rather-than-later camp and they made a major change this week to recover from their disappointing 2015 season by appointing Dusty Baker as their new manager.

The role of a manager in MLB was brought into question this year due to the Miami Marlins sacking Mike Redmond and temporarily replacing him with Dan Jennings, hitherto their General Manager and possessing scarcely any baseball coaching or managing experience. To an extent you do have to set the Marlins to one side when it comes to MLB trends as their owner Jeffrey Loria is unconventional, to put it politely, yet we’ve seen numerous other examples in recent years of teams appointing ex-players with little managerial experience.

The Nationals did this with Matt Williams and despite winning the 2014 NL Manager of the Year award, the award voters giving him the credit for their 96 wins with clearly the best roster in the league that year, which backfired as he failed to mould a group of talented individuals into a team producing consistent performances.

As is so often the case with managerial changes, the Nationals have gone for an opposite approach this time in the experienced Baker. However, the process of his appointment looks confusing to say the least, with former San Diego Padres manager Bud Black having been pencilled in to the position only for the team to turn back to Baker when they failed to reach an agreement with Black.

According to CBS’s Jon Heyman, it all started to unravel when the Nationals decided on appointing Black and then acted upon this by offering him a one-year contract.

Teams are entitled to negotiate contracts how they wish, but that either showed disrespect to Black or was an indictment on how unimportant they feel a manager is (or perhaps it was even a bit of both).

The Nationals went into the 2015 season with a 25-man roster payroll of $162m, a mix of veterans and young players who – based on how things played out last season – needed a skilled leader to keep them together whilst also running the strategic side of the game to maximise their chances of winning games and getting back to the postseason. There are only 30 MLB manager positions at any one time, so there are many candidates out there and any team actually in a period of competing for titles should want to get the very best they can.

You don’t attract such quality with a one-year contract offer. What the Nationals were effectively saying was “we’re not sure if this is going to work so we’re just going to give you a one-year deal and then if it goes wrong we can ditch you for someone else”. That’s hardly confidence-inspiring, nor does it help a manager in dealing with a clubhouse that therefore knows he could soon be out of the door.

They’ve ended up with a good manager in Baker, not without his faults but with plenty going for him too, so it may turn out well in the end for them, but potentially more through luck than judgement.

The Marlins meanwhile splashed out on a four-year deal with ex-Dodgers skipper Don Mattingly. He was on a bit of a hiding to nothing with LA, getting it in the neck when his expensively created team didn’t go all the way and yet likely to not receive a great deal of credit if they had done so anyway.  The Marlins have some good young talent so he has an interesting roster to work with, even if he may need to work around his owner’s unpredictable nature.

Mattingly’s replacement at the Dodgers is still to be decided. Plenty of names have been linked to the post and it’s a very attractive job even with the World Series or fail expectations to contend with. That seat on the MLB managerial merry-go-round should be filled soon.

What’s Missing from the World Series

We’re four games into the 2015 MLB World Series and baseball fans can have few complaints about the action that the Kansas City Royals and New York Mets have given us so far.

The Royals took advantage of being at home by jumping out to a 2-0 series lead, only for the Mets to hit straight back when the series shifted to New York with a win in Game Three. Noah Syndergaard’s opening salvo provided an immediate spark to Friday night’s game, taking ownership of the first pitch away from Alcides Escobar and the Royals and showing that the Mets were intent on putting their stamp on the series.

However, the Royals’ eighth-inning exploits in Game Four on Saturday night swung the contest firmly back in their favour. A 3-2 deficit became a 5-3 lead and reliever Wade Davis took over from there with two scoreless innings to put Kansas City ahead 3-1 in the series, one win away from claiming the championship.

Whilst the action on the field has been great to watch, it’s only served to emphasize what a shame it is that we no longer have British baseball coverage of the Fall Classic (let alone the rest of the regular season). The games are shown live on BT Sport, with MLB.TV subscribers able to view online too, and that’s infinitely better than having no access to the games at all on these shores.

Still, former Baseball on 5 (and MLB on Five Live Sports Extra) presenter Josh Chetwynd summed up the feelings of many during the 14-inning opening game

Where we now have repetitive mid/between inning adverts, we used to enjoy Jonny, Josh and/or Dave wearing tuxedos dissecting the game and leading the club of baseball nuts watching the game we love in the early hours of the morning. Michael Brown has a petition going to get Jonny Gould back on the airwaves precisely because of the sheer enjoyment he and the rest of the crew provided for many of us over the years.

With the NFL hosting yet another game at Wembley this weekend, it goes to show how far back baseball has slipped that we don’t have our own coverage even just for the marquee event of the year.

Here’s hoping that may change one day and we can once again enjoy presenters awarding marks out of ten to the national anthem rendition, seventh inning stretches, sneaky bites of chocolate not quite concealed quickly enough when cutting back to the studio, and the great community spirit that only dedicated coverage can foster.