Monthly Archives: November 2019

Oakland A’s UK featured on The Athletic

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Dom, Hannah and I have had the great pleasure of being featured in an article on The Athletic.

Alex Coffey has recently been appointed as their A’s beat writer and she got in contact with us to find out more about our A’s UK group and the peculiarities of following Oakland from across the pond.

I’ve been a subscriber of The Athletic for nearly two years now and can highly recommend it. Baseball fans can enjoy plenty of well-known national writers (Ken Rosenthal, Jayson Stark, Peter Gammons etc) plus beat writers covering the vast majority of teams. If, like me, you’re not someone who follows other North American sports too closely then the launch of the Athletic UK office earlier this year has resulted in lots of excellent football (as in football!) coverage, with plans to expand out into other traditional British sports too.

It’s well worth signing-up for the trial at least to see what’s on offer, if only to read the article about us!

So Long, Jharel “Squeaky” Cotton

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There was always going to be a casualty or two on Wednesday when the A’s had to make decisions on their 40-man roster. With no spaces left and at least one prospect (pitcher Daulton Jefferies) having to be added or risk being snaffled away in the Rule 5 draft, someone needed to make way to make room.

That someone was Jharel Cotton, who was designated for assignment and subsequently traded for “cash considerations” (MLB’s hilariously quaint transaction term for money) to the Chicago Cubs.

It was an understandable decision, but a bit of a sad one too.

The little run Cotton went on at the end of 2016 after being acquired from the Dodgers, not least his seven-inning start at the Coliseum in a win against the Texas Rangers, gave hope that we’d unearthed another good player, and the sort of good player that fans really latch on to.

Everyone can take a big interest in a star player, regardless of what team they support. It’s often the players that have their faults, but give their all for our team, that fans really take a shine to, in many ways because they are unheralded by everyone else. No one was looking at Cotton to be a front-line starter, but he had the potential to be a good back-of-the-rotation guy who we could call our own for 4 or 5 years.

I still think he has that potential, just that he won’t be trying to fulfil it in an A’s uniform.

2017 came with plenty of learning pains, but it was the pain in his right elbow during Spring Training in 2018 that really set him back. His recovery from Tommy John elbow surgery seemed to go okay and it was an unfortunate hamstring injury that derailed him from making a Big League return in the second-half of the 2019 season, unimpressive Minor League numbers being worth noting yet also being worth put into the context of his ongoing return to full health.

Hopefully he’ll get a chance to pitch in the Majors with the Cubs in 2020 and to get his career back on track. So long, Squeaky!

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.

British Baseball Hall of Fame 2019 Elections

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Four new members join the British Baseball Hall of Fame

The 2019 elections to the British Baseball Hall of Fame have introduced four new inductees, increasing the class to 38.

Ryan Bird, Jason Holowaty and Darrin Muller were inducted from the modern ballot, with Alan Asquith being elected by the historical vetting panel that was introduced in 2016.

Hall of Fame Chair Matt Smith commented: “I’m delighted to see four such worthy candidates joining our Hall of Fame, all with different stories to tell but sharing a true commitment to the game in Britain and excelling at what they did.

Ryan Bird and Alan Asquith had memorable playing careers in different eras, with Ryan representing the Richmond Flames and Herts Falcons and Alan being a pillar of the strong Humberside baseball community.

Jason Holowaty combined a playing career that brought four national championships with a long tenure of service to baseball at MLB and BaseballSoftballUK. As for Darrin Muller, for many years he has been one of the most widely recognised and respected representatives of British Baseball at home and abroad, both as a coach and particularly as an umpire.

The task of electing figures who represent the best of British baseball is both a difficult challenge and a hugely rewarding process.

There are so many players, coaches, umpires and officials who have left a mark on our game over the decades and, in contrast to the process Stateside, the full depth of their achievements is rarely packaged neatly through comprehensive statistics or biographical data. However, for us, this is part of the fun. The work that goes into researching potential candidates and writing their stories goes largely unseen but is, to us, as important as the final balloting process that determines who among that year’s list of candidates shine through the most.

Thanks to the Great Britain national team programme, we were able to honour the 2018 class at an event over the MLB London Series weekend back in June, and we will hopefully be able to do something similar in June 2020 for this year’s class. Beyond this, the contributions of Ryan, Jason, Darrin and Alan will be there for all to see on the BBHOF website as we continue to document and celebrate baseball’s rich history on these shores”.

Ryan Bird

Over eight seasons in British domestic play, South African-native Ryan Bird etched a place in the history books as one of British baseball’s greatest hitters. At the time of his retirement, Bird, whose career ran from 2008-2015, posted the highest career batting average (.508), on base percentage (.578) and slugging percentage (.822) in modern British baseball history. He was named the country’s most valuable batter three times (2008, 2009, 2013) and led the National Baseball League in RBI in 2013 and home runs in 2009. He was also recognised as the best fielding first basemen in 2012. All told, he tallied 15 HRs and 119 RBI over the course of 385 plate appearances for the Richmond Flames and Herts Falcons.

Jason Holowaty

Both on offence and defence, Jason Holowaty shined in a distinguished British playing career. He was a key player for four national championship teams – Richmond (2006), London Mets (2007, 2008) and Southern Nationals (2011). Off the field, Holowaty contributed to baseball in the UK and, more broadly, in Europe and Africa, as a key game development executive for Major League Baseball in the region from 2002 to 2016. He has also worked for BaseballSoftballUK in a game development capacity. A lifetime .423 hitter, Holowaty not only earned a batting title as a member of the Richmond Flames in 2006, but also nabbed a Gold Glove award as the best defensive second baseman for the London Mets the following season.

Darrin Muller

Darrin Muller has had a long-ranging and successful involvement with British baseball over many years. His accomplishments in particular include numerous successes as coach and then one of the most impressive umpiring careers of any British umpire. Darrin has umpired in more than 2250 games. They include 17 National Baseball Championships and 13 Youth National Baseball Championships, 445 International games, 11 ISST’s (International High School) European Championships, 4 Pony Baseball European Championships, 2 Pony World Series, 6 Little League European and African Nations Regionals, the 2016 Little League Junior World Series, 12 CEB European Tournaments and the 2009 IBAF World Cup.

Alan Asquith (Historic Committee)

In 1974, the leading British baseball journal of its day, Baseball Mercury, described Alan Asquith as “for years, the country’s leading pitcher.” Indeed, for more than a decade Asquith was a leading light in the Humberside area in particular and one of the best nationwide. In both 1966 and 1967 he received the award as the top pitcher in the Northern Division of the National League, but his 1968 season may have been his most rewarding. Asquith pitched his club, the Hull Aces, to a national title by winning both the semi-final match against the Liverpool Tigers, and the finals versus the Hull Royals. He allowed just a combined five hits while striking out 17 in those two games.

Further information

Full details of the four new members, and the other 34 individuals previously elected to the British Baseball Hall of Fame, can be found a: www.bbhof.org.uk

Double Platinum Chapman

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Who knows what was in the water at El Toro High School in Lake Forest, California, when Nolan Arenado and Matt Chapman attended? If you could bottle the stuff it would be worth its weight in gold.

Both players took home their second consecutive Platinum Glove award recently, voted as the overall best defensive player in the National League and American League respectively.

In U.S. national coverage, everyone brings up Arenado as a great fielder and for good reason. Hopefully Chappy will start getting the same level of recognition because for how superlative a third baseman Arenado is, our man is right there alongside him.

He joins our other great Matt, Olson, as repeat winners, prompting a typically droll comment on Twitter from friend of A’s UK Brett Anderson.

With Marcus Semien and the oft-maligned Robbie Grossman also making the Gold Glove shortlists at shortstop and left field respectively, the Awards showed what we all know: there’s plenty of premium leather in Oakland.

Eric Chavez is, of course, the gold-standard when it comes to fielding A’s third baseman of recent vintage. Whether Chappy can repeat or better his run of six awards (2001-2006) will probably come down simply to how long he remains an Oakland A.

That’s not something I want to worry about too much right now, not least because the more pressing reason to fret is the impending free agency of the guy who plays to Chappy’s left every day.

Great as it is to have Semien on the three-man shortlist for AL MVP alongside Mike Trout and Alex Bregman (AL West Is The Best …!), it only further increases the risk that another team will be throwing a lot of money at him in 12 months’ time.

Selfish, I know, but I would be more than happy for the MVP announcement on Thursday 14th to pass by without Semien’s name being mentioned if instead there’s an A’s press release in draft waiting to reveal a contract extension.

(Side note: prior to the 2019 season getting underway I decided to start up a specific A’s UK blog. On reflection, this website, plus three YouTube channels, three Twitter accounts and a Twitch game-streaming site is probably more than enough for me to keep on top of. Consequently, I’ll be back posting A’s UK blogs on here from now on. If that’s solely your interest in my writing then you can use the Oakland A’s UK category to only find those posts).

New website design goes live!

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If you’re reading this then in some ways the comment is a redundant, but after several months of planning and testing I’ve finally been able to give live with the new website design.

Here’s a short video in which I go through the new features and layout.

https://youtu.be/oGfOUmXddAc

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?