Sounds like there is a faction of owners willing to just skip the season. Pathetic. FWIW Crane isn’t one of them.
Manfred is a eunuch, he isn’t for what’s best for the sport of baseball. He’s simply a mouthpiece for making the owners money. Sad!
Yes he is and he is much worse than simply that. He decided the Red Sox and Yankees needed a whipping boy and Mike Fiers gave him the truncheon he needed. In a fair system, the Red Sox as two time offenders would have had a greater punishment as the Astros.
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Both players would shatter the mark, with McGwire reaching 70 homers on the last weekend of the season. But when the rampant use of performance-enhancing drugs throughout the game came to light in the years that followed, the thrill was gone. Or was it? The PEDs might have cheapened the accomplishment, but the excitement at the time of the chase was real and undeniable.
Yep. “Cheapened, but wasn’t it awesome?” is how they treat that entire era
Yes, we know now many of the numbers came with the help of artificial enhancement. What can I say? It happened. It was fun.
Fun! Shit happens!
I think in a fair system, MLB would have acknowledged a league-wide problem, if Manfred thought it was so bad, and investigated every team OR called all 30 owners and GMs to the Commissioner’s office and dealt with it face-to-face, not with a memo. MLB also could have dealt with it internally and refused to comment on internal matters.
Singling out one team (not NYY or Boston, of course) as The Villain, making it a very public “scandal,” and sweeping the rest under the rug was cowardly and wrong.
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Not to derail this thread, but Buster puts out a gem this morning. After seeing the Astros infield as the photo above the headline, you just gotta know it’ll be positive news!
On “tanking”
But should MLB have moved to address this problem on its own in 2017 or 2018 or 2019, in a time of enormous prosperity, rather than let it develop into a cancerous issue with the union? The Houston Astros famously finished the 2013 season with one player making over $1 million, and as the tanking strategy became more popular, other teams followed suit. Individual teams made more money with tanking – but has MLB’s overall product suffered, particularly as the union’s distrust has now fully manifested?
And then there’s the question of service-time manipulation, a longstanding source of anger for the players and the epitome of bad faith on the part of teams. Consider the case of George Springer, whose big league career began with an act of bad faith.
In 2013, Springer – a first-round pick by the Astros two years before – had an OPS over 1.000 playing in Double- and Triple-A. Nobody could argue with a straight face that Springer wasn’t a major league caliber player and not among the organization’s top 30 players when September call-ups were chosen.
But not only did the Astros keep him in the minors at the end of that season, but they held him out of the big leagues until April 16 of the following year to delay his free agency by a year. Forget the arbitration case that was decided earlier this year: Everybody in baseball understands why it is that Kris Bryant’s rookie-season debut didn’t happen until April 17, why so many of baseball’s elite prospects magically transform into big leaguers after two-plus weeks in April.
I enjoyed the handwaving at Kris Bryant’s grievance hearing (I’m sure he wouldn’t like to “forget” it and the future monies it’s gonna cost him).
Just some deep diving to show just how disingenuous Buster is:
Bryant’s 2014 season in the minors (68 games in AA and 70 in AAA):
SEASON TEAM G AB R H HR RBI BB SO SB OBP AVG OPS
2014 Minors 138 492 118 160 43 110 86 162 15 .438 .325 1.098
While 23rd in payroll in 2014 (they didn’t to deal with a failing RSN), the Cubs finished in dead last. Seems like nobody should argue with a straight face that Bryant wasn’t a major league caliber player! He easily could have been added to the roster and made an impact or gotten his feet wet, since ya know, the team finished in last place. Astros bad!
I get that it’s trendy to bag on the Astros and how Luhnow ran the organization, but let’s not make up faux outrage articles and dismiss anything that could hurt a hot take. If you want to say that service time manipulation and MLB’s recent reluctance to spend on “older” free agents is a major cause of distrust among the players and owners, I can entertain that.
As I drove into town to the grocery store I drove past a fast pitch softball complex and a little league complex. Both had tournaments going on and damn near full parking lots. What up with that?
BTW I had to fight the urge not to post a Diondre Cole meme.
Well, that IS his job.
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Several local youth baseball/softball leagues canceled their season.
The league my son plays in is going ahead with play, but with several rules and guidelines in place. Currently there aren’t any active cases in the county I live in. Hopefully there won’t be any cases due to this youth baseball season.
The league asked that the stands be used at a minimum and if used to be spaced 6’ apart. It’s recommended that fans sit along fence lines, or watch from their car.
Only parents can attend games. No, grandparents, aunts, cousins. Concessions are call ahead and pickup only.
I’m still not sure how it will work with younger kids in the dugout (my son is in 13/14 Jr/Sr league), but kids are be spaced 6’ apart within the dugout.
This would be almost impossible in just about every youth baseball dugout I’ve ever seen. A team with 12 players would need 66ft of dugout, not including coaches. Maybe some nicer fields have longer dugouts.
Yeah, this was discussed…Batters not up to bat for the inning will stand outside the dugout. Hopefully catchers can stay in the dugout to get some shade.
But without extra coaches or help from several someone behind the dugout, this would be impossible to keep younger kids separated.
The owners’ new offer is a variation on the theme. Now they are proposing a 76 game at 75% of each players’ pay for each game.
All of the owners’ proposals seem to end up at the same place (quoting CBS writer Mike Axisa):
- 82 games at sliding scale = ~33% salary
- 50 games at prorated pay = ~33% salary
- 76 games at 75% prorated pay = (drumroll) ~33% salary
Like I have said more than once, they are not going to play. I hate we are losing one year of our players’ careers, but this is Greed v. Avarice.
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The owners agreed in April to pay the players two pizzas. Their first offer to resume was to pay them one pizza instead. Their second offer was to cut that pizza in half and call it two pizzas. Their next offer will be to slice the pizza again and call it four pizzas.
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Yogi Berra would’ve been all in on this plan.
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Yogi would have given them cash, which is just as good as money.
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I just canceled my subscription to the MLB radio broadcasts. It felt weird enough that I had to think about doing it. .
Thanks for reminding me to cancel mine. I hate paying for something and getting nothing.
Rotoworld references a tweet quoting Manfred yesterday saying MLB will “100%” play ball in 2020.
Baseball?
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