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Post by psuhistory on Nov 26, 2015 12:55:26 GMT -5
SABR biography of Edgar Martinez in advance of the HOF vote... Edgar Martinezby Emily Hawks, SABR Baseball Biography Project, 11/23/2015 sabr.org/bioproj/person/05b7d71dWhen many reflect on the 1990s Mariners, often the flashier stars jump to mind: Ken Griffey Jr., Randy Johnson, Alex Rodriguez. However, few on those teams would disagree that the stalwart of the Mariners was a player who toiled just outside of the spotlight. Known as Gar, El Papa, or Papi, Edgar Martinez was the quiet, hard-working hitting machine who was the heart of the Mariners. Chants of “Eeeed-gaaaar” reverberated throughout the Kingdome during every Martinez at-bat, and Martinez’s name became synonymous with the designated hitter position at which he excelled. A Mariner for his entire career, his legacy is strongly felt in Seattle even to this day. Edgar Martinez was born on January 2, 1963 in New York City to parents Jose Martinez and Christina Salgado Martinez.1 When he was two years old, his parents divorced, and Martinez went to live with his grandparents, Mario Salgado and Manuela Rivera, in the Maguayo neighborhood of Dorado, Puerto Rico. At eight years old, he watched the Pittsburgh Pirates win the 1971 World Series on television, led by Puerto Rican great Roberto Clemente. “After that series, I went outside my house and I started playing in the backyard,” said Martinez. “I was hooked on baseball after that.”2 Martinez’s parents reconciled three years later and summoned their three children back to New York. Though his brother and sister returned to his parents, Martinez opted to remain with his grandparents in Puerto Rico. “He locked himself in his room and wouldn’t come out, didn’t want to leave,” said Martinez’s uncle, Jose Juan Rivera. “I felt my grandparents needed me,” Martinez explained. “I went with my feelings.”3 Martinez grew up playing baseball with his cousin and future big leaguer Carmelo Martinez. Carmelo was two years older, and they would often pitch to each other between games, throwing anything they could find: balls, rocks, even bottle caps. “Bottle caps were great training for hitting breaking balls, they curved so much,” Carmelo recalled. “I’d go out with a broomstick and hit the rocks all over, try for open space,” Edgar remembered. “I never broke windows or anything but the neighbors did complain.”4 After graduating from Jose S. Alegria High School in Dorado, Martinez went on to attend American College in Puerto Rico, while also working the night shift in a pharmaceutical factory and playing semipro baseball. When Edgar was 20, Mariners scout Marty Martinez (no relation) held a tryout camp in Dorado. Though he had heard of Edgar’s hitting abilities, he’d also heard that he lacked speed and power. Still, this did not deter him. “I never did listen much to other scouts,” he said. “I had my own ideas on things.” Edgar completed his tryout after working an eight hour night shift at the factory. His performance was enough to garner him a $4,000 offer to sign with the Mariners, yet he still required a little prodding from his cousin, Carmelo. “He was the one who kept saying ‘take the chance, you can make it,’” Edgar said. “I did not know. Finally, I decided to try it. But Carmelo . . . he kind of made the decision for me.”5 Martinez began his professional career with the Bellingham Mariners of the Northwest League. He started slowly, batting just .173 in 1983. But he was also contending with the culture shock of playing in the far northwest corner of the contiguous United States, bordering Canada. “When I got to Bellingham, I could only speak a few words of English, just enough to order in a restaurant,” Martinez recalled. “And I couldn’t believe people could live in such cold weather.”6 He improved the following year with the Wausau Timbers of the Midwest League, hitting .303 and drawing 84 walks. Martinez split the 1985 season between the AA Chattanooga Lookouts of the Southern League, where he hit .258 in 111 games, and the AAA Calgary Cannons of the Pacific Coast League, .353 in 20 games. Back in Chattanooga in 1986, he led the league third basemen with a .960 fielding percentage. Martinez began the 1987 season in Calgary, where he batted .327 through 129 games, including 31 doubles and 10 home runs. After this strong performance, the Mariners called him up, and he made his big league debut on September 12. He quickly became acclimated to big league pitching, compiling a .372 average in the season’s final 13 games. Martinez certainly enjoyed the change in lifestyle. “To me, everything is first class. We stay at the best hotels, we don’t have to carry our luggage and you make better money in the big leagues,” he observed shortly after his call-up. He aimed to make the best impression possible and was willing to do whatever was required of him to stay in the majors. “I think I can play utility, third, second, wherever they want to play me I try to do it.”7 In 1988, Martinez joined the Mariners for spring training in Arizona, but was trimmed from the major league roster on March 22 and once again began the season in Calgary. His season began with a rough start. During a game in Tempe, a ground ball took a bad hop, struck him in the face, and broke his nose. The injury sidelined him for a few games, but he recovered splendidly, winning the 1988 Pacific Coast League batting title with a .363 average. He also performed creditably with the big league club in limited service in September. Shortly after the season’s conclusion, Martinez underwent a patellar scraping and debridement procedure on his left knee, which had been causing him discomfort throughout the season.8 In 1989, Martinez began the season with the big league club in Seattle. Joining him in the Opening Day lineup were fellow rookies Ken Griffey, Jr. and Omar Vizquel. Martinez struggled early on and again split his time between Seattle and Calgary. The consistent playing time in the minors lifted him out of his rut. “When I was sent down I played every day and I found my rhythm,” Martinez said. “ was more comfortable and secure with myself.”9 Unlike many players who became discouraged by living in constant flux between the major and minor leagues, Martinez embraced his situation. “I saw other players who were very frustrated by playing in the minor leagues, but I was lucky,” said Martinez. “I never got frustrated. I was doing what I really liked. I was just happy to be playing the game.”10 Cumulatively, he hit .345 in 32 games at Calgary, and .240 in 65 games with Seattle.
Following the 1989 season, Martinez returned to his native Puerto Rico to play winter ball. He won the Puerto Rican League batting title, hitting .424 through 43 games at San Juan and shared MVP honors with Carlos Baerga.11
On his return, Martinez agreed to a one-year, $90,000 deal with the Mariners, though the M’s third base job in 1990 apparently belonged to Darnell Coles. But after a stretch in which Coles committed five errors in six games, manager Jim Lefebvre moved him to the outfield, clearing the way for Martinez to take over at third. Which itself wasn’t without incident: Lefebvre stuck with Martinez even after a horrendous game on May 6 when Martinez tied the American League record of committing four errors in a single game.12 Lefebvre knew what he was doing. Martinez had become the reliable source of offensive production the team had been looking for, hitting .302 on the season, with an OPS of .830 in his first season as a “full timer.” Many were also noticing his strong work ethic, including the Mariners’ strength and conditioning coach and former Olympic shot putter Pete Shmock. “He has the kind of discipline I wish all baseball players had,” Shmock said. “I’m proud of him, and he should be proud of himself.”13 Despite Martinez’s excellent season, most media and fan attention was lavished on teammate Griffey, Jr., who had both flare and flashier power numbers. This didn’t bother the humble Martinez. When asked about the disparity in the amount of publicity each player received, Martinez commented, “It’s simple. Junior is one of the greatest players. He deserves the attention.”14 Martinez had played much of the season through knee pain, and immediately after the conclusion of the season, underwent arthroscopic surgery on his right knee to repair a torn ligament.15
Before the 1991 season, Martinez signed a two-year contract for $850,000 plus incentives.16 He began the season on an offensive tear, hitting .412 through the month of April. Manager Lefebvre experimented with putting Edgar at nearly all spots in the lineup, including 67 games in the leadoff position later in the season. His strongest performance came in the cleanup spot, where he hit .380 in 71 at bats. He finished the season again hitting over .300 with an overall WAR of 6.1.
By 1992, Martinez began to get noticed in the baseball world at large. Offensively he seemed to be getting increasingly better, even in spite of a right shoulder injury that was causing a great deal of pain. He was selected to his first American League All-Star squad, going into the break hitting .328 with 14 home runs and 26 doubles. “Since I was a kid, playing in the All-Star Game was a dream,” Martinez said. “I feel great to be selected. It is an honor.”17 The following month, the Mariners signed Martinez to a three-year, $10 million contract—the most lucrative in franchise history to that point.18 Amidst the batting race in late August, Martinez realized he had finally been recognized as a competitor when a shipment of bats he ordered from Rawlings arrived, and every one of the dozen was in pristine condition, with the perfect cut of wood.19
As Mariners beat writer Bob Finnigan noted, “Over the years it was a common sight to see him sitting at his locker doing his daily eye exercises or pulling out his little kitchen scale, checking every bat of a new shipment, carefully writing the weight in ounces on the knob, and occasionally shaking his head over discrepancies.”20 To the ever meticulous Martinez, those precise scale figures were a sign he’d made it big. However the pain in his shoulder cut his season short: it began impeding his play. “Most of the season it just hurt me to throw,” Martinez said. “But lately it has bothered me swinging the bat.”21 He underwent arthroscopic surgery to remove bone spurs in his right shoulder on September 19. Martinez’s .343 BA easily won the AL batting title, and indeed led the entire majors. He also tied Frank Thomas for the most doubles in baseball with 46, and won his first Silver Slugger award. The following offseason brought a mixture of joy and sorrow for Martinez. In October, he married Holli Beeler, a Seattle-area native and Seattle Pacific University student. The two met on a blind date after being set up by a mutual friend.22 Soon afterward, however, he faced adversity in his personal life. “Shortly after , my grandfather passed away. I got the flu for a long time. My grandmother had a stroke,” Martinez recollected.23
In January of 1993 the Mariners signed Edgar’s cousin Carmelo to a minor league deal and invited him to spring training camp. By that time, Carmelo had played nine seasons in the majors and had long been soliciting hitting advice from his younger cousin. “That was a strange feeling when Carmelo started to ask me for help. My cousin was my hero when I was a little kid,” Edgar said. “He is the one who taught me to hit and is still the only batting coach I’ve ever had.”24
Just before the 1993 season began, Martinez suffered a freak mishap in an exhibition game that would ultimately change the entire trajectory of his career. Four teams were set to play in the ‘Baseball Classic’ at BC Place Stadium in Vancouver, British Columbia, as part of a preseason exhibition. The Mariners opened the series in a game against the Milwaukee Brewers on April 3. The venue had hosted a Guns ‘N Roses concert earlier in the week, so the field’s turf and dirt had been hastily installed. The dirt used to fill the cutouts surrounding the bases was loose and sandy, and it contained no clay for the players to gain grip with their cleats. “It was like playing in a sandbox, like playing on a beach,” said manager Lou Piniella.25 When Martinez stole a base in the fourth inning, he heard a pop in his leg. He hit the ground and lay there for two minutes until helped off the field by the trainers. Team doctor Larry Pedegana later diagnosed Martinez with a partial muscle tear above the left knee. Martinez would play only 42 games that season, with dismal numbers across the board (.237/.366/.378). It was by far his worst regular season. The event profoundly shaped Martinez’s approach to the game in the future. After the obstacles he endured in his personal life the preceding offseason, Martinez recounted, “From the time I came to spring training I was behind and I felt I got hurt because I wasn’t in good enough shape. After that I decided I would never let that happen again.”26
The bad luck continued early in the 1994 season, however, as Martinez was hit by a pitch on Opening Day while facing Cleveland right-hander Dennis Martinez. “I thought, ‘Not again,’” Martinez said. “I couldn’t believe it was my first game.”27 Returning to play nearly a week later, he made three errors in a game. After a stint on the disabled list, Martinez went on to appear in 89 games of the strike-shortened season. He played 65 games at third base, 23 as designated hitter, and appeared once as a pinch runner.
Martinez roared back into form in 1995. Playing nearly all games as a designated hitter, he had the best season of his career leading the American League in runs (121) and batting average (.356), he led the major leagues in doubles (52), on-base percentage (.479), and OPS (1.107). He also earned an impressive offensive WAR of 7.2 He was selected to his second American League All-Star squad, won a second Silver Slugger, and finished third in MVP voting. Martinez gave the Mariners a much-needed boost after star player Griffey, Jr. went on the disabled list on May 26. Twenty-five of his 29 home runs, and 97 of his 113 RBI came after Griffey’s injury.28 Due in no small part to Edgar’s achievements, the Mariners went on to win their first-ever AL West division championship.
In their playoff debut, the Mariners faced the Wild Card Yankees in the ALDS. Martinez swung a hot bat for the entire series, getting three hits in each of the first two games, for example, although the Mariners lost both contests. The M’s battled back to win Game Three, in which Martinez buoyed the team with a grand slam home run. And they also captured Game Four, with Edgar contributing a three-run dinger in that victory.
With the series back in Seattle for the decisive fifth game, 57,411 frenzied fans packed into the Kingdome. The Yankees sent Game One victor David Cone to the mound, who held the Mariners in check through seven innings. But in the eighth, down 4-2, the Mariners tacked on a run, and then added another in the ninth, sending the game into extra innings. After a dramatic relief appearance by Mariners’ ace Randy Johnson in the top of the ninth, the Yankees countered with former Cy Young winner Jack McDowell in the bottom half of the inning. Johnson gave up a run in the top of the 11th, and the Mariners went into the bottom half of the inning trailing 5-4. With everything on the line, Joey Cora and Griffey singled and Martinez came to the plate with runners on first and third. Having fanned against McDowell in the 9th, Edgar was out for revenge. Reliever Norm Charlton recalled their encounter in the dugout, “I told him, ‘You’re going to get another chance.’ He looked at me with the look in his eye that said, ‘I know.’”29
Edgar did not waste his chance. On an 0-1 count, he laced a split-fingered fastball into the left-field corner. Cora scored easily, while Griffey kicked into overdrive from first. As the entire team waved him in along with third base coach Sam Perlozzo, Junior slid safely into home, securing the Mariners their first Division Championship and sending the Kingdome into an eruption. Martinez had a monstrous series: hitting an electric .571, with two homers and 10 RBIs. “A professional is the best description I can use for him,” Piniella said. It’s the highest praise I can think of for a major-league baseball player.” Griffey added, “People are always asking about Edgar. What can you say? He’s just Edgar. The man can hit.”30 Though the Mariners went on to lose the ALCS to Cleveland, the dramatic Game Five ALDS victory has not been forgotten. Even today, 20 years later, ”The Double” is permanently etched in collective memory and franchise lore. It’s depicted in a Safeco Field mural and was constantly re-lived for 15 years through the baritone voice of the late Ford C. Frick award-winning Mariners broadcaster Dave Niehaus.
Martinez, now being used almost exclusively as a DH, put up another solid All-Star year in 1996, hitting .327 In an unfortunate ironic twist, the only game he played at third base that season resulted in four cracked ribs and 21 games on the DL after a collision with catcher John Marzano.31
Adding a fourth All-Star appearance to his resume in 1997, and a third Silver Slugger to his trophy case, Martinez helped bring his team back to the playoffs, though they fell to the Orioles in four games in the ALDS. At the time, with ownership interests in limbo, great uncertainty surrounded the future of the Mariners. “It looks to me like they want to change leagues,” Martinez said after the season, a matter of some moment to a man who made his living as a superb DH. “Right now I have no clue if they want to keep me or if they want to trade me. I’d rather stay, but it’s not up to me.”32
Fortunately, the Mariners remained in the AL where Martinez continued to produce. Over the next two years he batted .327 and .330 and led the AL in OBP, something he accomplished three times in his career. Indeed, he excelled at getting on base: for two-thirds of his 18-year career, he earned an OBP over .400.
Near the end of the decade, eye problems connected to strabismus, a lifelong condition for Martinez, began bothering him. Strabismus affects eye coordination, and Martinez’s right eye would wander, causing him to lose focus. He was first diagnosed with the condition in the minor leagues, but the problem tends to worsen with age. In 1999, Martinez began losing sight of pitches and seemed headed for the DL. He even confided in some people that he might have to retire. Early in his career, Martinez began incorporating 30 minutes of eye exercises into his pregame routine. When the trouble worsened, he invited team optometrist Douglas Nikaitani to his house for extra homework. The doc put charts on the walls and told Edgar to fuse them together while simultaneously batting tennis balls away. He added martial arts and math problems to the exercise, trying to push Martinez to his limits. These strange ministrations seemed to work. “I felt different,” Martinez said. “I could see the ball more. I was able to pick up the rotation . . . I felt I was improving, back to where I wanted to be again.”33
In 2000 he led the AL in RBI (145), was selected to his fifth All-Star team, had a career-best 37 home runs, and finished sixth in MVP voting. He also hit .364 in the ALDS as the Mariners swept the White Sox, but they ultimately fell to the Yankees in the ALCS.
2001 was a magical year for the Mariners: the team tied the 1906 Cubs’ record of 116 wins in a season. Martinez was one of eight Mariners selected to that year’s All Star Game, which took place on their home field. In the Division Series against the Indians, Martinez hit .313, but only .150 in their Championship Series loss to the Yankees. It would be his final playoff appearance.
A ruptured hamstring tendon behind his left knee shortened Martinez’s 2002 season and he again underwent surgery in April. Whether Martinez, then approaching 40, would play another year was questionable. But the Mariners weren’t quite ready to let the heart-and-soul of their team go, and signed him to a one-year deal. “We just had to get it done,” said the M’s CEO Howard Lincoln.34 Martinez rewarded the franchise’s confidence, rebounding from his injury in 2003, hitting .294 with 24 home runs, .403 OBP and a strong 3.3 WAR. Buoyed by his season, Martinez signed another one-year deal with the Mariners in November.
But around mid-August of the following year, with his team buried in the AL West cellar 29 games below .500, and Martinez hitting only .258, he decided to retire at season’s end. His body was worn out and would no longer allow him to compete at his accustomed level. Unlike many stars he played with over the years—Griffey, Jr., Johnson, and Rodriguez, to name a few—Martinez played for Seattle his entire career. Though he was sometimes a quiet presence, especially when contrasted with big personalities like Griffey, Jr. and Jay Buhner, Martinez still knew how to have a laugh. He featured prominently in the always popular Mariners commercial campaigns over the years. Fan favorites included a commercial in which he taught other young Latino players to say “geoduck” (a clam which is a Pacific Northwest delicacy), another where he had a garage-door opener in his car that controlled the Safeco Field roof, and the legendary “light bat” commercial where he constructed a lamp out of a bat. “I never got the bat lamp,” Martinez recalled, feigning sadness.35 Still, what most fans and teammates remember was his unwavering work ethic. Mariners Vice President of Communications Randy Adamack remembered, “I can recall two years I came to the office the day before Christmas. The parking lot was empty except for one other car, Edgar’s.”36
It’s little mystery why the city of Seattle renamed the street adjacent to Safeco Field “Edgar Martinez Drive.” In fact, the city did not even wait for his retirement to do so, making the switch on “Edgar Martinez Day” at Safeco Field, the last day of his playing career. “Why wait?” said Seattle mayor, Greg Nickels. “He’s been a part of Seattle for so long, and his contribution has been unlike any other pro athlete, we thought it would be a great idea.”37 Commissioner Bud Selig—on hand that weekend to commemorate Ichiro Suzuki’s breaking George Sisler’s single-season hits record—called Martinez a role model for the game and announced that the annual Designated Hitter Award would forever be known as the Edgar Martinez Award. Teammate Bret Boone characterized him as “the greatest Mariner of all time.”38
That point is scarcely arguable. He appears on the team leader boards in virtually every offensive category, leading in games played, on-base percentage, extra-base hits, doubles, RBI, walks, runs, and total bases, and finishing second in OPS, overall WAR, batting average, hits, and home runs. Shortly after the season concluded, Martinez became the first Puerto Rican to be awarded the Roberto Clemente Award for his charitable work in the Seattle community. It was a fitting award for Martinez, who became interested in baseball largely because of Clemente. “Clemente was my idol as a child,” he said, “and to get this award is very special to me.”39
Though he retired from playing baseball, the always hard-working Martinez could not remain idle during his retirement. In addition to spending more time with his family—by then, he and wife Holli had three children: a son, Alex, and daughters, Tessa and Jacqueline—Martinez also launched a promotional merchandise agency called Branded Solutions. When asked why he didn’t just retire to a life of leisure, spending his post-playing days on the golf course, Martinez said, “I tried that. But I felt the need to be productive. I feel energetic. I feel young. I wanted to do something.”40 Martinez and his wife also founded The Martinez Foundation, a charitable organization that provides scholarships and support programs to students of color who are pursuing teaching careers.
Martinez had always said that he might be interested in a return to the baseball world, but he wanted to wait until his children were older. “In 2005, on opening day, I had a baby in my arms watching the game,” Martinez recalled ten years later. “Now it’s the right time. I really missed the game over all those years.” 41 On June 20, 2015, the Mariners named Martinez as their new hitting coach. “For the last three years, I’ve wanted to get back into the game, obviously I wanted to do it with the Mariners,” Martinez said. “I haven’t seen so much talent on the Mariners for a long time . . . I think it’s a great opportunity for me.”42
While Martinez has certainly had a significant impact on the game, his Hall of Fame candidacy has been a hotly debated topic ever since his retirement. Martinez debuted on the ballot in 2010, receiving 36 percent of the vote. His tally held fairly steady for four years, but dropped a bit in 2014 and 2015 to about 25 percent. Many believe Martinez’s late start to his career, coupled with the fact that he played primarily as a designated hitter, have held him back. One of the biggest supporters of Martinez’s HOF candidacy is former teammate Randy Johnson, who was inducted in 2015. “The first person on my ballot who would get my vote is Edgar,” said Johnson. “I’ve faced a lot of Hall of Fame hitters, and . . . Edgar is the best hitter that I ever saw.”43
For fans in Seattle, Martinez will long be remembered as the heart of their team. While he was a superbly talented hitter who worked hard at his craft, his most important attribute may well be the quality of his character. He is perhaps best described by the late Dave Niehaus: “I've never heard anybody in any walk of life say anything ever halfway bad about Edgar Martinez. I've never heard a cross word from him. He has always had nice things to say about everyone, even in trying circumstances. He's a great human being.”44
Notes
1 David L. Porter, Latino and African American Athletes Today: A Biographical Dictionary, (Santa Barbara: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004), 253.
2 Ian C. Friedman, Latino Athletes, (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2007), 133.
3 Larry Stone, “Martinez is still the talk of his town,” Seattle Times, October 4, 2004.
4 Bob Finnigan, “Double Play—Cousin Carmelo Talked Edgar Martinez into Taking a Chance, Signing with M’s,” Seattle Times, March 7, 1993.
5 Porter, Biographical Dictionary, 253; ibid.
6 Blaine Newnham, “Mister Muscle—Martinez Gives M’s a Lift,” Seattle Times, May 24, 1990.
7 Bob Sherwin, “Martinez, Diaz Help Save M’s Moore from Embarrassment,” Seattle Times, October 2, 1987.
8 Ibid., “Christensen Reassigned; 6 Others Get Ax,” March 22, 1988; Bob Finnigan, “Parker’s Bleeders Killed Mariners,” Seattle Times, April 5, 1988; email, Rick Griffin to author, October 27, 2015, in author’s possession. Griffin is the M’s senior director of athletic training.
9 Bob Sherwin, “Majors Top Minors for M’s—Martinez, Briley Show They Plan to Stay in Win Over Blue Jays,” Seattle Times, June 19, 1989.
10 Newnham, “Mister Muscle.”
11 Bob Finnigan, “Reynolds Looks Like a Million; Presley Looks Like a Red Sock,” Seattle Times, January 14, 1990.
12 Jim Cour, “Mistakes Don’t Rattle Martinez—M’s Third Baseman Swings Hot Bat,” Seattle Times, May 20, 1990.
13 Newnham, “Mister Muscle.”
14 Ibid.
15 Bob Sherwin, “M’s Finish Season with 7-4 Loss—Seattle 1 Victory Short of Matching Best-Ever Season,” Seattle Times, October 3, 1990.
16 Bob Finnigan, “Valle Overcomes Contract Dispute to Report on Time,” Seattle Times, February 23, 1991.
17 Bob Sherwin, “Edgar—All-Star Dream Comes True for Sore-Shouldered Martinez,” Seattle Times, July 10, 1992.
18 Ibid., “M’s Invest in Future—Martinez Signs for Hot Numbers: 3 Years, $10M,” Seattle Times, August 14, 1992.
19 Bob Finnigan, “Make Way for Martinez—League’s Top Hitter Finally Gets Noticed Outside Seattle,” Seattle Times, August 25, 1992.
20 Bob Finnigan, “Edgar was a one-man hit parade – injuries sapped his legs but couldn’t derail him,” Seattle Times, October 4, 2004.
21 Ibid., “Edgar’s Season May Be Finished—Shoulder Surgery Possible for Martinez,” September 16, 1992.
22 Connie McDougall, “Rooting for the Home Team,” Response, Winter 1997.
23 Finnigan, “Edgar was a one-man hit parade.”
24 Ibid., “Double Play.”
25 Ibid., “M’s Lose Edgar for Up to 6 Weeks— Martinez Sidelined After B.C. Mishap,” April 4, 1993.
26 Ibid., “Edgar was a one-man hit parade.”
27 Bob Sherwin, “Mariner Log – Edgar Gets a Scare in First Trip to Plate,” Seattle Times, April 5, 1994.
28 Ibid., “Martinez Gets Summertime Due – Finishes 3rd in MVP Vote After Lifting Griffey-Less M’s,” November 17, 1995.
29 Bob Finnigan, “Miracle Mariners – Pair of Aces, Edgar’s Clutch Hit Ends Series for the Ages in 11th,” Seattle Times, October 9, 1995.
30 “What They’re Saying About Edgar,” Seattle Times, October 9, 1995.
31 “Mariners ’96: A Look Back,” Seattle Times, September 30, 1996.
32 Glenn Nelson, “Martinez Uncertain About Future—Wants to Stay, But Has No Say,” Seattle Times, October 6, 1997.
33 Ken Rosenthal, “Martinez Keeps Hits Coming Despite an Eye Disorder,” Sporting News, May 6, 2001.
34 Bob Finnigan, “Back in the Fold – Martinez Agrees to One-Year Deal with Mariners,” Seattle Times, November 8, 2002.
35 Ibid., “Edgar was a one-man hit parade.”
36 Ibid.
37 Art Thiel, “Seattle to Rename Street After Edgar Martinez,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, September 30, 2004.
38 Bob Finnigan, “A tip of the cap – Rangers 10, M’s 4 | Seattle Honors Retiring DH with a Moving Tribute | Edgar Martinez Day”, Seattle Times, October 3, 2004.
39 Steve Kelley, “Martinez Receives Clemente Award – ‘It Means a Lot’,” Seattle Times, October 27, 2004.
40 Greg Johns, “Edgar’s Life After Baseball,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, February 16, 2007.
41 Ryan Divish, “Mariners hire Edgar as New Hitting Coach,” Seattle Times, June 21, 2015.
42 Ibid.
43 Jerry Crasnick, “Randy Johnson: Vote Edgar Martinez,” ESPN.com, January 7, 2015, espn.go.com/mlb/story/_/id/12132849/randy-johnson-endorses-former-seattle-mariners-teammate-edgar-martinez-baseball-hall-fame.
44 Steve Kelley, “Loud Bat Belied the Quiet Pro Behind It,” Seattle Times, October 4, 2004.
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Post by psuhistory on Nov 29, 2015 19:19:49 GMT -5
Interesting article on the Caribbean Baseball Initiative and a project to return minor league baseball to Havana for the first time since the Reds had a AAA affiliate there during the 1950s... A Pitch Is Framed by Diplomacy in Cuba By Dan Barry, NY Times, 11/292015 www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/sports/baseball/a-pitch-is-framed-by-diplomacy-in-cuba.htmlHAVANA — A minibus of Americans rumbled through a city in transformation, past the run-down housing and round-the-clock construction, the sparsely stocked bodegas and chic new restaurants, to a reception at the residence of the American chargés d’affaires. The hint of change teased the November night. A few guests wore golf shirts embroidered with the brand names of sodas and snacks and auto parts. But the business of these men arriving by bus, all in dark suits or blazers, was of a different order: to have a major league team’s minor league affiliate based in Havana, perhaps as early as 2017. Their plan was freighted with history. It would restore the professional baseball bond once shared by two countries long at odds, but it would be possible only in accordance with United States law and, these men insisted, with the full participation of Cuba. In other words, when the time was right. But, as the common sight of a driver talking on a cellphone while in a 1950s-era Chevy suggests, time moves differently here. More than half a century has passed since the Havana Sugar Kings, a Cincinnati Reds affiliate, played in the Class AAA International League. Since the giddy gunfire of followers of the revolutionary Fidel Castro grazed a shortstop and a third-base coach at a game against the Rochester Red Wings. Since Havana won the 1959 Little World Series against the Minneapolis Millers here at home. The notion of returning to those days, absent the gunfire, may sound like pie in the sky, given the longstanding American embargo against Cuba. But President Obama and the Cuban president, Raúl Castro, announced plans last December to restore full diplomatic ties — a first hesitant step toward normalizing relations — and some see a chance for an exemption from the embargo: a baseball “carve-out.” What’s more, this group’s enthusiastic leader, a veteran minor league executive named Lou Schwechheimer, has spent the last dozen years preparing for just such a moment. He has secured the exclusive rights from Minor League Baseball to return professional baseball to Havana. He has assembled this group, called the Caribbean Baseball Initiative, which includes two highly regarded former American ambassadors. He has obtained the necessary licensing from the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. He has raised considerable capital. And, very quietly, he has built a baseball empire. As of this month, the Caribbean Baseball Initiative owns controlling interests in the New Orleans Zephyrs, a Miami Marlins franchise in the Class AAA Pacific Coast League, and the Charlotte Stone Crabs, a Tampa Bay Rays franchise in the Class A Florida State League. The group also holds a minority interest in the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders, a Yankees franchise in the International League. None of these teams will be moved to Cuba, Schwechheimer said, although they may figure in various good-will initiatives he has in mind, including playing a Class AAA all-star game in Havana, providing much-needed baseball equipment, and sponsoring seminars on training and conditioning. But he also said, “We have the financial resources to acquire additional minor league teams, one of which may ultimately wind up in Havana — but only at the appropriate time.” Until that appropriate time, Schwechheimer and his associates plan to continue their minibus missions to Cuba, listening, explaining and seeking a partner in a joint baseball venture. “But only thoughtfully, respectfully and when Cuba is willing,” he said. “We’re not going to be the ugly Americans.” Looking to Past, and FutureSchwechheimer’s Cuban mission sprang from a long-ago gathering of baseball lifers, swapping stories over drinks. A particularly informed hot stove league, you might say. It was at professional baseball’s 2002 fall gathering in Tampa, Fla., and Schwechheimer, then a 45-year-old executive and part owner of the Pawtucket Red Sox, found himself with, among others, Frank Verdi, the third-base coach once winged by a bullet, and Harold Cooper, a onetime president of the International League, who began his career during the Depression, wiping the mold from a ballpark’s hot dogs with a vinegar rag. As they recalled the days when Havana was part of minor league baseball — the high level of play, the passion of the fans, the Sugar Kings — one of the men, George Steinbrenner, challenged the young Schwechheimer to return Havana to the fold. Schwechheimer accepted. Soon he was sharing his vision with advisers at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, where he was studying. Soon he was the keynote speaker at a conference in Havana, delivering a paper titled “Your Baseball Stadium: A Front Porch to Havana and an Economic Development Opportunity for Cuba.” Since then, he has dedicated himself to having the International League once again live up to its name — a goal made all the more possible with Obama’s surprise and daring announcement last December to “begin a new chapter” with Cuba. “This is the moment in time,” Schwechheimer said. “And we’re closing in on it.” But Schwechheimer faces a few daunting obstacles, said Juan A. Triana, a professor of economics at the University of Havana. For one, the “vertical permission” structure of Cuban bureaucracy can be exhausting, he said. For another, some hard-liners here have little interest in restoring ties with the United States. “It must be done step by step,” Triana said. “It could take one year, two years, three years.” This was Schwechheimer’s fifth trip to Cuba, and many others are planned, including one next month. His patient confidence, he said, comes from believing that baseball is the “common denominator” in the Cuban-American equation, as well as from the directive he has received in meetings with State Department officials: “Be bold and engage.” For five days, the men on the minibus kept to a crowded schedule of meetings with top-level American and Cuban officials, interrupted here and there with arranged moments of baseball good will. They spent a good part of their time peering through tinted glass at the evolving Havana panorama: the New World utilitarian building blocks and crumbling Old World structures, the Che Guevara silhouettes and the restaurants with valet service, the northward view of the sea along the boulevard called the Malecón, toward Florida, 90 miles away. All the while, their mantra was “respectful engagement,” with a side of “tranquilo.” With Schwechheimer were a Rhode Island financier, a university professor of sports management, a veteran minor league executive, and three members of the Cohen Group, a high-voltage consultancy firm in Washington: Tommy Goodman, a Spanish-fluent lawyer who handled the trip’s every detail, and two legendary American statesmen. One, Marc Grossman, a former ambassador to Turkey, retired in 2005 as the State Department’s third-ranking official, serving as the undersecretary of state for political affairs. In 2011, Obama called the retired Grossman into temporary service as a special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He roots for the Los Angeles Dodgers. The other, Jeffrey Davidow, has been the ambassador to Mexico, Venezuela and Zambia, as well as the assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs. He retired in 2003 as career ambassador, the Foreign Service’s highest position, which, by law, can be held by no more than five people at a time. He follows the Boston Red Sox. An Emphasis on PatienceThe two Foreign Service veterans had learned long ago how to hear what was not being said, how to deconstruct a handshake, how to deftly use the tool of time. They understood the value of patience. For example, on the group’s first night in Havana, Schwechheimer treated several Cuban friends to dinner. He mentioned in passing that he would someday like to share his baseball plans with Antonio Castro, an orthopedic surgeon, one of the country’s most prominent baseball officials — and a son of Fidel. It was quickly intimated that such a meeting was possible. The next night, one of Schwechheimer’s dinner guests, a former Cuban legislator, invited the Americans to the historic Hotel Nacional de Cuba. There they were introduced with some pomp to the hotel’s manager, who said he would provide a private room for the meeting on the day it happened. Then the American entourage was led into a small theater to watch a long cabaret performance that seemed lifted from a 1940s MGM musical. Every so often the legislator would raise his hand, and bottles of Cristal beer, bowls of olives and trays of cured ham would appear. For the rest of the five-day trip, a meeting with Antonio Castro seemed imminent. There were periodic cellphone calls to Goodman to stand by, prompting the American visitors to change out of casual clothes and into suits and ties. All the while, the two former ambassadors kept their expectations low. The meeting never took place, further underscoring the sense that not all is what it seems in Cuba. But Schwechheimer was unperturbed. A chat with Castro was never part of the original schedule. Besides, the group was already making headway in substantive meetings with Cuban officials in the ministries of culture and sports — as well as with the Cuban Baseball Federation, which governs the sport — and this would not be its last trip. Get the big sports news, highlights and analysis from Times journalists, with distinctive takes on games and some behind-the-scenes surprises, delivered to your inbox every week. “Tranquilo,” Schwechheimer said. “We’ll be back.” Besides, the visitors had more than enough to do in trying to navigate the decades-old distrust between the two countries, even in the limited sphere of baseball. There is the Cuban resentment over the continuing and often risky defections of its ballplayers, including some of the top stars. Many believe this baseball drain has led to a decline in the quality of play in their country’s amateur games and on the national team. There is also the thorny matter of compensation. Given the embargo, Cuba receives nothing when a defecting ballplayer, like Yoenis Cespedes or Yasiel Puig, signs a multimillion-dollar contract with a major league team, which is not the case when a Cuban plays in, say, Japan or South Korea. The two countries, along with Major League Baseball, have been working to resolve the matter. Antonio Castro told ESPN last year that the current arrangement, which effectively forces Cuban ballplayers to sever ties with their native country, was “crazy,” but he also allowed that Cuba “has to budge” on the matter. Once these issues are resolved — perhaps through an exemption to the embargo — Schwechheimer expects to be at the front of the line, offering affordable family entertainment, as well as jobs, to Havana. And, yes, Cuban ballplayers would be welcome to play in these minor league games — if they made the roster. Schwechheimer said his group was not lobbying to change Cuban or American law. Its mission, he said, is to present its motives as honorable should Cuba someday say yes to the possibility of a minor league franchise, and to celebrate, through gestures of good will, the commonality found through a game. “What Lou’s trying to do makes sense,” Davidow said. “It more than makes sense. It’s a good thing.” Baseball’s Complex RoleTo that end, the group gravitated toward various baseball-centric places in and around Havana. This is not difficult, given the game’s hold on the country, where baseball souvenirs are for sale at an open market in Old Havana, and black-and-white photographs of legendary Cuban ballplayers hang in a high-end, museumlike restaurant called San Cristobal Paladar. Still, the growing popularity of soccer in Cuba was evident everywhere, especially on television. At one point, the minibus passed a soccer game being played on a baseball field, and someone half-joked, “The enemy.” In addition, baseball remains intertwined with the complex diplomatic and political realities of Cuba, as evidenced by the reluctance of Cuban and American officials to discuss it. A State Department official said in an email that the American Embassy in Havana was aware of the efforts by private institutions like the Caribbean Baseball Initiative to increase ties between the two countries, and described baseball as “an excellent avenue for sports diplomacy and creating good will between our peoples.” The official wrote, “The connections that our countries already have in baseball create a common bond, and the increased flow of players and friendly competition furthers the U.S. goal of enhancing opportunities for the Cuban people.” Officials for the Cuban Baseball Federation declined to speak on the record, and a request for comment from the Cuban Embassy was not answered. It was left, then, to a Cuban ballplayer to speak. The player, Carlos Tabares, 41, is a star veteran for the Havana Industriales, the tradition-steeped Yankees of Cuban baseball. The stocky Tabares was found one day working out with a group of aspiring young players, his shirt sweat-soaked and grass-flecked after a series of sprints. He has had many teammates in his 24-year career, including two defectors who played in the 2015 World Series: Cespedes, of the Mets, and Kendrys Morales of the Kansas City Royals. Tabares said he was happy for both men. Although sad to see his good friend Cespedes leave, he said he rejoiced in hearing of his former teammate’s success at the major league level. “I had many proposals myself when I was in my 20s,” Tabares said, perspiration beading on his shaved head. “But I would never do that to my family. What I would have lost for the major leagues...” As for the prospect of minor league baseball one day returning to Havana, Tabares said he welcomed it, of course. “It has to be that way,” he said. One day the American baseball ambassadors were given a tour of Estadio Latinoamericano, home to the Industriales. In the bowels of that worn 70-year-old stadium were pieces of Cuba’s baseball past: a marble tablet engraved with the names of “Inmortales del BaseBall”; the busts of two legends, Martín Dihigo and Adolfo Luque; a wall-size painting of Fidel Castro, in military fatigues, standing at the plate, bat in hand. The Cuban baseball officials leading the tour allowed that they would one day like to build a hall of fame. Well, Schwechheimer responded, perhaps the Caribbean Baseball Initiative could help with that. Another day, the minibus of Americans made a pilgrimage to Finca Vigía, the hilltop house where Ernest Hemingway lived and wrote — and carved a crude baseball field among mango trees, so that his two sons and children from the area could play the game he loved. Often he would pitch to the boys, who were called the Gigi All-Stars. Some new all-stars, young members of a local Little League team, were taking batting practice while waiting for their American visitors. Schwechheimer bounded out of the bus, grabbed a glove and assumed the role of catcher. For a little while, other matters were set aside. The logistics for the next trip. The plans for more meetings with top officials, including Antonio Castro. The challenge of getting past the diplomatic impediments, the bureaucratic obstacles, the more than half-century of mutual suspicion. For a little while, before the rains came and the minibus of Americans left for the next appointment, the scrawny Minnie Minosos and Tony Olivas and Yasiel Puigs of the future smacked balls into the mango trees, and the former ambassador Davidow caught a foul ball in his straw hat, and Schwechheimer presented the boys with dozens of much-needed baseballs. They said “bueno” and “gracias,” but the shared language was this game.
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Post by psuhistory on Dec 27, 2015 11:01:48 GMT -5
Article on the recent deterioration of talent in the Cuban National Series, with some historical context. Even the Penn State baseball team managed to take a game off Industriales during a tour of Cuba last month... Cuban Baseball Crisis: The Downside of Warming Relations with AmericaThe Economist, Havana, 12/19/2015 www.economist.com/news/christmas-specials/21683976-downside-warming-relations-america-cuban-baseball-crisisLOOK for the Che Guevara mural on a pitch-black street corner in Lawton, a run-down district on the outskirts of Havana. Turn left, walk up the concrete steps and give the password (today it’s “I sell green dwarfs”). Inside, around 20 Cuban men sit silently. Despite the humidity, the ceiling fan is still, allowing puffs of sweet tobacco smoke to hover in the flickering fluorescent light. The newcomers are asked for a “solidarity contribution” of 25 Cuban pesos, or $1. After the customary first drops are spilled to sate the thirst of the saints, a $3 bottle of clear rum makes its way around. It could easily be a clandestine political gathering. But this group has far more important business: the first game in the Major League Baseball (MLB) semi-final series between the Kansas City Royals and Toronto Blue Jays. For half a century after Cuba’s revolution in 1959, the island’s sports fans knew little of professional leagues beyond their shores. But today, thanks to the internet’s belated arrival and a wave of Cuban players defecting and starring in MLB, in-depth knowledge of American baseball is a badge of honour for baseball-loving Cubans—that is, nearly all the men and plenty of the women, too. “You didn’t know Kansas City won? You’re an embarrassment,” one attendee teased a friend during the ride to Lawton in an exhaust-spewing 1950s taxi, whose shock absorbers were no match for the area’s cavernous potholes. The easiest way for Cubans to follow MLB in real time is at hotel bars in Vedado, a central Havana district packed with middle-aged American tourists taking advantage of the recent relaxation of travel restrictions. But few Cubans can afford a beer priced in dollars. And if a woman happens to be running a shift at the bar, locals say, there’s always a risk she will put a soap opera on the TV instead. So baseball fans gather in speakeasies like this decrepit flat, whose owner has managed to acquire an illegal satellite broadcast signal and hook it up to his 1980s Japanese television. The group try to keep quiet, lest the neighbours snitch to the local Committee for the Defence of the Revolution (a network of government informants in every town). But they are rooting for the Royals because of the team’s first baseman, Kendrys Morales, who fled Cuba on a raft in 2004 after serving several stints in jail for his seven previous failed escape attempts. Every time he comes up to bat they allow themselves a muffled cheer. A round of high-fives follows Kansas City’s 5-0 victory. The next day a big game is scheduled in the domestic baseball league, at Havana’s rickety 55,000-seat Latin American Stadium. It pits the hometown Industriales, Cuba’s answer to the New York Yankees, against a visiting club from nearby Matanzas. A few years ago the stands would have been packed. But today the outfield bleachers are empty, and only the rows of seats closest to the action appear even half-full. Bored-looking police drag on cigarettes. A group of hometown fans tries to rouse the crowd by blaring on hand-held air horns, but it is well short of critical mass. One reason for the apathetic mood is that the government has banned alcohol sales in stadiums to stop fights. A bigger problem is the poor quality of the play. Last year 11 Industriales players left for the United States; Matanzas lost ten. Only the weaker players remain, and they are demoralised: runners seem content to jog around the basepaths, and fielders let the ball skip past them on difficult plays. In recognition of the depleted rosters, the Cuban league now disbands half of its teams at mid-season and shares their players among the eight clubs that are doing best. Today’s game is painfully lopsided, as the Matanzas hitters pound the Industriales starting pitcher for seven runs. The biggest attraction is Rey Ordóñez, who defected in 1993, played in MLB for nine years and is catching a game on a visit home. Fans pose with him for pictures. “It’s very hard for the team,” says Lourdes Gourriel junior, the 21-year-old shortstop for the Industriales, following his team’s defeat. “It’s weird seeing someone on TV [in MLB], and just yesterday they were here with you. But that’s everyone’s individual decision. We’re still friends with those who left.” South American football fans are accustomed to their countries’ brightest sporting stars decamping to richer European leagues. But for Cuban baseball fans the exodus is new. Less than a year after the United States and the government of Raúl Castro, Fidel’s younger brother and successor, announced they would re-establish diplomatic relations, this brawn drain is the most visible consequence of rapprochement with the yanquis, and an indication of what might be lost as the Cuban economy liberalises. Bottom of the Nineteenth CenturyAlthough baseball originated in the United States, the sport arrived in Cuba during its infancy in the 1860s. Within a decade of the first recorded match on the island, Cuba had established the first professional league outside America and put its adopted national game at the service of political aims: the league’s organisers funnelled its profits to guerrilla groups fighting for independence from Spain, and the movement’s spies posed as baseball players when shuttling messages and funds to and from supporters in the United States. “Baseball is more Cuba’s national pastime than it is America’s,” says Roberto González Echevarría, the author of a history of Cuban baseball. “It was considered modern, democratic and American, while the Spaniards had bullfighting, which was retrograde and barbaric. It’s as if the American Founding Fathers had been wielding Louisville Sluggers [an iconic brand of bat].” After Cuba gained its independence in 1902 baseball became one of its principal means of exercising soft power. It was Cuban athletes, not American soldiers, who spread the sport across the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, helping to form a shared cultural identity with the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Venezuela and eastern Mexico, and earning the Cuban players the nickname the “apostles of baseball”. And it was baseball players who became the best-known Cubans in the United States. Of all the MLB players born in Latin America who started playing before 1959, two-thirds were Cuban, even though most of the island’s stars were black and banned from MLB until the league’s colour barrier was broken in 1947. (In 1912, in response to inquiries about the lineage of two olive-skinned Cuban players, the Cincinnati Reds conducted an “investigation” which declared them “two of the purest bars of Castilian soap [that] ever floated to these shores”.) During the same period Cuba was putting black and white talent on the same fields in its racially integrated winter league, establishing the country as an exemplar of moral leadership in sports. After Fidel Castro (pictured, swinging) took power and became the island’s baseball-fan-in-chief, the sport’s tacit political role became explicit. He proclaimed athletes to be “standard-bearers of the revolution playing for the love of the people, not money”. He banned professional sports and founded the National Series, a wildly popular amateur league in which each province fielded a team of players from its territory. He also established a formidable player-development system, with scouts identifying talented children and academies to train them once they became teenagers. American fans, who then, as now, paid attention only to MLB, were unaware of the stars Cuba was producing, since they never played for a team in the United States. But Cuba’s athletic assembly line yielded a national team that dominated the weak competition in international events like the Olympics (in which MLB players do not participate): from 1987 to 1997, the squad won 156 straight games. The elder Mr Castro made such successes central to his propaganda strategy. “The only way Cuba could raise its head in the world was in sports,” says Ismael Sené, who ran the sports department of the Communist Youth in the early 1960s. “There was a campaign against us from the outside, saying that we were all needy, that we didn’t have food. Well, look at our athletes!” The fact that baseball, America’s “national pastime”, was Cuba’s strong suit made each victory extra sweet. But setting so much store by its baseball players left the government vulnerable to shifting geopolitics. In 1991 René Arocha, a pitcher in the national team, walked out of his hotel room during a tournament in Miami, made his way to his aunt’s house, and never returned, making him the first team member to defect in history. He had not been planning on playing baseball afterwards, because he had assumed that MLB players were far superior to Cuban ones. But after connecting with a Cuban-born agent, he was given an MLB contract with a six-figure salary, and the next year became the St Louis Cardinals’ second-best pitcher. After Mr Arocha had proved that Cuban players were of MLB quality, and the fall of the Soviet Union plunged Cuba into a “special period” of unprecedented poverty, more defectors began to leak out. Two half-brothers, Liván and Orlando Hernández, left the island separately in the 1990s, one at a tournament, the other on a rickety boat. Both played starring roles for World Series champions in their first years in MLB, providing Miami’s Castro-hating exiles with a remarkable narrative about the risks Cubans will take for a taste of freedom and the chance to play America’s game. To reduce the risk of further defections, the Cuban team put its players under tight surveillance whenever they travelled abroad, making their national treasures feel like prisoners and encouraging more defections. Squeeze PlayThe government responded to early defections with stoicism. “When one leaves, another ten better players emerge,” Fidel Castro once said. But in the past few years, the trickle of defections has become a torrent. As recently as 2007 there were just ten Cubans in MLB. Today there are 27. And whereas some of the early defectors had undistinguished careers, the current crop is making an impact that, were it to occur anywhere but in the reviled United States, Fidel Castro would probably regard as his greatest accomplishment. Yoenis Céspedes, a burly outfielder with a pronounced uppercut swing, single-handedly powered the New York Mets to the World Series this year. His deadly accurate throws to home plate from distances of 300 feet (91 metres) or more have earned him the nickname the Cuban Missile. José Fernández, who fished his mother out of the ocean after a wave swept her overboard during their escape to Mexico when he was 15, is the toast of Miami’s Little Havana for his unhittable array of blazing fastballs and knee-bending curves. Aroldis Chapman holds the record for the fastest pitch in MLB history at 105 miles (169km) per hour. At the “Esquina Caliente” (Hot Corner), a bench in a downtown Havana park where die-hard fans have gathered daily for decades to talk baseball, the regulars today come prepared with the latest statistics on how Cuban players—and even the American-born children of Cuban exiles—are performing in MLB. They use websites like CubanPlay, a new, locally run site, by connecting their phones to public hotspots accessible with $2-an-hour Wi-Fi cards. Major-league success has been accompanied by major-league riches: the 27 Cuban MLB players earn an aggregate annual salary of $100m. As the rewards have grown, a sophisticated infrastructure to smuggle more players has built up. Almost all recent defectors have escaped with the help of sinister human-trafficking syndicates. These hire boats to bring players to nearby countries, bribe the Cuban coastguard to let them depart, and Dominican or Mexican authorities to grant residency papers, pay tribute to organised-crime groups for the right to operate on their turf, and hold players hostage until they sign an MLB contract and provide a return on the gangsters’ investment, perhaps from their signing bonus. Yasiel Puig, a star right fielder, was held at a motel in Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula for months while his captors, associated with the fearsome Zetas mafia, argued over payment. Leonys Martín, an outfielder, was held at gunpoint in Mexico and forced to sign a contract in which he promised to pay 30% of his earnings to a front company; his smugglers are now in a Florida jail. Since Raúl Castro became Cuba’s president in 2006, he has cautiously tried to relax state controls. But the defections have forced the pace when it comes to baseball. In 2013 Cuba said it would allow athletes to play professionally in foreign leagues—if they paid a 20% tax and returned for international tournaments and the winter National Series. A handful have gone to the Japanese league in the summer and earned seven-figure salaries. Both MLB and the Cuban government now say they want a “normalised” system, in which Cuban athletes can travel to America legally and safely, play for MLB teams on a work visa and return home in the off-season. Antonio Castro, one of Fidel’s nine acknowledged children, an international baseball official and the national team’s doctor, has publicly called for such a change. In an echo of the 1970s “ping-pong diplomacy” in which table tennis helped restore relations between the United States and China, MLB is encouraging a thaw between Havana and Washington. It has applied for an American government licence to do business in Cuba, is sending former players on a pre-Christmas goodwill tour of the island and is trying to organise an exhibition game in Havana featuring one of its teams next March. Meanwhile, Cuban baseball stars are giving Americans a new perspective on a country many perceive as nothing more than a totalitarian dystopia. Yet the defections continue, for two reasons. The first is that the Cuban baseball authorities’ proclamations that players are now “free to go” ring hollow. It is the government, not athletes, that determines who can leave and for how long, to which country and team, and how much they will be paid. It generally selects older stars who have shown loyalty to the regime. The second is the continuing influence of ageing “cold warriors” in the United States. Although Barack Obama has streamlined much of the bureaucracy required to authorise contracts with Cuban players, they must still establish residency outside Cuba and sign an affidavit saying that they “do not intend to, nor would [they] be welcome to, return to Cuba”. And America’s trade embargo, which can only be lifted by Congress, bans transactions with the Cuban government. That precludes any arrangement in which athletes would pay a modest tax on their foreign earnings in recognition of the state’s investment in training them, just as the United States taxes its citizens on their worldwide income. Cuba’s requirement that its players working abroad also participate in the National Series and be available to the national team represents another stumbling block, since MLB clubs would never allow their stars to skip out for an international tournament during the season, or risk injury during a long winter campaign in Cuba. Socialism with American CharacteristicsYet for all the Cuban government’s rhetoric about America’s athletic imperialism, it may have an unlikely ally in MLB on the issues that concern it most. Despite MLB’s reputation as a fiercely capitalist industry worth $9 billion a year, the game’s economic model has much in common with Cuban-style socialist principles. To maintain fans’ interest, MLB needs a competitive balance between its rich and poor clubs. It accomplishes this by levying a tax on teams with high payrolls, and via an annual draft that routes the best young players to losing franchises. Cuban players aged over 23 with at least five years in the National Series are exempt from these rules. That enables them to auction their services to the highest bidder, undermining MLB’s carefully calibrated system of economic redistribution and reducing club owners’ profits. As a result, MLB is likely to advocate a tightly controlled system of acquiring Cuban players, rather than a free-for-all. Moreover, MLB clubs and agents are already warning that after so many defections, the Cuban baseball pipeline is running dry and will need to be replenished. At the Premier 12, an international tournament held last month in Taiwan and Japan, Cuba finished an embarrassing sixth. The unique baseball culture Cuba has developed over 50 years of isolation has proved to be a formidable manufacturer of outstanding players. The Dominican Republic and Venezuela serve as providers of raw athletic material for MLB. Ordinary Cubans, by contrast, have grown accustomed to a remarkable closeness to world-class athletes, who play only for their home provinces and for almost no pay. “I’m just another fan,” says Reinier Reynoso, a 27-year-old pitcher for Industriales who is hanging out with the faithful outside the ballpark before a game. Fans and players “party together”, he says. Since MLB has a keen interest in producing a new generation of Cuban superstars, it is reluctant to meddle with this potent combination of popular encouragement and state support. “We have no interest in going to Cuba and taking all of their players,” says Dan Halem, MLB’s chief legal officer. “We want Cuban baseball to thrive. We’re perfectly happy for Cuba to develop their own stars and keep them for a period of time. If they lose all their stars, fans will lose interest. There aren’t enough countries where baseball is played for this to just be a feeder for Major League Baseball.”
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Post by Lark11 on Dec 27, 2015 11:59:31 GMT -5
Old Tiger Stadium:
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Post by Frankie on Dec 29, 2015 12:00:21 GMT -5
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Post by psuhistory on Dec 29, 2015 21:00:25 GMT -5
Interesting collection of stuff... I think the last 25 years or so have seen more changes in the study of baseball's history than during any comparable span of time since it became a modern sport. A disproportionate amount of this work has focused on the Deadball Era in the US, including many histories of individual seasons or individual teams, player biographies, administrative or political and business histories of the main leagues, and much more. This has probably reached the point where fresh analysis is more valuable than additional descriptive histories. You could make a similar argument for most of the twentieth-century history of US baseball... The major opportunities lie in baseball's international history, where basic work still needs doing on the Cuban League and on the early history of amateur baseball in Japan. There are no equivalents in English of the variety of different histories about US baseball from 1903 to the Depression, mainly because of the difficulties of the archives and records... There's also a surprising amount of blank space in the history of US baseball during the nineteenth century. Apart from books on a handful of star players, and Edward Achorn's work on the 1883 and 1884 seasons, much of the published history hovers around the standard of an encyclopedia article, not without value but reinforcing a piecemeal perspective that makes it difficult to evaluate the economic, competitive, and athletic aspects of a rapidly changing sport. In this area, the logistics are difficult, but the records are there: even Achorn's books tend to focus narrowly on St. Louis in 1883 and Providence in 1884; a history of a season taking in all the major league cities would be unique and valuable...
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Post by Lark11 on Jan 2, 2016 14:57:01 GMT -5
Crosley Field in 1962:
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Post by psuhistory on Jan 6, 2016 10:48:46 GMT -5
Navin Field in Detroit, 1934, later Tiger Stadium, shown here before the upper deck expansion and enclosure. Built in 1911 to replace Bennett Park, at the same time as other concrete and steel structures were replacing wooden ones around the league, it reflected the prosperity and ambition that the powerhouse teams of Ty Cobb's early career had brought to Detroit baseball...
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Post by psuhistory on Jan 9, 2016 10:43:45 GMT -5
Revisiting a seldom-read account of the Polo Grounds bleacher experience during the 1950s, in this case Game One of the 1954 World Series: interesting too for its eyewitness view that if you were familiar with Mays as a player, "The Catch" was basically a day at the office... The Baseball Book That Changed My Life: A Day in the Bleachers by Arnold HanoBy Mark Armour, National Pastime Museum, 12/30/2015 www.thenationalpastimemuseum.com/article/day-bleachers-arnold-hanoMy early baseball education came mainly from Topps’ baseball cards and Random House’s “Big League Library” series (Jim Brosnan’s Great Baseball Pitchers, George Vecsey’s Baseball’s Most Valuable Players, and a dozen others). The late 1960s and early 1970s was a great time for young baseball readers, and my school libraries had a fair sampling of books on such heroes as Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth, and Willie Mays. I read all I could find. A turning point in my baseball reading, when I began to appreciate the impressive history of the game’s literature, came with my teenage discovery of Charles Einstein’s three (later four) volumes of The Fireside Book of Baseball, an anthology of game accounts, columns, poems, illustrations, and cartoons covering several decades. The series had been around a while before I ran across it, but I first read the words of Ring Lardner, Heywood Broun, and Damon Runyon in the pages of these books, checked out of the Groton (Connecticut) Public Library in the mid-1970s. Some of it was tough sledding for a teenage boy. Runyon, who later became one of my favorites, wrote in a colorful stylized language that was not yet familiar to me. The same was true of most of the prewar material. A piece by Arnold Hano highlighted the first Fireside volume (1956); it was a chapter from his book A Day in the Bleachers. The book is a first-person account of sitting in the Polo Grounds’ bleachers for Game 1 of the 1954 World Series. The excerpt is about a single play—a sensational catch by the Giants’ Willie Mays. I knew of this play, but I so loved Hano’s chapter that on my next trip to the library I checked out the whole book. The central character of A Day in the Bleachers is not Mays, nor is it Dusty Rhodes, who won the game with a home run. The main subject is Hano, a 32-year-old freelance writer living in Manhattan who wakes up on the morning on September 29, 1954, and announces to his wife that he is going to the ball game to root on his beloved Giants. “You’ll never get in,” she tells him. Ignoring this, he takes the D Train from Midtown to the Polo Grounds, waits in a long line, buys a ticket, crams into the bleachers, occupies himself for a few hours waiting for the game to begin by interacting with fellow denizens (a few of whom are rooting for the Indians), agonizes through 10 innings of tight baseball, and heads (happily) for the exit. This takes up 154 pages, perhaps 40,000 words. Hano writes clearly and directly, with wry humor and confidence. He observes the game expertly, and with a delightfully fierce partisanship. He keeps score (of course) and jots down additional notes in the margins of his New York Times. He loves sitting in the bleachers, where he doesn’t have to be so polite. “My wife says I am a vindictive man when it comes to baseball; I believe she is right,” writes Hano. “In the bleachers, however, you can be vindictive. Nearly everyone else is.” Hano guardedly chats with his neighbors without really meeting them. Surely the vast majority of the 52,000 present were rooting for the Giants, but there are at least two Indians partisans nearby—a man directly behind that Hano never once turns around to see, and a woman in a red hat (a Dodgers fan, of all things) a couple rows in front. To Hano, these two are a nuisance, and every time the Indians do something worth cheering about, their happiness offends him enough that he can’t help bickering with them. But mostly, Hano observes the game and all its nuances, strategies, and player analysis that all of us have talked about at ball games since we could put two thoughts together. One of my favorite sentences in the book comes near the start, when Hano is explaining why he prefers sitting in the section of the bleachers that is just to the left of dead center field. The reason, he explains, is that when the pitcher is right-handed (like both of the day’s starters, Sal Maglie and Bob Lemon) Hano would be directly in line with the ball as it travels from the pitcher’s hand to home plate. With this view, from more than 500 feet away, he would know whether it’s a ball or a strike without waiting for the umpire to make his signal. “Once in awhile I’m mistaken,” Hano tells us, “but then, I remind myself, umpires are human.” If you had never been to a ball game before, if you had never screamed yourself hoarse rooting for a team, this passage might seem ridiculous. Does the author really think he can call balls and strikes from his distant perch better than the umpire who is inches away from the action? On the other hand, if you are able put yourself in Hano’s place that day, the answer is easy: if the angle is right, sure, why not? Hano is an unapologetic Giants fan, but not a dishonest one. He sees the flaws in his team, and he is not overly confident about how things are going to turn out. He considers the Giants the better team and the National League the better league, but he’d been around enough to know that might not be enough. Not today, and not over four games. He does not hide his worry. When Bob Lemon led off the Indians’ fifth in a 2–2 game, Hano observed: “I hoped Lemon would strike out; it is perhaps fair to say that I would not have been particularly concerned if he had broken his leg in running out a ground ball. The next day I would have felt bad about it, sorry for Lemon and for the Indians and their misfortune, but at the moment my only desire was to see the Giants win.” Well, OK, not many people wish physical harm upon others when going about their normal lives, and I doubt Hano did either. But when you are rooting for your favorite team? In the World Series? In a tie game? Hey, it’s complicated. Hano watched a classic ball game—his Giants won on a three-run home run by pinch-hitter Rhodes in the bottom of the 10th. But it will forever be remembered for Mays’s spectacular catch in the eighth inning, saving what would likely have been a two-run triple by Vic Wertz in a 2–2 game and almost certainly a Cleveland victory. Hano expends nine pages on this play (the catch and the equally spectacular throw), going through various stages of objectivity and fear. How far will the ball go? What other great catches have I seen at this park? Would DiMaggio have reached it? What are the base runners doing? Are the fielders moving to the correct bases? Hano’s description of the actual catch is simple enough: “Mays simply slowed down to avoid running into the wall, put his hands up in a cup-like fashion over his left shoulder, and caught the ball much like a football player catching leading passes in the end zone.” Hano did not think the catch was particularly difficult for Mays, nor one of Mays’s better catches. No one else could have caught it, Hano believed, but once Mays’s instincts and speed got him to the ball the catch was fairly routine. The book ends 28 pages later, as Hano is packing up his things to head for the exit. He looks for his game-long combatants. The woman in the red hat had left. (“Good, I thought. Crawl back to that rock.”) So had the Indians fan who sat behind him. Hano claims, a little unconvincingly, that he did not need a final gloating. “My wife—I knew—was wrong,” he concludes. “I am not really a vindictive person. When my team has won.” Hano first pitched a magazine-length story to the New Yorker, who declined, and then spent a few months trying to sell it as a book. When Crowell published it the following summer, it received tremendous reviews, including a full-page feature in the New York Herald-Tribune. James T. Farrell, in the New York Times, wrote, “Though we know its outcome, our interest is held here as it might be in a novel.” This is undeniably true, as my repeated readings have confirmed. Because there were very few baseball books for adults in those days, bookstores had no idea how to sell it. Put it with the sports books, and only teenage boys will see it. File it with the nonfiction, and it will be ignored by academics. “It sold like cold cakes,” Hano jokes. By the time I ran across it, nearly 20 years later, it was long out of print, occasionally read by discerning library patrons across the land. I found a beautiful used copy many years ago for $5.95, which I still own (the price is still visible in light pencil). Hano and his wife moved to Laguna Beach, California, the summer the book came out. He was a prolific writer and editor before and after Bleachers, not only sports, and not only nonfiction. After the critical success of his book he became a frequent contributor to SPORT magazine, which published some of the best sportswriting in the country over the next two decades. Hano was followed to California by the Dodgers, Giants, and several other sports teams, and he essentially became SPORT’s West Coast writer for 20 years. His association with Mays continued, with several magazine profiles and the topic of three of Hano’s 27 books. In 1987 SABR paneled a bunch of experts (not me) and came up with something called “The Essential Baseball Library.” There were 57 titles chosen, several of which were multi-volume sets. The list leans toward “academic” and away from “enjoyable to read,” but I was still surprised that Bleachers did not make the cut. Had it become my little secret? “The catch” had remained famous (the story was part of my wedding vows, in fact), but the book had not. Happily, Bleachers has had a resurgence. De Capo put out a paperback in 1982 (with an introduction by Roger Kahn) and again in 2004 (introduction by Ray Robinson), and it is no longer terribly difficult to find. The hard copies might run you a few hundred bucks, if you can find one. Even better, Hano is still around and often called upon to talk about his great book and his enviable writing career. I spoke with him on the phone a few weeks ago, in fact. He told me that he went to the game intending to write about it, and the game’s enduring fame was simply good fortune. You no longer need to learn about Hano from me. Jon Leonoudakis, a talented documentary filmmaker, has recently made a film about Hano, which might be coming to a theater near you. If not, you can buy the DVD. I highly recommend it. Six years after rejecting Hano, the New Yorker published John Updike’s “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” a stirring first-person account of attending Ted Williams’ final game. Whether Updike had read Bleachers is not known, but Updike’s story has a secure place among the very best baseball stories. Two years later Roger Angell began writing first-person accounts for the same magazine, which he is still doing 53 years later. As great as Updike and Angell obviously are, and as much as they did not hide their biases, they did not write as partisans. Hano laid bare the thrilling, nerve-wracking, delightful, and occasionally ridiculous experience of watching your team play a baseball game. And he is one hell of a writer. His book remains a treasure.
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Post by psuhistory on Jan 9, 2016 10:45:51 GMT -5
Interesting observations on the return of all-fields offense, implicitly suggesting that the different historical conditions of the early 1900s and early 2000s may nevertheless have produced some similar offensive trends... The Rise of More All-Fields Offenseby Jeff Sullivan, FanGraphs, 1/5/2016 www.fangraphs.com/blogs/the-rise-of-more-all-fields-offense/You should be well aware of the general offensive trend: Offense is down, relative to the previous era. At the turn of the millennium, the league combined for almost 25,000 runs. A couple years ago, baseball fell short of the 20,000 mark. Last season’s rebound was encouraging, but only partial, and driven by an increase in home runs. There’s nothing more valuable for offense than homers, but the biggest problem are strikeouts, the frequency of which has soared past one-per-five plate appearances. To sum this up: Runs are harder to score than they used to be, with strikeouts now higher than ever. That’s the most important thing. Also, it’s the easiest to notice. It’s plainly obvious that strikeouts are reaching an absurd level, and we know a 3.50 ERA isn’t what we used to think. So as far as the commissioner is concerned, he’s going to want to keep his eye on the overall run level. But if you dig in deeper, there’s another trend. Hitters are producing fewer runs, sure, but the runs being produced are also made in kind of a different way. It’s an intuitive way, and an interesting way, given yet another trend that’s taken the game by storm. It would appear that, league-wide, hitters are getting better at using all fields. The data here are limited, because it goes back only so far, and record-keeping methods have changed. We have batted-ball location information stretching back to 2002. I’ve decided to go back only as far as 2006, because it looks like between 2005 and 2006, there was a change in how the numbers were recorded. I understand this might make you suspicious, and it might make you think I’ve carefully selected my endpoints for the sake of my own argument, but the data we have for the first few years doesn’t change this picture. I simply wanted to stay consistent. You can go back to 2002 if you like — it’s all on our leaderboards. Following is a plot, covering 10 years. You see wRC+ by batted-ball location, where the field is split into even thirds. There’s wRC+ for pulled baseballs, wRC+ for baseballs hit up the middle and wRC+ for baseballs hit the other way. Remember this is batted-ball wRC+, so strikeouts and walks aren’t included. The green line has remained pretty stable. It hasn’t been higher than 161, and it hasn’t been lower than 154. Batters continue to punish the ball to the pull field. The other two lines, though, show steady increases. The red line has risen from 99 to last year’s 120. And the blue line has risen from 78 to last year’s 104. It’s important to note that location rates haven’t meaningfully changed — the league pull rate has remained around 40%. So it’s not that batters are going up the middle or the other way more often. It’s that, when they do go up the middle or the other way, they’ve been finding more success. There’s been more run production lately coming from non-pulled batted balls. We’ve seen more of an all-fields offense. When you get to thinking about causes, of course you think about defensive shifts. Shifts have been roughly doubling in frequency each season for the past five years or so, and most of the idea of a shift is to shut down hit opportunities to the pull side. That, in turn, opens up space elsewhere. Now here’s a plot similar to the one above, but this time showing locational BABIP: BABIP up the middle has stayed about the same, with hints of maybe a recent spike. Pulled-ball BABIP has dropped to last year’s .289. Opposite-field BABIP has risen to last year’s .295. It’s the first time hitters have posted a higher BABIP going the other way than going to the pull side. Shifts have to be part of the explanation. That much is apparent. At the same time, it almost certainly can’t be everything. Not that I have all the answers. As usual, my role here is to show something interesting and basically guess. It could be an indirect effect of the shift; maybe players are just being developed to be better at all-fields hitting. It stands to reason that, generally speaking, that’s how the shift can be combated in the bigger picture. Maybe teams are selecting for better all-fields hitters, in order to be less shiftable. Maybe there’s some kind of relationship between locational hitting and the gradual increase in pitch velocities. I haven’t asked around on this, and I haven’t spent more than an hour or two thinking about the numbers. I’m sure I could be missing something. By the way, last year’s pulled-ball HR/FB rate tied the previous high from the decade. The up-the-middle HR/FB rate was the highest it’s been. Same for the opposite-field HR/FB rate. It’s not just about singles and space. There’s been more power to other fields, too. File this one away as a neat thing. Nothing more, nothing less — and nothing as important as the league-wide increase in strikeouts. It’s not the kind of thing that’s easy to notice, which helps explain why it took me this long to notice it. But here’s where we are in baseball today: Runs are down, but maybe recovering; offense is up to the opposite field and up the middle. It feels like a potential counter-shift. It might be too early to say, but then at some point, a counter-shift figures to be inevitable.
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Post by psuhistory on Jan 17, 2016 9:31:58 GMT -5
Former MLB Commissioner Fay Vincent Talks PEDs, Buck O'Neil, Gambling By Graham Womack, The Sporting News, 1/12/2016
One thing that was striking about this year’s Baseball Hall of Fame election was how much better players suspected of steroid use did in the vote. Mike Piazza, who never failed a steroid test but is thought by some to have used, was voted into Cooperstown. Jeff Bagwell, who’s faced some of the same unsubstantiated rumors as Piazza, fell just short of induction. Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds are starting to look like they could be voted in by the BBWAA as well.
Many writers and fans have mellowed about the Steroid Era, though it remains a controversial issue. One person who hasn’t mellowed? Former Major League Baseball commissioner Fay Vincent, who I spoke at length with over the weekend. Vincent was commissioner less than three years before owners forced his resignation in 1992, not long before the time the Steroid Era got going in baseball.
The 77-year-old Vincent lives in Florida now and is far removed from baseball in any official capacity, though he still had to much to say, good and bad, about the state of the game.
SPORTING NEWS: I know when you were commissioner of baseball you banned steroids, but the players’ union didn’t agree to testing until 2004. I was curious to get your thoughts on players doing better in Hall of Fame voting who may have been steroid users.
FAY VINCENT: Well, you have it wrong. I didn’t ban steroids. The Congress of the United States said steroids were on the prohibited substance list. It’s a common misunderstanding that steroids were not banned in baseball until much later. They were banned by Congress. What I did was say, ‘Because they’re banned by Congress, we are gonna be bound by those restrictions, and steroids are gonna be a problem.’
The union, of course, wouldn’t let me discipline players away from the federal statute. That is, unless the government enforced the statute, the union’s position was I couldn’t enforce the statute. That is, I couldn’t ban players because of steroid use. There are an awful lot of people who believe that until the union gave in, steroids were not banned in baseball. But they were banned by Congress, and I think you can see the difference.
So, yes I put out a memo in 1990 or ‘91 saying, ‘Because Congress has put steroids on the prohibited substance list, you ought to be aware that for people in baseball who are not subject to the union’s authority, I’m going to treat steroids as a serious matter.’ Later on, when Congress (turned its attention to) baseball, the union gave in and said they would permit testing. A lot of things changed, I think in the year 2000.
I think steroids is a form of cheating. I think anybody who cheats in sports should be punished. I would be very severe with the punishment because I think the punishment’s a great deterrent, and it works. It certainly works in the gambling area in baseball. I think the problem we have today is that players will take a risk of only being banned for 50 games or something. They take the steroids because it certainly helps their performance. I think that we should be very much tougher on steroids.
SN: When you sent your memo out, did you have any inklings of there being a steroid problem in baseball?
FV: I thought that there were, I didn’t know — but I looked at some of the players including McGwire and Canseco, and I thought at least the guys were taking something.
I thought it was a football problem. We were all wrong. I thought that baseball was a game of quickness. I looked at Henry Aaron and (Joe) DiMaggio and (Ted) Williams, and I thought they all talked about being quick. Nobody was interested in lifting weights or getting very muscular.
It turned out that obviously steroids is a much more substantial problem than we thought or I thought, mostly because there’s so many different forms of chemical compounds that are called steroids. There’s a steroid to make you recover quicker if you’re a pitcher, be stronger if you’re a batter, a variety of other things. That’s why we can’t have steroids or any other performance enhancing drugs in sports, because it makes the competition inherently unbalanced, and that just can’t work.
SN: If it were up to you, would Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens or McGwire, any of those players, would they be eligible for the Hall of Fame?
FV: They’re eligible of course, but from my point of view, I wouldn’t vote for them.
SN: Have your thoughts changed on (Pete Rose) over the years? Do you think that he has any place in baseball or the Hall of Fame at this point?
FV: Well, I’ve said for 26, 27 years ... it’s not a case of whether Pete Rose deserves to be in the Hall of Fame. The issue is, do we want to change the deterrent? One thing we know is the deterrent against gambling is 100 percent effective. The only person of substance in the last 75 years to challenge it was Pete Rose. He thought he was bigger than baseball, and Bart Giamatti told him he wasn’t. That’s a very important rule, and I think it works. I think we have no gambling problem in baseball. You change the deterrent, you’re gonna have a gambling problem.
I think all the talk about Pete Rose is misguided. The issue is the deterrent. I’m glad Rob Manfred kept him out because — and I think Manfred’s 100 percent correct — he doesn’t want to change the deterrent because he knows if he does, he’s gonna have a lot more gambling.
SN: I wanted to ask, and I’m not sure if this would be a sore subject for you, but do you blame Bud Selig at all for the Steroid Era?
FV: I don’t blame people. I think the Steroid Era came along because chemistry is going to constantly affect sports. Not just baseball. It’s an enormous problem for all of athletics. You can take pills that’ll make you run faster, and we know that works in track and field because we’ve seen Olympic champions that cheat and win some medals. In fact, in the case of the woman sprinter (Marion Jones), she went to jail for it.
It’s a very big problem in sports. If there’s any blame, it’s for all of the people in sports who haven’t gotten together and figured out a way to deal with it. The chemists are always going to be ahead of the police. As long as we have chemists who are going to make these drugs and players who are going to take them in order to make lots of money, we’re going to have a major problem.
SN: You were saying earlier that you thought steroids were kind of more of an NFL problem. Has there been any point in like the last 10 or 15 years where you might of had a moment where you were just like, ‘Wow, this was so much bigger of a problem than I would have thought during my tenure as commissioner’?
FV: After I left baseball, in the mid ‘90s, I realized it was an enormous problem. I think the union was totally wrong in not permitting baseball to do something about it.
In my era, cocaine was a big problem, and the union wouldn’t let us test for cocaine. I threw Steve Howe out of baseball after seven or eight drug violations. The union sued and went to arbitration in order to get him reinstated. They wouldn’t do that today, I don’t think. Congress would come down on them in a very big way.
But in those days, Don Fehr and the others thought that it was unfair to go after the players and test them without any evidence that they were taking drugs, cocaine. Well, obviously they were taking cocaine. It was everywhere in baseball, and it was a huge problem, and we couldn’t test. The union deserves a lot of blame for that fiasco. We saw that in 2000 when the Congress got involved and the players were there in front of television, and they all looked pretty silly. [Editor’s note: This occurred in 2005, not 2000.]
SN: Do you think if you’d stayed commissioner longer that the Steroid Era might have played out differently?
FV: I don’t think so, because I don’t think the union was going to ever give us any slack. I think it took Congress to get involved. I think that hearing was a fiasco for everybody. I think Congress said to baseball, if you don’t get an agreement, do something union and players, we’re gonna pass a statute, and that fixed it. Everybody was afraid of Congress getting involved. Nobody wanted that. So Fehr and Selig and others got together, and they made a deal, and it was the right thing to do.
But I couldn’t get the union to do anything. All they did was challenge me at the time of the Steve Howe (banishment). I was 100 percent right. Steve Howe should have gone out of baseball for life. I would have thrown A-Rod out last year or two years ago when there was that fiasco. He ended up being out for a year. But I would have thrown him out for life. I mean, after he lied, after that Biogenesis guy was taped, that interview, talking about what he’d done with A-Rod, it was a farce.
SN: If you had done that, do you think the union would have gotten involved on A-Rod’s behalf?
FV: Sure, there would have been a major case, and the arbitrator almost surely would have sided with A-Rod. They always side with the union. On the other hand, I think it would have been important for baseball and for me to make the point and prove to Congress that they had to get involved. The problem with the union is, they’re not afraid of the owners. They are afraid of Congress, and I would have made it very clear that if the union contested the A-Rod case, we’d ask for statute for statute.
The problem is, the owners in baseball, the commissioner can’t fight with the players because the players are the whole game. The players control baseball … It’s a disappointing insight to fans and maybe to you and others, but the players really run and control baseball. The really major force offsetting that power is Congress. It’s not the owners.
SN: That was how the Mitchell Report and the Congressional hearings happened. That was all stuff that ran through Congress.
FV: Congress is important, and they showed that. Mitchell got no cooperation from the union, and that’s very hard for the union to defend.
SN: I’m a big fan of baseball history, and you read about the autocratic power of somebody like Judge Landis. Was it surprising to you at all when you became commissioner of all the competing interests that you had to deal with when you wanted to make decisions?
FV: I don’t think people really understand. Once the union got involved in baseball, and after 1947, after the Taft-Hartley Act, the union is subject to regulation by Congress. The statute protects union, gives players and every union member and any union enormous rights so that the power of the commissioner, indeed the power of owners is very sharply restricted by the federal statute that protects union rights. That statute is a very powerful one, and it gives union members enormous protection. That means that almost anything that’s important in baseball cannot be legislated strictly by the commissioner. It has to be agreed to and approved by the union.
So the great shock to the American public, and they haven’t figured it out yet, is the power of the commissioner is very, very limited. They still think the commissioner can do all sorts of things. He can’t. You see that with Roger Goodell. I mean, Roger Goodell keeps losing major court or arbitration cases. The lesson is, a commissioner in sports is very restricted.
SN: Did you know that getting into being commissioner? Did you have an idea of that already?
FV: Yeah, sure. A) I’m a lawyer and B) I was the deputy under Bart so I saw exactly what the story [was]. It came as no surprise.
SN: Do you have any idea what Bart Giamatti’s views may have been on steroids?
FV: Well sure, I think Bart would have agreed, I would have agreed with Bart. In our era, steroids didn’t exist. I don’t think he ever heard the term because he died in 1989. I think in 1989, certainly in 1990, Canseco and there may have been a few guys who were playing around with those sorts of things.
Bart saw the cocaine problem very severely, and he saw the union unwilling to set the [standard]. When he and I were in baseball together, there were no written rules about how to enforce the cocaine problem. It was all sort of ad hoc. It was all sort of common law. There was no written agreement between the owners and the players on cocaine use. It was illegal. The use and possession and distribution of cocaine was illegal. But baseball had no written agreement on what happens if you get caught with cocaine or you admit it the first time. It was all sort of ad hoc.
It got to be the first time, the union wanted to treat it as medical. So we put people in drug rehabilitation facilities, we wouldn’t suspend them. But they’d be treated as having a medical problem. The second time, you could suspend. The union would agree to, I forget the number of games, but a certain suspension. And the third time was sort of up for grabs. There was no understanding about what would happen.
That’s why when I had Steve Howe, and it was the seventh or eighth violation, we were really in uncharted waters. There was no precedent, no understanding, no agreement, and I threw him out. I was right. But the union fought it because their job is to protect the players. They wanted him back in office and on the field and making money. That’s what they’re supposed to do. But it wasn’t a smart thing for baseball, and I think the union looked pretty terrible. A) They won the case, they got him reinstated, and a few years later, he rolled a truck over and died of his own drug use. His body was loaded with the drugs, amphetamines and other things when he died.
SN: What’s your view on players like Tim Raines, Paul Molitor or Keith Hernandez who had cocaine problems early in their careers but were able to clean up their act?
FV: I think one of the difficulties is there is no understanding and no agreement. Baseball has no common policy with respect to those issues. Don’t forget, what most people are concerned about is not what baseball does but what the Hall of Fame does, and the Hall of Fame is all about voters. Some voters take a hard view, and some don’t. It’s really quite a mess, and there’s gonna have to be some progress. There has to be some set of rules because I don’t think it can go on in this sort of murky way.
SN: Do you have any sort of connection with the Hall of Fame? Have you been involved with any of the Veterans Committees or anything?
FV: Not recently. Years ago, I was chairman of the committee that was set up by the Hall of Fame to evaluate black players who had been overlooked. So I was chairman of a committee that 10 or 12, mostly historians going back over the whole list of players who played in the 19th century and on into the 20th century. We elected, I forget how many, 15 or 20 black guys and one woman who had been involved in Negro baseball and who had been overlooked because nobody thought that a black person should be in the Hall of Fame. So we did some real good. But since then, I haven’t been involved, no.
SN: Speaking of that, I do an annual project having people vote on the best players not in the Hall of Fame, and I’m struck how many players from black baseball still get votes, guys like Bud Fowler and Bingo DeMoss. Do you think at some point, another committee could convene to consider more of those players?
FV: Oh, I don’t know. I think at some point, you have to stop. Almost nobody saw those players play. The statistics of Negro baseball are very limited. I think we ought to stop and let history be history. How many more times can you have a committee like that?
The committee I was on, I didn’t have a vote, these historians did, but we made a big mistake. We should have put Buck O’Neil in the Hall of Fame. I was a big supporter, but I didn’t have a vote. And I think that was an embarrassment. Not that he was the greatest player or a great manager. But he was a great human being, and he really had a major role in keeping the black consciousness, the black baseball history alive. He was very involved in the Negro League Museum in Kansas City. I thought he deserved recognition, but the historians said he wasn’t a good enough player, he wasn’t a good enough manager. They were very rigorous, and they voted him down. So those things happen.
SN: You could argue he’s the greatest ambassador to baseball in baseball history. I think of Lefty O’Doul as well, but other than that — probably O’Neil was better even.
FV: Well, there are a lot of people. There are anomalies, and I think there are some people who’ve really been left out who belong. I think Dominic DiMaggio belongs in the Hall of Fame. I think he was hurt because his brother was so luminous. I myself think that Johnny Pesky belongs in the Hall of Fame, but it’s not gonna happen, and I think eventually most of those players, nobody’s — I mean, my age, I remember seeing those guys play, but I’m 77, and most Americans don’t even know who Johnny Pesky is.
SN: What do you make of baseball’s revenues being so much higher? I think when you left office they were around $2 billion a year, and now they’re close to $10 billion. What do you make of that?
FV: I think it’s terrific for baseball... There’s so many changes in American culture that are very hard to measure. 1986, Microsoft went public. Nobody in those years, and I was one of them, thought that that would have an enormous effect on baseball, but it did. The Internet, MLB.com, fantasy baseball, all that revenue is just pouring into baseball. I think baseball financially is in terrific condition. I think it’s tempting for the owners to get greedy and say we ought to have a salary cap or do something stupid like that. That would blow up baseball again.
I think the really big challenge to baseball and to all sports is how to deal with gambling. Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA, wants Congress to pass a law that says anybody who wants to can bet on sports. I think that’s going to happen, and when it does, the revenues in baseball, football, and basketball will probably quadruple. So you’re talking of going from 10 or 12, which is where they are today, to 30 or 40 billion dollars. Think of the money that’s going to be sloshing around baseball.
The reason is, the gambling revenue is being eaten up by the mob today, and the teams, the players, Congress, there’s no tax on that. Think of what the mob is making every Sunday when all that betting occurs on the NFL. Eventually, that’s going to change, and I think sports is going to be really confronted with some very difficult problems. Nobody’s talking about it. Adam Silver talked about it, everybody sort of ignores it. It’s the 800 pound gorilla in the room with respect to sports. I think it’s gonna happen. I think it’s gonna raise enormous corruption problems.
But the American public loves to bet. Look at Draft Kings and all the other things that are going on with fantasy sports. When the American public wants to bet and is willing to put out billions of dollars, you know that things are going to change. Baseball and football are going to want part of that money. The colleges are going to want part of it. The players are going to want a part of it. Nobody’s talking about that. People like you and magazines and The Sporting News and all those places, somebody should really be focusing on it because it’s going to be happening. It’s going to raise enormous problems.
SN: Last question for you, and by the way, I really appreciate taking this time spur of the moment to talk with me. My last question is, do you still love baseball today?
FV: I do. I’m less interested than I was. I confess to you that I watch it, but I’ve never been a passionate fan. I’ve been a great fan of baseball, but I don’t root for a team. I’m getting older, and I find myself following it a lot less. In the old days, I could tell you most of the players. If you said, who was — give me a name of a player — I would say, I know, he’s a relief pitcher for the Reds or for the Dodgers. I couldn’t do that today. And if you said to me, can you name all the managers in the National League, I probably couldn’t do it. I just don’t follow it as closely as I used to.
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Post by psuhistory on Jan 17, 2016 9:46:17 GMT -5
In terms of the Reds' interests, it's better to have control over television vested in the league. Whatever the problems/limitations of the system now, putting this back into a model in which every franchise looks after itself doesn't help them. Big market teams benefit from competing in the best league, which includes the smaller markets: television revenue should go into a common MLB pool for equal distribution among the franchises. If you don't like it, good luck marketing your product as an independent brand...
The Impending Battle Over the Future of Televised Baseball by Nathaniel Grow, FanGraphs, 1/11/2016
Next week, in a federal courtroom in New York City, the future of televised baseball will be at stake. On one side, attorneys representing baseball fans at-large will contend that MLB’s existing broadcast policies violate the Sherman Antitrust Act by illegally limiting competition and consumer choice, ultimately increasing the price we pay for televised baseball. On the other side, lawyers for Major League Baseball will seek to preserve the status quo by arguing that the league’s restrictions increase both the quantity and quality of games aired on television, to the benefit of fans.
The case — Garber v. Office of the Commissioner of Baseball — may not be the highest-profile lawsuit currently proceeding against MLB. But from the league’s perspective, it’s almost certainly the most important.
Long-time Fangraphs readers are probably already familiar with the Garber suit, as we’ve previously covered the case on a number of different occasions. By way of a brief recap, though, the lawsuit essentially alleges that MLB violates federal antitrust law by assigning its teams exclusive local broadcast territories (the same rules that also give rise to MLB’s infamous blackout policy).
Not only do the plaintiffs allege that the creation of these exclusive territories illegally prevents MLB teams from competing for television revenue in each others’ home markets, but they also contend the rules restrict teams from competing with the league itself in the national broadcast marketplace (preventing teams from signing their own national television contracts, for instance, or offering their own out-of-market pay-per-view services in competition with MLB Extra Innings and MLB.TV).
Thus, the Garber suit presents a direct challenge to MLB’s existing television business model, one that could revolutionize the way in which baseball is broadcast in the future.
The Garber case was originally filed in 2012. Since that time, the plaintiffs have survived a series of attempts by MLB to have the lawsuit thrown out of court. In 2014, for instance, presiding Judge Shira A. Scheindlin ruled that baseball’s historic antitrust exemption did not apply to the case, allowing the plaintiffs to move forward with their suit.
Then in May 2015, Judge Scheindlin certified the Garber suit as a class action, meaning that any outcome in the case will now cover all MLB fans adversely affected by MLB’s television practices, rather than only those specific individuals named as plaintiffs in the suit. At the same time, however, Judge Scheindlin ruled that the plaintiffs may only seek injunctive relief — i.e., a court order forcing MLB to change its broadcasting policies — rather than monetary damages.
That ruling set the stage for the lawsuit to go to trial this month, beginning on Tuesday Jan. 19th, proceedings that are expected to last at least two weeks.
Because only injunctive relief remains on the table in the suit, the case will be tried as a “bench trial,” meaning that the parties will present their evidence straight to Judge Scheindlin herself, without a jury present. Ultimately, Judge Scheindlin will apply antitrust law’s so-called “rule of reason” to the case, deciding whether the harms of MLB’s current broadcasting practices outweigh the benefits that have resulted from the existing system.
If Judge Scheindlin determines that the current policy is more harmful to consumers than beneficial (or, alternatively, that the benefits of the system could be better obtained via less harmful means), then she will rule that the league’s restrictions are illegal under the Sherman Act. On the other hand, should Judge Scheindlin find that the asserted benefits of MLB’s television policies outweigh their harmful effects, then the existing system would be affirmed as lawful under federal antitrust law.
During the trial, the parties will thus focus their arguments on whether MLB’s broadcasting rules have, on the whole, harmed or benefited fans. The plaintiffs, for example, will argue that MLB’s exclusive local broadcast territories have effectively given each team a monopoly over its local television market. Absent these restrictions, the plaintiffs will contend that teams would directly compete with one another by televising their games in each others’ home markets.
In other words, the plaintiffs envision a world in which the Boston Red Sox would be free to televise their games in, say, Pittsburgh, giving fans in western Pennsylvania direct access to Red Sox games on their local cable package. This could occur in one of two ways, with the Red Sox either signing a local broadcasting agreement with a Pittsburgh television station, or alternatively allowing the New England Sports Network (NESN) to directly broadcast the team’s games in Pennsylvania. Either way, the plaintiffs believe that the resulting competition would not only increase the number of games available on local television stations, but also — by eliminating the existing local monopolies — decrease the price that teams are able to charge for their local broadcast rights, thereby lowering all of our cable bills.
Similarly, with respect to nationwide broadcasting, the plaintiffs will contend that by eliminating the exclusive broadcast territories, individual MLB teams will be free to sign their own national television agreements — picture a Chicago Cubs deal with the NBC Sports Network, for instance — or sell their own out-of-market pay-per-view packages, competition that would once again increase the amount of baseball on television, while at the same time lowering the price we pay for it.
MLB, on the other hand, will argue that its current broadcasting practices have benefited fans in a variety of ways. The league believes that by guaranteeing its teams the exclusive rights to their home television markets, MLB’s rules have actually increased the total number of games that are broadcast, providing the necessary incentive for local stations in the league’s smallest markets to televise all of their teams’ games. At the same time, the league contends that this exclusivity has increased the quality of these broadcasts, incentivizing teams and networks to produce the highest quality telecasts possible.
Similarly, the league will argue that most individual teams would lack the financial incentive and ability to create their own Internet streaming services, meaning that centralizing the control over national broadcasting activity in MLB’s central league office was essential to supporting the creation of a streaming service like MLB.TV.
MLB can also be expected to emphasize the issue of competitive balance, contending that allowing individual teams to compete with one another in the local and national television marketplaces would drive an even greater percentage of broadcasting revenue to the largest market teams, ultimately impacting the quality of the competition on the playing field. Not only would allowing the New York Yankees to sign their own broadcasting agreements with television stations in Cincinnati or Milwaukee increase the Yankees’ team revenue, for instance, but it would also decrease the amount of local television revenue received by the Reds and Brewers, further exacerbating the existing revenue disparities between the teams.
In response, the plaintiffs will contend that eliminating exclusive broadcast territories would also give small market teams the ability to directly broadcast their games in larger, more lucrative markets, helping offset any revenue gains enjoyed by the biggest market clubs. Regardless, the plaintiffs will also argue that even if larger revenue disparities result from increased competition between large and small market teams, that problem can be better addressed through enhanced revenue sharing, thereby providing fans with the benefits of greater television competition, without sacrificing the level of competitive balance on the playing field.
Given the various economic arguments that will be asserted by the parties, the most important evidence presented during the trial will come from the economic experts that each side has retained. The highest-profile testimony, though, is likely to come from the various MLB executives currently slated to appear on the witness stand, including Commissioner Rob Manfred, former Commissioner Bud Selig, Robert Nutting (owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates), Laurence Baer (President & CEO of the San Francisco Giants), and Bob Bowman (President and CEO of MLB Advanced Media).
All in all, it’s difficult to predict who will ultimately prevail in the Garber case before all of the evidence has been presented. That having been said, the fact that Judge Scheindlin has refused to dismiss the case at several points over the past few years may suggest that she believes there is some merit in the plaintiff’s arguments. Of course, even if the judge is predisposed to favor the plaintiff’s side of the case today, that doesn’t necessarily mean that she will still feel the the same way once all of the testimony has been presented at trial.
But considering that Judge Scheindlin has appeared skeptical of most of MLB’s defenses in the past — as well as the fact that the plaintiffs must merely establish that any benefits imparted by the existing rules could be obtained through less harmful means — it is certainly quite possible that at least some part of MLB’s current broadcasting policies will ultimately be held unlawful. Indeed, the National Hockey League decided to settle a similar case earlier this year — one filed by the same attorneys that are bringing the Garber suit — rather than risk losing at trial.
If the plaintiffs do prevail in the Garber case, Judge Scheindlin will issue an order detailing the extent to which MLB may permissibly continue to restrict its teams’ broadcasting activities in the future. Such an order could alter MLB’s existing broadcasting rules in any number of ways, with potentially significant ramifications for the baseball industry.
For instance, Judge Scheindlin could rule that the very concept of exclusive local broadcast territories is inconsistent with antitrust law, and thus throw out MLB’s current restrictions in their entirety. This would not only force the league to allow its teams to directly compete with one another locally, but also permit teams to directly compete with the league itself in the national broadcast marketplace. At the same time, an order along these lines would presumably spell the end of MLB’s blackout rules.
Alternatively, Judge Scheindlin could determine that it is generally appropriate for MLB to provide its teams with some protection in their local markets, but that the league’s current broadcast territories are nevertheless much larger than necessary, and therefore should be reduced in size. Such an order would increase competition in areas outside of a team’s immediate metropolitan area, and would help to alleviate some of the current frustration over MLB’s blackout provisions by substantially reducing the number of fans that are subjected to blackouts on MLB.TV.
Of course, it’s also possible that Judge Scheindlin could find that all of MLB’s current broadcasting practices are, on the whole, beneficial for consumers, and thus perfectly legal under the Sherman Act.
Regardless of the specific outcome, it is probably unrealistic to expect that the Garber case will result in any substantial modifications to MLB’s broadcasting policies in time for the 2016 season. If the plaintiffs win the case, MLB will undoubtedly appeal, and in the process ask the court to allow it to continue enforce its current rules pending the outcome of the appellate process.
But if MLB does in fact lose the case, and that outcome is ultimately affirmed on appeal, then the long-term ramifications for MLB’s television business model could be enormous.
All in all, then, the Garber lawsuit is probably the most significant under-the-radar story in the baseball industry today. Depending on the outcome, this is a case that could dramatically alter the way we watch the game in the future, making the suit one that certainly bears watching.
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Post by psuhistory on Jan 24, 2016 12:22:21 GMT -5
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Post by psuhistory on Jan 24, 2016 12:46:42 GMT -5
The State of Analytics Within MLBby Dave Cameron, FanGraphs, 1/18/2016 www.fangraphs.com/blogs/the-state-of-analytics-within-mlb/This post was written by Adam Guttridge and David Ogren, the co-founders of NEIFI Analytics, an outfit which consults for Major League teams. Guttridge began his MLB career in 2005 as an intern with the Colorado Rockies, and most recently worked as Manager of Baseball of Research and Development for the Milwaukee Brewers until the summer of 2015, when he helped launch NEIFI. As part of their current project, they tweet from @neifico, and maintain a blog at their site as well.Much has been made lately of “title inflation”; the presence of multiple personnel above the role of assistant GM within MLB front offices. That’s a symptom of something larger, rather than a phenomenon unto itself. Front offices are growing, and most rapidly through analytics-centric staff of some type. Critically, though, they’re mostly proceeding with a classically hierarchical (vertical) structure. As a result, specialization is now at an all-time high. 40 years ago, a general manager’s duties extended to such perfunctory tasks as preparing operating budgets and arbitration presentations. In 2016, those may be functions of people who report to people who report to the GM (and perhaps the GMs themselves are reporting to yet another non-owner above them). Even just 10 years ago, well into post-Moneyball times, general managers would occupy barstools in the open lobbies of winter meetings hotels, and talk trades over drinks. That’s simply not how it is any longer, as the mechanics of trades (and evaluations) are more sophisticated. Certainly, not all organizations have taken the vertical route. But many (or most) have, and it has several effects, as one might imagine. As organizations seem to be relying more and more upon analysis, the ones actually creating/executing that analysis tend to be relatively low on the chain. Typically the person developing your pitching metrics or developing your interpretations of defensive data — in other words, some of the most critical judgements your organization makes — is beneath the structure which existed prior to the “analytics boom” of the past few years, as seniority plays a large role in hierarchies. Often, then, the analysts in these departments may have a larger understanding of the concepts and data than the people they’re reporting up to, and it is incumbent upon these analysts to make their conclusions palatable for decision-makers who aren’t as comfortable with the technical aspects of the analysis. As a consequence of this expanding vertical structure, the question of “is this actually valid work or not?” is more difficult to test internally, unless the organization assigns multiple analysts to double-check each other’s work, and doesn’t force one to report to the other. Upper management may have the impression they’re successfully implementing sabermetric tools — sub-metrics, projections, valuations, etc — due to the presence of analytics staff. They may or may not be, and in situations in which those managing the analytics staff do not have technical backgrounds, some in leadership roles may not have firm reference point by which to judge its relative quality. So while organizations at large may be relying on “analytics” more than ever, the team-to-team disparities in terms of quality can be just as exposed as ever, although the laggards are likely to be more content with their adoption of analytics than previously. A small number of organizations have managed a very flat approach. There are GMs, AGMs, and Directors of Baseball Operations who have worked neck-deep in analytical development themselves. Not coincidentally, these organizations tend to create environments where analysis is not a department within the house, but analysis of baseball is the house itself. Consequently, virtually all management personnel are not only familiar with the fine details of, for example, the how-and-why of how the organization distributes credit for called strikes between the catcher and pitcher (which of course helps determine the value of players generally), but are expected to question it, share ideas about it, or participate in further development of the matter. Crucially, though, it’s not that these flat organizations are utilizing less scouting information than the verticals; it’s that they’re treating baseball analysis as the enterprise through which all matters flow, rather than analysis being something that some people do in one department among other departments. The nexus between what are classically termed as scouting and sabermetrics is growing ever tighter. Perhaps, and hopefully, out of the ultimate recognition that they’re the same thing, analysis of baseball and ballplayers. Many scouts in the stands today know what DRS stands for, to say nothing of WAR. The first thing (and perhaps best thing) young analysts are eager to do is pick up on intricacies or wisdom from scouts. A tension still exists, but it’s far less palpable today than it was even a couple years ago. There’s some question as to how closely teams would want these two departments to cooperate, however. While there’s an obvious benefit to learning for each side, and raising the education level of all participants in general, there’s also likely something to be said for independence and diversity of thought. By creating too monolithic of a union between the two fields, some fear the risk of losing diversity of thought or independence of observations. Technology is at the epicenter of this nexus. In tomorrow’s follow-up, we’ll discuss how many of the new tools — Trackman, Statcast, wearable tech devices, etc. — are playing a role. For teams building departments, the duties of analytics can remain highly conflated and ambiguous. Speaking in generalities, there are three fields within sabermetrics, which have some overlap with one another: — Data Scientists: Those who manage and manipulate data for the purpose of divining relationships, seeking evidence, and optimizing behavior. Pitch sequencing studies, defensive positioning strategies, and catcher/pitcher stolen base credit allocation are some examples of projects they might work on. — Developers: Those who have the skills to create/manage systems and structures to display/warehouse/input information. For example, creating internal databases, scouting applications that combine reports with data, and heat maps that coaches can use in their game preparation. — Predictive analysts: Those who model information and learned intelligence for the sake of judgement/expectations. Player projection systems, player development theory, and player performance metrics would fall under this category. Perhaps a valid analogy is a Formula 1 race team: there’s a driver, a mechanic, and a designer/engineer. They understand plenty about each other’s jobs, but expecting one to execute the role of the other entirely would be suboptimal at best and perhaps a disaster. (And certainly, in hiring, viewing each of them as interchangeable “car people” would be a very poor idea). The role of the General Manager also has shifted. In more horizontal organizations, the work of the GM (in an evaluative sense) tends to be a finished product which the GM merely executes. The GM’s value-added, in this case, is the degree to which he’s able to extract value from competing GMs. Negotiation and executive skills are of utmost importance in adding value at that level. In the more vertical organizations, the role of the GM is still far more concerned with evaluation itself, and they can set themselves up as the sole decision maker, with the rest of the staff serving a support role. And, of course, GMs and organizations can act differently depending on the context of the decision. If we’re talking about a 19-year-old, we gravitate more towards the wisdom of the scouts. If we’re concerned with a 28-year-old with seven pro seasons and five in the major leagues, our answers are perhaps better founded in the performance record. If it’s a 24-year-old whose apparent abilities have never quite matched his performance results, we seek evidence to reconcile where our expectation should lie. In all cases, medical and perhaps other information is considered, and in some cases it’s of great weight. It’s equally obvious as it is critical: the above is eminently ripe to move from the GM’s head to a more transparent evaluative framework. That’s because player-to-player talent differences are qualitatively small, and the amount of information relevant to their ranking is very large. The essence of sabermetric improvement is moving from fragmentary evaluative processes and decisions to systematic ones. Again, the horizontal organizations are in situations where the General Manager is the executor, rather than the evaluator. That’s what we’ve seen take place in the world of finance over the past 15+ years, and for the exact same reasons, to the point where financial evaluations are themselves now highly automated, even despite the need for reliance upon different information sources situation-to-situation, often including subjective/unstructured information, which is synthesized within a matter of comprehensive evaluation). A number of teams have begun to move systematically. The Tampa Bay Rays have been a systematic organization for years, and they’re now gaining some company. Those organizations are reaping enormous benefits, at least in decision-making power if not yet in on-field wins. Organizations which have grown vertically may not gain at nearly the same pace as their competitors, even if they’ve added more staff. The structures built within them will likely need time to calcify before the need for even further change becomes apparent.
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Post by psuhistory on Feb 13, 2016 11:58:29 GMT -5
Thorn often lets listing stand in for analysis, but this has some useful information about the history of player discipline in the professional leagues. For example, I think it was more than seventy years after the formation of the first pro league in 1871 before anything like a majority of club owners actually gave a damn about the "league" as an interest even comparable to the interest of their individual clubs. This history of building up the league as a common interest has obvious implications for the meanings of the "bans" that have existed since the 1860s... Baseball’s Bans and Blacklistsby John Thorn, Our Game, 2/8/2016 ourgame.mlblogs.com/2016/02/08/baseballs-bans-and-blacklists/Players, managers, umpires, and executives have been banned from baseball ever since the first game-fixing incident in 1865. Prior to the onset of the Commissioner system in 1920, major league players were banned for a variety of offenses. The threat of blacklist was used as a cudgel to suppress player movement, to tamp down salary demands, and to punish players for drunkenness, insubordination, abuse of umpires, game fixing, obscenity, and unsavory associations. The first game fixing scandal and ensuing permanent expulsion (ultimately lifted in the case of each of the three New York Mutuals players banned: Ed Duffy, William Wansley, and Thomas Devyr) date to 1865, eleven years before the launch of what we today term Major League Baseball. Allegations of game fixing were rampant in the so-called amateur era and in the National Association, the professional circuit that in 1871–1875 preceded the National League. Bill Craver, later to be banished by the National League, was expelled by his Troy club for throwing games in 1871; however, he was signed by Baltimore. In 1874 John Radcliffe was expelled by the Philadelphia Athletics but nonetheless was picked up by the notoriously corrupt New York Mutuals. Two other players expelled in this year, Bill Boyd and Bill Stearns, were likewise “rehabilitated” for play with other clubs. This scenario played itself out similarly in the cases of candlestick Higham, George Zettlein, and Fred Treacey in 1875, as each player was booted from one club only to land on his feet with another. In short, club suspensions or bans held no force in a climate of weak league control. The first National League player (and thus the first in MLB history) to be expelled was George Bechtel in 1876; banned by Louisville for game fixing, he too continued as an active player with the New York Mutuals for a few games until the NL stepped in. A game-fixing scandal in the following year nearly spelled the demise of the league and resulted in four players expelled for life not only by their club but by the league (Jim Devlin, George Hall, Bill Craver, and Al Nichols, all of Louisville). NL President William Hulbert declared the ban and never lifted it despite appeals for reinstatement by some of the players and their supporters. These men were compelled to play in leagues not connected with the NL, sometimes under false names (a pattern continued by banned players in the 20th century). In the years that followed many players were blacklisted or suspended indefinitely, either by their clubs or by a committee of the league’s owners. In 1881–1882 the NL blacklisted ten players for a variety of offenses (mostly “lushing”) yet when a new rival major league, the American Association, declined to honor the NL bans and proceeded to woo the affected players, the blacklist was removed. In March 1882, the AA set a maximum penalty for drunkenness, insubordination, dishonorable or disreputable conduct: suspension for the balance of the season, plus the entire following season. Other offenses, however, might result in permanent ineligibility. A full list of players banned in the period before 1920 may not be possible but the list compiled for this study (below) represents the most complete effort to date. In the years leading up to the introduction of the Commissioner System in 1920 with the appointment of Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, indefinite suspensions, overt and covert blacklists, and definitive expulsions were common—more so in the years before the peace agreement of 1903 (the “National Agreement”) than before. In that year baseball established a three-person National Commission (American League president, National League president, and a chairperson) to deal with issues affecting both major leagues, including the enactment and enforcement of fines and suspensions. Ban Johnson represented the AL during this time, while five NL presidents served. Garry Herrmann, president of the Cincinnati Reds and a lifelong friend of Johnson, was the chairperson for all 17 years of the National Commission’s operation; critics thus accused Johnson of undue control over the game. Johnson’s failure to prevail in the Carl Mays case, in which the New York Yankees overturned his ruling in the courts, spelled the end of the National Commission. Also beset by troubling rumors concerning the 1919 World Series, the owners, seeking a single firm hand to guide the game through a rough patch, disbanded the National Commission and hired Landis, a seated Federal judge. The men receiving lifetime bans during Judge Landis’s reign and afterward are listed below, with brief discussion of each case. The phrase “permanently ineligible” may have had its origin in a Landis ruling of 1926 in the Cobb-Speaker-Wood case, in which pitcher Hub Leonard had accused the three of conspiring to fix a regular-season series between Boston and Detroit in late 1919. Landis offered these guidelines for punishments going forward, clearly looking to disassociate his term in office from the myriad messes of yore. Much of this language is reflected in MLB’s current Rule 21. One—A statute of limitations with respect to alleged baseball offenses, as in our state and national statutes with regard to criminal offenses. Two—Ineligibility for one year for offering or giving any gift or reward by the players or management of one club to the players or management of another club for services rendered or supposed to be have been rendered, in defeating a competing club. Three—Ineligibility for one year for betting any sum whatsoever upon any ball game in connection with which the bettor had no duty to perform. Four—Permanent ineligibility for betting any sum whatsoever upon any ball game in connection with which the bettor has any duty to perform. As stated, the great majority of baseball’s miscreants were expelled from the game long before the Baseball Hall of Fame opened its doors. The past twenty-five years, however, have produced a conflation of Major League Baseball’s need to assure the integrity of the game with the Hall’s wish to insure the sanctity of its induction process. Notably with the case of Pete Rose, but also to a lesser degree Joe Jackson and other “Black Sox,” the baseball public has come to believe that MLB enforces its verdicts on players even after their death while the Hall merely follows in step. MLB, however, derives no practical benefit from maintaining deceased players on an ineligible list. On February 8, 1991, the board of directors of the Hall of Fame, in an attempt to preempt the baseball writers from even considering Rose’s induction, voted 12-0 to amend the institution’s by-laws so that anyone deemed ineligible to work in Major League Baseball would be similarly ineligible for the Hall of Fame. All the same, in 1992 Rose received 41 write-in votes. These votes were thrown out. After he received 14 votes in 1993 and 19 in 1994, his name was formally excluded from the balloting process. Interestingly, in the very first Hall of Fame balloting, in 1936—long before a linkage between MLB’s ineligibility list and Hall of Fame policy–Joe Jackson received two votes. This low total reflected the electors’ perception that he had disqualified himself through his actions. (Perhaps the electors might once again be trusted to vote sensibly, without special instructions.) Jackson also received two votes in 1946; besides Rose, the only other banned player to receive votes was Hal Chase, with 11 in 1936 and 18 in the following year. The two lists below point up the history of permanent banishments, their frequent commutations, and their sometimes whimsical enforcement. The list of banished players prior to the appointment of Judge Landis is long indeed; it has never appeared in print or on the web, and may help to form the “permanently ineligible list” that, despite its citation in MLB Rule 21, may have existed only as a figure of speech. LIFETIME BANS SINCE 1920Joe Jackson (“Black Sox”; this story is too well known to bear repetition here) Buck Weaver (“Black Sox”) Eddie Cicotte (“Black Sox”) Lefty Williams (“Black Sox”) Happy Felsch (“Black Sox”) Fred McMullin (“Black Sox”) Swede Risberg (“Black Sox”) Chick Gandil (“Black Sox”) Joe Gedeon Second baseman of the St. Louis Browns who, like Weaver, sat in on a meeting with gamblers, had “guilty knowledge,” and failed to share it with authorities. Gene Paulette, banished by Landis for his association with St. Louis gamblers in 1919, even though he had played a complete 1920 season. Benny Kauff, arrested for auto theft but acquitted at trial, was banned anyway as, in Landis’s words, “no longer a fit companion for other ballplayers.” Lee Magee had been released by Chicago, then—after questioning at a trial over his disputed back salary elicited evidence of his gambling involvements—banned by Landis Heinie Zimmerman was banned in 1921 for encouraging his teammates to fix games; he had been blacklisted since 1919. As with Hal Chase (see section below on pre-Landis bans), Landis’s declaration after the Black Sox trial is seen as formalizing Zimmerman’s blacklist as a permanent banishment. Heinie Groh was banned after rejecting Cincinnati’s salary offer; Landis’s condition for reinstatement was that he could return to play for the Reds only; two days after the ban, Groh did. Ray Fisher declined a Reds’ pay cut, and sat out the season until hired by the University of Michigan to coach its baseball team. Landis banned him from Organized Baseball for violating the reserve clause but Fisher never returned. The ban was overturned by Bowie Kuhn in 1980. Dickie Kerr, a “Clean Sox” hero of the 1919 World Series, was banned after he played in an outlaw league in 1922 rather than accept the Chisox pay offer. Thus violating the reserve clause, Kerr was banned. Landis reinstated him in 1925, and he pitched for Chicago again. Jim “Hippo” Vaughn played a semipro game under an assumed name while under contract to the Cubs in 1921. His case was referred to Landis, who banned Vaughn for the rest of the season. When he signed a three-year contract with the Beloit Fairies, a semipro team out of Beloit, Wisconsin (backed by the Fairbanks-Morse Company), his status as a contract jumper was solidified. Although Landis permitted his reinstatement in 1931, Vaughn failed in his attempt to make the Cubs’ squad. Shufflin’ Phil Douglas of the Giants, angry with John McGraw, got drunk and sent a letter to a friend on the Cardinals suggesting that he would “disappear” when the club came to St. Louis. Landis banned him for life. Jimmy O’Connell, a second-year player with the Giants in 1924, offered a bribe to Heinie Sand of the Phils; perhaps he was the naive victim of a joke perpetrated by Giants coach Cozy Dolan. Landis banned both. John McGraw’s involvement has long been surmised but never proven. Cletus Elwood “Boots” Poffenberger was suspended by Landis at the request of the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1939, after he declined to report to Montreal. He then was reinstated at Brooklyn’s request in early 1940 so that his contract could be sold to Nashville of the Southern Association, for whom he won 26 games. He pitched for several other clubs in the minors but never returned to the majors. William Cox, Phils’ owner, was banned for betting on baseball games and forced to sell his franchise. Occurring in 1943, this was Landis’s last banishment. (In 1953, St. Louis owner Fred Saigh was forced to divest his control of the Cardinals when he began a fifteen-month sentence for tax evasion; that paved the way for Saigh’s sale of the team to Anheuser-Busch. Saigh was not formally banned, however.) Sal Maglie, Max Lanier, Ace Adams, Danny Gardella, Luis Olmo, and others were banned for five years after jumping to the Mexican League in 1946. Happy Chandler rescinded many of these bans, however, in settlement of lawsuits. Ferguson Jenkins, after being arrested in Toronto for possessing cocaine in August 1980, was banned two weeks later by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn. An arbitrator overturned the ban in September. Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays were banned by Kuhn in 1983 because they worked as greeters at an Atlantic City casino. Commissioner Peter Ueberroth reinstated both in 1985. Pete Rose was banned by Commissioner Bart Giamatti in 1989. Several appeals have been unsuccessful, most recently in 2015. George Steinbrenner was banned by Commissioner Fay Vincent in 1990, who reinstated him two years later. Steve Howe, after six prior drug suspensions, was banned on the same day that Vincent reinstated Steinbrenner. The ban was overturned by an arbitrator in November 1992. Marge Schott, Cincinnati Reds owner, was banned by Bud Selig in 1996 for bringing Major League Baseball into disrepute by repeatedly uttering racial, ethnic, and homophobic slurs. She was reinstated in 1998. Jenrry Mejia, Mets pitcher, received a permanent suspension from Organized Baseball on February 12, 2016, following a third failed drug test. BANNED PROFESSIONAL LEAGUE PLAYERS (1871-1920)Not that many of these bans or indefinite suspensions, for a variety of offenses, were later lifted by club or league resolve. Bans by minor leagues are not included, nor are suspensions levied for stated durations. Bans not marked as "[permanent]" below were ultimately truncated or rescinded, but when they were levied, an affected player would not when or if he might return to good graces. Some players were subject to “lifetime” bans more than once; several Hall of Famers are on this list. AA = American AssociationUA = Union AssociationPL = Players’ League Bill Craver, 1871 Scott Hastings, 1872 George Hall, 1872 Candy Cummings, 1873 Bill Boyd, 1874 Bill Stearns, 1874 John Radcliffe, 1874 candlestick Higham, 1875 George Zettlein, 1875 Fred Treacey, 1875 George Latham, 1875 Billy Geer, 1875 Henry Luff, 1875 George Bechtel, 1876 [permanent] Tommy Bond, 1876 Joe Battin, 1877 [permanent] Joe Blong, 1877 [permanent] Jim Devlin, 1877 [permanent] Bill Craver, 1877 [permanent] George Hall, 1877 [permanent] Al Nichols, 1877 [permanent] Lew Brown, 1880 Charley Jones, 1880 Mike Dorgan, 1881 Lipman Pike, 1881 Sadie Houck‚ 1881 Lou Dickerson‚ 1881 Mike Dorgan‚ 1881 Bill Crowley‚ 1881 John Fox‚ 1881 Emil Gross‚ 1881 Ed “The Only” Nolan‚ 1881 Ed Caskins, 1881 John Clapp, 1881 Morrie Critchley, 1882 [permanent] Hoss Radbourn, 1882 [expelled from AA only] Sam Wise [expelled from AA only] Bill Holbert [expelled from AA only] Jerry Denny, 1882 [expelled from AA only] Art Whitney, 1882 [expelled from AA only] Pud Galvin, 1882 [expelled from AA only] Charlie Bennett, 1882 [expelled from AA only] John Bergh, 1882 [expelled from AA only] Ned Williamson, 1882 [expelled from AA only] Fred Lewis, 1882 Herman Doscher, 1882 [permanent] candlestick Higham, umpire, 1882 [permanent] Phil Baker, 1883 Joe Gerhardt, 1883 Frank “Gid” Gardner, 1883 Tom Deasley, 1883 Jack Leary, 1883 John Milligan, 1883 Billy Taylor‚ 1883 John Sweeney, 1883 [permanent] Frank Larkin, 1883 J.J. Smith, 1883 Harry Luff, 1883 Mike Mansell‚ 1883 George Creamer, 1883 Al Atkinson, 1883 Joe Sommer, 1883 Bill Traffley, 1883 Phil Powers, 1883 Charles Sweeney, 1884 Tommy Bond, 1884 Frank Gardner, 1884 Tony Mullane, 1884 Jack Brennan, umpire, 1884 Lew Dickerson, 1884 Chappy Lane, 1884 Tom Gunning, 1884 [expelled from UA only] Ed Colgan, 1884 [expelled from UA only] Frank Meinke, 1884 [expelled from UA only] Steve Behel, 1884 [expelled from UA only] James Hillery, 1884 [expelled from UA only] P.F. Sullivan, 1884 [expelled from UA only] Jack Farrell, 1885 Dave Rowe, 1885 George Gore, 1885 Jim Mutrie, 1885 [expelled from AA only] Sam Barkley, 1886 Pete Browning, 1886 Jack Gleason, 1886 Jerry Denny, 1886 Toad Ramsey, 1887 Chief Roseman, 1887 Toad Ramsey, 1888 John “Phenomenal” Smith, 1888 Lady Baldwin, 1888 Yank Robinson, 1889 Jack Glasscock, 1889 [expelled from PL only] Jack Clements, 1889 [expelled from PL only] John Clarkson, 1889 [expelled from PL only] Marr Phillips, 1890 Denny Lyons, 1890 Denny Lyons, 1891 Jack Stivetts, 1891 Bones Ely, 1891 John Dolan, 1891 [expelled from AA only] Bert Inks, 1891 [expelled from AA only] Frank Knauss, 1891 [expelled from AA only] John Reilly, 1891 [expelled from AA only] Silver King, 1891 [expelled from AA only] Hoss Radbourn, 1891 [expelled from AA only] Rowdy Jack O’Connor, 1891 Al Buckenberger (manager), 1891 Bill Barnie (manager), 1891 Fred Pfeffer (manager), 1891 Red Ehret, 1891 [expelled from AA only] Harry Raymond, 1891 [expelled from AA only] Jocko Halligan, 1892 Patsy Tebeau, 1896 Fred Pfeffer, 1896 Jack Taylor, 1897 Ducky Holmes, 1898 Jack Taylor, 1899 Burt Hart, 1901 Hugh Duffy, 1901 Jimmy Jones, 1902 Joseph Creamer, trainer, 1908 Jack O’Connor and Harry Howell, manager and coach of the St. Louis Browns, were banned in 1910 for attempting to fix the outcome of the 1910 American League batting title for the beloved Nap Lajoie against the reviled Ty Cobb. O’Connor gave his third baseman, Red Corriden, an odd order: to go stand in shallow left field whenever Lajoie came up to bat. With no one covering third base, Lajoie got seven hits in the day’s doubleheader, six of them bunts, and slipped past Cobb for the batting title. Horace Fogel, club owner, 1912 Joe “Moon” Harris of the Cleveland Indians was banned for life in 1920 (before Landis’s appointment) for violating the reserve clause in his contract, after he chose to play for an independent team rather than the Cleveland Indians. He was reinstated by Landis in 1922 due, in part, to his creditable service during World War I. Hal Chase, never formally banned but blacklisted in February 1920 from the National League after hearings showed evidence of game fixing with Cincinnati in 1916 and, certainly, before and after; his crowning swindle was to bring gamblers and fixers together to throw the 1919 World Series. Today, Landis’s declaration after the Black Sox trial that no one who bet on baseball would ever be allowed to play is recognized as formalizing Chase’s blacklisting. He continued to play in outlaw leagues in the West.
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