Years of bad teams helped Rays secure a bright future
Raise your hand if you thought we would be turning the corner toward September and the Tampa Bay Rays would not only be leading the American League's tough East Division, but would be leading it by a somewhat sizeable margin?
Not one of you raised your hand? Me neither. I think we all figured it would take more than a change in logo and color schemes, and a separation from "the Devil" to get this low-budget franchise in gear.
For a decade, our closest american major league baseball team has been more about punchlines than production. Sure, there have been hopes in the past, when Tampa Bay loaded up on twilight players like Jose Canseco, Wade Boggs and Fred McGriff, Floridians expected to boost the gate, looking for the possibility of one final spark from one or all. Those best-laid plans fizzled like Jorge Gutman's interest in downtown Ocala, but, by losing, and losing big, Tampa Bay inherited a boatload of high draft picks and a hope for mediocrity.
They spent them on stars-in-the-making Delmon Young and Elijah Dukes, among others, then shipped Young and Dukes away when neither got the memo about the importance of behavior in the major leagues. But just when you think Tampa Bay mortgaged its future with those two high-profile busts, players like Carl Crawford and Evan Longoria answer the bell. Then, when Crawford and Longoria are forced to the disabled list, others keep the forward momentum, and suddenly the defending World Series champion Red Sox and perennial powerhouse Yankees are short on answers about this unexpected new obstacle.
How can it be? Balance.
No Rays regular is batting above .290, and no Rays pitcher has more than Andy Sonnanstine's 13 wins. But every regular has made clutch contributions, and if Edwin Jackson and Scott Kazmir win their starts in Chicago today and tomorrow, all five members of the starting rotation will have at least 10 wins. And despite embarrassing attendance, the Rays make their fantasies come true at home. The team is under .500 on the road, but a major league best 47-18 on home turf, including an 18-4 record at Tropicana Field against the other four teams that comprise baseball's top five (Angels, Red Sox, Cubs, White Sox).
Winning streaks of six, six and seven games before the All-Star break provided an intriguing cushion in the standings that was sliced with a seven-game losing skid just before the Mid-Summer Classic. Instead of folding, to their credit, the Rays have provided magic in many forms and played .688 ball since the break (22-10) and are giving ample time to the public to get accustomed to using Tampa Bay and baseball playoffs in the same sentence.
It hasn't happened yet. But by the mere fact we're now expecting it to, this franchise has made an important stride.
Random thoughts
Eight Georgia Southern football players, due to "violations of institutional rules," have been suspended for the Eagles' season opener at No. 1 Georgia. It's not clear if this is a reward or a punishment to those players, who now don't have to make the bus trip from Statesboro to Athens in order to be fed to the Bulldogs between the hedges. ...Steelers, Raiders, Cowboys, Giants, Broncos, Bears. Check the names of past Super Bowl winners and ask yourself, "Does an imposing mascot really propel a proud and aggressive football team psyche?" Now tell me how many Super Bowls the Cardinals have won, or even sniffed. Only an earthworm is scared of a cardinal.
Copyright 2008 Ocala.com
Rays of sunshine
Between the time the American League Baseball East team were formed in 1998 and the start of this season, they were the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and they were baseball's bad joke.
Every season they finished last in the division, except in 2004 when they scaled the heights and finished last but one. They have never managed to win more than 70 games in a 162-game season and they are the only major league team never to have reached the post-season play-offs.
Then, last November, Stuart Sternberg, the principal owner of this bunch of losers, announced that the Tampa Bay Devil Rays were no more, and that, for the 2008 season and ever more, they would be the Tampa Bay Rays.
Then April arrived, the season started and the Rays started winning. Not an occasional game, but a lot. And they have kept winning. It is August and they have almost passed the 70-win barrier, they lead the division ahead of the Sox and Yankees, and they have the best record of any team in the American League. Last Wednesday, in a stunning performance at their home ground, Tropicana Field, against the Cleveland Indians, the Rays came from 4-7 in the bottom of the ninth to tie it 7-7 and then went on to win it 10-7 with a walk-off, three-run homer from Carlos Pena. While the manager Joe Maddon knows that there is still a long way to go before the Rays can contemplate post-season play in October, what they have achieved so far is at least as remarkable in American sport in 2008 as Tiger Woods winning the US Open on one leg.
The Rays have got where they are by building patiently and slowly from the bottom up. They have drafted promising, young talent and given it time to mature. They have brought in veterans when necessary, giving a much-needed boost to the bullpen. And they have played good, defensive baseball. Maddon will not tolerate sloppiness or lack of hustle, as he proved last week by benching one of his young stars for failing to show sufficient endeavour in chasing down a routine ground ball.
Copyright of Abu Dhabi Media Company FZLLC.
Missing baseball players likely out of country: agent
Two 18-year-olds playing for the Cuban junior baseball team have likely left the Edmonton area and are making their way to Central America, an agent reveals to CTV News. Cuban star pitcher Noel Arguelles and shortstop Jose Iglesias have not been seen since their game against Team Canada on Sunday. Team members confirmed to CTV News earlier this week the two teens likely defected.
"These kids want to be able to see their dream to play baseball in the major leagues so this is a way to do it," the agent said, who asked to remain anonymous. "And this is the way they've chosen to do it."
The two teens are likely already in Mexico or the Dominican Republic, he says. Teams from 12 different countries are currently in Edmonton for the 2008 World Junior Baseball Championship. Games are being held at Telus Field and John Fry Park.
The agent says the players' choice has nothing to do with Cuban politics or freedom, but likely the money associated with landing a major league contract.
Arguelles and Iglesias are likely trying to avoid the Major League Baseball draft thus forcing all 30 teams in the league to make the highest bid for their talents.
Sources close to CTV reveal this could mean a USD 2 million payday for Arguelles, a pitcher who can throw 93 miles per hour.
The agent said the money gained in a signed contract will likely be filtered down to everyone involved in the escape. Event organizer Ron Hayter said Tuesday there is no search underway for the missing players.
"We have no indication where they are at this time," he said. "We're sorry about it because we don't like to see these things happen."
Three players from the Cuban team defected in 2000 after the tournament wrapped up in Edmonton. More than a dozen scouts from American Major League Baseball teams are currently at the Edmonton tournament.
2008 CTV globemedia All Rights Reserved.
Jeff Beresford-Howe: Baseball's trading deadline and the canny genius of Oakland's Billy Beane
The feel-good sports-lit hit of the summer of '03 was "Moneyball" by Michael Lewis. The story goes like this: The plucky, cash-strapped and unconventional Oakland Athletics, using Ivy League-educated statistical geniuses and the intense personality of their high-strung, Ramones-lovin' general manager, Billy Beane, outsmarted hidebound, got-the-job-because-they-drank-a-cup-of-coffee-in-the-bigs, glad-handing scouts and executives and put together great teams on a shoestring, often by making trades that seemed inexplicable at the time but worked out to Oakland's advantage.
Five years later, Beane and "Moneyball" are in the news again. That's because Thursday, July 31, 2008, is Major League Baseball's trading deadline and the A's are looking to deal away talent: underrated second baseman Mark Ellis, oft-injured, former phenom shortstop Bobby Crosby, and pitchers Huston Street and Alan Embree. The list would be longer, but in the last nine months, the A's have traded just about all of their veteran players: Danny Haren (to the Arizona Diamondbacks), Nick Swisher (Chicago White Sox), Joe Blanton (Philadelphia Phillies), Rich Harden (Chicago Cubs), Mark Kotsay (Atlanta Braves) and Marco Scutaro (Toronto Blue Jays) have been dispatched. Oakland's active roster is now filled with players with fewer than four years of show time.
So, what are the A's up to? Sportswriters say it's all about the genius of Billy Beane. But the irony is that the key to Oakland's moves, and ones you’ll see this week from San Diego, Baltimore, Florida, Kansas City, Toronto and Minnesota, to name some other teams traveling a similar path, isn't clever, high-tech management. Rather, it's a reliance on one of most thoroughly loathed relics of the dark ages of baseball: the reserve clause. The reserve clause was a standard part of every baseball contract until the '70s. It bound a player, for life, to the first team that signed him. Say it's 1967, and you're an 18-year-old kid with a rocket for an arm and a hellacious slider. The New York Yankees, who've draft you, thus obtaining your exclusive negotiating rights, offer you a one-year minor-league contract for USD 3,000 with a USD 30,000 bonus. USD 30,000! You can almost buy a home in Westchester for that! "Where do I sign?"
Once you sign, though, it means you can't play for another ball club without the permission of the Yanks. It doesn't matter if they want you. You are owned. As you can imagine, this had a profoundly depressive effect on salaries. The system came crashing down in the mid '70s when then-A's owner Charlie Finley forgot to (or just didn't want to, stories vary) pay a bonus to Catfish Hunter, then one of the best pitchers in the game. An arbiter threw out Hunter's contract. Completely.
Hunter became baseball's first genuine free agent and teams stood in line to get a crack at him. He ultimately signed with the Yankees for the unheard of figure of about USD 670,000 a year, triple what the next-highest-paid player was making. The players' union chief, Marvin Miller, who'd been cajoling the players for years to make a serious effort to bring free agency to the sport, used Hunter's example to say, "I told you so. This is what happens. You can play where you want for a lot more money."
Listen to Marvin Miller talking with The Takeaway about his legacy (July 28, 2008).
At each pass in labor talks, owners argued that baseball is unique in professional sports because it requires a long-term, expensive player development system, i.e., the minor leagues. If players could just walk away from a team after it had invested four years training them, what would be the incentive of the team to train them in the first place?
The players bought it. The reserve clause survives, mutated. True free agency, signing a two-year contract, then having the option to sign wherever you wanted two years later, never came to be. When our hypothetical 18-year-old rocket-armed kid signs a one-year Yankees contract in 2008, he is still bound to the Yankees whether he signs another contract or not. It's just not for a lifetime anymore. Depending on how fast he advances, it's more in the neighborhood of eight years, the prerequisite six in the majors before free agency can be granted and the first, say, two in the minors. (We'll leave out for now the majority of kids who sign that contract but will never graduate from the minors.) This has the still-predictable effect of radically depressing young players' salaries. From Beane's point of view, they're dramatically more cost effective than players who are eligible for free agency.
That's half of what Beane is thinking about. The other half is this: In June of 2000, baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, proving once again that a stopped watch is right twice a day, convinced baseball's owners, a group notorious for self-interest, to share Internet revenue equally. Given Selig's clumsy political skills, it probably helped that there wasn't any actual internet revenue at the time to share, and that elderly, uber-rich team owners probably most associated the Internet with the hits their portfolios took in the dot-com bust. This just in: The Internet took off. Major League Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM, mostly internet stuff, but also Extra Innings, now exclusively licensed to DirecTV) brings MLB somewhere north of USD 300 million a year, according to Money, and on top of that, Selig managed to get a very limited form of general revenue sharing funded by a Fox TV deal and a "payroll tax" on the New York Yankees. (The Yankees are paying Alex Rodriguez's salary, but they're also paying for Kansas City's left fielder.)
Together, this means that each Major League Baseball team has a guaranteed income before it sells a single ticket, makes local television and radio broadcast arrangements, collects cash from stadium-naming rights and advertising, or sells a single Belgian Budweiser, foam finger, parking pass or piece of laundry with a player's name on the back. How much, is a closely guarded secret. But estimates from Forbes and Money put it in the range of USD 30 million to USD 70 million and no one would be surprised if it were higher.
Some quick math: The median team salary in baseball is about USD 80 million. (Closest to that figure, according to CBS Sports, are the Cleveland Racist Logos, er, Indians, and the Milwaukee Brewers.) It's not hard to see that if a team goes much under that median, it doesn't have to sell a single ticket to make a profit. What you have then is a gigantic ATM machine laboring night and day to spit cash into the team owner's wallet. And that's the business model a bunch of teams, including the A's, have decided to pursue. The extreme example this year is the Florida Marlins. Its payroll, the lowest is the game, is around USD 22 million. That is to say they stand to make a considerable profit even before counting paid attendance. Expect the A's payroll, at USD 48 million, the 3rd lowest, to get even lower before the trade deadline.
But trading isn't where Billy Beane shines. His real genius is in reserve-clause management. No matter what happens this week, he's going to field a team with three kinds of players: (1) guys in their first three years, making at or near the minimum major-league salary; (2) guys in their next couple of years after that who forego independent salary arbitration to sign a medium-length deal. These players are typically cheaper because they're willing to sacrifice short term gains for medium-term security. The best players, unfortunately, tend to avoid this route; and (3) veterans from the Island of Misfit Toys, players with injury or attitude problems or prolonged period of ineffectiveness who can be acquired cheap in a one-year deal.
As both the A's and the Marlins are proving this year, you can win some games this way. Both teams are playing slightly above .500 ball, and the Marlins, playing in a weak division in a weak league, even have a shot at the playoffs. But why are Beane and the A’s doing it this way? It's moneyball, after all. Money is how we keep score in baseball and in America. And that's the real story of the trade deadline, not the players moving about. The A's have announced their willingness to leave Oakland (for Fremont), and high-salaried encumbrances would hinder a move (and a sale). In the end, Lew Wolff and John Fisher, the A's owners, are set to profit from bad baseball, earning more than if they had spent for high-priced free-agent veterans and made an effort to compete for a world championship.
Copyright 2008 The Takeaway
Time runs short for Tigers
On the 100th day of their season, the Tigers own a record that is mediocre by definition. They have 44 wins and 44 losses. Not great. Not lousy. Somewhere in between. More than half of the schedule is behind them, even though the symbolic midpoint will not arrive until the All-Star Game at Yankee Stadium one week from today.
Regardless, the standings have begun to matter, and right now they say Detroit is a .500 team. That's fitting, really. From the very beginning of this season, optimism and pessimism have traded haymakers and sparred to a draw. Here's one portion of the scorecard:The Tigers are a healthy 42-34 since that woeful 2-10 start, and they have won 20 of their last 28 games. That's good. The Tigers are 11-21 against the American League Central, the worst record of any American League baseball team within its own division. That's bad.
Jim Leyland's team is seven games behind the division-leading Chicago White Sox, as it opens a six-game home stand tonight. According to statistical projections by Baseball Prospectus, Detroit has between a 5 percent and 10 percent chance of reaching the postseason. Translation: The Tigers will need to play inspired baseball over the next 12 weeks if they want to reach October. And they are already shorthanded: At present, four players who are earning a combined USD 36.7 million this year are not on the active roster.
Magglio Ordonez (USD 15 million), Jeremy Bonderman (USD 8.5 million) and Brandon Inge (USD 6.2 million) are on the disabled list. Dontrelle Willis (USD 7 million) has been at Class A Lakeland, trying to rediscover his control. Ordoñez and Inge should return from their oblique injuries after the All-Star break. Bonderman is out for the season. Willis has felt more pain in his previously injured right knee, which increases the likelihood that he will not contribute in the major leagues this season. Detroit played superbly through much of June but is only 3-3 since Ordoñez was placed on the disabled list. His absence was particularly evident during the series in Seattle last weekend, when the Tigers mustered only four runs, all on solo home runs,over a span of 32 innings.
Leyland has acknowledged that Ordonez, the defending American League batting champion, is irreplaceable. But club president and general manager Dave Dombrowski assembled all this talent at a cost of nearly USD 138 million with the idea that an experienced core could carry the team. It remains to be seen whether that strategy will work, but left-hander Nate Robertson, signed to a three-year deal in January, turned in a validating performance Sunday. He allowed only one run over nine innings, his best start all year and earned high praise afterward from Leyland, catcher Pudge Rodriguez and closer Todd Jones.
Meanwhile, the protracted slump of another veteran, Edgar Renteria, has become one of the team's biggest concerns. Renteria, who will turn 33 next month, was acquired from Atlanta last off-season for his steady hitting and solid glove. But the change in leagues brought a big drop in his batting average, from .332 last season to .254 now. He's also on pace to commit more than 14 errors, which would be his highest total since 2005. He's not hitting for power, with only one extra-base hit in the last seven weeks. And he's not hitting in the clutch, as evidenced by a .095 batting average (4-for-42) in late-inning pressure situations, according to the Elias Sports Bureau.
Leyland said he spoke with Renteria on Saturday. "I'm going to keep running him out there for a while, to see if we can't get him going," Leyland said. "He's just trying too hard right now. He's working against himself."
Ramon Santiago, who started 17 games at shortstop last season, is due to return from the disabled list before tonight's game. Santiago is brilliant in the field but has a .237 lifetime average in the majors. He could play more often if Renteria continues to struggle. Santiago's defensive ability is a valuable commodity for a team that has the second-worst fielding percentage in the American League. In general, though, there is little chance of the team's everyday lineup undergoing a dramatic shift at the July 31 non-waiver trade deadline. The Tigers would be more inclined to acquire a starting pitcher, but for now the fifth spot in the rotation belongs to rookie Eddie Bonine.
This week's home stand against the CC Sabathia-less Indians and second-place Minnesota Twins will amount to a referendum of sorts on Detroit's interleague success. A strong showing, particularly against the Twins, would leave the Tigers with a respectable position at the All-Star break. But a 2-4 week would raise new questions about whether June was a resurgence or a mirage. The urgent days on a contender's calendar may not be here yet, but they are coming soon.
"Because we're so far behind," Jones acknowledged, "everything's big now."
Freep.com
Major League Baseball teams to wear special Stars & Stripes caps
NEW YORK. The 30 american major league teams will wear special Stars & Stripes caps during games on the Fourth of July weekend and on Sept. 11 as part of a "Welcome Back Veterans" program created by New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon.
The Welcome Back Veterans logo will be on bases used that weekend. Wilpon said he hopes the campaign will raise US100 million.
Major League Baseball plans to donate a portion of the revenue from the sale of the special caps. Baseball spokesman Rich Levin would not specify how much money from the cap sales would be donated.
Copyright 2008 The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.
It's time to do away with the DH
Sometimes you have to wonder what some prominent sports figures are thinking. In case you missed it, New York Yankees ace pitcher Chien-Ming Wang suffered a mid-foot ligament sprain and torn tendon in his right foot while rounding third base against the Astros on Sunday in Houston. The Astros, of course, are a team in the National League. So because the game was played at Minute Maid Park, the Yankees' star pitcher was forced to bat and run the bases, instead of being substituted for by a designated hitter. Wang, who is 8-2 with a 4.07 ERA, will be sidelined until September with the injury. Yankees co-chairman Hank Steinbrenner's response?
"My only message is simple," Steinbrenner was quoted in The New York Times. "The National League needs to join the 21st century. They need to grow up and join the 21st century."
But Hank, the son of famous Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, wasn't finished. "This is always a concern of American League teams when their pitchers have to run the bases and they're not used to doing it," Hank Steinbrenner continued. "It's not just us. It's everybody. It probably should be a concern for National League owners, general managers and managers when their pitchers run the bases. Pitchers have enough to do without having to do that."
Thank goodness daddy isn't replacing MLB Commissioner Bud Selig anytime soon. Otherwise Hank might just have his way one day. So, in light of Hank's moronic comments, it begs the question: Is the designated hitter good or bad for baseball? While many will argue that implementing the DH was a smart move by the American League in 1973, it has become clear over time that the position has ruined the strategy and purity of the game. Major League Baseball had every right 35 years ago to institute the DH. After all, offensive production in the game was lagging, and baseball was in dire need of a boost in fan attendance. But there are a few reasons that come to mind why the designated hitter should be abolished in the coming years.
First, take players like David Ortiz of the Boston Red Sox and Jim Thome of the Chicago White Sox. Both stars play the majority of their team's games as a designated hitter, with first base being their primary fielding position. But if the Red Sox or White Sox were in the National League or the American League didn't utilize the DH, players like Ortiz and Thome could cause some problems, and I don't mean at the plate. For starters, the Red Sox certainly wouldn't have Mike Lowell, Kevin Youkilis and Ortiz all on their roster. Youkilis is the team's main first baseman and Lowell plays third. One of the three best players on Boston’s roster would most likely be left out. As for Thome, do you think any team in the National League would sign both Thome and Paul Konerko? Both play first base and aren't versatile enough to play anywhere else.
Without a DH, these big boppers, as well as guys like Frank Thomas, Gary Sheffield and Jason Giambi, could benefit many other teams in baseball. This would result in more competitive teams year after year and eliminate bolstered offensive lineups throughout the American League. The designated hitter also greatly reduces the amount of strategy and thinking an AL manager has to perform. What makes baseball different from so many other sports are the endless possibilities a National League manager has late in a game, or the numerous situations he encounters throughout nine (or more) innings. It's fascinating to the see the double switches, the pinch hitters, the pinch runners, the relief pitchers and the reserve catchers take part in game on a nightly basis. This is where the National League manager earns his paycheck. Watch an American League game and the only sequence that you will see on a regularly are relief pitchers jogging out to the mound. In other words, the lack of strategy spoils the purity of this great game.
Finally, it's becoming more evident in interleague play that the AL and baseball could do without the DH. With the video technology hitters have access to and the lack of pitching depth across the majors, AL teams would do just fine without it. In interleague games at NL parks from this past Sunday through Tuesday, AL teams are averaging nearly 5.5 runs per contest. And in those games, AL squads boasted a 9-6 record against their NL counterparts. And, just for the record, who said pitchers can't hit? Rick Ankiel, Micah Owings and Babe Ruth have had no trouble going against the grain in their careers. With steroids apparently behind baseball these days, with attendance skyrocketing and with runs being scored all over the board, it's time MLB realizes its roots.
2008 Longmont Times-Call. All rights reserved.
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