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Rob Manfred

Won’t someone think of the catchers?

There’s at least one constituency affected by the looming future of robo umps that isn’t so sure about the whole thing.

While pitch clocksbigger bases and other rules changes debut this year at the major league level, the Automated Ball-Strike System will receive its biggest experiment yet at Triple-A. ABS will be used four days per week to call every pitch at baseball’s highest minor league level. On the other three days, umpires will traditionally call balls and strikes with a challenge system in place — teams will be able to appeal a handful of calls to the so-called robo-zone each game.

To many, ABS has begun to feel inevitable. Umpires have already agreed to allow it at the major league level when it is ready. Which means that within a season or two, everything around home plate could change

“It’s going to be here,” Servais said.

Others think Major League Baseball, and specifically Commissioner Rob Manfred, don’t recognize how seismically such a shift could alter the sport.

“I don’t see it happening,” said Yankees All-Star and distinguished pitch-framer Jose Trevino. “I don’t think Manfred has any idea what’s going on whenever he talks about that kind of stuff. He’s obviously never put the gear on, so he doesn’t know.”

Manfred, who last summer told ESPN that ABS could reach the majors by 2024, has cautioned this spring that the robo-umps remain in “the evaluation phase.” In order to be adopted in the big leagues, ABS would need to be approved by an 11-member competition committee that includes four players.

“There are issues that are still the topic of really considerable discussion within the ownership group and even more that are going to have to be resolved in the joint committee process with the players,” Manfred said. “The framing issue is one of those. I mean it’s a legitimate concern on the part of at least a subset of players.”

The subset includes some coaches, too, including New York Yankees director of catching Tanner Swanson — a pioneer of sorts in teaching backstops to steal strikes.

An appreciation for pitch framing had been under way for nearly a decade when Swanson jumped from college coaching to join the Minnesota Twins organization before the start of the 2018 season.

Among his most impactful ideas: If catchers received pitches while down on one knee as opposed to a traditional squat, they’d be better positioned to steal strikes near the bottom of the zone. Within just a couple seasons, the one-knee approach he coached with Minnesota was being used across the majors.

“When I got into pro ball, I think it really kind of opened the curtain to like, ‘OK, now this is not only extremely valuable, but this is something that we should be prioritizing just in terms of the frequency in which it happens relative to all the other skills.’” Swanson said.

Swanson preaches subtle movements with the glove on every borderline pitch — just enough trickery to sway even the most well trained umpire. Even if it came at the expense of blocking pitches or throwing out runners, the data showed framing trumped all other skills.

Swanson has had several notable success, starting with Mitch Garver in Minnesota and most recently Trevino, who was an All-Star and Gold Glove winner last season. Trevino converted 53.8% of non-swinging strikes on the edges of the zone into strikes — best in the majors, according to MLB’s Statcast.

The knee-down catching technique is already being taught to youth catchers on up, and there’s now an entire generation of big league catchers trained to put pitch presentation first.

“Framing’s always been big,” said Baltimore catcher Adley Rutschman, last year’s AL Rookie of the Year runner-up. “Since probably my junior year in high school, it’s been a big point of emphasis. Got to college, same thing, and in the pros, same thing.”

Robot umpires, of course, can’t be fooled. So what happens when framing falls out of focus?

The short answer to that is that the good-field, no-hit catchers will lose value, which is a thing that aficionados of pitch framing as well as those catchers themselves are extremely wary of. I think we’re well more than one year out from MLB adopting some form of automated ball-strike calling, but it is coming sooner or later. The version that I’m now leaning towards, which is a middle ground that seems to ease most of the anxiety about this, is a challenge system, in which human umps make the original calls, and either side can ask for some number of pitches to be reviewed by the robo ump. The experience so far has been that the reviews are very quick, and the response has been positive. If that is the case in Triple A this year, then this might indeed be very close to happening in MLB. Check back later in the year and we’ll see.

MLB to recognize MLBPA representation of minor leaguers

Wow.

Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association on Saturday finalized a card-check agreement expected to formalize the league recognizing the union as the bargaining representative for a unit of minor league players in excess of 5,000 members, sources told ESPN.

The agreement, in which the MLBPA will present union-authorization cards Wednesday to be counted by a neutral arbiter, is the latest step in the rapid unionization of minor league players and sets up the parties to negotiate a collective-bargaining agreement.

The parties plan to begin negotiations in the offseason in hopes of striking an agreement before the 2023 minor league season.

By voluntarily recognizing minor leaguers’ desire to unionize with the MLBPA, which was first announced by MLB commissioner Rob Manfred on Friday, the league is hastening what people on both sides saw as inevitable: the MLBPA representing a wide swath of minor league players, including all who play in the four domestic levels as well as those at team complexes in Arizona and Florida.

[…]

Absent the recognition, the MLBPA would have petitioned the National Labor Relations Board and earned status as the bargaining representative with a vote of more than 50% of players who returned ballots. With the MLBPA saying that more than 50% of the potential unit has returned cards indicating they want to join the union, the league chose to recognize the unionization of minor leaguers under the MLBPA umbrella.

See here for the background. I had assumed MLB would fight this, as they are not at all known for being labor-friendly, but it would seem that the numbers are such that it didn’t make sense to draw it all out. The next step would be a collective bargaining agreement with the minor leaguers, and that will among other things provide for the league more opportunities to gain some leverage over the major league players. This is a historic agreement and a great start for the union, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.

Here comes the pitch clock

Some foundational rule changes are coming to MLB next year.

A pitch timer, limits on defensive shifts and bigger bases are coming to Major League Baseball in 2023.

Following recent experiments in the Minor Leagues, the recently formed Joint Competition Committee voted Friday in favor of three rule changes aimed at improving pace of play, action and safety at the MLB level.

The pitch timer, defensive shift limits and bigger bases were the only three rules proposed by MLB to the Joint Competition Committee — a voting body consisting of four active players, six members appointed by MLB and one umpire, that was created as part of the 2022-26 Collective Bargaining Agreement. Though the automatic ball-strike system (AKA “robot umps”) — and, alternatively, an ABS challenge system — has been experimented with in select Minor Leagues this season, a formal rule change proposal related to the ABS has not been made to the committee and is not expected for the 2023 season.

Read on for the details. I favor the pitch clock and I’m fine with the larger bases. I’m more ambivalent about banning the shift, but I think everyone agrees that the significant decrease in balls in play is a negative at least from an aesthetic fan-friendly perspective, and on those lines I can support it. I suspect it may take some time for the full effects of the changes to be felt – the sport will need to start growing contact hitters again, if nothing else – but we should begin to see them during the season. MLB has made big changes to respond to a drop in offense before – lowering the pitcher’s mound, reducing the strike zone – and I’m sure they will again some day as things evolve further. I’m looking forward to seeing how this plays out. ESPN has more.

MLBPA seeks to represent minor leaguers

Good to see, though there are some questions that will need to be answered.

The Major League Baseball Players Association took an initial step toward unionizing the minor leagues Sunday night, sending out authorization cards that will allow minor league players to vote for an election that could make them MLBPA members.

“Minor leaguers represent our game’s future and deserve wages and working conditions that befit elite athletes who entertain millions of baseball fans nationwide,” players’ association executive director Tony Clark said Monday in a statement. “They’re an important part of our fraternity and we want to help them achieve their goals both on and off the field.”

The potential unionization of more than 5,000 minor leaguers is the latest action in a yearslong effort by players who won a $185 million settlement from the league in an unpaid wages class-action lawsuit and have received housing from teams and increased pay in recent years. Minor league players, whose compensation and benefits are not collectively bargained, continue to argue for higher salaries, which for a vast majority range from around $5,000 to $14,000 annually. Furthermore, the Senate Judiciary Committee has suggested it will call a hearing to explore MLB’s antitrust exemption and its treatment of minor leaguers.

[…]

Advocates for Minor Leaguers, the group that has spent recent years organizing minor league players, is now working with the MLBPA, which collectively bargains with MLB on behalf of the 1,200 players on major league rosters.

“The last couple years has been a buildup of players offering their voices and their concerns, with Advocates for Minor Leaguers continuing to echo and aggregate those voices in a way that have gotten us to this point,” Clark told ESPN.

In order for the MLBPA to represent minor leaguers in collective bargaining, 30% of players need to sign union authorization cards, which would prompt an election. If a majority of those who vote in an election choose for union representation, the National Labor Relations Board will require MLB to recognize the union. The league and MLBPA then would collectively bargain for minor leaguers, an outcome that even five years ago would have registered as farfetched.

You can see a statement from the MLBPA here. I’m all in favor of this, and Lord knows the minor league players need representation, between MLB’s relentless efforts to cut their pay and more recently reduce the number of minor league teams. It’s just that the MLBPA hasn’t necessarily been a friend to minor leaguers in previous CBAs. Which is understandable, since those players weren’t and still aren’t a part of that union and the MLBPA was aiming to get the best deal it could get for its members. If the owners put some MiLB concessions on the table as a chip, well, the MLBPA had to consider what it meant for them. Very few current minor leaguers were affected by past CBAs, at least at the time, so I don’t think that will be an obstacle. The contraction of the minor leagues, with MLB in control of them, is a strong incentive for the players and the union to join forces. If this goes through, it won’t stop MLB from trying similar tactics in the future, it will just be a test of the larger union’s resolve. I’m rooting for them to get this done. CBS Sports has more.

Baseball fans are mostly OK with the idea of robot umps

So says a poll, so it must be true.

Illustration by Martin Laksman

MLB fans, it may be time to welcome your robot overlords.

Baseball is known for its long-standing traditions, unwritten rules about players’ on-field conduct and a fan base that skews older compared to other major U.S. professional sports. A new Morning Consult survey, however, found that MLB fans are gradually entering the modern era and accepting likely changes to the sport.

A plurality of self-identified MLB fans (48%) said they support the implementation of an automated ball and strike system, also known as “robo umps,” for MLB’s 2024 season. Thirty-six percent of fans said they do not support such a system, which Commissioner Rob Manfred floated as a possibility in a wide-ranging ESPN interview last month.

[…]

The future of baseball

  • Half of MLB fans said they “strongly support” or “somewhat support” an automated ball and strike system that calls every pitch during a game and relays the balls and strikes to a human home plate umpire via an earpiece. There’s slightly more support (55%) for a replay review system of balls and strikes, which would allow each manager to challenge several calls per game.
  • While self-identified sports fans showed slightly less enthusiasm for robo umps than MLB fans did, a clear plurality still supported the concept. Of the options included in the survey, regular sports fans showed the most support for in-game manager challenges at 54%.
  • More than half of MLB fans (54%) said they are “very interested” or “somewhat interested” to watch a game in which a home plate umpire receives balls and strikes through an earpiece, while 56% expressed interest in watching games featuring manager challenges.

I’m basically fine with the robo-ump scheme. The tech still needs some work, as well as some refinements to the rulebook strike zone, which is not called that way and would be very unpopular if it were. Back in 2020, I figured it would be five to ten years for robo umps; the current CBA allows for them to be implemented as soon as 2024. I think I’d be happier starting with a challenge system first, but we’ll see what we get. In any event, if you’re a traditionalist, don’t expect a wave of fan sentiment to carry your preference for you.

Rob Manfred speaks

About the Astros and other things.

Did not age well

When it comes to the Astros’ sign-stealing saga and its aftermath, Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred does have one big regret.

Was it his non-punishment of any individual players or granting immunity to them to get candid answers out of them? In an expansive interview with ESPN’s Don Van Natta Jr. that published Wednesday, Manfred said he wasn’t interested in “rehashing past stuff” like the Astros scandal.

But there was something in the wake of his punishment of the Houston franchise (a $5 million fine, stripping two years’ worth of first- and second-round draft picks and year-long suspensions to now-former general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch) that still gnaws at Manfred.

It was Manfred’s choice of words in the aftermath to the sanctions about why he didn’t strip the Astros of their 2017 World Series championship.

“The idea of an asterisk or asking for a piece of metal back seems like a futile act,” Manfred said in February 2020, referring to the Commissioner’s Trophy.

Those words generated a fierce backlash from MLB players and fans and two-plus years later, Manfred calls the “piece of metal” reference one of his biggest miscues since becoming commissioner in January 2015.

“The ‘piece of metal’ thing — the worst,” Manfred told Van Natta. “I regret it because it’s disrespectful to the game. I also regret it because I was being defensive about something.”

You can read the interview here – it’s quite long. I agree that was a dumb thing for him to say, but I’ve always had the impression that a lot of fans – and other players – were mad about the fact that no Astros players received discipline for their role in the scheme. There are lots of reasons for that – MLB wanted their cooperation, the collective bargaining agreement didn’t allow for it, the real responsibility belonged to management, etc – but it’s how people felt. No one ever said this stuff was entirely rational.

As for his September 2017 letter to the Yankees that recently became unsealed and revealed a $100,000 fine for New York using the dugout phone to steal and transmit opponents’ signals during the 2015 and 2016 seasons, Manfred was asked if widely publicizing that punishment at the time would’ve instilled a greater fear among teams for the repercussions of sign-stealing.

“Look, I think the answer to that question is really temporal,” Manfred said. with Van Natta noting the commissioner showed “a flash of irritation and not sounding as thick-skinned as he claims.”

I mean, speaking as a Yankees fan who didn’t understand why they fought the release of that letter so hard – it really made them look guilty of something, and in the end it was largely no big deal – that would have been better from my perspective. Maybe next time.

We finally see that Manfred letter to the Yankees

The Chron headline is blaring, but I kind of think we already knew most of this stuff.

Major League Baseball fined the New York Yankees $100,000 in 2017 for using their replay room and dugout phone to steal their opponent’s signs during the 2015 and 2016 seasons in what commissioner Rob Manfred described as a “material violation” of rules governing the replay room.

The ruling was in a letter that Manfred sent to Yankees general manager Brian Cashman on Sept. 14, 2017.

[…]

The two-page document provided few specifics and rehashed much of what Manfred already acknowledged in a Sept. 15, 2017 statement, one in which he disciplined the Red Sox for using their replay room to decode signs and warned “future violations of this type will be subject to more serious sanctions, including the possible loss of draft picks.”

The Astros continued to use their electronic sign-stealing scheme and trashcan banging at Minute Maid Park despite the warnings. Owner Jim Crane fired manager A.J. Hinch and general manager Jeff Luhnow after the system became public in Jan. 2020. The league also fined the franchise $5 million and took away its first and second-round draft picks in 2020 and 2021.

Manfred’s letter to Cashman helped to reinforce two long-held beliefs: electronic sign-stealing predated the Astros’ infamous trashcan banging scheme and ran rampant throughout the sport before stricter enforcement arrived in Sept. 2017. Multiple players across baseball have acknowledged it since the Astros’ punishments were levied and they became pariahs. No other publicly known sign-stealing schemes — including the one detailed in Manfred’s letter to Cashman — approach the severity of Houston’s trashcan banging scheme.

[…]

According to the letter, a Yankees baseball operations assistant admitted to league investigators that he provided information about opponent’s signs to members of the team’s replay room during the 2015 and 2016 seasons.

The staffer’s name is redacted in the letter. The Boston player, who had played for the Yankees earlier in his career, is also not named.

The staff in the replay room “physically relayed the information” to the Yankees dugout, but the letter did not specify how it happened. The team also tried its tactics during road games, according to the letter. At ballparks where the dugout was farther from the replay room, the Yankees sometimes used a dugout phone line to “orally provide real-time information” about the opponent’s signs, the letter said.

Manfred wrote that the Yankees’ wrongdoing “constitutes a material violation of the replay review regulations” and had “the same objective of the Red Sox’s scheme that was the subject of the Yankees complaint.”

In his public statement on Sept. 15, 2017, Manfred acknowledged that the Yankees “had violated a rule governing the use of the dugout phone” during a season prior to 2017.

“The substance of the communications that took place on the dugout phone was not a violation of any rule or regulation in and of itself,” Manfred said in that announcement. “Rather, the violation occurred because the dugout phone technically cannot be used for such a communication.”

Both the 2017 Astros and 2018 Red Sox were cited for sign-stealing schemes that originated in the team’s replay room. The Astros ran a far more egregious operation: positioning a camera in center field at Minute Maid Park, pointing it at the catcher and banging trashcans to relay the signs he flashed to Houston hitters.

Manfred’s letter to Cashman mentioned nothing about cameras. It also does not accuse the Yankees of illicit activity after Sept. 15, 2017 — the day Manfred promised harsher punishment for sign-stealing.

The 2018 Red Sox scheme was “far more limited in scope and impact” than the Astros’ 2017 actions, according to the league’s findings. Alex Cora, Boston’s manager that season, incurred a one-year suspension for only his actions as the Astros’ bench coach in 2017.

See here for the previous update. Going back through my archives, the first mention of this letter was from 2020, and most of what happened since then was related to the Yankees’ efforts to keep it under wraps. I don’t see any specific mention of the Yankees being accused of some form of sign stealing, but there was definitely the assumption all along that multiple teams had at least dipped a toe in those waters, with more than a little suspicion thrown at New York. The key thing, which we did know from the beginning, was Manfred’s warning to teams in 2017 that any further violations will be treated more harshly. Which is what happened to the Astros and to a lesser degree to the Red Sox.

So if you’re an Astros fan and you want to feel smug about this and go on about Yankee hypocrisy, go for it. You’ve got all the evidence you need. Just know that some of the dunking I’ve seen on Facebook has largely boiled down to “we cheated better than you did!” which really isn’t all that compelling if you ask me. I’m sure you can do better than that. If you’re a Yankees fan, the best response is along the line of “yeah, but when MLB said ‘no, seriously, cut it out’, we did and you didn’t”. And then we can go on hating each other as usual, which is the natural order of things in sports. Everybody wins!

Courts keep turning the Yankees down

Time to give up and move on, y’all.

The New York Yankees keep taking losses in court.

A federal appeals court has denied the team’s latest attempt to keep a 2017 letter from Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred detailing alleged sign-stealing by the Yankees.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit turned down the Yankees’ request for an en banc hearing of an earlier court decision affirming a U.S. District Court Judge’s ruling that the letter be unsealed.

En banc hearings, which are rarely granted, ask the circuit court’s 13 active judges to rehear the case. The appellate court’s March 21 ruling was made by a three-judge panel.

NJ.com reported Thursday the letter could be unsealed in a week. The Yankees’ only legal recourse at this point would be to seek a Supreme Court review.

“We’re disappointed in the Court of Appeals’ decision, but we respect it,” Yankees president Randy Levine told NJ.com. “But I believe that it’s going to lead to a lot of unfair results down the road.”

The Yankees have claimed making the letter public would result in “severe reputational damage.”

See here and here for the background. I follow a lot of dumb stories on this blog, and this is one I’m ready to stop following. I don’t know what could possibly be in that letter the team has fought so hard to keep under wraps, but at this point if one was inclined to believe it must be something terrible, I’d be hard pressed to argue against you. Either there really is something damaging in there, or they have a greatly over-inflated sense of their own importance. Possibly both. Can we please just rip this band-aid off and get on with our lives? Thanks.

Do tell, Chris

I have three things to say about this.

A rival of the Astros during their current run as a Major League Baseball power said Houston wasn’t the only team that’s resorted to cheating.

Red Sox lefthander Chris Sale, who pitched against Houston during playoff series in 2017, 2018 and 2021, made the remarks during a Monday interview on “The Greg Hill Show” on Boston sports radio station WEEI.

When asked about former Astros designated hitter Carlos Beltran — a central figure in the 2017 sign-stealing operation — telling the YES Network that the team’s championship that season is tainted during his first interview on the subject, Sale said the Astros weren’t alone in the cheaters’ fraternity.

“If the Astros were the only team doing it, then yeah, give (the championship) back — take it back,” Sale said. “I know for a fact they weren’t. All these people pointing fingers: Well, hey, take a check in the mirror real quick. Make sure that you and your team weren’t doing something.

“What (the Astros) did was wrong. And I’m not trying to condone it. Shoot, we’re talking five years ago now and we’re still talking about this stuff. I’d like to kind of turn the page on it. It happened. They dealt with it. There’s nothing you can do about it now sitting here where we are. So you just kind of move on from it.”

1. I’m sure Sale is correct that the Astros were not the only team cheating. It would be odd if they were.

2. That said, cheating exists on a spectrum – small scale, short term, individual effort to large scale, long term, team effort. The Astros were on the far end of the scale in all categories, they were extremely visible about it in retrospect, and as the World Series winner that year it was just embarrassing. But maybe they weren’t alone in those regards, maybe they just had the bad luck to be outed about it. Which leads to…

3. Spill the beans already. I know no one is going to narc on their own team, and if you’re accusing a rival it will be seen as gamesmanship, but surely someone out there is now in the same position that Mike Fiers was when he ratted on the Astros. I really don’t want to be talking about cheating when we may finally have a “normal” season again, but the reason we’re still talking about this five years later is because we feel like there had to be more to the story. (Yes, the MLB letter about the Yankees, whatever it says, is a part of that as well.) So let’s get it all out there, therapy-style, and see if we can’t finally get some closure.

Carlos Beltrán speaks about sign stealing

Of interest.

Carlos Beltrán, the venerated designated hitter painted by Major League Baseball as a ringleader of Houston’s electronic sign-stealing scheme during the 2017 season, said this week he “wished somebody would’ve said something” and stopped the trashcan banging scheme.

In an interview with YES Network broadcaster Michael Kay, who doubles as the television voice of the New York Yankees, Beltrán said the Astros’ World Series championship has a stain and tried to direct blame to Houston’s front office for a scheme the league deemed “player driven.”

“Nobody said anything to us, you know, nobody said anything,” Beltran said. “I wish somebody would’ve said something. A lot of people always ask me why you didn’t stop it? And my answer is, I didn’t stop it the same way no one stopped it.”

“This is working for us. Why you gonna stop something that is working for you? So, if the organization would’ve said something to us, we would’ve stopped it for sure.”

Beltrán said Astros players never received commissioner Rob Manfred’s edict in mid-2017 that cracked down on electronic sign-stealing and promised harsh punishments for teams that broke rules.

Beltrán was the only player cited by name in Manfred’s report detailing the league’s findings into the Astros’ scheme. He took issue with the distinction in his remarks with Kay, which will be aired in full on Monday at 3 p.m. CT on the YES Network. Excerpts of the interview were released on Sunday morning.

“The part that bothered me about that is that, you know, when I sit down to cooperate with them (MLB), they said to me, “We’re not going against the players. We’re going against …field personnel, front office and organization,’” Beltrán said. “And the fact that I’m the only player named in that report? So how … that happen? Like, that’s the part that I don’t understand. Everyone gets immunity except Carlos Beltrán? I don’t get it.”

On the one hand, it makes sense for Beltrán to put blame on the Astros’ front office for not stepping in to stop the banging scheme. MLB put the blame on the manager and coaches and the front office as well, which is why Jeff Luhnow is an ex-GM. On the other hand, Beltrán was a full-grown adult who certainly should have known that what they were doing was against the rules, and that whether it worked or not it would reflect poorly on them all. You can say it didn’t help much – others have made that claim, but Beltrán is contradicting them – and you can say the Astros would have won the World Series in 2017 regardless – I for one believe that to be true, whatever Yankees GM Brian Cashman may say. But that almost makes it worse. You were the best team on the field, you knew you were the best team on the field, so why put all that energy into something shady? Just go out there and beat ’em.

The main thing I take away from this is that it’s going to be a long time before we’re done with the banging scheme. It’s such a shame, because the 2017 Astros were a great team, and it was a huge boost for the city a couple of months after Hurricane Harvey. We’d all be so much better off if they’d never done this, whatever the effect might have been. Sean Pendergast has more.

Yankees still fighting to keep that MLB letter under wraps

I mean, it can’t hurt to ask.

The New York Yankees plan to continue to fight the unsealing of a letter from MLB detailing alleged sign-stealing by the organization.

The Athletic, citing a source with knowledge of the team’s plans, reported Friday the Yankees will appeal the release of the 2017 letter from commissioner Rob Manfred. A federal appeals court on March 21 had affirmed a U.S. District Court judge’s June 2020 order to unseal the letter.

Friday’s report said the Yankees plan to file a petition either later in the day or Monday, the deadline for submission, for an en banc hearing with the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals. That appeal would ask the circuit court’s 13 active judges to rehear the case. The appellate court’s previous ruling was made by a three-judge panel.

Historically, en banc reviews have been rarities in the Second Circuit.

The Yankees have claimed making the letter public would result in “severe reputational damange.”

See here for the background. I can’t imagine they’d continue on to SCOTUS if they lose again, but at this point who can say? As ol’ Jack Burton once said, you never know till you try.

Appeals court upholds ruling to unseal MLB’s 2017 letter on sign stealing

Look, if you’re going to follow a weird story, you’ve got to stay committed to following that weird story.

A September 2017 letter from Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred detailing alleged sign-stealing by the New York Yankees should be unsealed, a federal appeals court ruled Monday.

The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a June 2020 ruling by U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff ordering “a minimally redacted version” of the letter to be unsealed.

Per NJ.com, it may be two weeks or more before the court releases the letter.

Rakoff’s order had been stayed pending an appeal by the Yankees and MLB. The Yankees claimed making it public would result in in “severe reputational damage.”

But in Monday’s decision that also upheld the dismissal of a $5 million lawsuit filed by daily fantasy sports player Kristopher Olson and 100-plus other plaintiffs seeking damages from MLB, the Astros and Boston Red Sox over illegal sign-stealing operations of recent seasons, the appeals court upheld Rakoff’s ruling regarding the letter.

“In light of plaintiffs’ attempted use of the letter in their proposed Second Amended Complaint and the district court’s discussion of the letter in explaining its decision to deny plaintiffs’ request for leave to amend in their reconsideration motion, and because MLB disclosed a substantial portion of the substance of the letter in its press release about the investigation, we conclude that the district court did not abuse its discretion in unsealing the letter, subject to redacting the names of certain individuals,” the appeals court’s ruling said.

The sealed letter to the Yankees had been obtained during the discovery phase of the class-action lawsuit, which claimed MLB and the Astros and Red Sox for liable for any money lost during games in which either team cheated.

The plaintiffs had argued that a Manfred press release in 2017 had been an “actionable misrepresentation” of the facts laid out in the letter, with the plaintiffs claming that “the investigation had in fact found that the Yankees engaged in a more serious, sign-stealing scheme.”

On Sept. 15, 2017, MLB issued a statement from Manfred concluding the investigation into the Red Sox’s illegal use of an Apple Watch, which had been prompted by a complaint lodged by the Yankees. As a part of that investigation, Manfred discovered the Yankees’ illegal use of their dugout phone and fined them a “lesser, undisclosed amount” than he levied the Red Sox.

“No club complained about the conduct in question at the time and, without prompting from another club or my office, the Yankees halted the conduct in question,” Manfred wrote. “Moreover, the substance of the communications that took place on the dugout phone was not a violation of any rule or regulation in and of itself. Rather, the violation occurred because the dugout phone technically cannot be used for such a communication.”

In that same ruling, Manfred said he found “insufficient evidence” to substantiate a claim from the Red Sox that the Yankees illegally used the YES Network to steal Boston’s signs.

See here, here, and here for the argument. A copy of the appellate court’s ruling is in the Chron story. The affirmation of the DraftKings lawsuit is likely the more substantial matter, but who knows? I still think this letter is probably no big deal, but if it is then the lessons are clearly 1) don’t do things that you’ll be embarrassed about later if people find out about it, and 2) better hope no one writes down the details of your embarrassing stuff. NJ.com has more.

MLB ends its lockout

One small bit of good news.

Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association reached a tentative agreement on a new collective-bargaining agreement Thursday, ending the league’s 99-day lockout of the players and salvaging a 162-game season, sources familiar with the situation told ESPN.

With the end of the second-longest work stoppage in the game’s history, spring training camps will open Sunday, free-agent signings can begin Thursday night, and baseball will attempt to return to some semblance of normalcy after months of fraught negotiations.

The deal materialized after talks ratcheted up this week, when the league made a proposal that bridged the significant gap in the competitive-balance tax, a key issue in the end stages of talks. A dispute over an international draft threatened negotiations and caused the league to “remove from the schedule” another two series Wednesday, but those issues were resolved Thursday morning and the league delivered a full proposal to the union, which it voted to accept.

The final vote by the MLBPA’s eight members of the executive subcommittee and 30 player reps was 26-12 in favor of the agreement, sources told ESPN.

The basic agreement governs almost all aspects of the game, but baseball’s core economics were front and center in the labor talks. In addition to the new CBT, which increases from $230 million to $244 million over the five-year deal, the minimum salary governing players with less than three years of major league service will jump from $570,500 to $700,000, growing to $780,000, and a bonus pool worth $50 million will be distributed among those younger players who have yet to reach salary arbitration.

MLB had pushed for expanding the postseason to 12 teams — a plan to which the MLBPA agreed. Additionally, player uniforms will feature advertising for the first time, with patches on jerseys and decals on batting helmets.

Other elements of the deal include:

• A 45-day window for MLB to implement rules changes — among them a pitch clock, ban on shifts and larger bases in the 2023 season

• The National League adopting the designated hitter

• A draft lottery implemented with the intent of discouraging tanking

• Draft-pick inducements to discourage service-time manipulation

• Limiting the number of times a player can be optioned to the minor leagues in one season

I haven’t written about the lockout, mostly because there’s enough depressing news out there, but I’m glad to see it’s finally over. The owners largely maintained the gains they had won in previous CBA talks, but the players picked up a little bit of ground. I’m happy to see a pitch clock and the universal DH, and I can live with a 12-team playoff. The fact that it took this long to get to a deal, even though the sides were mostly bargaining over relative pennies at the end, is all on the owners, who imposed the lockout in the first place. For now, as I breathe a sigh of relief and look forward to more free agent signings, all I can say is “Play ball!” Fangraphs has more.

David Ortiz elected to MLB Hall of Fame

Congratulations, Big Papi.

With the process still tainted by the steroid era, David Ortiz was the lone player elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame this year, while others like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens were shut out.

“Big Papi” was the only player to clear the required 75% threshold, according to results of this year’s voting by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. Ortiz finished with 77.9% in becoming the 58th player elected in his first year of eligibility. At 46, he will also be the youngest of the 75 living members of the Hall.

“I learned not too long ago how difficult it is to get in on the first ballot,” Ortiz said. “Man, it’s a wonderful honor to be able to get in on my first rodeo. It’s something that is very special to me.”

Bonds, baseball’s all-time home run leader; 354-game winner Clemens; 600-homer-club member Sammy Sosa; and longtime ace pitcher Curt Schilling were in their 10th and final year of eligibility in the annual BBWAA balloting.

Bonds, Sosa and Clemens posted numbers that marked them as surefire, first-ballot Hall of Famers, but they became avatars for the era of performance-enhancing drugs. While Bonds and Clemens in particular have long denied using PEDs, accusations have dogged them in the media and in books, and have been the subject of court dramas and testimony in front of Congress. In the end, about a third of the voters decided the allegations were too egregious to overlook, enough to bar their entry to the hallowed halls of Cooperstown, at least via the writers’ vote.

Ortiz is a different story, despite his own PED suspicions. A 2009 story in The New York Times reported that Ortiz was among 104 players who tested positive for performance-enhancing substances during a round of tests conducted in 2003. Those results were supposed to remain confidential, and the tests were done to see if the league had reached a threshold to conduct regular testing.

Ortiz has long denied that he used banned substances, and in 2016, commissioner Rob Manfred said the tests in question were inconclusive because “it was hard to distinguish between certain substances that were legal, available over the counter and not banned under our program.”

Manfred added that during subsequent testing Ortiz “has never been a positive at any point under our program.”

When asked about those suspicions Tuesday, Ortiz said, “We had someone coming out with this one list, where you don’t know what anybody tested positive for. All of a sudden people are pointing fingers at me. But then we started being drug tested and I never tested positive. What does that tell you?”

As for the last-chance candidates, Sosa’s support never approached the threshold for election, but the cases of Bonds and Clemens were more divisive among the selectors. Both climbed over the 50% mark in 2017 only to see their support plateau in recent seasons. The tallies for their last go-arounds were 66% for Bonds and 65.2% for Clemens.

There’s a whole lot of discourse about this, and I’ll just link to a few articles so you can get a feel for it. I’m worn out just thinking about it. Ortiz joins six other former players who were elected via the Eras Committee process in December. And hey, guess what?

The hotly debated cases for Bonds, Clemens, Sosa and Schilling will move to a new arena: the Hall of Fame’s Today’s Game era committee. The era committees comprise players, executives and media members who are charged with evaluating overlooked candidates. The Today’s Game committee is next scheduled to convene during the 2022 winter meetings in December.

We get to live through the whole Bonds/Clemens/Sosa/Schilling debate again later this year, and again in 2024. Deep breaths, we’ll get through this together. Fangraphs, The Ringer, and Drew Magary, among many others, have more.

Will MLB come to Central Texas?

Drayton McLane thinks it might.

Drayton McLane, who knows a thing or two about the subject, believes Central Texas is closing in on being able to support its own Major League Baseball team. That pronouncement might lead you to wonder what we’ll call our new team—Lone Star Hipsters? Canyon Lake Coyotes?—and to look forward to summer evenings sipping a cold one at the ballpark as the sun sets on the San Marcos River.

Anyway, McLane has precisely the kind of can-do spirit Texas is going to need to land a third MLB franchise. No one thought he’d succeed in purchasing the Astros in 1993, and certainly no one thought he’d persuade Houston voters to approve, in 1996, the construction of Minute Maid Park. He breathed life into a franchise that had never won much of anything and led them to six postseason appearances during a nine-year stretch from 1997 to 2005. That run culminated with a National League pennant, which at the time was close to the sweetest moment Houston sports fans had ever experienced.

Now 84, McLane makes it clear he’s not going to lead this effort. That’s where Nolan Ryan comes in, but more on him later. In fact, McLane admits it’s a tad early to begin putting down a deposit on season tickets.

“Ten years from now, it’s a possibility,” he told me.

[…]

One thing that never came up in our conversation: the availability of a team. That’s the easy part. The Oakland A’s and Tampa Bay Rays are something akin to free agents, with both unable to land new ballpark deals in their host cities. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred has given the A’s permission to shop around for better options, and team officials were to visit Las Vegas this week. The Rays, apparently desperate for leverage, have come up with the  far-fetched idea of playing half their games in Montreal and half in Tampa or St. Petersburg. Almost no one who follows the sport believes a split-city format is workable, and it seems only a matter of time before the Rays begin shopping for a new full-time home.

Plus, Manfred has said MLB will expand—by at least two teams—once the A’s and Rays are settled. While Portland may have a big head start on Central Texas, are there really four better North American markets than the Austin–San Antonio corridor? Think of San Marcos as perhaps the perfect accessible-to-both-cities spot for a ballpark. And McLane might be underestimating the market’s viability. The Interstate 35 corridor between Austin and San Antonio is booming, and a ballpark accessible to both cities would make the are more appealing than several current MLB cities.

Austin’s economy was the twelfth-fastest-growing among major metropolitan areas in 2019, according to the Austin Chamber of Commerce.  A sleepy government and university town no more, Austin now hosts some of the largest and most profitable companies in in the world, from Apple and Amazon to Tesla and Oracle.

There are plenty of TV sets, too. San Antonio is the nation’s thirty-first-largest television market, according to Nielsen, while Austin checks in at number 38. Together, the cities deliver 1.65 million television households, more than a long list of major-league cities, including St. Louis, San Diego, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore.

We’ve discussed the possibility of a second team in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, but I tend to agree with McLane. Central Texas is the more likely location, with enough population between Austin and San Antonio to support an MLB team. For a variety of reasons, MLB owners are not looking to expand now, but I expect that it will be on the table in the not too distant future, maybe some time after the next CBA. One possible obstacle to this dream is the nightmare that is I-35, which I guarantee will be overly congested no matter how much it gets expanded. Maybe this could be the fulcrum to finally get the Lone Star Rail line built. If I’m gonna dream, I may as well dream big.

MLB pulls 2021 All Star Game out of Georgia

Well, well, well.

Major League Baseball on Friday pulled this year’s All-Star Game out of Atlanta in protest of Georgia’s new restrictive voting law.

The “Midsummer Classic” was set for July 13 at Truist Park, home of the Atlanta Braves, in addition to other activities connected to the game, such as the annual MLB Draft.

“I have decided that the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport is by relocating this year’s All-Star Game and MLB Draft,” Commissioner Robert D. Manfred Jr. said in a statement. “Major League Baseball fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box.”

[…]

While Truist Park is in Cobb County, just outside of Atlanta, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms warned her constituents that MLB’s move will likely be the first “of many dominoes to fall, until the unnecessary barriers put in place to restrict access to the ballot box are removed.”

“Just as elections have consequences, so do the actions of those who are elected,” she said in a statement.

U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, a Republican from neighboring Florida, blasted MLB for caving to public pressure.

“Why are we still listening to these woke corporate hypocrites on taxes regulations & anti-trust?” Rubio tweeted.

This week, President Joe Biden said he would strongly support moving the All-Star Game out of Georgia to protest the new law.

MLB’s action follows strong statements from the Georgia-based companies Coca-Cola and Delta Airlines blasting the state’s law.

Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia House of Representatives minority leader, said in a statement Friday that she’s “disappointed” that MLB officials took the All-Star Game from Atlanta but is “proud of their stance on voting rights.”

Georgia Republicans “traded economic opportunity for suppression,” said Abrams, who is credited with voter-drive efforts that delivered the Peach State to Biden and two Democrats to the U.S. Senate.

MLB has not determined a new All Star Game location yet, but as the story notes the 2020 game was supposed to be in LA but was canceled due to COVID-19. That’s an obvious solution if they want it. You can see a copy of the full MLB statement here. They’re basically following in the footsteps of the NBA, which you may recall pulled their 2017 All Star Game out of Charlotte following the passage of the extremely anti-trans HB2 in North Carolina; that law was later amended, though not repealed. Stacey Abrams has said elsewhere that she does not advocate for boycotts of Georgia in response to their voter suppression bill because the effects of such boycotts tend to hit lower income folks and people of color harder, but it’s still meaningful to see a response.

Meanwhile, in Texas.

Some of the state’s most influential companies are criticizing a package of proposed changes to Texas elections that civil rights groups liken to Jim Crow laws and that will suppress voting.

The bill approved by the Texas Senate on Thursday would limit early voting hours, prohibit drive-thru voting and ban local election officials from sending vote-by-mail applications to voters unless specifically requested. A bill that combines the Senate and House versions is expected to reach Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk within weeks.

Among the Texas-based companies decrying the bill are American Airlines, computer-maker Dell and Waste Management.

The Houston-based waste disposal company said in a statement that it supports elections that are open to all voters.

“Integrity and equal access for all are critical to a healthy voting system and our democracy,” spokeswoman Janette Micelli said.

The Greater Houston Partnership, the Houston region’s chamber of commerce, said in an email that it believes that the state’s voting process should instill confidence in the process and be “open and readily accessible by all.”

“We encourage our elected leaders, on both sides of the political aisle, to balance these two ideals, strengthening all Texans’ right to vote in free and fair elections,” the GHP said.

AA and Dell we knew about, while Waste Management is new to the party – welcome, y’all. As for the GHP, that statement is pretty damn limp, and SB7 author Bryan Hughes is quoted in the story claiming this is exactly what his trash bill is meant to do. Don’t be mealy-mouthed, GHP. Take an actual stand or sit down and be quiet. Daily Kos, which notes that Southwest Airlines and AT&T have “offered vaguer statements in support of voting rights” without mentioning SB7, has more.

Luhnow lawsuit dismissed

Nothing left to litigate about, apparently.

Did not age well

Former Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow’s lawsuit against the ballclub was dismissed on Friday after both parties “resolved their differences,” severing the final tie between the team and its most successful executive in history.

District Court Judge Kyle Carter granted the motion, which was filed jointly in 125th State District Court on Friday. Karl Stern, the attorney who submitted on behalf of Luhnow, did not respond when asked for further comment. An attorney representing the Astros did not return a request for comment.

Luhnow sought more than $20 million in damages in the breach of contract lawsuit he filed in November. The 54-year-old Luhnow claimed he was the “scapegoat” for a sign-stealing scandal that tarnished Houston’s 2017 World Series title.

[…]

Luhnow’s contract called for “any dispute” in the application of its terms to be resolved by “arbitration by the commissioner or the commissioner’s designee,” but Luhnow’s attorneys argued it was unenforceable in their suit due to commissioner Rob Manfred’s role in Luhnow’s dismissal. Manfred wrote MLB’s investigative findings into the sign-stealing scheme.

Luhnow’s lawyers said it would be a “complete sham” to allow Manfred or his designee in any arbitration hearing and called for an independent arbiter to preside. It is unknown whether arbitration occurred to cause the suit’s dismissal, but lawyers unaffiliated with the case surmised that was always a likely outcome.

“Arbitration is confidential. It is outside the public purview and accompanied by orders that make the proceedings secret,” Michael Lyons, of the Dallas firm of Lyons & Simmons, said in November. “Filing suit is a way for Jeff Luhnow to clear the air from a PR standpoint and get his story out in a way he might not otherwise have been able to do.”

See here and here for the background. I don’t really care what happens to Jeff Luhnow, but I feel like once I start blogging on a topic, I should see it through. Also, mandatory arbitration clauses are bad. I think that about covers it.

MLB deadens its balls

Wait, that sounds wrong.

Major League Baseball has slightly deadened its baseballs amid a years-long surge in home runs, a source confirmed to The Associated Press on Monday.

MLB anticipates the changes will be subtle, and a memo to teams last week cites an independent lab that found the new balls will fly 1 to 2 feet shorter on balls hit over 375 feet. Five more teams also plan to add humidors to their stadiums, meaning 10 of MLB’s 30 stadiums are expected to be equipped with humidity-controlled storage spaces.

A person familiar with the note spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity Monday because the memo, sent by MLB executive vice president of baseball operations Morgan Sword, was sent privately. The Athletic first reported the contents of the memo.

The makeup of official Rawlings baseballs used in MLB games has come under scrutiny in recent years. A record 6,776 homers were hit during the 2019 regular season, and the rate of home runs fell only slightly during the pandemic-shortened 2020 season — from 6.6% of plate appearances resulting in homers in 2019 to 6.5% last year.

[…]

The league mandates all baseballs have a coefficient of restitution (COR) — essentially, a measure of the ball’s bounciness — ranging from .530 to .570, but in recent years the average COR had trended upward within the specification range.

In an effort to better center the ball, Rawlings has loosened the tension on the first of three wool windings within the ball. Its research estimates the adjustment will bring the COR down .01 to .02 and will also lessen the ball’s weight by 2.8 grams without changing its size. The league does not anticipate the change in weight will affect pitcher velocities.

The memo did not address the drag of the baseball, which remains a more difficult issue to control.

If you’ve been paying attention to this, you know that the composition of the ball, which was extremely bouncy in 2019 then all of a sudden much less so in the playoffs, has been a mystery and a controversy in recent years. For an in-depth examination, give a listen to this episode of Effectively Wild, where guest Meredith Wills, a PhD astrophysicist, discusses her experiments in literally taking balls from different years apart to figure out what the factors in its changes over time were. MLB says the “deadening” this year should have a relatively small effect, but who knows what that will mean in practice.

MLB has also released its health and safety protocols for the season.

Major League Baseball (MLB) today announced an agreement with the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) on an enhanced set of health and safety protocols for the 2021 season that adopts current best practices in addition to those in place during the successful 2020 season and reflects the recommendations of the parties’ consulting medical experts and infectious disease specialists. The enhanced 2021 Operations Manual will apply during Spring Training, the Championship Season and the Postseason, and also includes a one-year continuation of seven-inning doubleheaders and the modified extra innings rule during the 2020 championship season. Spring Training presented by Camping World begins on Wednesday, February 17th.

“We were able to complete a successful and memorable 2020 season due to the efforts and sacrifices made by our players, Club staff and MLB employees to protect one another. The 2021 season will require a redoubling of those efforts as we play a full schedule with increased travel under a non-regionalized format,” MLB said. “We have built on last year’s productive collaboration between MLB and the Players Association by developing an enhanced safety plan with the consultation of medical experts, infectious disease specialists, and experts from other leagues. We all know the commitment it will take from each of us to keep everyone safe as we get back to playing baseball, and these enhanced protocols will help us do it together.”

Read on for the full list. The actual HSE stuff seems to be modeled after what the NFL did. From a game perspective, there will be the 7-inning doubleheaders and the runner on second to start extra innings, but no National League DH or expanded playoffs, as those were items the MLBPA preferred to defer to the collective bargaining agreement. Here’s hoping MLB can make it through the season as successfully as they did last year.

MLB recognizes Negro Leagues as official major leagues

A long time coming.

Major League Baseball has long celebrated the legacy of the Negro Leagues. But for the first time, MLB is officially recognizing that the quality of the segregation-era circuits was comparable to its own product from that time period.

Addressing what MLB described as a “long overdue recognition,” Commissioner Rob Manfred on Wednesday bestowed Major League status upon seven professional Negro Leagues that operated between 1920 and 1948. The decision means that the approximately 3,400 players of the Negro Leagues during this time period are officially considered Major Leaguers, with their stats and records becoming a part of Major League history.

“All of us who love baseball have long known that the Negro Leagues produced many of our game’s best players, innovations and triumphs against a backdrop of injustice,” Manfred said in a statement. “We are now grateful to count the players of the Negro Leagues where they belong: as Major Leaguers within the official historical record.

”The seven leagues are the Negro National League (I) (1920-31), the Eastern Colored League (1923-28), the American Negro League (1929), the East-West League (1932), the Negro Southern League (1932), the Negro National League (II) (1933-48) and the Negro American League (1937-48). Those leagues combined to produce 35 Hall of Famers, and the result of MLB’s decision is that Negro League legends such as Josh Gibson, Oscar Charleston and Cool Papa Bell have achieved the Major League status denied to them in their living years by the injustice of segregation.

The decision took into account discussions with the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, a 2006 study by the Negro League Researchers and Authors Group and an expanding historical record of Negro League statistics, among other factors. In its announcement, MLB specifically commended historian Larry Lester, a co-founder of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, as well as Gary Ashwill, Scott Simkus, Mike Lynch and Kevin Johnson for their construction of Seamheads’ Negro Leagues Database, which has pieced together newspapers, scorebooks, photo albums and microfiche to provide the most complete statistical record of the Negro Leagues to date.

As part of the decision, MLB and the Elias Sports Bureau — MLB’s official statistician — have begun a review process to determine the full scope of the designation’s effect on records and statistics. Historians and other experts will be consulted as part of that process.

The Negro Leagues’ status change was applauded by Negro Leagues Baseball Museum president Bob Kendrick.

“For historical merit, it is extraordinarily important,” Kendrick said. “Having been around so many of the Negro League players, they never looked to Major League Baseball to validate them. But for fans and for historical sake, this is significant, it really is. So we are extremely pleased with this announcement. And for us, it does give additional credence to how significant the Negro Leagues were, both on and off the field.”

The Negro National League is celebrating its 100th anniversary, and there would have been a lot of commemoration of it in MLB this year had it not been for the coronavirus. As such, the timing of this makes sense, and was widely expected to happen. The stats of some future MLB players like Willie Mays will change as a result, as The Ringer documents in its story on how this came to be.

Negro Leagues players and historians have advocated for reclassification for decades. As Hall of Famer James Thomas “Cool Papa” Bell once said, “The Negro Leagues was a major league. They wouldn’t let us play in the white leagues and we [were] great ballplayers in the Negro Leagues, so how can you say we [weren’t] major league?” In the decades after the 1970 publication of Robert Peterson’s influential book about Black baseball, Only the Ball Was White, researchers such as John Holway and Larry Lester led painstaking efforts to assemble comprehensive statistics from long-buried box scores. Last year, a collection of Negro Leagues scholars and researchers published a book of essays called The Negro Leagues Were Major Leagues, which laid out the strong statistical and ethical case for inclusion. But until 2020—when the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Negro Leagues coincided with sweeping societal protests of racial injustice and an abbreviated, jury-rigged MLB regular season—MLB hadn’t considered the subject.

In response to an inquiry from The Ringer earlier this year, the league began exploring the possibility of reclassification, as we reported in August. Later today, the league will officially announce the results of that effort and proceed with plans to assign the same major league status enjoyed by the AL and the NL to the Negro Leagues—and, in the cases of players like Mays who played in the Negro Leagues between 1920 and 1948 and later joined the AL or NL, integrate records produced in segregated leagues.

“I’m turning cartwheels and excited about a lot of hard work that I’ve put in over the years to get the leagues recognized as a major entity on par with the American and National League,” Lester says. “I don’t know what to say other than, why did it take them so long?”

The causes of the long delay aren’t much of a mystery. As we detailed in August, the exclusion of the Negro Leagues from the official list of major leagues stemmed from the findings of MLB’s Special Baseball Records Committee, which commissioner William Eckert convened in 1968 as part of the preparations for the landmark Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia. In 1969, the all-white, five-man body bestowed major league status on six circuits, including some (such as the 1884 Union Association) whose level of play was far lower than that of the Negro Leagues. But because of the prejudices of the day, the SBRC didn’t even discuss the candidacy of the Negro Leagues.

The SBRC’s ruling remained in effect until today’s announcement, which MLB’s forthcoming press release acknowledges is “long overdue.” For years, the SBRC’s stated standards for major league classification made the chances of reconsideration for the Negro Leagues seem tenuous. In assessing candidates’ qualifications, the committee considered factors including scheduling irregularities, inconsistent playoff formats, the frequency of unofficial games and uncompleted campaigns, media coverage, ballpark capacity, player skill level, and the number of crossover former or future AL or NL players. In recent years, more historians have noted that the Negro Leagues’ shortcomings in those areas were largely products of the racism that spawned segregated leagues in the first place, and that to exclude them on the basis of barnstorming, inconsistent schedules, or a lack of coverage would doubly penalize already-ostracized players for hardships that white baseball authorities imposed.

The existence of the pandemic-altered 2020 season—which, of course, counted as “major league”—made it harder to defend the exclusion of the Negro Leagues on account of scheduling quirks or a lack of consistency in format. MLB’s centennial celebrations of the Negro Leagues, conducted amid swelling public support for the Black Lives Matter movement and national demonstrations against police violence and structural racism, only made it more glaring that the league was still snubbing those past players by neglecting to sanction their status as major leaguers. Those circumstances gave rise to a rapid reappraisal.

“In all the years that I worked on this, I didn’t really think that it was going to eventually result in something like this, says Gary Ashwill, the Seamheads Negro Leagues Database’s cocreator and lead researcher. “It really never entered my head, to be honest.” Ashwill—who has conducted Negro Leagues research for more than 20 years, launched the database in 2011, and continues to update it in collaboration with Lester and several other researchers—sees MLB’s admission of the SBRC’s error as “movement toward rectifying some historic injustices amid the biggest historic injustice in the history of baseball. And also, at least symbolically, it’s a move toward a kind of reckoning with the history of racism in the United States.”

Read the rest, and read their August story as well. And then, go read this less sanguine view of the situation, and maybe ponder how much better off we’d all be if the Negro Leagues and the men – and women! – who played in them had been treated as the true major leaguers they always were all along.

More on the Luhnow lawsuit

Because I now have the brain space to think about stuff like this again.

Did not age well

While baseball fans and courtroom voyeurs might long for a public legal showdown between Astros owner Jim Crane and former general manager Jeff Luhnow, attorneys say the more likely outcome of their contract dispute over Luhnow’s firing is a quiet, secretive resolution behind the protective wall of private arbitration.

Three Texas attorneys were united on that point of view Monday after examining the 18-page breach of contract lawsuit filed by Luhnow against the ballclub before Texas 125th District Judge Kyle Carter.

Luhnow alleges that Crane violated his contract by firing him in January after he was suspended for a year by Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred. Crane’s decision, Luhnow says, denied him benefits that include $22 million of his $31 million contract plus bonuses and a guaranteed slice of the ballclub’s profits.

While the bulk of the complaint alleges a plot by the Astros and MLB to scapegoat Luhnow as the villain of the 2017-18 sign-stealing scandal, attorneys say its most critical point is in the 34th of 43 paragraphs, which says Luhnow is required to submit contract disputes to arbitration “by the commissioner or the commissioner’s designee.”

“Jeff Luhnow will have a very difficult time defeating the arbitration agreement clause,” said Rogge Dunn, a Dallas attorney who has represented former Orioles manager Buck Showalter, Texas Tech University and a former Baylor University Title IX oversight director in employment law cases.

Luhnow’s attorneys say it would be a “complete sham” for Manfred to have a key role in arbitrating disputes in which he is a central figure. The lawsuit asks Carter to submit the case to a jury or to appoint an arbitrator of his own choosing.

“His point is that this is an inside deal,” Dunn said. “The commissioner will protect the owner and scapegoat me, and he also gets to appoint the arbitrator, who will know on whose bread is being buttered.”

Mike Muskat, a partner with the Houston firm Muskat, Mahony & Devine, said Texas law is “very favorable toward enforcement provisions,” which decreases the prospect Luhnow can avoid an arbitration proceeding in which MLB gets to pick the arbitrator.

“I’ll give (Luhnow’s attorneys) credit for a creative argument, but the law is pretty solid,” Muskat said. “There’s a pretty high hurdle to avoid arbitration based on the selection of the arbitrator.”

See here for the background, and there’s a copy of the lawsuit embedded in the story. I’ll say this much, if Luhnow turns this into a crusade against mandatory arbitration clauses in employment agreements, even if it’s for the most self-interested of reasons (*), I will regain a modicum of respect for him. He’s right that this kind of forced arbitration is a scam that greatly benefits employers – and businesses in general when we’re talking about other types of service agreements – but the fight needs to be bigger than this. You can do it, Jeff!

(*) Money is very much the motivating factor here, as there’s over $30 million at stake. If the Astros can fire Luhnow for cause, instead of firing him for being a loser, as is the case most of the time when managers/GMs are canned, then they don’t owe him any of the money he was to be paid in his contract. Whatever else you may think of Luhnow, he’s not an idiot.

Luhnow sues Astros

This ought to be entertaining.

Did not age well

Jeff Luhnow sued the Houston Astros for breach of contract on Sunday, alleging that Astros owner Jim Crane and Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred negotiated penalties for the sign-stealing scandal that enabled the team to paint Luhnow as “the scapegoat for the organization” and fire its general manager “in order to save more than $22 million in guaranteed salary.”

In January, after a two-month investigation into how the Astros violated baseball rules by improperly deploying technology to decode signs in the 2017 and 2018 seasons, Manfred suspended Luhnow and Astros manager A.J. Hinch for the 2020 season. Crane then fired Luhnow and Hinch.

Luhnow’s lawsuit uses quotation marks around the word “investigation” and calls it “a negotiated resolution” between Crane and Manfred “that enabled the team to keep its World Series championship, went to great lengths to publicly exonerate Crane, and scapegoated Luhnow for a sign-stealing scandal that he had no knowledge of and played no part in.”

Manfred later suspended Alex Cora, who was the Astros’ bench coach in 2017 and then became manager of the Boston Red Sox, for the 2018 season. The Detroit Tigers hired Hinch as their manager last week, and the Red Sox re-hired Cora.

Luhnow has not found work in baseball. His suit, filed in Texas district court in Houston, alleges the Astros breached their contract with him because none of the conditions that would be considered as just cause for his dismissal actually occurred.

Yes, the first story appeared in the LA Times. Go figure. The Chron followed a little later with a copy of the lawsuit and some more details.

“The commissioner struck a deal with Crane to make Luhnow the scapegoat of the cheating scandal while absolving Crane, the players and others of responsibility,” the suit reads.

[…]

Luhnow’s lawsuit calls the league’s investigation “deeply flawed.” It paints Director of Advance Information Tom Koch-Weser as the scandal’s “actual ringleader” who, according to the suit, blamed Luhnow “to save his own job.”

Major League Baseball’s investigation included 22,000 text and chat messages to or from Koch-Weser that, according to the suit, Manfred “ignored … as part of the effort to scapegoat Luhnow.” Luhnow is not included in any of the messages, according to the petition.

The petition claims that Koch-Weser was the “only witness to claim that Luhnow mentioned electronic sign-stealing.” Luhnow’s lawsuit calls him a “biased source who has zero credibility.”

“The Astros told Koch-Weser that he could keep his job so long as his actions were sanctioned by his supervisors, including Luhnow,” the suit states.

Koch-Weser remained employed by the Astros throughout the 2020 season.

Luhnow’s lawsuit attempted to demonstrate his adherence to baseball’s crackdown on electronic sign-stealing during the 2017-19 seasons. In Major League Baseball’s report, Manfred excoriated Luhnow for “(failing) to take any adequate steps to ensure that his club was in compliance with the rules.”

You can add this to the season ticket holders’ lawsuit as part of your offseason things to watch. The suit was filed in the 125th Civil Court, so congratulations to Judge Kyle Carter for having this hot potato land on his bench. I have no idea if any of these allegations are true, but I can’t wait to find out more.

What more is there to be said about the Astros sign stealing scandal?

There’s at least one podcast’s worth of material out there.

Did not age well

Rather than writing a sequel to “Astroball,” his 2018 book about the improbable rise of the Jim Crane/Jeff Luhnow-era Astros, former Sports Illustrated writer Ben Reiter opted for a six-episode podcast that delved into the sources and aftermath of the 2017-18 sign-stealing scandal.

The podcast, titled “The Edge,” wraps up Wednesday and Wednesday, Nov. 11, with a two-part final episode that likely will be devoted in large measure to Reiter’s interviews with Luhnow, the former general manager who was ousted along with manager A.J. Hinch in the wake of the sign-stealing revelations.

Reiter said in a recent interview that he expects the podcast to be his final word, at least for now, on the Astros’ rise and fall that has occupied much of his professional life since 2014.

He acknowledges, however, that the impact of the scandal will be lasting, both for the players and the Astros brand, and that details remain hidden about the case that will be brought into the light grudgingly, if at all.

“A lot of people are going to be very motivated to keep their lips sealed forever on this, including some very powerful people,” Reiter said. “My hope as a journalist is my belief is that the truth always finds a way to emerge. I think that is what’s going to happen with this story.”

Reiter said he took on the podcast because he “felt a great personal responsibility to dive back into this story. I had written so much about the team since 2014, and I’d missed something. Everybody had missed something.”

[…]

As for his goal of learning as much as possible about what happened with the Astros and why it happened, Reiter said he is satisfied that he has uncovered as much as can be learned. He does, however, acknowledge that MLB’s report in January was incomplete.

“I think that there are certain things that MLB knows that do not show up in the report,” he said.

“MLB wants to move forward. They want to put this scandal behind them. There’s certainly the possibility that motivation worked against a full investigation of what happened, not only in the Astros, but across the league.”

The podcast is called “The Edge”, and you can find it wherever you’d expect to find podcasts. Now that I might have a bit of spare time in my schedule, I plan to give it a listen.

MLB is on its way back

What a long, strange trip it was, and who knows how successful any of it will ultimately be. But here we are.

The lack of a deal between MLB and the MLB Players Association led to the league imposing a schedule, as was its right in a March 26 agreement that also guaranteed players a fully prorated portion of their salaries. MLB on Monday told the union it planned to impose a schedule as long as the players would report to training camp by July 1 and codify a health and safety manual that runs more than 100 pages. The players agreed to both on Tuesday.

“All remaining issues have been resolved and Players are reporting to training camps,” the union tweeted Tuesday night.

The season’s success probably depends on MLB’s ability to contain coronavirus spread, an issue the health and safety protocol covers in immense detail. Addressing everything from travel to social distancing to a ban on spitting, the manual is a strict guide for a potential 2020 season and illustrates the difficulty of pulling off such an endeavor.

If it can, MLB in 2020 will look radically different:

  • Teams will play their four divisional opponents 10 times and each of the five interleague opponents in the same geographical area four games apiece.
  • The National League will use a designated hitter.
  • In extra innings, teams will begin with a runner on second base.
  • The trade deadline will be Aug. 31, less than a month before the regular season is scheduled to end
  • Rosters will start at 30 men for the first two weeks, then go to 28 for the next two weeks and stay at 26 for the remainder of the season.
  • Teams will have a taxi squad that allows them to have as many as 60 players available to play in major league games.
  • There will be a special COVID-19 injured list with no minimum or maximum length of time spent on it, while standard injured list stints will be for 10 days, and the typical 60-day stint will instead be for 45 days.

[…]

Under the imposed season, players will receive their full pro rata, a sticking point in negotiations during which owners sought pay cuts in their first three proposals. The players never budged from their stance, and they will receive in total around $1.5 billion — about 37% of their full-season salaries. Players will not receive forgiveness on the $170 million salary advance they received as part of the March agreement, and they are owed no bonus money from the postseason — two items that the league had offered as part of a deal that included the players rubber-stamping expanding the playoffs from 10 to 16 teams.

The players sought a 70-game season in which they would receive $50 million in playoff revenue as well as a cut in 2021 of new money from TV rights in the expanded playoffs. The league also would have received the ability to wear advertising patches on uniforms and the support of players wearing in-game microphones, among other ancillary items.

All potential deals fell apart amid the animus between the parties. That they wound up where they did on Tuesday, agreeing to the implementation of a season after not agreeing on anything for months, served as a bright moment after darkness had shrouded the sport since it shut down in mid-March.

This was more or less where everyone expected things to wind up after what turned out to be MLB and the players’ final offers were rejected. Both sides will now be able to file a grievance claiming the other side did not negotiate in good faith. I’d put more money on the players winning that than the owners. How successful any of this will be given that positive tests have become a frequent occurrence among teams and players in various leagues. I’m ready to see MLB play again, but there’s a big part of me that’s still very dubious, both about whether this can happen and whether it should. For now, it is and it will. The Chron has more.

No Yankees letter yet

May we all keep following this, all the other news about baseball is terrible.

The Yankees and Major League Baseball on Monday asked the 2nd U.S. Court of Appeals to prevent public release of a 2017 letter from MLB commissioner Rob Manfred to the Yankees that disgruntled fantasy league players say may contain evidence about cheating violations by the ballclub.

U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff last week granted a request to unseal the letter by attorneys representing a group of DraftKings daily fantasy players who sued MLB over the impact of the Astros’ and Red Sox’ electronic sign-stealing scandals of 2017-18.

The letter from Manfred to the Yankees was included in discovery materials handed over during the fantasy players’ lawsuit, which was filed in the southern district of New York. It was sealed from public view because the Yankees said that making the letter public would cause “severe reputational injury.”

Attorneys for the fantasy players, however, say the letter may provide evidence that the Yankees were involved in a “more serious, sign-stealing scheme” than the ballclub’s technical violations cited by Manfred in 2017.

See here for the background. Judge Rakoff has since put his original ruling on hold pending appeal, so who knows how long this could take, and for something that may ultimately be about not very much that’s new. But until then, we all get to speculate and post stuff on Twitter. That counts as entertainment in these troubled times. CBS Sports and NJ.com have more.

We’re going to get the default MLB season

Ugh.

The Major League Baseball Players Association asked MLB to set a schedule for the 2020 season rather than counter the latest return-to-play proposal by the league, setting the stage for MLB to implement a significantly shortened schedule and deepening the labor strife between the parties.

In a statement Saturday night, MLBPA executive director Tony Clark rejected MLB’s latest proposal and said: “Further dialogue with the league would be futile. It’s time to get back to work. Tell us when and where.”

A March agreement between the parties allows MLB to set a schedule, and the league has suggested that in the absence of a negotiated agreement with the union it could impose a schedule of somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 games and pay players full prorated salaries worth a total of around $1.25 billion.

MLBPA lead negotiator Bruce Meyer, in a letter sent to deputy commissioner Dan Halem on Saturday night and obtained by ESPN, said: “We demand that you inform us of your plans by close of business on Monday, June 15.”

In a statement on Saturday night, MLB said in part: “We are disappointed that the MLBPA has chosen not to negotiate in good faith over resumption of play after MLB has made three successive proposals that would provide players, Clubs and our fans with an amicable resolution to a very difficult situation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Upon any implementation of a schedule, players wouldn’t necessarily report to a second spring training immediately, sources told ESPN. The parties still do not have an agreement on a health-and-safety protocol and would need one before players arrive. Any season would be scheduled to start after a three-week spring training, though a coronavirus outbreak could change the league’s plans. Multiple players on 40-man rosters have tested positive for the virus recently, according to sources.

If MLB does implement a season, both parties could file grievances to be heard by an arbitrator, though neither would necessarily delay games being played, sources said. The union could file a grievance that the league did not fulfill its obligation to play the most games possible, sources told ESPN. The March agreement says the league should use “best efforts to play as many games as possible, while taking into account player safety and health, rescheduling needs, competitive considerations, stadium availability, and the economic feasibility of various alternatives.” The league could likewise file a grievance over a lack of good faith negotiations regarding salary by the union, sources said.

Commissioner Rob Manfred told ESPN this week that “unequivocally we are going to play Major League Baseball this year,” placing the chances at “100 percent.”

Here’s the full statement from the MLBPA:

Buster Olney puts most of the blame for this impasse on the owners. I’d make it at least 90-10 in that direction. The owners do have one legitimate complaint, which is that their revenue model depends a lot more on game attendance and associated items like parking and concessions than other sports, where national TV is the bulk of the income. As such, games with no fans will indeed eat into their bottom lines. The problem is that they basically never changed their initial offer, which would have slashed player pay by about a billion dollars, and any claim on their part about their actual financial situation is completely muddled by the secrecy of their accounting. Ben Clemens goes through a very simple exercise in financial engineering to show how owners can make lots of money while showing zero cash balances every year. Even a cursory study of MLB history would cast a large amount of doubt on any financial claims the owners would make.

We’re still not out of the woods here. Safety protocols for the players and everyone who works at the games still need to be established. The NBA has agreed in principle to restart their season, but even they still have player concerns to address before anyone laces up a pair of sneakers. And of course, none of this bodes well for the next round of collective bargaining agreements between MLB and the players. After a long and generally prosperous time of labor peace, it looks like it’s about to get tumultuous. Hold onto your hats.

A twist in the sign stealing story

We’ll see how twisted it gets.

A federal judge ordered the unsealing of a 2017 letter from Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred to the New York Yankees that, according to court documents, detailed a “more serious, sign-stealing scheme” than the league initially revealed that September.

The Yankees and Major League Baseball have until Monday at noon to submit “a minimally redacted version” of the letter, according to the 12-page memorandum order filed in the Southern District of New York.

The letter itself may not be unsealed until June 19 in order for the Yankees to file an emergency appeal.

[…]

The letter in question was obtained during the discovery phase of a $5 million class-action lawsuit brought by DraftKings players against the league, the Astros and Boston Red Sox in the wake of the sign-stealing revelations earlier this winter.

A group of more than 100 plaintiffs, led by daily fantasy player Kristopher Olson, claimed the league and two teams were liable for any money lost during games where either the Red Sox or Astros cheated.

Judge Jed S. Rakoff dismissed the suit in April, but the plaintiffs are appealing the decision to the 2nd Court of Appeals.

Rakoff wrote Friday’s memorandum order that called for the letter’s unsealing, finding in favor of the DraftKings players who remain as plaintiffs. In their argument to keep the letter’s contents sealed, the Yankees said releasing the letter would inflict “significant reputational injury.”

“Much of the letter’s contents have already been revealed in the 2017 press release,” Rakoff wrote in his decision. “Furthermore, embarrassment on the part of MLB or the Yankees about the precise contents of the letter is not particularly weighty, and the privacy interests of any individuals mentioned in the letter may be remedied by minimal redaction.”

See here for more on the DraftKings lawsuit, to which the Yankees were not a party. My guess is that the single most likely outcome of this is that the letter tells us very little we didn’t already know, based on what Judge Rakoff says in his ruling, but the possibility certainly exists for something juicy to be in there. It’s not going to change anything the Astros did, but it might contribute to their “everyone else was doing it too” defense. It’s also possible that this will make MLB look bad – again – for the way they handled the investigation and the punishments that were handed out. We’ll find out soon enough. At this point, all I can say is that I’m glad for some baseball news that isn’t about the owners’ latest ridiculous season-starting proposal to the players. Views from 314 and Pinstripe Alley, both Yankees blogs, have more.

NBA sets a plan, MLB still working it out

Happening today.

The NBA is finalizing details of a plan which is expected to be approved by the league’s Board of Governors on Thursday, paving the way for a return from the coronavirus shutdown.

The board is poised to give the green light to commissioner Adam Silver’s return of basketball which would begin July 31 with a 22-team format, and end in mid-October with a champion being crowned, ESPN reported.

The plan requires support from three quarters of the league’s 30 teams in order to be approved.

The NBA suspended its season on March 11 because of the global COVID-19 pandemic.

The Milwaukee Bucks, Toronto Raptors, Boston Celtics, Miami Heat, Indiana Pacers, Philadelphia 76ers, Nets and Orlando Magic currently hold the playoff spots in the Eastern Conference.

The Los Angeles Lakers, Los Angeles Clippers, Denver Nuggets, Utah Jazz, Oklahoma City Thunder, Houston Rockets, Dallas Mavericks and Memphis Grizzlies occupy the postseason positions in the Western Conference.

Under the plan, each of the 22 teams will play eight regular-season games for seeding purposes for the postseason.

The 16 teams currently in the playoff picture will be joined by the New Orleans Pelicans, Portland Trail Blazers, Phoenix Suns, Sacramento Kings and San Antonio Spurs in the Western Conference.

In the East, the Washington Wizards are also included.

[…]

All games are expected to be within the confines of Disney’s ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex in Orlando Florida, with all teams remaining on site to minimise risk of COVID-19 outbreaks.

See here for the background. ESPN adds a bit more:

Life in the NBA bubble will be governed by a set of safety protocols. While players and coaches will be allowed to golf or eat at outdoor restaurants, they will also need to maintain social distancing, sources told ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne.

The NBA is planning to have uniform, daily testing for the coronavirus within the Disney campus environment, sources told ESPN. ESPN is owned by The Walt Disney Company.

If a player tests positive for the virus, the league’s intent would be to remove that player from the team to quarantine and treat individually — and continue to test other team members as they play on, sources said.

Employees at the Disney resort will have to maintain similar protocols. For example, no staff will be allowed into players’ rooms, and hallways will be carefully managed to avoid crowding, sources told Shelburne.

Weird, but the NBA had played the bulk of its season anyway, and the playoffs are always a different thing entirely. I just hope those employees at the Disney resort had someone thinking about their welfare as this deal was being hammered out. The Chron has more.

And then there’s MLB:

Major League Baseball has rejected the players’ offer for a 114-game regular season with no additional salary cuts and told the union it did not plan to make a counterproposal, sources confirmed to ESPN.

Players made their proposal Sunday, up from an 82-game regular season in management’s offer last week. Opening Day would be June 30, and the regular season would end Oct. 31, nearly five weeks after the Sept. 27 conclusion that MLB’s proposal stuck to from the season’s original schedule.

MLB told the union it had no interest in extending the season into November, when it fears a second wave of the coronavirus could disrupt the postseason and jeopardize $787 million in broadcast revenue.

While management has suggested it could play a short regular season of about 50 games with no more salary reductions, it has not formally proposed that concept. Earlier this week, multiple players told ESPN that they would not abide a shorter schedule, with one saying, “We want to play more games, and they want to play less. We want more baseball.”

See here for the previous update. If this sounds dire to you, let me refer you again to Eugene Freedman, who’s been around this block a few times.

Basically, it looks like the sides have agreed to the March deal, and now need to work out the safety and testing details, plus what to do if a player wants to opt out. Maybe the NBA getting set to start at the end of July will inspire them to agree on some version of their July 4 Opening Day season. Fingers crossed. The Chron has more.

MLB players make their counteroffer

Back to the owners.

The Major League Baseball Players Association delivered a return-to-play proposal to MLB on Sunday that includes a 114-game season, deferred salaries in the event of a canceled postseason and the option for all players to opt out of a potential 2020 season due to coronavirus concerns, sources familiar with the details told ESPN.

The proposal, which was the first from the union and came on the heels of an MLB plan that was loudly rejected by the players, comes at a seminal moment as baseball tries to become the first major American professional sport to return. Although the players expect the league to reject it, they hope it will serve as a bridge to a potential deal this week.

The 114-game season, which under the union’s proposal would run from June 30 to Oct. 31, is expected to be immediately dismissed by the league; MLB has proposed an 82-game season and suggested that the more games teams play this year, the more money they lose. The union remains steadfast that players should receive their full prorated salaries, while MLB’s plan included significant pay cuts that affected the highest-paid players the most but covered all levels.

The inclusion of potential deferrals in Sunday’s proposal was an acknowledgement by the players that amid the coronavirus pandemic and unrest around the country, cash-flow issues could prove problematic for owners. The deferrals would occur only if the playoffs were canceled, a concern the league has voiced, and would total $100 million. They would apply to players whose contracts call for $10 million-plus salaries and include interest to make them whole.

Deferrals could be part of any counter from the league, which had not officially responded to the union’s proposal Sunday. With the desire to start a season by the first week of July, both parties recognize that time is of the essence for a deal.

While MLB’s 67-page health-and-safety protocol draft included the ability for high-risk players — those with preexisting conditions or family members more susceptible to COVID-19 — to opt out of the season, the union’s proposal suggests that players can do so and receive salary. Players not deemed high risk would be able to opt out but would not receive salary.

See here for the background. I would recommend you read these Twitter threads about collective bargaining by Eugene Freedman for a better understanding of what the players are doing. As he describes there and in the latest Effectively Wild, the owners’ proposal to cut salaries and the players’ offer of a longer season are both basically non-starters unless the other side agrees to reopen the matter. Now that they have both asserted that they won’t open those matters, the real negotiations about health and safety can begin. At least, that’s the hope. If there’s going to be progress on this, it will probably happen this week, but you never know. Fangraphs has more.

UPDATE: Lookie here:

Now, maybe, we are getting somewhere.

MLB’s latest startup proposal

The league still wants to stick it to the players.

Major League Baseball drew the ire of the players’ union Tuesday with an economic proposal that called for a significant cut in salaries that would affect all players and particularly the game’s highest paid, sources familiar with the proposal told ESPN.

The long-awaited plan, the first volley in an expected back-and-forth that will determine whether baseball returns in 2020, proposed a marginal salary structure in which the lowest-paid players would receive close to a full share of their prorated salary and the game’s stars receive far less than expected.

Players immediately bristled at the proposal, which includes an 82-game schedule that would begin in early July after a 21-day spring training, sources familiar with the plan said. Teams would play three exhibition games in the final week before starting a regular season that would finish Sept. 27.

The MLB Players Association is expected to reject the plan and counter in the coming days with a proposal that could include a longer season, according to sources.

The league’s proposal, which includes bonuses if postseason games are played, offers lower-salaried players a higher percentage of their expected wages and would give some of the game’s biggest stars a fractional cut of their salaries. The formula the league offered, for example, would take a player scheduled to make the league minimum ($563,500), give him a prorated number based on 82 games ($285,228) and take a 10% cut from that figure, leaving him with a $256,706 salary.

[…]

Although the proposal would keep a larger proportion of players close to their whole salaries — about 65% make $1 million or less and would receive more than 80% of their prorated salaries — players young and old objected to the plan, which they believe runs in contrast to a March agreement with the league that they believe legislated that players be paid full prorated salaries upon the return of baseball.

The league believes language in the deal calls for good-faith negotiations with the union about the economic feasibility of playing with no fans, which MLB expects to do upon a return. The league initially considered proposing a 50-50 revenue split with the players, citing massive losses due to the coronavirus pandemic. MLBPA executive director Tony Clark immediately rejected the idea, equating it to a salary cap.

See here for the background. Basically, this PR move by the owners is to stick to the highest-paid players, in an attempt to divide the union and make the players look as unsympathetic as possible to the public. I’ll outsource the analysis of this to Jay Jaffe, who sums it up as follows:

While this proposal does bear some resemblance to a progressive taxation scheme, the question that needs to be asked is why it’s the millionaires, whose careers have limited windows, bearing the brunt of the economic impact instead of the billionaire owners for whom annual profits — and for MLB, which has seen revenues grow for 17 straight years, there have been a whole lot of those — and losses pale in comparison to escalating franchise values. That’s without even considering the disproportionate risk the players are assuming by returning to play amid the pandemic. It’s not just their livelihoods that are at risk, it’s their lives. They can’t write those losses off.

Here’s a convenient timeline of the action so far, with some fact-checking as needed. By the way, while the owners as a whole are targeting the stars, one franchise is also sticking it to their minor leaguers, always a classy move. I’ll give a last word on this to Joe Sheehan:

More insidious, though, is the principle behind the plan. It’s asking Mike Trout to give money to Arte Moreno. Trout is rich; Moreno is wealthy. When Moreno had leverage, he paid Trout as little as he could. Now he’s asking Trout to give him back basically all the money Trout made in the first four years of his career.

Of course, any possibility of baseball or any other sport relaunching at this time is highly dependent on testing and keeping the players and coaches and umpires and staffers and everybody working at the stadiums COVID-free. Michael Baumann digs into what that means.

I asked Abdul El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and the former health commissioner for the city of Detroit, whether we know enough about COVID-19 to plan for games in October and November. “Yes, we do know enough about the virus,” El-Sayed says, “to know that we can’t make decisions five to six months in advance.”

One thing baseball has going for it compared to other major team sports—football, basketball, and so on—is that the actual gameplay isn’t particularly conducive to COVID-19 transmission. “An outdoor sport like baseball where [players are] not breathing heavily in each other’s faces seems like a good candidate for a sport that can return,” says Laura Albert, an associate professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin whose research includes the optimization of emergency and public health systems.

While Albert isn’t worried as much about the in-game component of MLB’s plan to return in July, though, she has other concerns. Namely, even if the league prohibits sunflower seeds, tobacco, and spitting, there would still be plenty of scenarios during which a player with the virus could spread it to others. “There will be positive cases and there will be transmission between players,” she says. “And I anticipate it happening on airplanes and buses, in the locker rooms or bathrooms. It’s not totally clear how we can change those spaces to be safe if there’s a bunch of people using them.”

[…]

MLB’s return, whenever it happens, is already being heralded as a sign of things returning to normal. Indeed, as much as baseball fans miss the game itself, that touchstone to a more comfortable time is a huge reason why even a limited season is such an attractive proposition. But MLB has already accepted that if the league is going to have a prayer of making it to the World Series this year, the game won’t look, feel, or sound the same as it has in the past.

“Our lives are not going back,” Albert says. “They’re not returning to what they were like before, and there’s not one way we could really control the spread of COVID-19—there’s many things we have to do. And so it’s great that the leagues are embracing this. It’s not window dressing. I think it’s important for us to get used to these things.”

There’s a limit not only to what MLB and the MLBPA can do to ensure that the game is safe, but also to what they can know and predict. It will certainly be difficult for such a powerful industry to comprehend that idea, but it will be necessary for the baseball world to understand and embrace it. Given how COVID-19 works, the data on infection rate leaves investigators and public officials to work on a lag.

“We’re not dealing with linear dynamics here. That’s the hard part that I think is confounding so many of our best efforts to respond reasonably,” El-Sayed says. “You’re talking about exponential growth. Everything that we see today is information about the dynamics of the virus two weeks ago. And so all of a sudden you could be having exponential growth dynamics that only start showing up after it’s too late for you to act to stop them.”

As much as everyone is tired of having the course of the country and the economy determined on a fortnightly basis, [Thomas J. Duszynski, the epidemiology education director at the Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis] says that’s about as far ahead as we can responsibly plan right now. He’s open to the idea of MLB coming back—but only if the league is willing to stop the season if conditions change. “If they go down this road and start to play games, which personally I hope they do, and we see a shift in that science that says, ‘Hey, wait a minute, the disease is getting worse again,’ is MLB going to be able to pull this back?” he says. “Are they going to be able to shut it down and still survive?”

Both El-Sayed and Duszynski believe that it’s possible that a leaguewide infection could progress to the point where MLB simply can’t press on.

“God forbid a player dies because of this,” Dusynski says. “What kind of ripple effect would that have through Major League Baseball?”

I’m actually not that worried about a player dying. It could happen, but it would be unlikely. I’m much more worried about a coach, or an umpire, or a stadium staffer dying. Or a member of a player’s family, or a family member of one of these other groups. That could happen regardless – about 0.7% of players have already had COVID-19, per the MLB antibody study. Clearly, the risk is greater if the games are played. The players have the most leverage to assess and try to mitigate the risk to themselves and their families. I hope that’s sufficient for everyone else.

The NBA inches closer to a return

We’ll know more soon.

NBA teams are expecting the league office will issue guidelines around June 1 that will allow franchises to start recalling players who’ve left their markets as a first step toward a formal ramp-up for the season’s resumption, sources told ESPN.

Teams expect a similar timeline from the league on when they’ll be allowed to expand individual workouts already underway with in-market players to include more team personnel, sources said.

The NBA suspended the 2019-20 season on March 11 because of the coronavirus pandemic. The league is discussing a step-by-step plan for a resumption of the season that includes an initial two-week recall of players into team marketplaces for a period of quarantine, one to two weeks of individual workouts at team facilities, and a two- to three-week formal training camp, sources told ESPN.

Barring an unforeseen turn of events, many NBA owners, executives and National Basketball Players Association elders believe commissioner Adam Silver will green-light the return to play in June — with games expected to resume sometime before the end of July, sources said.

The NBA is still considering a two-site format for the return of the season, including Orlando’s Walt Disney World and Las Vegas, sources said.

See here for some background. That story was from Thursday. As of Saturday, things had progressed a bit further.

The NBA is going to Disneyworld. Or at least, it hopes to save its season and declare a champion in a single-site scenario outside of Orlando.

In the most public sign yet that the NBA is hopeful that it can resume its 2019-20 season amid the coronavirus pandemic, NBA spokesman Mike Bass said the league has begun exploratory talks with the Walt Disney Company about using its venue in central Florida to hold practices and games without fans present.

“The NBA, in conjunction with the National Basketball Players Association, is engaged in exploratory conversations with The Walt Disney Company about restarting the 2019-20 NBA season in late July at Disney’s ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex in Florida as a single site for an NBA campus for games, practices and housing,” Bass said in a statement.

“Our priority continues to be the health and safety of all involved, and we are working with public health experts and government officials on a comprehensive set of guidelines to ensure that appropriate medical protocols and protections are in place.”

The MLS is also looking at Orlando, at the ESPN Wide World of Sports facility. I don’t know how much that might complicate the logistics, but one presumes they will figure it out. The Chron had reported earlier in the week that the Toyota Center in Houston had been in the discussion as a potential venue, but that is apparently no longer in play. It’s possible the NBA will go straight into a playoff system, or it may play some more regular season games but eliminate the teams with the worst records to limit the number of people required to be there. I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

As you know, Major League Baseball has also been working on a season-starting proposal, though in typical fashion the owners are making up claims about financial losses in an attempt to back out of the previous agreement with the players and squeeze them on salaries. I suspect this will get resolved at some point, in which case we may suddenly have a lot of sports coming back to us. Assuming, of course, that there isn’t a big post-reopening spike in infections or other insurmountable obstacle. But if things go as the optimists hope, we could go from no sports to a fairly full slate in a hurry. We’ll see.

Here’s the MLB season-starter proposal

Make of it what you will.

Major League Baseball owners gave the go-ahead Monday to making a proposal to the players’ union that could lead to the coronavirus-delayed season starting around the Fourth of July weekend in ballparks without fans, a plan that envisioned expanding the designated hitter to the National League for 2020.

Spring training would start in early to mid-June, a person familiar with the decision told The Associated Press. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because details of the plan were not announced.

[…]

Teams will propose that players receive the percentage of their 2020 salaries based on a 50-50 split of revenues MLB receives during the regular-season and postseason, which likely will be among the most contentious aspects of the proposal during negotiations with the players’ association.

That proposal would take into account fans being able to return to ballparks at some point, perhaps with a small percentage of seats sold at first and then gradually increasing.

Rosters would be expanded from 26 to around 30. With minor leagues shuttered, there likely will be the addition of about 20 players per club akin to the NFL’s practice squad.

MLB officials are slated to make a presentation to the union on Tuesday.

Players and teams agreed to a deal on March 26 that called for each player to receive only a portion of salary, determined by what percentage of a 162-game schedule is played. As part of that deal, if no season is played each player would receive 2020 service time matching what the player earned in 2019.

But that deal is contingent there being no restrictions on mass gatherings at the federal, state, city and local level; no relevant travel restrictions in the U.S. and Canada; and Commissioner Rob Manfred after consulting the union and medical expects, determines there is no risk to playing in front of fans at regular-season ballparks.

Players and teams committed to “discuss in good faith the economic feasibility of playing games in the absence of spectators or at appropriate neutral sites.” Manfred has said about 40% of MLB revenue is tied to gate, including concessions, parking, ballpark advertising, luxury suites and programs.

Union officials and players have cited the March 26 agreement as setting economic terms and say they have no inclination for additional cuts.

See here for the background and some more details about the initial proposal. I’m going to hand this off to Fangraphs for some deeper analysis.

In a half-season scenario, if teams lost nearly all of their stadium revenue, and every other revenue and expense stream (including player payroll) were cut in half, there’s an argument that the owners might lose about $50 million per team this season. While that’s still about $2 billion shy of the profits they’ve made over the previous three seasons ($4 billion including BAMTech money), it’s a significant loss. Of course, the vast majority of those non-stadium revenues will not be cut in half. MLB is still in a very good position with its television partners, and even getting 75% of non-stadium revenue would allow the league to break even without renegotiating the deal it previously agreed to with the players. And that’s before we even get to teams taking lower annual local rights fees in exchange for ownership stakes in regional sports networks, which might send another half-billion dollars or more to teams annually. Those profits aren’t included in the revenue sharing among teams, and similar issues will make revenue sharing with players incredibly difficult to determine.

And even if we were to assume that by playing half a season without fans MLB is going to operate at a loss paying the players half their salaries, and then further decide that players should share a greater part of the burden of potential losses in the form of revenue sharing despite not having received any of the benefits of increasing profitability the last three years, what constitutes revenue in this scenario? Calculating revenues in a normal year is hard; calculating them this year will be near-impossible. We can talk about the under-market local TV deals of the Red Sox, Mets, Yankees, and Cubs, which siphon off baseball revenue in the form of network ownership, as a potential sticking point but even more difficult is determining revenue on national and local television deals and sponsorships.

If a team or the league agrees to take a discounted amount for a television deal or local sponsorship in order to make more money in future years, would such a deal require player approval? After all, the team or the league would be actively negotiating away money that might go to the players this year, but wouldn’t in future seasons when revenue sharing wasn’t in effect. The league and teams have longstanding relationships with their television partners and sponsors and they want to keep each other happy and provide each other with the biggest possible return on those relationships. The players are uniquely disadvantaged when trying to determine revenue due to these relationships and the potential for moving money around to the advantage of the parties already engaged in the deal. Involving the players will only lead to more acrimony and bigger headaches down the line.

So I dunno. I would dearly love to see baseball start again, if it is sufficiently safe, but I have no desire to see the players sacrifice their salaries for the owners’ benefit. I’m sure there’s room to make this work better, if the sides are willing to talk. We’ll see how the players react. ESPN has more.

MLB’s restart plan is coming

Get ready.

According to multiple reports, commissioner Rob Manfred will present a blueprint for the season’s resumption during a Monday conference call with league owners. From there, the first formal proposal for a return to play would be given to the Players Association, perhaps as early as Tuesday.

Reports on Saturday characterized the situation as still extremely fluid, with many hurdles to overcome. Approval is not only needed from the players but also from local governments and medical experts with whom the league has been in constant consultation.

According to reports, the plan presented to owners is expected to contain an 80-game season that begins in early July with the goal of playing as many games as possible in empty home ballparks.

Some form of a second spring training would be required in June — either at home ballparks or at facilities in Florida and Arizona. Active rosters would have to be expanded beyond 26 players, perhaps as big as 45 or 50, according to The Athletic.

Teams would play exclusively against their divisional opponents and against their geographic counterpart in the other league — meaning the Astros could face teams in only the American League and National League West. The postseason would expand from 10 to 14 teams, too.

Concerns about harder hit areas of the country, travel and the availability of widespread testing for COVID-19 are still obvious. What to do if a player or staff member tests positive is still unknown.

In an agreement between the league and its players association on March 26, MLB promised not to resume its season until there were no bans on mass gatherings, medical experts determined there was no health risks for players, team personnel fans or ballpark staff and travel restrictions were lifted in the United States and Canada.

The agreement did offer flexibility for the league and union to discuss playing in empty stadiums, which is now almost a certainty. The economic impacts of such a scenario could offer the most discontent between the league and players union.

The three-divisions plan, with teams playing in their (likely empty) stadia against the teams geographically closest to them is different from the three states plan, which was the last one I had taken note of, but it’s in the same vein. The idea is to minimize travel (which also reduces costs) and make it easier to keep the players close by. Whatever gets proposed will have to be approved by the players, who have their own concerns about safety and compensation and other things. There’s basically no other news out there about this right now, or at least there wasn’t yesterday when I drafted this. I’m sure we’ll see more once the actual plan has been released. In the meantime, I am hopeful that we are on a path to getting baseball back, and more than a little concerned that it’s all an illusion that will not be able to withstand the reality of our situation. I’m sticking with the hope for now.

How about an Arizona/Florida/Texas plan for MLB?

Call it the MLB Plan 3.0 for having a season.

With the spread of the novel coronavirus threatening Major League Baseball’s 2020 season, the league and the union continue to seek ways to salvage the year as best they can. Predictably, that has entailed any number of proposals and contingency plans, including those that would see teams either all isolated in Arizona, or split between Arizona and Florida. On Monday, multiple league sources informed CBS Sports about a different idea that has been discussed in recent days.

In this arrangement, the league would have teams stationed in one of three hubs: Florida, Arizona or Texas. The clubs would then make use of the local major- and minor-league (or spring training) facilities and play regular season games behind closed doors without fans.

One source even expressed guarded optimism about the idea’s chances of coming to fruition.

Ballparks in St. Petersburg (Florida), Phoenix (Arizona), and Arlington (Texas) each have roofs, retractable or otherwise, that would safeguard against rainouts and other extreme weather, allowing for multiple games to be hosted at those sites per day. Theoretically, MLB could also ask teams stationed in Florida and Texas to drive three-plus hours to other MLB parks (Houston’s Minute Maid Park and Miami’s Marlins Park).

It’s unclear if MLB would assign 10 teams to each metropolitan area, or if it would opt for an unbalanced approach that would see 12 teams in one area and eight in another.

[…]

“From our perspective, we don’t have a plan, we have lots of ideas,” [MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred] told Fox Business. “What ideas come to fruition depends on what the restrictions are, what the public health situation is, but we are intent on the idea of making baseball a part of the economic recovery and sort of a milestone on the return to normalcy.”

See here and here for the previous iterations of this idea. The DMN adds more details.

While teams would need to drive as much as two or three hours in Florida to visit certain sites, Texas can offer two Major League stadiums: Globe Life Field in Arlington and Minute Maid Park in Houston. There are also numerous minor league facilities such as Dr Pepper Ballpark in Frisco and The Dell Diamond in Round Rock. There are also numerous top-tier college facilities, if those are made available.

[…]

Among things to be decided if Texas becomes more realistic: How would MLB temporarily realign from two 15-team leagues to three 10-team leagues? Under the Arizona/Florida idea, rather than having teams divided into the National and American Leagues, they would compete in the Cactus and Grapefruit Leagues.

Also, which teams would be asked to give up the relative comforts of their own spring training facilities to temporarily plan in Texas? If MLB moves towards a league that is geared simply to be TV-friendly without fans, it might make sense to have leagues set up based on time zones, with East Coast teams in Florida, teams in the Central in Texas and the rest of the teams in Arizona.

There are eight teams with Central Time Zone home bases: Both Chicago teams, St. Louis, Kansas City, Minnesota, Milwaukee, Houston and the Rangers. Colorado is a Mountain Time Zone-based club, an hour behind the Central. A team from the Eastern Time Zone, perhaps Detroit, might need to be added.

Another question: Would the Rangers be able to use all of the numerous state-of-the-art amenities afforded them in Globe Life Field? Or would teams playing in their home stadiums have to give up some access to major league amenities if the majority of teams are playing in minor league stadiums?

Teams would also need some secondary bases for depth options since the minor league season is becoming more and more unlikely. That’s where minor league and college facilities could become more of a point of conversation.

As the Chron notes, Texas A&M has expressed interest in letting its stadium be used in this scenario. I’m sure other colleges would as well. Normally, even the biggest college stadium would be far too small for an MLB game, but with there being no spectators, that’s not an issue. So who knows? One other obstacle, as the CBS story notes, is that some prominent players, like Mike Trout and Clayton Kershaw, have said they don’t want to be separated from their families for the four months this would take (assuming no return to regular stadium action in the interim). I feel like that is surmountable if this ever gets past the “there are no bad ideas” stage of the discussion. For now, MLB is just making sure that it has something it can try to execute in the event that things have improved enough to move forward with a season.

Manfred finally disciplines the Red Sox for their sign stealing

Here’s the MLB press release, written as a letter from Commissioner Rob Manfred.

Executive Summary

Following an exhaustive investigation into allegations of improper use of the video replay room by the Boston Red Sox, I have come to the following conclusions:

• I find that J.T. Watkins, the Red Sox video replay system operator, on at least some occasions during the 2018 regular season, utilized the game feeds in the replay room, in violation of MLB regulations, to revise sign sequence information that he had permissibly provided to players prior to the game.

• I find that unlike the Houston Astros’ 2017 conduct, in which players communicated to the batter from the dugout area in real time the precise type of pitch about to be thrown, Watkins’s conduct, by its very nature, was far more limited in scope and impact. The information was only relevant when the Red Sox had a runner on second base (which was 19.7% of plate appearances leaguewide in 2018), and Watkins communicated sign sequences in a manner that indicated that he had decoded them from the in-game feed in only a small percentage of those occurrences.

• I do not find that then-Manager Alex Cora, the Red Sox coaching staff, the Red Sox front office, or most of the players on the 2018 Red Sox knew or should have known that Watkins was utilizing in-game video to update the information that he had learned from his pregame analysis. Communication of these violations was episodic and isolated to Watkins and a limited number of Red Sox players only.

• I find that the Red Sox front office consistently communicated MLB’s sign stealing rules to non-player staff and made commendable efforts toward instilling a culture of compliance in their organization.

Discipline

Based on the findings described above, I hereby issue the following discipline:

1) J.T. Watkins shall be suspended for the 2020 season and 2020 Postseason. When Watkins returns from his suspension, he will be prohibited from serving as the replay room operator during any game for the 2021 season and 2021 Postseason.

2) The Boston Red Sox will forfeit their second round selection in the 2020 First-Year Player Draft.

3) Alex Cora will be suspended through the conclusion of the 2020 Postseason for his conduct as the bench coach of the Houston Astros in 2017. While I will not impose additional discipline on Cora as a result of the conduct engaged in by Watkins (because I do not find that he was aware of it), I do note that Cora did not effectively communicate to Red Sox players the sign-stealing rules that were in place for the 2018 season.

No other member of the 2018 Red Sox staff will be disciplined because I do not find that anyone was aware of or should have been aware of Watkins’s conduct. The Club’s front office took more than reasonable steps to ensure that its employees, including Watkins, adhered to the rules. Notwithstanding these good faith efforts to comply with the rules, however, the Red Sox organization ultimately is responsible for the conduct of a member of its advance scouting staff.

The full report is here. As with the Astros, Manfred did not discipline individual players, in part because he needed their cooperation in the probe, and in part because the collective bargaining agreement did not allow for it. Judging from what I saw on Twitter, the overwhelming response is “that’s it???”, which I can understand. For sure, it seemed like Cora, who was already fingered in the Astros’ 2017 banging scheme and then apparently brought that experience to Boston, would get a harsher sentence. Apparently not. No idea why it took this long to release the report – it was likely ready to go in March, before everything was about COVID-19 – but whatever. It is what it is at this point, and if we can ever get to being able to bitch about it while real games are being played, I’ll be grateful for that. Fangraphs has more.